Florida Buys back the Everglades

While I am never short of information to post here, as there is so much going on in the world of conservation, environmental concerns, and my own wildlife watching, occasionally I pick up on a story that I have to refrain from talking about. This often is more to do with protecting the area or ecosystem, but on occasion it is just that the facts are not clear. It was such a story that I first got sketchy information on about six months ago. An American agricultural company were selling off all its land because with Climate Change brining higher sea levels the company would lose all its assets.

While I dug as far as I could, I kept on coming up against barriers. While I could not confirm the story, I also could not dismiss it either. Especially as the commodity that was being grown was sugar. With the drive in the US for producing Ethanol, essentially alcohol from sugars, everyone I spoke to could not understand any part of US Agri-Business leaving the sector at this time, unless they knew something we didn't. When I suggested to my contacts that it could be because of impending Sea level rise, while they accepted that something of that sort could be the only justification for this happening, I also faced the same sceptical attitude about how real Climate Change is.

Now, today on the NPR Environment Podcast, there was a story that The United States Sugar Corporation has sold the State of Florida one hundred eighty seven thousand acres of land, thats over three hundred square miles, in the Everglades for $1.7 billion

While the slant given to the story was that this was a great boost to the restoration programme that has been going on for the last nine years, no one could understand why this had happened.

While I personally am more than happy to see this land brought back into the unique ecology of the Everglades, the state has been misled into paying a premium for the land. However, what the state of Florida has done via this land purchase is provide land that will be needed to mitigate the effect of a rising sea level. Therefore, while they may have paid top dollar now, the people in that region will come to see this as money well spent, as restoring the Everglades will help prevent the loss of homes and lives when the sea does rise.

Greenland Ice Sheet

In Sciences magazine and via National Public Radio (All Things Considered, part of the NPR Environment Podcast), from America, reports of the effects of Climate change on the Greenland ice sheet. However the content of the reports were very in much downplaying the alarming content.

In August last year, two scientists one from the Woods hall Oceanographic Institute, and the other from the University of Washington had set up instruments to measure the effects of climate change on the glacier. With increased temperatures the two mile thick ice sheet is melting from the top. This melt water forms lakes that then flows, through the ice, to the base of the glacier. With these instruments are they were able to measure the effect of one single lake, that was two miles long and 40 ft deep. That lake drained in 90 minutes with a flow greater than that of the Niagara falls. Using seismic data and satellite telemetry, the effect of this melting water draining to the base the glacier lifted the glacier three feet and send it hurtling towards the coast. Once that water drained the glacier resumed its sedentary pace.

The way this was being reported, made it sound as though we had nothing to worry about from this. However, this was just one lake of over one thousand that are now forming in the summer months. While not all will drain to the base of the glaciers and provide the lubrication for glacier movements. These sudden flows of the ice, and this increase speed as measured in this instance, facilitates the break-up of the glaciers into blocks. That will more readily flow into the sea.

As my regular reader will know, and to the derision of many, I am predicting that the Greenland Ice sheet will rapidly diminish following the loss of summer sea ice. That will occur in four to five years, by 2012-2013. I predict this not because I am some kind of doom munger but because this is what the science is saying.

However, and this is the real point of this posting, there really seems to be a concerted effort by the media and by governments not to give the people the real facts behind climate change. In fact anybody that tries to alert people to the real danger that we are facing, seems to be gagged. Or worse still derided as a profit of doom.

This all has the effect of creating the impression that climate change is not as serious as it really is. Until governments and the media start taking this issue seriously how can the general public? At the moment there are far too many vested interests influencing government and policy. Further as government seem to assume that this is a problem for the future, they fail to tackle the issue today. While there are many individuals who are making the effort to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we all need guidance as well as policies from government.

We're already seeing the effects of climate change, this is not something for the future this is something that is happening now. The Human Animal is releasing carbon dioxide is their atmosphere at a rate of 14,000 times more than has ever occurred in our planet's history. In some ways it is remarkable that the planets of thermostat has been made to cope thus far. But with the ocean saturated with carbon, to the extent that it is killing off life in the oceans, it will only be a matter of years before we see the full extent of that damage to the planet.

When half of the living Nobel prize winners signed a document telling the worlds governments that we were ten years away from irreversible change, the media and governments ignored this. We are now reaping the harvest of that ignorance.