Opinion | If humans are wired to only fear short-term threats, forget about fighting climate change
- During WWII, 130,00 people were employed and US$23 billion spent in the race to build an atomic bomb
- We should be pouring at least as many resources into slowing down the break-up of glaciers and rise in sea levels, but we can’t seem to garner the same sense of urgency
I’m writing this on a plane to Greenland – well, actually, on a plane to Denmark, because there’s no way to get to Greenland by a civilian airline without going through Copenhagen first – and it has occurred to me (not for the first time) to wonder where everybody else is.
Worldwide there may be 1,000 scientists working on the “cryosphere”, the frozen parts of the planet, but their energies are divided among many different aspects of climate change: thawing permafrost releasing megatonnes of methane; loss of sea ice cover on the Arctic Ocean, why the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, etc.
How many people are working specifically on accelerating glacial flows? Maybe a hundred full-time scientists, if you’re feeling optimistic.
What holds glaciers back is the friction between the ice and the bottom. Warmer ocean currents are eating away at the base of the glaciers and effectively detaching them from the bottom, i.e. taking the brakes off.
