Global warming is making it possible for humanity to drill into undersea oil deposits in the thawing Arctic and extract fossil hydrocarbons that had been kept inaccessible for millennia behind barriers of frozen seas and frozen ground. The carbon dioxide gas to be released by the burning of liquid fuels derived from Arctic petroleum will enhance the global warming that makes their mining possible in the first place. This is a positive feedback loop — an amplifying cycle — of negative consequence. The policy of the government of the United States is for immediate fossil hydrocarbon extraction, and consequently for accelerating the positive feedback global warming cycle.

“If you look back, the thing that strikes you, if you’ve got any sensitivity, is that extinction is the most common phenomena,” Richard Leakey told the Associated Press, in New York City on May 27, 2012. “Extinction is always driven by environmental change. Environmental change is always driven by climate change. Man accelerated, if not created, planet change phenomena; I think we have to recognize that the future is by no means a very rosy one.”

Obama’s Less Bad Arctic Oil Drilling
31 May 2012
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/30/drilling-the-arctic-obama-style/