"Friday, December 7, 2012
AMEG Strategic Plan
2012-12-04
AMEG Strategic Plan
This strategic plan was prepared by the independent policy group, AMEG (the Arctic Methane Emergency Group), comprising a multidisciplinary team of leading scientific experts, system engineers, communicators and concerned citizens.
Purpose
The purpose of this document is firstly to warn the world of the extreme and imminent danger of global famine and ensuing strife created by rapid Arctic warming and precipitous sea ice retreat, and secondly to provide a strategic plan for handling this situation.
The international community is totally unprepared for the speed of change in the Arctic, the dramatic effects on global climate and the dire repercussions on food production.
The tendency among scientists and the media has been to ignore or understate the seriousness of the situation in the Arctic. AMEG is using best available evidence and best available explanations for the processes at work. These processes include a number of vicious cycles which are growing in power exponentially, involving ocean, atmosphere, sea ice, snow, permafrost and methane. If these cycles are allowed to continue, the end result will be runaway global warming.
The situation is so urgent that, unless appropriate action is taken within a few months, the window of opportunity will be lost. Adaptation to the consequences will be impossible, as famine spreads inexorably to all countries.
The situation is of unprecedented danger in the history of civilisation. Humans are not psychologically prepared to deal with such mortal danger except by suppressing thoughts of it. But we, as a human society, have to “get a grip” if we are to survive.
The good news is that AMEG believes that the emergency situation can be handled, but only if faced squarely and treated with focus, determination and urgency. The international community must not only tackle the effects of a growing number and severity of weather extremes, tantamount to abrupt climate change, but must also tackle the underlying cause: a vicious cycle of Arctic warming and sea ice retreat.
Peoples of the world must be told the truth about the extreme danger that we all face. Then there is a unique opportunity for all nations to pull together to fight the common “enemy”, which is the vicious cycle of Arctic warming and sea ice retreat.
Governments of the world must not pretend that there is no immediate crisis. They must understand the chain reaction of cause and effect, and collaborate to protect all citizens.
Introduction
Abrupt climate change is upon us. Extreme weather events are on the increase. Farmers are in despair. Food prices are rising. The UN climate change policy simply based on emissions reduction cannot deal with the immediate danger. The UN and member governments should have acted years ago to avert the crisis now unfolding. What has been happening in the Arctic has been completely overlooked, and now only drastic action to cool the Arctic has any chance of rescuing humanity.
A key factor is the Arctic sea ice, whose reflection of sunshine keeps the planet cool. Remove the sea ice, and not only does the planet start to overheat, but the whole climate is suddenly changed. The global weather systems, on whose predictability farmers rely, are dependent for their stability on there being a temperature gradient between tropics and the poles. Remove the snow and ice at one pole, and the weather systems go awry and we have “global weirding”. Furthermore, the weather systems get stuck in one place, and we get weather extremes: long spells of hot/dry weather with drought, or long spells of cold/wet weather with floods.
This global weirding has started with a vengeance. The sea ice is rapidly disappearing. The behaviour of the polar jet stream is disrupted. Extreme weather events occur more often and with greater ferocity. And the food price index climbs and climbs.
There is an obvious relationship between strife and food – if you starve a nation they will fight to get food. This relationship has been pinned down by an organisation called the Complex Systems Institute, CSI. They show that the food riots break out when the food price index rises above a certain critical level. An example was the Arab Spring."
http://a-m-e-g.blogspot.com/Transhumanist Kurzweil:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/we-are-now-one-year-away-from-global-riots-complex-systems-theorists-sayFigure 1 ~ A trend line analysis of CSI data
https://complexity.uncc.edu/about-csi
