re: #6 Obdicut

Because of AGW. This is the first time the climate has been warm enough to free them up.

And of course, the weirder brand of people are going to celebrate the opening of these passages as a sign that AGW is going to bring us good things.

Every cloud really does have a silver lining. Seen in isolation, the opening of these passages is good for us.

If my house is underheated and it catches fire, my bedroom becomes toasty warm. Seen in isolation, that’s good.

AGW has been, and for a time will continue to be, good for Canada, Russia, and Alaska. Growing seasons are longer, and the winters are not so bitter cold.

The trouble even today is that in other parts of the world, the same warming has more of a downside. Summers are already hot in India.

The trouble, down the road, with this warming is that once the summer pack ice around Greenland is mostly history, Greenland itself will be less cold. For Greenland, that’s good. The icecap will recede, bushes and trees will grow on the land that emerges from beneath the ice, and farms and cities will be eventually develop. But the water from all that ice? Sea levels will rise. Low-lying land that is now fertile will be rendered useless for agriculture by the infiltration of salt into its water table. There’s a lot of it, a mere five, ten, twenty feet above sea level. The sea doesn’t have to rise twenty feet to ruin such land; all that is needed is that a tropical storm surge, on top of high tide, on top of the AGW-driven rise in sea level, reach twenty feet.

Down the road, a lot of permafrost thaws. For all we know now, this might happen quite suddenly. There’s the potential for some runaway positive feedback: permafrost thaws some, methane bubbles out, methane is greenhouse gas and warms things up, more methane released, repeat and amplify. Can you say chain reaction?

Down the road, summer temperatures get to where crop-killing heat waves become much more frequent. Hundred-year heat waves come along every seven years? Quite possible. We are rich in food, now. But let the crops fail often enough, and that could change. Russia’s wheat crop failure just this year gives a hint of what could lie down the road.

The signs are all over the place: road out ahead. We need a different road. Wind/solar/nuclear/efficiency. Or smashup. With a cherry on top: an open Northwest passage. The consolation prize is insufficient.