At the Poles, Melting Occurring at Alarming Rate (WaPo)

[jpak]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR2007102100761.html

For scientists, global warming is a disaster movie, its opening scenes set at the poles of Earth. The epic already has started. And it's not fiction.

The scenes are playing, at the start, in slow motion: The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centuries is melting away. The sea ice reaches only half as far as it did 50 years ago. In the summer of 2006, it shrank to a record low; this summer the ice pulled back even more, by an area nearly the size of Alaska. Where explorer Robert Peary just 102 years ago saw "a great white disk stretching away apparently infinitely" from Ellesmere Island, there is often nothing now but open water. Glaciers race into the sea from the island of Greenland, beginning an inevitable rise in the oceans.

Animals are on the move. Polar bears, kings of the Arctic, now search for ice on which to hunt and bear young. Seals, walrus and fish adapted to the cold are retreating north. New species -- salmon, crabs, even crows -- are coming from the south. The Inuit, who have lived on the frozen land for millennia, are seeing their houses sink into once-frozen mud, and their hunting trails on the ice are pocked with sinkholes.

"It affects everyone," said Carin Ashjian, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute scientist who spent early September with native Inupiats in Barrow, the northernmost town of Alaska. "The only ice I saw this year was in my cup at the cafeteria."

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[hatrack]

1. Wow-wee, let's hear it for the Washington Post - only four or five months behind DU!!

:eyes:

[tom_paine]

2. That reminds me of the first inklings I had that the Old Republic of America was dead

mostly from having a populace (that's you and me included, too) that was, collectively, morally and intellectually incapable of preserving the democracy and Constitution that was handed to us.

I remember it well in mid and late 2002 when I told a guy I worked with, maybe an Honest Republican not a Loyal Bushie, that the run up to the Iraq was was phony and that I knew the Niger Yellowcake Documents were forgeries because, among other reasons, the IAEA said so.

Well, this guy, your average white guy middle/upper management type, and of course he was 100% ignorant of what the Niger Documents or even what the IAEA was.

Ok, fine. When the issue came up and was blasted all over Corporate Cable TV Infoganda during 2003, I believe, about six months after we had that discussion and I told him was I was 100% certain their was little or no WMDs in Iraq and one of the reasons was this phonied up document, I felt certain that the fact that I knew the whole story months in advance and had discussed it with him would increase my credibilty.

:rofl: Fat fucking chance. Dumb bastard didn't even remember, and looked at me with glazed eyes when I brought it up.

Oh, we're finished, all right, in more ways than can be named.