Humanity is facing the greatest crisis we have ever faced. Global Warming is accelerating at an alarming rate, especially at the poles, where it is progressing more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet. This is happening much faster than anyone, even the IPCC, ever thought it would. Without rapid major changes in our society, we will be dealt a series of catastrophes making life much more challenging for humans and many other species. The good news is that due to developements in renewable energy technology, we are now ready to make the shift to a new age of clean and sustainable energy, and a healthier, more beautiful and more peaceful world. Let us first face the bad news.
2007 was a stunning year for those concerned about Global Warming. It started out with January shattering all records for the first month by 1.53 degrees, the first time since record keeping began that the globe's average temperature was so far above the normal. There were 8000 heat records in August in America. The first 10 months were the hottest recorded on land. Most disturbing, the Arctic, which serves as the worlds refregerator, dramatically warmed in 2007, shattering records for the amount of melting ice. Within a mere two years, from 2005 until 2007, the polar ice cap lost 23% of its surface.
Summer melting last year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million square km., the smallest ever in modern times. In 1980 there was 7.8 million square km. of ice cover. The ice is also much thinner. It is now 6 feet thick instead of 10, so the mass of the North Pole's Summer ice is less than half what it was just 28 years ago. It is the same at the South Pole. NBC news recently reported that in 2006 alone, just the Antarctic peninsula and West Antarctic lost 192 billion metric tons of ice. This March, a major breakup of an Antarctic ice shelf "astounding" scientist, according to NBC. It has become very obvious that Global Warming is progressing faster than anyone ever thought!
Every Summer when the North Pole is tilted toward the Sun and experiences 24 hours of light the ice cover reflects vast quantities of heat back into space. Ice reflects most of the heat, whereas water absorbs it. Without this natural cooling effect it is easy to see that once the polar ice is gone, the world will be a much different and hotter place. It is extremly difficult to imagine that this condition will be reversible, so it should be obvious that once we lose the North Pole ice cap, we will be past the "tipping point".
It was originally predicted that by 2100 there would be no Summer polar ice. Then the prediction was moved up to 2050, then 2040. Now Professor Wieslaw Maslowski has told the American Geophysical Union that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss. Warmer waters from the Atlantic and Pacific are greatly speeding the melting process, a phenomenon called oceanic advedtion. His prediction is that the Arctic could be ice free in the Summer by 2013! Remarkably, this was without incorporating the data from 2005 to 2007. NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally has predicted that there could be no Summer ice by 2012. Al Gore, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, said that Summer ice at the North Pole could be gone in 7 years. While the IPCC was working on their report, the North Pole was falling right off their charts with unprecedented and unexpected melting and temperature increases that have already made their work very much out of date, as well as all of our plans for dealing with this world crisis.
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