Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have discovered that a massive Antarctic ice sheet previously assumed to be stable may be starting to disintigrate. Its collapse would raise sea levels around the earth by more than 16 feet.
BAS staff are carrying out urgent measurements of the remote points in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) where they have found ice to be flowing into the sea at the enormous rate of 250 cubic kilometers a year. Only four years ago, in the last report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), worries that the ice sheet was disintegrating were firmly dismissed. That's quite a change in thinking in just four years. Professor Chris Rapley, the BAS director, said "The previous view was that WAIS would not collapse before the year 2100. We now have to revise that judgment." Collapse of the WAIS would be a disaster, putting chunks of low lying, desperately poor countries such as Bangladesh under water - not to mention much of southern England.
England's Prime Minister Tony Blair has called a conference to increase the pace of international action on climate change. One topic to be covered, at Tony Blair's request, is to explore the question of how much climate change the world can take before the consequences are catastrophic for human society and ecosystems. This conference takes place in about a year when the UK is heading the G8 group of industrialized nations and the European Union.
Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, had an ominous prediction when she said that major global warming impacts on the world in the next 20 to 30 years could not be avoided. Her forecast that we are powerless to prevent major damagefrom climate change is accepted by scientists but rarely accepted by a politician. Greenhouse gases that have already been put into the atmosphere, will be enough to threaten the survival of many ecosystems and wildlife such as polar bears and penguins. "I believe that most of the warming that we are expecting over the next few decades is now virtually inevitable, and even in this time frame we may expect a significant impact," Mrs. Beckett said.
The conservation organization WWF believes the polar bear, lacking the melting summer sea ice they normally hunt on, could be extinct within 20 years due to the effects of global warming. And yet these facts are not mentioned in the mainstream press.
As much as our mainstream television new and press love to stand out in a storm to report it, you can search almost in vain for anyone even willing to speculate that the increase in 'extreme weather events' -- multiple massive hurricanes in Florida, prolonged drought in the southwest, Europe's burning summers, Brazil's first south Atlantic hurricane ever, the storm of the century on Canada's east coast, Japan's worst season of typhoons in memory or Chicago's first ever air pollution warning during winter -- might have anything to do with global warming.
A new report by the International Climate Change Task Force said:
"The countdown to climate change catastrophe is spelled out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world -- and it is remarkably brief. In as little as ten years, or maybe less, their report indicates, the point of no return with global warming may have been reached. And it breaks new ground by putting a figure -- for the first time in such a high level document -- on the danger point of global warming, that is, the temperature rise beyond which the world would be irretrievably committed to disastrous changes, such as agriculture failure, water shortages, major droughts, increased disease, sea level rise and the death of forests. -- with the added possibility of abrupt catastrophic events such as runaway global warming, the melting of the Greenland ice sheetor the switching-off of the Gulf Stream.
The 'bottom line' is that we are less than 1.2 degrees of temperature latitude before the crucial point of no return is reached.
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