Snipped from AlterNet.org.

Do you feel that if one is constantly presented with bad news that after a while the person becomes numb to the effects of the bad news? Can a whole society become numb to catastrophic predictions involving climate change? I feel we have reached the tipping point in our news saturation of global warming and its dire effects and are experiencing sensory overload. We have heard so much devastating news about our future that we can’t even seem to process it anymore much less respond. So, when a news release exposes even more devastating discoveries that compounds the global threat of climate change, no one even blinks an eye. What will have to happen before the global society takes measures to seriously address this threat? There was news today reported in AlterNet.org that certainly should make all of us wake up and do something.

This latest report comes from a team led by James Hansen at NASA. It states that the reports issued by the well known Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change might be “absurdly optimistic” about the pace of melting ice caps and rising sea levels. In other words, things may be much worse than originally predicted. A British journalist whose expertise is on climate change and other environmental issues, finds that the lack of serious response to climate change is not limited just to the U.S. but that the UK government is also seriously delinquent in addressing the problem. I would add to this that the whole world is not addressing this problem either. Especially developing countries like China who puts one new coal-fired power plant on line every week.

So how do these new reports bode for the planet? Here is a portion of the article that explains these new projections.

The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59 centimeters this century. Hansen’s paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn’t fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees Celsius above today’s level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 cm but by 25 meters. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature.

We now have a pretty good idea of why ice sheets collapse. The buttresses that prevent them from sliding into the sea break up; meltwater trickles down to their base, causing them suddenly to slip; and pools of water form on the surface, making the ice darker so that it absorbs more heat. These processes are already taking place in Greenland and West Antarctica.

Rather than taking thousands of years to melt, as the IPCC predicts, Hansen and his team find it “implausible” that the expected warming before 2100 “would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century.” As well as drowning most of the world’s centers of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes. “Civilization developed,” Hansen writes, “during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end.”

If you would like to read the full article click the image below.