The National Snow and Ice Data Center has determined that the Arctic sea ice melt this summer is the most extensive recorded in 33 years of observation.
Everybody's talking about Isaac this week, and for obvious reasons. The hurricane is big and dangerous; a force of nature.
Practically nobody is talking about an equally big, and in its own way equally dangerous, phenomenon occurring right now in the Arctic Ocean.
Using satellite tracking the National Snow and Ice Data Center has determined that the Arctic sea ice melt this summer is the most extensive recorded in 33 years of observation. Ice now covers just 1.58 million square miles, under 30 percent, of the Arctic Ocean.
But what's happening at the "top of the world" is hardly a "force of nature." Rather it is what scientists have been predicting would happen as a result of human-induced climate change ... only more so.
"It's hard even for people like me to believe, to see that climate change is actually doing what our worst fears dictated," Jennifer A. Francis, a climate scientist at Rutger's, told The New York Times this week. "It's starting to give me chills, to tell you the truth."
Scientists have been predicting that the Arctic ice will be gone entirely by the middle of the century. But the current rate of melting, The Times reported, indicates that may happen "much sooner, perhaps by the end of the decade."
Everybody's talking about Isaac this week, but practically nobody's talking about the vanishing Arctic ice and what that might portend to a world that is already experiencing wild and dramatic shifts in its weather patterns.
They are not talking about it — except in derisive terms — at the Republican National Convention. They are not talking about it in the White House.
But our children, and their children's children, will not forgive us our silence, as we continue to studiously ignore the buildup of greenhouse gases that are drastically changing the world they will inherit.