It rained for 9 hours at Summit Station/Greenland, 10,530’ elevation.
Greenland is sending signals to coastal metropolises around the world that it’s never too early to start building seawalls. These are not mixed signals from the big ice island. Rather, they are straightforward signals indicative of rapid breakdown of average ice thickness of 5,000 feet sooner than ever thought possible.
Stating the obvious, it’s horrible news.
In conjunction with freakish rain at the top of Greenland, the response to global warming has increasingly exposed humans as farcically trapped behind the biggest eight ball of all time by not taking global warming seriously. Now, there may be no way around it.
Greenland is acting out. For example, it rained at the Summit Station at 10,530 feet above sea level where it has never rained throughout all recorded history. It’s not supposed to rain at the top of an ice sheet nearly two miles above sea level. But, it did.
Why?
Climate System Scientist Paul Beckwith knows why, as he explains in a 41-min video released July 14, 2022 entitled: Greenland Ice Sheet Vulnerable to Bone-Crushing Melt from Stronger More Frequent Atmospheric Rivers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MriddHHGAH0
He starts by explaining how the first rainfall in recorded history at the summit happened one year ago. An atmospheric river caused it. Accordingly, he explains: “These atmospheric rivers are occurring more frequently.”
Here’s how Beckwith sees it: “The idea that the ice on Greenland will last decades and decades, even centuries. I think you could throw those ideas out the window as you get more and more atmospheric rivers, you’ll get more and more abrupt changes in the melt rate.”
On the first day of rain at the Summit, it rained every hour, which was unprecedented and shocking to the scientists at the station at 10,000 feet elevation. Temperatures were more than 18°C higher than normal.
The implications are horrifying. For example, when and how much sea level rises has become a roll of the dice that threatens every coastal city of the world. When and how much?
Keep in mind nobody is gonna ring a bell or pre-announce: Hey, Greenland’s crumbling so fast that we’d better head for the hills. Nobody is going to make a public statement like that, and if they did, climate deniers, including 52% of House Republicans and 60% of Senate Republicans would tear them to pieces in the media labeled as a “commie plot,” or as a “lie to scare Americans,” or something equally stupid and juvenile that a whole bunch of people would believe.
Beckwith introduced a new study d/d June 2nd, 2022 entitled: Greenland Ice Sheet Rainfall, Heat and Albedo Feedback Impacts From the Mid-August 2021 Atmospheric River, Geophysical Research Letters, Vole 49, Issue 11 by Jason E. Box, et al. Box is widely recognized as the world’s leading authority on Greenland.
Regarding the analysis according to Christopher Shuman, a glaciologist with University of Maryland: “To see this many melt events at this intensity in such a short period is absolutely remarkable in the historic records that are available to us… We now see three melting events in a decade in Greenland – and before 1990, that happened about once every 150 years, and now rainfall in an area where rain never fell,” Ibid.
According to Beckwith: “This has huge implications for Greenland’s rate of melt, it has huge implications for global sea level rise. It has huge implications for the Ocean Circulation Pattern… It’s a solid indicator that we’re in abrupt climate system change… crazy things are happening, we’re at that state.”
The frequency of atmospheric rivers driven by highly amplified jet stream patterns is increasingly troublesome and threatens continued rapid melt. This is also an issue in Antarctica.
Since the timeline and extent of sea level rise is now an unknown more so than ever before and in the face of rapidly deteriorating conditions at both poles, coastal communities worldwide should preempt the unknown by building sea walls, especially low-lying areas like Miami. And yet, there are no hues and cries across the land to initiate emergency measures to hold back rising seas.
Bottom line according to Beckwith: “Throw out all of the models, the idea that it can take decades and decades or even centuries for a place like Greenland ice to melt out with a huge increase in sea level rise… If atmospheric rivers become more frequent, the Greenland ice sheet is basically a sitting duck to be obliterated by these atmospheric rivers.”
“In just one week in July last year, the ice and snow virtually disappeared from the surface of Greenland’s barren interior. Only a few months earlier, when Box predicted this might happen, he was dismissed by many of his fellow scientists as an alarmist.” (Source: Greenland Melting, Rollingstone, 2022)
Box explains the problem of science: “For most scientists publishing a paper is a masturbatory act… Few people read it, you feel good, and then it’s over; it has no influence on policymakers; it does nothing to increase public understanding of what is happening to the climate system,” Ibid.
Meanwhile, according to NASA: Greenland and Antarctica are losing three times as much ice each year as they did in the 1990s.
Years of warnings about dangers of excessive fossil fuel CO2 emissions have not moved the needle. Fossil fuels today account for 75-80% of the energy mix, same as 50 years ago. And, according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel companies plan on $1.5T of new production between now and 2030.
With warnings galore of dangers of global warming, even The Economist felt compelled to carry an article Aug. 25, 2020: The Greenland Ice Sheet has Melted Past the Point of no Return: “The ice loss, they think, is now so great that it has triggered an irreversible feedback loop: the sheet will keep melting, even if all climate-warming emissions are miraculously curtailed. This is bad news for coastal cities.”
The Economist article was two years ago, one year before the unusual rain incident at Summit Station, which was a big time wake up call. Yet, the planet’s biggest threat remains worse than ever. Alas, at some point in time global warming warning articles, like this one, will become meaningless. Gurgle!
Robert Hunziker is a writer from Los Angeles
“We regret we failed to protect you.” This was part of a statement issued by United Nations human rights experts on July 14, urging the Israeli government to release Palestinian prisoner Ahmad Manasra. Only 14 years old at the time of his arrest and torture by Israeli forces, Manasra is now 20 years old. His case is a representation of Israel’s overall inhumane treatment of Palestinian children.
The experts’ statement was forceful and heartfelt. It accused Israel of depriving young Manasra “of his childhood, family environment, protection and all the rights he should have been guaranteed as a child.” It referred to the case as ‘haunting’, considering Manasra’s “deteriorating mental conditions”. The statement went further, declaring that “this case … is a stain on all of us as part of the international human rights community”.
Condemning Israel for its ill-treatment of Palestinian children, whether those under siege in war-stricken Gaza, or under military occupation and apartheid in the rest of the occupied territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is commonplace.
Yet, somehow, Israel was still spared a spot on the unflattering list, issued annually by the United Nations Secretary-General, naming and shaming governments and groups that commit grave violations against children and minors anywhere in the world.
Oddly, the report does recognize Israel’s horrific record of violating children’s rights in Palestine. It details some of these violations, which UN workers have directly verified. This includes “2,934 grave violations against 1,208 Palestinian children” in the year 2021 alone. However, the report equates between Israel’s record, one of the most dismal in the world, and that of Palestinians, namely the fact that 9 Israeli children were impacted by Palestinian violence in that whole year.
Though the deliberate harming of a single child is regrettable regardless of the circumstances or the perpetrator, it is mind-boggling that the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres found it appropriate to equate the systematic violations carried out by the Israeli military as a matter of course and the 9 Israeli minors harmed by Palestinian armed groups, whether intentionally or not.
To deal with the obvious discrepancy between Palestinian and Israeli child victims, the UN report lumped together all categories to distract from the identity of the perpetrator, thus lessening the focus on the Israeli crimes. For example, the report states that a total of 88 children were killed throughout Palestine, of whom 69 were killed in Gaza and 17 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. However, the report breaks down these murders in such a way that conflates Palestinian and Israeli children as if purposely trying to confuse the reader. When read carefully, one discovers that all of these killings were carried out by Israeli forces, except for two.
More, the report uses the same logic to break down the number of children maimed in the conflict, though of the 1,128 maimed children, only 7 were Israelis. Of the remainder, 661 were maimed in Gaza and 464 in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The report goes on to blame “armed Palestinian groups” for some of the Palestinian casualties, who were allegedly injured as a result of “accidents involving children who were near to military training exercises”. Assuming that this is the case, accidents of this nature cannot be considered “grave violations” as they are, by the UN’s own definition, accidental.
The confusing breakdown of these numbers, however, was itself not accidental, as it allowed Guterres the space to declare that “should the situation repeat itself in 2022, without meaningful improvement, Israel should be listed.”
Worse, Guterres’ report went further to reassure the Israelis that they are on the right track by stating that “so far this year, we have not witnessed a similar number of violations”, as if to suggest that the right-wing Israeli government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid has purposely changed its policies regarding the targeting of Palestinian children. Of course, there is no evidence of this whatsoever.
On June 27, Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) reported that Israel “had been intensifying its aggression” against children in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the beginning of 2022. DCIP confirmed that as many as 15 Palestinian children were killed by Israeli forces in the first six months of 2022, almost the same number killed in the same regions throughout the entirety of the previous year. This number includes 5 children in the occupied city of Jenin alone. Israel even targeted journalists who attempted to report on these violations, including Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed on May 11, and Ali Samoudi, who was shot in the back on the very same day.
Much more can be said, of course, about the besiegement of hundreds of thousands of children in the Gaza Strip, known as the ‘world’s largest open-air prison’, and many more in the occupied West Bank. The lack of basic human rights, including life-saving medicine and, in the case of Gaza, clean water, hardly suggests any measurable improvement in Israel’s track record as far as Palestinian children’s rights are concerned.
If you think that the UN report is a step in the right direction, think again. 2014 was one of the most tragic years for Palestinian children where, according to a previous UN report, 557 children were killed and 4,249 were injured, the vast majority of whom were targeted during the Israeli war on Gaza. Human Rights Watch stated that the number of killed Palestinians “was the third-highest in the world that year”. Still, Israel was not blacklisted on the UN ‘List of Shame’. The clear message here is that Israel may target Palestinian children as it pleases, as there will be no legal, political or moral accountability for its actions.
This is not what Palestinians are expecting from the United Nations, an organization that supposedly exists to end armed conflicts and bring about peace and security for all. For now, the message emanating from the world’s largest international institution to Manasra and the rest of Palestine’s children will remain unchanged: “We regret we failed to protect you.”
– Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
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