The animation Jon posted yesterday at one point mentioned positive feedback loops. It’s mighty scary when the news headlines start picking up on new scientific evidence of those same positive feedback loops. Here’s what Bill McKibben had to say in response to an article in today’s issue of The Independent:
There are moments when the sheer sense of urgency of this work overwhelms us. Today is one: a research ship in the Arctic has come back with the first real evidence that, by warming the world, we’ve begun to let methane vent from the oceans. Read the article: the ship found ‘methane chimneys’ carrying this global warming gas straight from the ocean floor–the concentration in the air was a hundred times normal. We have so little time to solve this problem–Copenhagen in December 2009 is the last real chance that the world will do what needs doing. Which is why we need to be doing everything we can this year to force leaders to make Copenhagen real. Everything.