It’s time to share yet another sad fact of the life that we are creating for ourselves: the Qori Kalis Glacier in the Peruvian Andes has been there for at least 5,000 years, covering ancient plant beds from that period. Professor Lonnie Thomson of  Ohio State University has made over 27 trips to the glacier since 1974, and has noticed the slow retreat of the ice, but now is extremely alarmed at the acceleration he’s observed. He thinks that when he returns there this summer he will see that HALF of the remaining ice will have melted since his visit last year.

As a result of the melting ice, a small lake started forming at the rim of the glacier in 1991 – it is now 200 feet deep! This new Peruvian lake is currently contained by a natural dam which protects the people who live in the valleys below the glacier, but it won’t be enough: in March 2006, a huge chunk of ice broke off and fell into the lake sending a wall of water cascading through the valley…When the glacier started to form 5-6000 years ago, there were only 300 million or so people in the world, and natural, long-term climactic changes forced SLOW human and animal migrations. But today with 6.5 BILLION people in the world and the same climactic changes happening in less than a century, what are we going to do? How many people need to die before the world wakes up and realizes that no matter how great the threat from terrorists, it is nothing like the threat from what the non-terrorist, civilized world is knowingly doing today?

Today’s average world temperature is only a few degrees lower than it was at the height of the Eemian interglacial period (125,000 years ago) – at that time the melting ice raised the sea level by 6 meters (20ft)! But that was a very slow change in climate that took tens of thousands of years to occur. We’ll hit those same temperatures within the next 30-50 years… We’re not seeing the rise in sea levels yet, but it’s certainly a sort of delayed reaction because there are just so many things in nature that need to happen to catch up with the temperature increases.

Just think for a moment about how many human habited coastal areas are closer to sea level than 6 meters and you’ll have an immediate idea of how badly threatened humanity is – all of Florida and most of the gulf coast, Holland for sure, much of India. Even London, Paris, New York and Boston would be mostly under water. And this is just the tip of this melting climactic iceberg. The Titanic was believed to be an unsinkable ship. The world that we habit is no more unsinkable than that magnificent ocean liner, but we are going to end up, just as surely as most of its passengers, with water over our heads and unable to breathe.

I sorry to be another bearer of bad tidings, but time is running out and the human-controlled world must be made to listen NOW. And I’m not just talking about the so-called developed nations as EVEN if we all got together to make a concerted effort right now: what can it accomplish in the face of the massively increasing problem of the Chinese and Indian populations if they are not also working together with us?

It’s time to stop the world’s ridiculous human and financial waste caused by a never-ending need to increase consumerism and capitalism, all in the name of freedom and improved “quality of life”.  And it’s time to stop our obsession with fighting “Terror” so that we can concentrate on saving “Terra”.

© 2007 Tony Knight