Ice melt to close off Arctic's interior riches: study

Source: Associated Press

(Reuters) - Global warming will likely open up coastal areas in the Arctic to development but close vast regions of the northern interior to forestry and mining by mid-century as ice and frozen soil under temporary winter roads melt, researchers said.

Higher temperatures have already led to lower summer sea ice levels in the Arctic and the melting has the potential to increase access for fishermen, tourists and oil and natural gas developers to coastal regions in coming decades.

The melting has also led to hopes that shorter Arctic shipping routes between China and Europe will open.

The Arctic is increasingly a region of deep strategic importance to the United States, Russia and China for its undiscovered resource riches and the potential for new shipping lanes. The U.S. Geological Survey says that 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and natural gas lies in the Arctic.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/31/us-arctic-warming-roads-idUSTRE74S1UF20110531

...from administering the last greedy blows to the arctic interior, due to global warming?

There's also a sad irony that the melting sea ice is opening more coastline for greedy hands to explore for more of the drug that melted the sea ice to begin with.

... the only thing 'they' can see is 'how can we make money off of it'? Not ... "let's not destroy one of the few nerarly pristine environments left on the planet" ....


:banghead: :spank: :(

it's fueled from pure greed for profit. If there isn't any profit to be made from said action, it won't get done. If there's profit to be made, the greedy will even go as far as killing ourselves and everything else around us to make said profit.

Profit is capitalisms only God.

to do so, just to get their greedy hands on untapped natural resources. To hell with
the consequences...

In fact that is their plan for Mars (terraforming), the Moon, etc. They are "terra-ists" with a god complex.

Thanks for the thread, tex-wyo-dem.

that we burn it. It makes nice plastics and provides lots of constructive chemicals. We should be using electricity to power our vehicles and solar/wind power to provide it. Then we could use all of the natural gas to make other plastics and chemicals we need for industry.

Oil isn't inherently evil. Burning it does cause a lot of trouble, however.

There's nothing we can do to reverse climate change once we've hit the tipping point where the permafrost is thawing out, releasing incalculably huge amounts of methane from ancient rotting vegetation. We have no choice but to implement a technological solution. We obviously can't stop burning oil and gas right now. It will take time. We just need to keep improving technology to eventually wean ourselves off of it.

This has been posted on DU already, but worth posting again...

Arctic Foxes and all other living things in the far northern hemispheres. Are we so selfish that these poor animals have to feed our insatiable need for oil and other resources. We should be ashamed.
We have taken the habitat of so many animals that it sickens me. What are we but just a higher form of evolved life.

Geeze, it gets worse by the day. We wonder why we have Turkeys and coyotes in our back yards. I an 68. I never saw a live goose or swan in my area until a few years ago. We used to have lots of colorful birds in our area. Gone....
Sparrows everywhere and they are not even native.

When my time on this earth is over, I hope now that my family will remember all that was, I have told them about the wonderful animals we used to see. Now they will have to look up the animal in the encyclopedia.
Oops, Forget that, look it up on line.

I very much agree with you. It is the lose of animal habitat and the lose of these spectacular creatures that depresses me the most. Not just the animals in the arctic, but all that will suffer due to dramatic climate change. And to think we are causing this suffering due to our insatiable greed angers and depresses me further.

We are in the midst of one of the great extinction periods in the history of the world, only this time it isn't caused by geologic activity or a comet hitting the earth. It's an unprecedented event where another species is the cause of the mass extinction.

I am a firm believer that everything in connected...if we cause the decline and/or extinction of just one species, whether it be plant or animal, it will upset the balance and will come back to create more suffering on us all. Karma.

... so that the f*ckers who are currently profiting from the slaughter
and destruction would be the ones who were directly affected by it
(rather than just passing the bill down a generation or two).

:mad: