"The Ice Is Melting Much Faster Than We Thought" - Independent

[hatrack]

"Two recent climatic events are warning signs that climate change may be proceeding much more quickly than previously thought, James Lovelock claimed. They are the increasingly rapid melting of the Arctic ice-sheet covering Greenland, which will raise global sea levels considerably, and the extreme heatwave in western central Europe in the first two weeks of last August.

EDIT

Senior scientists, including a team from the Swiss Met Office and Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, have since said that last year's heatwave was entirely unprecedented in climatic history, and attributed it directly to climate change. "There's no question in any reasonable scientist's mind that that was the first real bad event of global warming," said Professor Lovelock. "But the media picked it up only as a story about the wickedness of the French in not looking after their old people."

Just as alarming, he said, is the dissolving of the Greenland ice sheet, which measurements show is "melting far faster than we expected".

Describing the picture on the front page of today's Independent, he said: "That's a kilometre up in Arctic Greenland, near the North Pole, and that's what it looks like in summer now. There are torrents of meltwater plunging off the glaciers."

EDIT

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=524302

[brokensymmetry]

1. As I mentioned on another post...

I've started to wonder how bad things will get when all the ice has melted. How hot will it get?

We can take 110 degrees in summer, or even 120 degrees. Can we take 140 degrees? What happens if things really start cranking up?

The sad thing is, it may be too late to do anything about it...

[smirkymonkey]

2. And will we have the energy to cool ourselves

down?

Scary.

[brokensymmetry]

3. Well, that's the problem.

If any fossil fuels are used to cool us down, we make the problem worse. Even if we use nuclear (no greenhouse gases), the losses due to transmission and other inefficiencies mean that we add heat to the system.

I think those cool days of Spring and Fall will be precious memories.

[smirkymonkey]

4. Is there any solution to this dilemma?

is it too late?

[brokensymmetry]

5. That's the big question, isn't it?

I don't know...I don't suppose anyone does.

We live in interesting tims.