Allen L Roland: Global Warming is Here and Now

Climate Change a Step Behind. Many experts claim we will see a near ice free arctic within 10 years. That would usher in rapid permanent climate change, resulting in extreme weather events such as severe drought, massive flooding, prolonged cold spells and insufferable heat spells. Rapid global warming and the sea ice collapse will also lead to the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet, and the release of the vast amounts of carbon, currently locked in the permafrost, which will in turn intensify global warming. The facts are there, see Arctic Sea Ice Collapse 1979 to 2012 (PIOMAS). We are all interconnected on a soul level, and that particularly applies to Nature. Nowhere is that more obvious than when you watch the recent NOVA special, "Earth from Space". This space based vision of our planet is a spectacular story of interaction and connectivity, but when you see through the heart, that same interaction and connectivity exists on a human heart based soul level. But we humans have devastated our planet Earth, and our karmic debt is coming due. It will come in the form of severe climate change, and it will eventually force us to surrender to our deepest innate urge to cooperate and unite with each other. So let's explore the human cost of climate change, and no one does it better than than Andrew T Guzman in his recently published book, overheated, The Human Cost of Climate Change. In Overheated, Guzman takes climate change out of the realm of scientific abstraction, to explore its real world consequences. He writes not as a scientist, but as an authority on international law and economics. A hotter world, writes Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order. Already we can see how it will work: The ten warmest years since 1880 have all occurred since 1998, and one estimate of the global death toll caused by climate change is now 300,000. That number might rise to 500,000 by 2030. Guzman shows in vivid detail how climate change is already playing out in the real world. Rising seas will swamp island nations like Maldives, coastal food producing regions in Bangladesh will be flooded, and millions will be forced to migrate into cities, or possibly "climate refugee camps." Even as seas rise, melting glaciers in the Andes and the Himalayas will deprive millions of people of fresh water, threatening major cities, and further straining food production. Prolonged droughts in the Sahel region of Africa have already helped produce mass violence in Darfur.