Richard Zurawski

About six months ago as we were relaxing on our decks at the height of our northern summer, the Antarctic was in throes of its frigid winter. I wondered out loud what would happen, as we slid back into winter and the Antipodes drifted into summer, in that mostly ignored, ice enshrouded land mass, some two times greater in extent than Canada. I wondered what their summer would mean for the Western Ice Sheet, the third largest ice field in the world, the one where Scott, Amundsen and Shackelton landed a century ago?

You see, in 1993 a British group of scientists looked at the Western Sheet and pronounced to the world that within thirty years there would be major changes, all brought about because of human climate intervention. The Ross, Ronne, Larsen and Wilkens Ice Sheets all reside in the Western Antarctic, the Ross and Ronne each as big as Germany, a kilometre thick and containing hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometres of ice. Now they are melting and breaking apart. In 1998 the Wilkins Sheet calved a 1000 square kilometres of ice in a day, then in 2001 the Larsen broke off an even larger chunk of some 3000 square kilometres. This past week the Wilkins sheet broke off a piece some 80 miles long. And now it appears that then entire Wilkins sheet is due to collapse either in the next month or during next Antarctic Summer. Some 11,000 square kilometres of ice, 300 metres thick, almost the size of Cape Breton Island will disappear in one swell foop!

Now to most of us it will not have an impact, because firstly its too far away to really appear on our radar screens and secondly, this ice is already in the water and will not change the ocean levels one iota. But there is an impact. Firstly to the millions of creatures who live there and secondly because these ice sheets stopper the flow of the Western Antarctic’s glaciers. And this should really make you sit up. Once the stoppers erode, that is the ice sheets, the glaciers will flow faster than ever and all the projections about ocean level rise get thrown out the window. When, and not if the entire Western Sheet flows into the ocean you and I will feel it, to the tune of roughly five to six metres of extra water in the ocean basins.

Back in 1993 the British scientists said that it would take thirty years for the Wilkins Ice Sheet to give way. It happened is fifteen, half the time they thought it would.That should also tell you something. The IPCC has based its estimates and published its landmark reports with the same numbers, but everywhere we look we see that they are falling behind and climate change is under way twice as quickly as previously thought.

And here in Canada we dither, the Conservative government continues to play the US/Saudi/China/India obfuscation exercise. We water down the impacts of scientific reports and marginalize, ridicule and underfund/report the truth. What will it take before we act? A hundred deaths, a thousand, a million. To continue to ignore climate change and to facilitate inaction, makes me wonder what we will do when the shoe drops in our back yard and millions and tens of millions are threatened and die. What will the Climate Change Nuremberg trials look like and will we bring George Bush, Stephen Harper, John Baird and their ilk forward to accept responsibility?

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