Can scientific ingenuity outrun climate change?

This is the Global Seed Vault, also known as the doomsday vault. Run by the Norwegian government, it was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze for almost a million seed packets, one for each of planet earth’s vital food crops.
The facility was created to permanently protect the world’s food basket from global disaster – manmade or natural. Opened in 2008, it was expected that the deep permafrost into which the vault is sunk would offer “failsafe” protection.
But this is no longer the land of permanent ice and snow. Last week it was discovered the vault had been breached, with melt-water flowing into the tunnel entrance. The water then froze, “so it was like a glacier when you went in”, a Norwegian government spokesman told the press. Thankfully, it froze solid before penetrating the part of the vault where the seeds are stored. The ice has been hacked out, and the backup for mankind’s food supply is safe for now. But scientists are alarmed.
The flooding was a result of global warming, which has led to extraordinary temperatures in the Arctic. At a time when light snow ought to have been falling in the region, heavy rain instead sent melt-water gushing into the vault. 
“It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” the spokesman said.
The vault’s operators have since been working to waterproof the tunnel. Trenches are being dug on the surface to channel rain and melt-water away, and pumps are being installed in the vault itself in case of flood.
But the scare sparks a greater question: can the facility survive as humanity’s lifeline in case of sudden catastrophe? In fact, say worried voices in the scientific community, it has struck already: catastrophe has slowly been unfolding for years and could soon accelerate at a frightening pace.
That global warming is under way has been known for years. In recent times the tipping point has been reached, with scientific consensus confirming that even if mankind were somehow able to halt the activities that have lead us to this point, the momentum of climate change would roll on for decades or longer. The seed vault was part of the international attempt to protect Planet Earth and its inhabitants against at least some of the consequences of that momentum. Confidence had been high that human ingenuity could outrun its worst effects. That confidence has suffered a severe blow.  
“It was supposed to operate without the help of humans, but now we are watching [it] 24 hours a day,” the spokesman said.
Now we wait is to see whether the extreme temperatures this year were a one-off or will be repeated — or even exceeded. Norway’s Meteorological Institute noted that the Arctic, and particularly Svalbard, are warming faster than the rest of the world. On Spitsbergen, the end of 2016 saw average temperatures rise as much as 7 degrees Celsius above normal.
The melting Arctic permafrost has also triggered another concern among scientists. Ancient diseases for which there are no vaccinations and to which humanity has no immunity may be resurrected. Permafrost is an excellent preserver of viruses, while bacteria can be frozen alive for up to a million years.
Last August, a boy died and nearly two-dozen people were hospitalised in the Siberian tundra after contracting anthrax thought to have been released into the water supply from the thawing carcass of a reindeer that had been frozen for decades. Spanish flu virus dating back to 1918 has been detected alive in corpses buried in the Alaskan tundra, and researchers consider smallpox and the bubonic plague are likely buried and dormant in Siberia.