It's a Slow Apocalypse, Charlie Brown

When I started this blog it was because the end of the world was really bumming me out. One of our early slogans was "Apocalypse Got You Down? Chill out at Ice Station Tango." But I never meant to imply that the end of the world was fast approaching. My sense of the apocalypse is that it is already here, but it's a very slow process. Movies like 2012 (check out NASA's debunking of fears associated with 2012) and The Day After Tomorrow rush the thing for the sake of giving viewers a good ride, but, in reality, the end will come at a slow droning pace, not like the fast striking Martian conspiracy to suck the planet into the Large Hadron Collider or anything like that.

Unfortunately, that slow drone is gaining momentum. In spite of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which we Americans took a pass on, carbon levels have increased 6.5 percent. A new report shows that both halves of Antarctica are melting (h/t Stacy Sedai, who also designed this image back in 2006 -->). Again, even this news isn't an indication that the end is near. It just means that the things that will doom us are progressing steadily. NASA says that Antarctica lost 196 billion metric tons of ice in 2006. That will raise sea levels by 0.02 inches. Now project that out over twenty years. But don't project it at a flat rate unless we start signing some serious legislation to combat the root causes of our climate problems. No, project it at a steadily increasing rate reflective of the rate at which things are getting worse.