GLOBAL WARMING

Antarctica

Under the surface of this vast white emptiness are profound and potentially troubling changes taking place, and at a quickened pace. It seems there has always been a certain comfort in the stories that global warming problems won't manifest the themselves for generations to come. It's seeming more and more urgent with temperatures climbing in parts of Antarctica in recent years. Melt water seems to be penetrating deeper and deeper into ice crevices, weakening immense and seemingly impregnable formations that have developed over thousands of years.
As a result huge glaciers are thinning and ice shelves the size of American states are disintegrating. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey reported in December that in some parts of the Antarctic Peninsula large growths of grass are appearing in places that until recently were hidden under ice.
Free floating ice in the sea does not raise sea level. The ice just melts and displaces no more mass as water or as ice. But a glacier, which rests on land, can raise the global sea level if that vast volume of ice slides into the sea at a high rate. Research and striking changes that are visible to the naked eye, all point to the disturbance of climate patterns thought to be in place for thousands of years.
According to a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters, the discharge rate of three important glaciers still remaining on the Antarctic Peninsula accelerated eight-fold from 2000 to 2003. Ice is thinning at the rate of tens of meters per year on the peninsula, with glacier elevations in some places having dropped by as much as 124 feet in just six months.
In a story out of London an international climate-change task force warns that global warming is approaching the point of no return, after which widespread draught, crop failure and rising sea levels will be irreversible.
The task force on Monday called on the Group of 8 leading industrial nations to cut carbon admissions, double their research spending on technology and work with India and China to build on the Kyoto Protocol for cutting emissions of "greenhouse gases."
The independent report was created by the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain, the Center for AmericanProgress in the United States, and the Australian Institute.
Stephen Byers, co-chairman of the task force, said it is vital that U.S. cooperation in tackling climate change is secured. President Bush has rejected the Kyoto accord, arguing that the carbon emission cuts it demands would damage the U.S. economy. In my opinion this administration is destroying this economy with an ill-planned, unnecessary war in Iraq, tax cuts and enormous deficit, etc.
In a question presented to meteorologist Tom Skilling on Wednesday regarding if it were possible for the entire world to be flooded, he said.
"Let's assume all the water bound up as ice on land were released into the sea. Then snow and glaciers would contribute about 2 feet of ocean rise; the Greenland icecap, 21 feet; the Antarctic icecap, 223 feet. Total potential rise: 246 feet -- a worldwide catastrophe, surely but not annihilation. That's certainly comforting.