The 6th Mass Extinction

The role of the Media was never so decisive in the outcome of mankind, where it can contribute to keep the profit driven culture which is driving us to extinction or act beyond the ‘established culture’ and provoke a change in the course of mankind. This topic was never so urgent.

When mankind’s distorted values and references are putting us on the edge of extinguishing life on this planet, it was never so crucial that we “take our ties off” and act as human beings. Please consider the urgency of publishing, sharing or make yourself heard through any means about the following.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOPS, RUNAWAY CLIMATE CHANGE AND IMPLICATIONS.

1. “...the area of ice begins to shrink. That's not just the floating sea ice but also land-based snow areas, so the amount of really brilliant white reflection of sunlight back out into space is decreasing year-on-year. That means that the sun’s energy is being absorbed into the tundra of the frozen areas of the northern continental masses and into the open ocean where the ice was, so that the whole system is now accelerating and accelerating and accelerating and the hotter it gets the faster it gets hotter, the faster it gets hotter the more water vapor, the more water vapor the faster it gets hotter, the faster it gets hotter the less ice, the less ice the less reflections and the faster it gets hotter... You begin to get the idea? so we're seeing what we call hyper-exponential increase of temperature in the Arctic area.” - David Wasdell, ‘Arctic Feedback Dynamics’: Watch here

2. “the thinning of the ice is causing it to break up more readily in the summer and in fact what’s happening now is that the melt in the summer is greater than the growth in the winter, so all the ice that grows during the winter will melt the following summer, so you will have a summer Arctic which is actually ice free, and this will come about very soon at the rate we are going. If you extrapolate what is going on now for thickness it will bring us an ice-free summer Arctic in about 4 years from now [interview made in 2012]. So, already we should be seeing something drastic happening probably this summer.” - Prof. Peter Wadhams from the Polar Ocean Physics Group, ‘Arctic Methane: Why The Sea Ice Matters’: Watch here

3. “There is a potential risk that if warming continues a greater amount of methane could be released. (...) the carbon pool is huge and the water shelf is very shallow and the warming occurs stronger than in different areas of the world’s ocean. (...) the total amount of methane in the carbon atmosphere is about 5 gigatons. The amount of carbon preserved in the form of methane in this Arctic shelf is approximately from 100’s to 1000’s gigatons. And of course it’s only 1% of that amount that is required to double the atmospheric burden of methane. To destabilise 1% of this carbon pool not much effort is needed (...) What divides this methane from the atmosphere is a very shallow water column and a weakening permafrost which is losing its ability to serve as a seal. I think it’s a matter of… it’s not a matter of thousands of years, it’s a matter of decades I think, at most hundred years… [Dr. Igor Semiletov interrupts her: It could happen any moment]” - Dr. Natalia Shakhova from the International Arctic Research Center, ‘Methane Hydrates Extended Interview Extracts’: Watch here

4. “Because elevated atmospheric carbon from fossil fuel burning is the trigger mechanism poking the climate dragon [carbon stores locked in shallow sea gas hydrates and from Arctic tundra]. The trajectory we're on is to awaken a runaway climate heating that will ravage global agricultural systems leading to mass famine, conflict. Sea level rise will be a small problem by comparison.” - Jason Box,  ‘Is the climate dragon awakening?’: Read here

5. “The permafrost carbon feedback is an amplification of surface warming due to the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane from thawing permafrost. There is roughly 1700 Gigatons of organic carbon or frozen organic matter in the permafrost. As we burn fossil fuels and the temperatures increase, that begins to thaw out and once it thaws out it begins to decay and release carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere. This will amplify the warming [that is] due to the burning of fossil fuels.”  - Dr. Kevin Scheafer, ‘Arctic Emergency: Scientists Speak’: Watch here

6. "It is the summer sea ice loss passing the point of no return leading to unstoppable catastrophic Arctic methane feedbacks sooner or later... puts us in a state of planetary emergency today." - John Nissen, Arctic Methane Emergency Group’s Chairman: Click here

7. “There are such massive methane reserves below the Arctic Ocean floor that they represent around 100 times the amount that is required to cause a Permian style major extinction event, should the methane be released into the atmosphere. Unfortunately for us, global warming has heated up the oceanic currents fed by the Gulf Stream flowing into the Arctic, causing massive destabilization of the subsea methane hydrates and fault seals and releasing increasing volumes of methane directly into the atmosphere.” - Malcolm Light, ‘Focus on Methane’: Click here

8. "three kinds of warming: Global Warming; Accelerated Warming in the Arctic; and Runaway Global Warming" - a comprehensive explanation on the Arctic Feedbacks and how those lead to Runaway Global Warming, by Sam Carana: Click here

CO2 And The Value Distortion In Our Socioeconomic System.

CO2 EMISSIONS LEAD TO GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND GLOBAL WARMING, BUT THAT LIFE THREATENING MECHANISM IS JUST A SYMPTOM OF THE ACTUAL ROOT CAUSE AND DIFFICULTY IN SOLVING THE PROBLEM: A VALUE DISTORTION IN OUR SOCIOECONOMIC SYSTEM.

9. “I gave the talk at the University of Iowa in 2004 and at the 2005 meeting of the American Geophysical Union. This led to calls from the White House to NASA headquarters and I was told that I could not give any talks or speak with the media without prior explicit approval by NASA headquarters. After I informed the New York Times about these restrictions NASA was forced to end the censorship but there were consequences - I have been using the first line of the NASA mission statement “to understand and protect our home planet” to justify my talks. Soon the first line of the mission statement was deleted never to appear again.” - James Hansen - ‘Why I must speak out about climate change?’ (on TED): Watch here

10. “But what’s rather interesting about this, that tells you something about the nature of our society, is that those same CEOs and managers who are trying to convince the public that it’s a liberal hoax know perfectly well that it’s extremely dangerous, that they have the same believes that you and I have, and so they're caught in a kind of an institutional contradiction. As leaders of major corporations they have an institutional role, that is to maximize short-term profit, and if they don't do that they're out and someone else is in, that does do it, so, institutionally speaking it’s not a choice that’s going to happen in the major institutions, so they may know that they’re mortgaging the future of their grandchildren and everything they own will be destroyed but they're caught in a trap of institutional structure; that’s what happens in market systems and a financial crisis is a small example of the same thing; you may know that what you're doing carries a systemic risk but you can't calculate that in your transactions or you're not fulfilling your role and somebody else replaces you, and that’s a very serious problem, it means that we're marching over the cliff (...) so we are essentially saying: let’s kiss each others goodbye.”- Noam Chomsky, ‘How Climate Change Became a Liberal Hoax’: Watch here

11. I distrust the IPCC process because their projections on the warming are so wrong; even their worst case scenario is unrealistic because it doesn't take account of what’s happening in the Arctic and the Arctic temperature is going to go shooting up by 10 degrees or more really quite quickly, and when you get temperatures increasing like that you get the permafrost to thaw away very quickly (...) It’s very much out of their (IPCC’s) comfort zone; they have been working on the basis that things will take 100 years and that seems to pervade their thinking. Then there are lots of procedural constraints. They are only allowed to take papers that are published and peer-reviewed, and then you find that the papers that have been more extreme, scenarios, the more scary ones, don’t get published so there’s a vicious cycle of suppression built into the procedural systems of the IPCC. (..) Remember it’s an INTERGOVERNMENTAL organization.”   - ‘AMEG’s Director John Nissen at ARCUS SF’: Watch here

12. "Indeed, the IPCC acts as if there was a carbon budget to divide among countries, whereas the reality is that there is a huge carbon debt to our children, while the situation could become catastrophic any time soon. It appears that the IPCC has been trying desperately to please those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo." - Sam Carana Click here

13. “It's not politicians that can solve problems. They have no technical capabilities. They don't know how to solve problems. Even if they were sincere, they don't know how to solve problems. It's the technicians that produce the desalinization plants. It's the technicians that give you electricity. That give you motor vehicles. That heat your house and cool it in the summer time. It's technology that solves problems, not politics. Politics cannot solve problems 'cause they are not trained to do so. (...) and the question that's raised by politicians is: How much will a project cost? The question is not ‘how much will it cost’. Do we have the resources? (...) So you see, we have all that, but we're in a monetary system, and in a monetary system there's profit.” - Jacque Fresco on politics versus technology: Watch here

TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS:

14. An Effective and Comprehensive Climate Plan: Click here