Notes from an Environmentalist.
"The Answer my friend is blow'in in the wind".
The Irminger Sea off Greenland.
“The Answer My Friend
Is Blow’in in the Wind.”
Bob Dylan
1962
Just about anywhere on earth you can see the effects of global warming. Whether it is in Phoenix, where people are dying in the streets from heat stroke, California, where people are burning to death in forest fires, or in New Orleans, Miami and New York where people have been drowning in ever more intense hurricanes.
Similarly, you can see corals dying in Australia, glaciers melting in Antarctica, deserts expanding in Africa, and rainforests disappearing in Brazil. All, as our planet hurtles towards more irreversible tipping points.
The best place to see one of the most alarming tipping points is the Irminger Sea.
The Irminger is where meltwater flowing off the Greenland glacier makes the sea’s surface waters less salty. This is a problem, because it dilutes the hot salty surface waters flowing north on the Gulf Stream.
Normally the Gulf Stream waters would evaporate near the Irminger Sea making them saltier and heavier so they would plunge as huge invisible waterfalls, two miles deep to the ocean floor.
There, they would flow south toward the equator, warm and rise again to become the Gulf Stream, the top half what is called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC which acts like an escalator pulling the Gulf Stream north and pushing the bottom currents south.
But the Irminger Sea can muck things up by adding fresh water to the system so the surface waters don’t plunge, and the Gulf Stream don’t flow.
When this happens, it will be a major tipping point, starving Africa, plunging Europe into longer crop destroying winters, causing more severe storms and eventually raising sea levels as much as 21 feet.
When will this happen? Publishing in the journal Nature Communications the Danish statistician Peter Ditlersen audaciously predicted 2057 in what has become the most cited paper of the year for the journal.
No wonder it raised eyebrows, everybody knows someone that will be alive in thirty-three short years.
So, the disappointing thing is that we don’t have much time to prevent these tipping points from happening. But the encouraging thing is, we already have the technology to allow us to continue having the benefits of abundant green energy without the global warming emissions of fossil fuels.
We don’t have to take years and spend billions of dollars on things like nuclear fusion and geoengineering. We already have the technology and it is safe, time-tested, readily available, and its fuel is as ubiquitous as the wind itself.
Countries like Denmark have been using offshore wind energy for years. Now it is America’s turn. All we have to do is lease, permit and build offshore wind turbine fields.
This then will be the story of the beginning of America’s offshore wind industry now taking place, 14 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and on the docks and wharfs of places like New Bedford, Cape Cod and in Salem Harbor. Places that have always looked toward the ocean for their economy and salvation.