What Do You Mean - World Civilization?

World civilization means the nations of the world interconnected by trade, travel, treaties, and international commerce.

So, when climate change scientists talk about dangers to the existence of civilization they do not mean that the population of human beings as a species is going to become extinct.

In other words, the human species would live on even if civilization ended.

For example, Greenland alone has enough ice that if that ice was to melt it would raise the world's ocean level by 21 feet (~7 meters).

That alone would destroy the ocean-port cities of the civilized world, and thereby destroy world civilization by destroying its primary commerce.

But if you add Antarctica to the equation, much more than just the coastal ports would be lost, because the ocean level would rise beyond belief.

Scientists have not been worried about Antarctica before 2006 when it was shown that some of its western ice sheet was getting a bit shaky.

The eastern ice sheet, however, was considered to be "inviolate", meaning "not to worry", nothing will ever happen to it.

But like many things climate scientists considered to be "inviolate", the eastern ice sheet of Antarctica is now going somewhere:

Using gravity measurement data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin has found that the East Antarctic ice sheet-home to about 90 percent of Earth's solid fresh water and previously considered stable-may have begun to lose ice.
...
"While we are seeing a trend of accelerating ice loss in Antarctica, we had considered East Antarctica to be inviolate," said lead author and Senior Research Scientist Jianli Chen of the university's Center for Space Research. "But if it is losing mass, as our data indicate, it may be an indication the state of East Antarctica has changed. Since it's the biggest ice sheet on Earth, ice loss there can have a large impact on global sea level rise in the future."

(Science Daily). I am really sorry if that scares Barbie and Ken, but we must keep in touch with reality if we are to do anything about it.

Write your congress people and the president to let them know you do not want this trend to continue one second longer than it has to.

Otherwise we will be giving new meaning to "Atlantis" some day if our descendants live far inland from what is now considered to be the coastline.

They would live in a society that would be much like the society now living in the mountain regions of Afghanistan and Tibet.

Space exploration as we now know it would be ended to await the development of a new civilization which would again have to resume what humanity must do in order to survive the demise of the Sun.

The next post in this series is here.

Extinction Is Not For The Sane At Heart

Nations become suicidal sometimes when enough people lose a grasp on reality to begin to act like an individual person does when that individual threatens to jump off the bridge.

Take NAZI Germany in the late 1930's as an example. Thankfully Germany fully recovered.

We have a growing problem of suicidal thinking in the United States.

People who are primarily not college graduates, or otherwise educated about ecology and environment, are buying into a notion that humanity can do no permanent or serious damage to the environment, in terms of changing the climate.

Some Russian hackers stole emails from a climate research facility which they interpreted as proof of a vast global conspiracy to deceive the world about climate change.

A NASA scientist was interviewed to get his take on the situation:

Last week, someone leaked e-mails obtained by hacking into the server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Activists who have long denied the reality of climate change ... say they show that climatologists have engaged in a grand conspiracy to manufacture a case that global warming is occurring due to human activities. Do the hacked e-mails undermine the case for anthropogenic climate change?

No, they have no effect on the science. The evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.

(Newsweek [they "lost" it, so here is the Wayback Machine version]). The Piltdown man scientific fraud, a clear case of scientific fraud, did not mean that all evidence for human evolution was thereby made fraudulent. The hacked email controversy is not a clear case, but even if it was it would not prove the case alleged by the climate change deniers.

It is essential that we learn the tenets of Ecocosmology so that our understanding is expanded to a cosmic understanding.

That is, a broader understanding of what humanity must do, including taking care of the earth, in order to avoid extinction of the human species.

The Solar Wave Of The Future Now

Scientists have now confirmed that waves much higher than the size of the earth form on the surface of the Sun.

The wave in the photo shows a surfer at "Ghost Tree", a northern California surf spot.

The entire earth would be about the size of the surfer on one of these solar waves:

Years ago, when solar physicists first witnessed a towering wave of hot plasma racing along the sun's surface, they doubted their senses. The scale of the thing was staggering. It rose up higher than Earth itself and rippled out from a central point in a circular pattern millions of kilometers in circumference. Skeptical observers suggested it might be a shadow of some kind — a trick of the eye — but surely not a real wave.

"Now we know," says Joe Gurman of the Solar Physics Lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Solar tsunamis are real."

(NASA). Surfs up on the Sun. Only the fittest surfers will survive when the Sun eventually "does the Sun thing", like all stars do, and destroys all the planets near it.

The reality that humanity is very tiny in the cosmos should inspire us to become fit to survive, to pass The Test.

Ecocosmolgy tells us that we are a tiny species surrounded by enormous giants that are certain to destroy us utterly, so we should band together as a sane group working to help each other.