Folks tend to look for clues about climate change in weather patterns. It is true that climates are shifting but on a seasonal basis it is hard to measure how much is change and how much is typical variability. The global indicators, melting glaciers, ocean temperatures and melting permafrost are a more direct way to measure change. All indications are that global warming is accelerating, to wit:

The Washington Post reports that Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier, a river of ice large enough to raise sea levels by 1.6 feet, was already among the fastest-melting glaciers in the world. Now scientists have found that the ice mass is flowing even more rapidly.

Further, Siberia is experiencing active permafrost melt on a grand scale. Some prognosticators suggest that by the end of the century Russia will make more from wheat exports than it does from oil today.

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Mariner has mentioned often that the United States is in the long, painful death throes of Reaganism. Causes are a changing world, changing environment, changing technology and new economic structures. What is trending at the moment is Republican autocracy. Will manipulation of the elections be enough to sustain the twentieth century into the twenty-first?

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Speaking of economics, a growingly obvious trend is the shrinking of Europe’s role in world economics. Europe has tended toward smaller business models; for example, Apple has a larger net value than the top 30 firms in Europe. Perhaps its history of smaller nations and many economies has led Europe to this preference but as a result, there will be only two global business leaders: China and the United States – perhaps, with luck, India. The global trend definitely is toward international, multimarket corporations who will anchor worldwide supply chains similar to Amazon.

The government role is to develop supply chain style arrangements between nations. One new example of this is an agreement by the G7 to levy a worldwide 15 percent tax on corporations to prevent corporations from avoiding taxes by moving operations to the nation with the least tax.

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Several news items have been about seafood. It seems the warming oceans have had an effect on everything from seals and whales to lobsters and commercial fishing species. From Science Magazine:

“… basically what we found all over the ocean, wherever we had data, is that the abundance of large fish, in terms of numbers and weight, were ten times higher originally than they are now. That is, that what we’re left is one-tenth of the original number and weight of large, large fish.”

Here in the United States it already has been noted several years ago that the ‘Maine’ lobster has moved on to other locations.

Ancient Mariner