Got Ice?

From a paper on the threat of global warming, written by an environmentalist some years back, I found this literally numbing description of the prospect;

A big enough rise of global temperatures would eventually melt the world's glaciers, and indeed a retreat of mountain glaciers since the 19th century was apparent in some regions. That would release enough water to raise the sea level a bit. Worse, beginning in the 1960s, several glacier experts warned that part of the Antarctic ice sheet seemed unstable. If the huge mass slid into the ocean, the rise of sea level would wreak great harm, perhaps within the next century or two. While that seemed unlikely (although not impossible), by the 1980s scientists realized that global warming would probably raise sea level enough to damage populous coastal regions.

There is some truth that is stranger than fiction, and more threatening than scientific predictions. One of them occurred yesterday.

A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists said Thursday, citing climate change as a "major" reason for the event. The Ayles Ice Shelf — all 41 square miles of it — broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic.
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Derek Mueller, a polar researcher with Vincent's team, said the ice shelves get weaker and weaker as temperatures rise. He visited Ellesmere Island in 2002 and noticed that another ice shelf had cracked in half.

"We're losing our ice shelves and this a feature of the landscape that is in danger of disappearing altogether from Canada," Mueller said.

What are the polar bears going to do now? It seems that our wasting the planet's resources has brought about the grim prospect that we may have wiped many more species off the earth. Time to get out the rotary mower and turn down the thermostat. No, well past time.