Why are all the Numbers “Trillions”?

It can’t be “inflation,” since we are in deflationary times… I’ve even used the phrase “managed depression,” since comparing this meltdown to other post-World War II economic downturns doesn’t provide a lot of analytical parallels. $70 trillion in credit default swaps, $7.2 trillion in subprime mortgages, $1.5 trillion in hedge funds, $11 trillion of national debt, $1 trillion being hoarded by banks, combined bailout bills well over a trillion and now that mega-numerical quantity is being applied to ice!

With government trying to apply its limited resources to stop the meltdown, it sure would be nice if Mother Nature would hold off on the natural disasters just a tad longer. Imagine what another Katrina-like tragedy would do to the economy, and Ike was hardly chopped liver. With folks freezing in the snow belt, ice storms shutting down power grids, it hardly seems as if the warming associated with climate change is still with us.

That’s where the next set of “trillion” numbers kick in again. NASA has been tracking ice loss in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic region and has recorded a 2 trillion ton total reduction in global ice since 2003. The Associated Press put it this way on December 16: “More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.” That’s just Greenland… we watching enough ice melting in the Arctic to permit ships to pass through the legendary “Northwest Passage” in the summer months.

While 2008 added a little more snow, even Alaska has lost 400 million tons of ice in the last five years. Arctic water seems to be a heat-storage device (the old ice pack didn’t have that impact), so as more ice melts, the polar heat-storage capacity rises, “Scientists studying sea ice will announce that parts of the Arctic north of Alaska were 9 to 10 degrees warmer this past fall, a strong early indication of what researchers call the Arctic amplification effect. That's when the Arctic warms faster than predicted, and warming there is accelerating faster than elsewhere on the globe.” (Same AP article)

In plain English, this says that weather characteristics (which impact water supply, agriculture and the viability of disease-carrying insects) will change all over the world, hurricanes will intensify in the warmer Atlantic and Gulf waters, and sea levels are beginning to rise more rapidly that projected, with storm-centric regions like the Caribbean feeling inundation more intensely because of storm surges associated with tropical depressions coupled with the loss of natural coastal vegetation and sandbars that slowed the flow.

As frozen land (permafrost) in places like Alaska and Siberia melts from these trends, trapped methane gas – which is over 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide in terms of creating a greenhouse effect – the warming effect is further accelerated. It seems too late to stop all this, but it never too late to try and stem the process as best we can. With American research capacity, even at trouble General Motors, the answers might just help save lives and create new and essential jobs in an environment that seems to spell TROUBLE at every turn. Wouldn’t be great if American ingenuity led the world to solving this nightmare? Hopefully, President-elect’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan (“Bailout 2”) has a “warm” spot for this technology need as well.

I’m Peter Dekom in search of a silver lining… somewhere.