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.
Last year, 2007, was a very bad year for global warming, see below. There is some slightly better news this year. The North Pole did not lose even more ice cover this Summer, as it was the second worse year for ice loss. That is relatively good news, for if the trend of last year would have continued, and we would have lost even more ice, there would be virtually no hope of reversing the process. Perhaps we still have time to save our polar ice and our favorable climate and environment.
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 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! NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally has predicted that there could be no Summer ice by 2012. Al Gore is now saying that there is a 50% chance that Summer polar ice will be gone in 5 years. This makes all our plans for dealing with global warming out of date.
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