June 27, 2011
Mickey Friedman
Woke up this Monday morning, June 27, 2011 to the shocking news that what some people call global warming but what I prefer to call the climate crisis is real. Like in, “happening.”
Maybe Henny Penny was worried about the wrong thing. Forget about the sky falling. It’s the melting ice. I figured it out by reading some small articles, much smaller than the news that the Red Sox beat the Pirates, thank God. So the Sox at least took one of the three games.
Gray Whale - Photo Guillermo Arias AP
It was a matter of connecting the dots. First, there was the article reminding us about the whale making it to the Holy Land. I must have missed the original report last year:
When a 43-foot (13-meter) gray whale was spotted off the Israeli town of Herzliya last year, scientists came to a startling conclusion: it must have wandered across the normally icebound route above Canada, where warm weather had briefly opened a clear channel three years earlier.
On a microscopic level, scientists also have found plankton in the North Atlantic where it had not existed for at least 800,000 years.
So you’ve got a very big whale and very small plankton taking very unexpected journeys. And what’s the big deal? Well, these two species just took a trip across the Northwest Passage; a trip they couldn’t take before because of the ice. Or the used-to-be-ice. It turns out that in all our records, the Northwest Passage – which is the journey from Alaska across northern Canada – has only been unfrozen twice, in 1998 and 2007. But the ice, because of the climate crisis we don’t want to accept, isn’t there the way it used to be.
