By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report
(Image: Setting sun, skull profile via Shutterstock; Edited; JR/TO)
I'm graced to live adjacent to Olympic National Park and have it as my backyard sanctuary.
Recently, I hiked up to an alpine lake at 5,000 feet, where my friend John and I pitched camp and settled in to climb a nearby peak. The clear, rarified air wafting through sub-alpine fir expands the soul, not to mention the power of the incredible mountain views.
But the trip, fantastic weather and summit aside, had a bittersweet edge to it.
We are at high latitude in upper Washington State, relative to the rest of the contiguous 48 states. The trip was in late January, and on the climb we were well over one mile above sea level, but we never saw the temperature drop below freezing, even at night. Large areas of our route up the peak found us slogging up scree slopes bare of snow, when normally the basin we were in would have required the use of avalanche transceivers and other precautions for traveling in heavy snow on steep slopes.
The signs of anthropogenic climate disruption are all around us now, evident to anyone willing to see them.
I brought my snow shovel, but it never left my pack as we pitched our tent on terra firma, on the banks of a formerly frozen alpine lake that was melting out. "These plants are budding, I can't believe it," John, who has lived in the area for more than 25 years, told me from nearby our tent. "These are spring conditions, but it's January!"
After our climb, we hiked back down toward the trailhead. The trail, just below our campsite at the lake, wound past thick, old-growth cedar trees with orange trail markers placed 10 feet up the trees in order to be visible to skiers amid deep snows. These days, we hiked up bare ground, and had to look up to see the trail markers.
The signs of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) are all around us now, evident to anyone willing to see them.
This month's dispatch was a difficult one to write, given the preponderance of earth-shaking reports about how far along we truly are in this anthropogenic climate catastrophe.
But don't just take my word for it, dear reader.
2014 is officially in the books as the hottest year on record, and all 10 of the hottest years have occurred since 1998.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data also revealed that the 2010s decade is on pace to become the hottest on record, which means it would surpass the 2000s as the previous hottest, which surpassed the 1990s as the same, which surpassed the 1980s.
The trend is clear.
What's more, 2015 began with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels already above the 400 parts per million level, which is a troubling sign, given that annual levels tend to peak in May.
Sea levels are now rising 25 percent faster than previous estimates, and the acceleration witnessed in the 1990s is even more dramatic than previously calculated.
With experts calling our current time period the sixth great mass extinction event in earth's history, we have been warned to expect between 30 to 50 percent of all current species to go extinct by 2050 due primarily to ACD. A recent report listed several key species we must expect to see go extinct in 2015, including the Amur leopard, Sumatran elephant, Javan rhinoceros, leatherback turtle and mountain gorilla.
A stunning new study published in the prestigious journal Science concluded that we are on the verge of causing "a major extinction event" in the oceans, and one of the scientists who authored the study stated frankly, "I honestly feel there's not much hope for normal ecosystems in the ocean" without a dramatic shift away from the current business-as-usual fossil-fueled economy.
Please continue this article here: http://truth-out.org/news/item/28864-species-extinctions-human-chronic-disease-on-the-rise-as-climate-disruption-mounts#
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