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" Because we are more interested in what Susan Rice said to David Gregory, and because we are more interested in some arcane squabbling over an artificial economic &amp;quot;crisis&amp;quot; that has its roots in the desperate jonesing of cable-news producers for a bigger smidgen of the slice of the piece of the audience that watches their stuff anyway, you may not have noticed that the past week as been a bonanza for news about the fact that we are destroying the planet on which we live. To me, this ought to have been on my teevee at least as often as Kelly Ayotte, but that&amp;#039;s just the way I roll. First, two months ago, NASA revealed that the Arctic ice-pack is smaller than it ever has been since NASA started measuring it by satellite. This week, at a meeting of the World Meteorological Organization in Qatar \u2014 and, yes, I recognize the irony of holding a climate-change conference in a petro-state \u2014 scientists elaborated on this phenomenon. The amount of Arctic sea ice that melted this year was bigger than the land area of the United States. But it was the ice melt that seemed to dominate the annual climate report, with the U.N. concluding ice cover had reached &amp;quot;a new record low&amp;quot; in the area around the North Pole and that the loss from March to September was a staggering 11.83 million square kilometers (4.57 million square miles) -- an area bigger than the United States. &amp;quot;The alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far-reaching changes taking place on Earth&amp;#039;s oceans and biosphere,&amp;quot; WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said. &amp;quot;Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records.&amp;quot; Then, there was the release in Doha of another report in which scientists concluded that the permafrost in the Arctic may be pretty much gone, a crisis that even the people who take climate-change for the grave problem that it is tend to overlook. Not only is this devastating to the people who live in the Arctic \u2014 the loss of the permafrost is part of the reason why Shishmaref, an Alaskan barrier island that has been continuously populated for over 4000 years, is melting into the Chukchi Sea \u2014 but also, the thawing of the permafrost makes the greenhouse gas problem even worse. The permafrost is made up primarily of decaying organic matter. When it thaws, increased methane and carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. The process is not reversible. The cork cannot go back into the bottle. Widespread thaw would create a vicious circle, since the release of more CO2 and methane would trap more heat in the air and in turn accelerate the melting. That, in turn, could bring an irreversible, runaway effect. The experts predicted an irreversible loss of between 30 and 85 percent of permafrost near the surface. That was based on a forecast of Arctic temperatures rising by 6 degrees C (10.8 F) through 2100. And, as is always the case, we are woefully unprepared to deal with the whole thing. &amp;quot;The infrastructure we have now is not adequate to monitor future changes in permafrost,&amp;quot; said lead author Kevin Schaefer, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). &amp;quot;We need to greatly expand our current networks to monitor permafrost, which requires direct investment of money and resources by individual countries.&amp;quot;&amp;quot;Individual nations need to evaluate the risks of thawing permafrost and make plans to protect communities in the most vulnerable regions,&amp;quot; Schaefer said. Homes, businesses, and other infrastructure in the far north were built on ground that stayed frozen, and may collapse if this ground thaws. There are two elements of this ongoing global catastrophe that are particularly maddening, and one of them is not the fact that the Republican leadership in the House just named a climate-change denialist \u2014 Lamar Smith of Texas \u2014 the chair the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. (Smith once famously observed that, &amp;quot;We now know that prominent scientists were so determined to advance the idea of human-made global warming that they worked together to hide contradictory temperature data.&amp;quot; Oy.) The first is that the fight over how best to confront a global crisis on a global basis seems altogether intractable; the Doha conference at which these reports were presented is currently locked in a brawl over whether or not we should have a new global protocol to replace the old Kyoto protocol that will expire in 2020. There are fights between developing nations and larger countries over who should shoulder most of the burden of confronting the crisis, and over whether or not developed countries \u2014 like, sadly, the US \u2014 finally will sign onto the Kyoto pact at all. In the middle of that fight are the paradoxes of China and India, which have thriving economies but which, because they also have vast poverty, do not produce as much harmful emissions into the atmosphere as do the US and European countries. The other frustrating thing is the apparent inability of the world in general to tumble to the fact that climate-change is a creature of interconnected phenomena. The report about the permafrost is a perfect example. The melting of the permafrost is not merely a hardship for the people who live atop it, and it is not merely destined to change the topography of the Arctic to such an extent that some places simply disappear into the sea, it also contributes to the overall problem, making the greenhouse gases worse, thereby heating up the planet some more, thereby causing more permafrost to melt, thereby unleashing more methane and CO2, and around and around we go. I am increasingly skeptical that any political system \u2014 let alone ours \u2014 is capable of confronting a threat like this in all of its interconnected manifestations. I applaud Bill McKibben and his movement simply for its implacability. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter how cleverly you argue your case, physics and chemistry and mathematics will get around to trumping you, and not gently, either. People who wonder about the cost of it all are generally people who believe that economics really is a branch of the physical sciences. Which it is not, as the physical sciences themselves may eventually prove to our great distress. This really is as clear and as direct an equation as we can have. The earth is damaged, and the damage is getting worse, and, sooner or later, the damage will become an irreversible cascade. And if politics is all we have to stop it, then we don&amp;#039;t have anywhere near enough. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16832/climate-change-is-getting-worse-113012/?src=rss>