Glaciers vs buildings?

The massive ice structures breaking and melting away are much larger than the twin towers that collapsed in 2001

Ahmed Shah Masood, also known as the Lion of Panjshir, was a popular commander of Afghanistan. This is the same man that was assassinated 2 days before the 9/11 attacks. While the world remembers him as a military commander of Afghanistan, he was once an engineering student in Kabul’s Polytechnic. The man who had received training for building structures was responsible for destroying countless of them inside Afghanistan both during and after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

The world was horrified when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddha statues in early 2001. There was massive criticism hurled at the Taliban for destroying the ancient statues, which were symbols of a previously tolerant Afghanistan that was custodian of ancient and sacred structures. Then came the 9/11 attacks. About 3,000 people were killed and large structures were destroyed, chiefly the World Trade Centre. The images of those collapsing towers defined the politics of the world for years ahead.

While these man-made structures getting destroyed catch the attention of the world and the global media, somehow the same reaction is not observed when other much more massive structures are being destroyed such as the glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctica. One of the main differences is that these are not man-made but rather man-destroyed, if you will. Those massive ice structures that are breaking away and melting away are much larger in size than the twin towers that had collapsed in 2001. But unfortunately, the other major difference between this destruction and that of the buildings is that the former is done by the emperors of the world. For starters, they are always the good guys because they say so.

Even when it comes to climate change, the world has its pirates and emperors. The emperors are much bigger criminals but they have the privilege to define crime as they please. The slow destruction of the planet because of climate change is responsible for the deaths of humans, animals, plants and oceans on a much larger scale than what Bin Laden could have ever dreamt of achieving with the planes flying into the twin towers.

Since the West is primarily responsible for causing climate change, the world is interestingly not horrified by the disappearance of massive ice pieces from the planet. While the Bamiyan statues did nothing to keep the balance of life on earth, the ice caps on our planet do exactly that. Just by being there, they repel the heat of the sun back into space because of being white, acting as a large screen placed on the surface of the planet. They also prevent the coastal cities from drowning. Just in the Arctic, 95% of the oldest and thickest ice has been lost since 1985. Since around the time when the twin towers collapsed, between 2000 and 2019, a study found that the mass of ice lost was equivalent to submerging the surface of the entire England under 2 meters of water every year.

If this trend continues, it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility that climate change either in the form of rising sea level or massive precipitation would have gotten to the Bamiyan statues anyway. I am in no way justifying the acts of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. I am merely pointing to the irony that a few structures destroyed resulted in world politics being dominated and driven by them for decades. Can the destruction of these much larger natural structures define our politics and policies for the decades ahead? And decades is all we have as a species to survive. You don’t have to take my word for it. Trust the science and listen to the scientists. The world would also be a much safer place if our celebrities included scientists and science authors instead of TikTok dancers and morning show hosts. It is all about our priorities that define how the future would look like.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 9^th, 2023.

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