AN ENCOUNTER WITH CLIMATE CHANGE

From the weather scientists to the President to the Pope, a salient topic is climate change. There are deniers, but the evidence is that it is occurring and it will occur at an ever faster pace, due to the nature of positive feedback. (when things get worse, they can get even worse, faster). When the ice melts, the water gets warmer, so the ice melts faster. We, the living, may not see much change in our lifetimes, but succeeding generations will. Mass migrations the likes of which we observe in the present events in Europe, but much larger, will upset everything. The oceans will rise, as they have before and living areas will be inundated
My book of short stories, A Pig In The Rumble Seat (Amazon), contains  stories partly reflective of my career as a rocket engineer, engaged in design and development of the Atlas and Centaur rockets in the World War II Consolidated Aircraft factory in San Diego. I regret not including an experience that has a particular meaning for the present concerns, as it highlights a rare acquaintance with a time in the past when Earth’s oceans covered much more of the planet than they currently do.
About ten miles east of where I live in La Jolla on the Pacific coast, the terrain is similar to photos I have seen of the ocean bottom. Rolling hills and valleys composed of who knows what deposits over the ages. In an area known as Sycamore Canyon, the company, then renamed General Dynamics, hired architects and engineers to design and build facilities for test firing the rockets, comprising steel towers for holding the vehicles, storage tanks for propellents and a blockhouse from which test engineers controlled the firings.
Early in the building process, some of the mounds were scarfed away to provide a level area for operations, leaving other mounds that were sliced off from bottom to top like a cut through a round loaf of bread. Revealed was layer upon layer of shell creatures that had lived out their lives and built up a crust on the ocean floor during an ancient period when the region was covered by water. Using my Swiss Army knife, I pried some samples out which foolishly I never kept. I had at that time no feeling other than that ir was interesting. It was in fact a profoundly spiritual event to be in touch with something that lived a millions of years ago and had been brought into the light.
We now know that there was at least one period in Earth’s history when there was little or no water trapped as ice and the sea level was perhaps two hundred feet higher than it is now. In California, the Gulf of California would have moved significantly northward, an explanation for the seashell deposits in Sycamore Canyon. There was no San Diego. Most of the East Coast, including all of Florida, was under water. Then followed a period when warm oceans produced severe storms, In the polar regions and Greenland the precipitation was heavy snow which turned into enormous ice fields, enough to lower the ocean levels to where it is now.
Could the ice caps melt and raise the ocean level again? The answer is yes, and probably faster than we expect because a new factor augments what might be characterized as a normal, cyclic global warming event. That is the the human factor, whose activities and excesses in burning fossil fuels release annually more than a hundred gigatons of carbon dioxide, a heat trapping gas, into the atmosphere. To make matters worse, and will likely speed up the process, rising temperatures will thaw the perma-frost, which upon decaying, will release vastly more tonnages of heat trapping gases.

So things can get worse, much worse, faster, and probably will. Positive feedback at work.