The future is calling.
In a new immersive video, The Weather Channel (hardly a fringe, pseudoscience liberal organization) presents a projected weather report from the year 2100 … assuming we don’t act decisively now.
The video uses movie magic to frightening effect. But anyone knowledgeable about climate change will recognize that the movie magic is underpinned by real observations and science.
After all, as I’ve written about on this blog, Charleston, SC floods at some high tides even today:
As does Norfolk, VA, also depicted in the video:
As do Miami, Shishmaref, Fiji, and Kiribati.
The sea level rise graph presented in the video is entirely recognizable as the most recent data and “business as usual” (RPC 8.5) projection by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a consortium of the world’s climate scientists:
And the root cause depicted in the video, showing the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland dumping land ice into the ocean, is informed by actual time lapse photography of that glacier, which is currently retreating at 17 km/y:
This is similar to other time lapse photography of collapsing glaciers captured nearby in Greenland, as well as Iceland and Alaska, by the photographer James Balog.
Are we really going to allow this to happen to us?
allow our grand coastal cities, the skyscrapers we built so proudly, to be submerged in the sea?
even though we have alternatives?
because fossil fuel companies want to keep making record profits off their antiquated business model?
because they can afford with those profits to buy the servitude of half our politicians?
because we are experimenting in our precious social media with the notion of “fake news” and arguing with each other about the very nature of reality, as if we haven’t devised reliable methods of ascertaining reality? (If scientific understanding is so “fake,” how did you get that wireless phone you’re arguing on?)
This is not “fake news.” The observations and predictions related to climate change are the serious, dedicated work of generations of scientists and public policy experts.
The future is calling. It’s ours to choose.
#rescuethatfrog