A Dire Warning From The “Doomsday Vault”

Climate change alarmists are taking full advantage of the “Sudden Stratospheric Warming” (SSW) event, which occurred above the Arctic in mid-February, as further evidence that the world’s unpredictable and sometimes chaotic weather is jeopardizing humanity’s food security.

The split of the polar vortex, otherwise known as an SSW event, shifted the Arctic airmass to most of Europe as well as Western parts of North America. Climate alarmist pointed out that massive snowstorms in Europe, dangerous weather patterns in the United States, and rain in the Arctic demonstrates how extreme weather is altering seasonal growing patterns.

Here is what Bloomberg said, “the world was upside down: it was raining in the Arctic Circle and snowing in Rome,” as explained above, the SSW event has been the primary driver of chaotic weather since mid-February.

Researchers, activists, executives and government officials gathered in Longyearbyen, a small coal-mining town on Spitsbergen Island, in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of what has become known as the “Doomsday Vault,” which is an underground bunker buried deep inside a mountain where the world stores its plant seeds from apocalyptic consequences of climate change and war, said Bloomberg.

Last month, we reported how the Norwegian government is planning to allocate 100 million kroner ($13 million) in technical improvements to enhance the facility after it sprung a leak from melting permafrost — officials warned that climate change could put the facility at risk.

“Biodiversity is the building block to develop new plants and because of climate change we’re in a terrible need to quickly develop new varieties,” said Aaslaug Marie Haga, executive director of Crop Trust, a group established to support gene banks. “The climate is changing quicker than the plants can handle.”

The “Doomsday Vault” is a secure seed bank buried deep inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The underground bunker is a long-term seed storage facility, built to keep its three vaults cool for 200-years — and can survive natural or human-made disasters.

The “Doomsday Vault” serves as a storage facility for more than 850,000 seed samples, according to the Bloomberg, which the three vault rooms are cooled to -18 °C (-3 °F).

Bloomberg describes the organizations behind the “Doomsday Vault:”

The vault is run by NordGen, the Nordic gene bank. A total of 74 institutes globally have deposits, and only those that send seeds have access. One notable exception is China, which has not signed the treaty, and is creating its own seed and gene banks outside the international cooperation. Participants say the real fight to preserve biodiversity is at the local level. Crop Trust is seeking to build an $850 million fund to finance its efforts, a long way to go from its current level of $285 million. Its largest donors are the U.S., Germany and Norway, but it’s now looking more to private business for funding.  

“We have to be prepared for the unknown,” Jon Georg Dale, Norway’s food and agriculture minister, said in his hotel in Longyearbyen during the event, where he was stuck after canceling a snow-scooter trip because of the thaw gripping the Arctic.

Some researchers, activists, executives, and government officials at the conference said there are no signs that the United States is backing away from its enviormental commitments, but did stress, Trump’s climate skepticism is concerning.

Ann Tutwiler, a former Obama-administration official who’s now head of Bioversity International, a global research group backed by more than 50 governments said, “businesses are becoming more aware of the problems of losing biodiversity.”

“The narrative of the 20th century was that we have to produce more food and that was all about a very narrow range of crops,” said Tutwiler. “Now because we have other issues we are trying to solve, such as climate and nutrition there’s a recognition you can’t do that with just those crops.”

Patrick Mulvany, an agriculturalist and adviser on biodiversity and food sovereignty said, ” the real efforts aren’t being made where they are needed the most: on the ground with the farmers who are not getting adequately compensated.”

“Unless that happens our future food is very insecure,” he said. “You can have as many seeds as you want locked up in the vault here but they deteriorate a little bit over time and they aren’t adapting to climate and new social pressures.”

It the minds of a climate change alarmist, well, never let a serious crisis go to waste. With the recent wild swings in weather across Europe and the United States, alarmists have come out of the woodwork — pushing their fear-mongering rhetoric of impending climate doom. But why? Well, perhaps, in the case of the “Doomsday Vault,” officials are looking for more government handouts to fund operations.

And there it is, the ah-ha moment: climate change alarmist preying on fear [climate change] to extract money from governments.