The Ice Age Cometh Part 3
Back here and here I talked about the melting polar ice caps and how that could bring on a new Ice Age by diluting the salinity of the Great Atlantic Conveyor Belt causing it to stop. As it is responsible for moderating the temperature of Europe and the Easatern Seaboard of North America this presents an environmental disaster of massive proportions. The death toll will be enormous. Today the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the Greenland ice cap is melting at a vastly accelerated rate
The vast ice cap that covers Greenland nearly three miles thick is melting faster than ever before on record, and the pace is speeding year by year, according to global climate watchers gathering data from twin satellites that probe the effects of warming on the huge northern island.
The consequence is already evident in a small but ominous rise in sea levels around the world, a pace that is also accelerating, the scientists say.
According to the scientists’ data, Greenland’s ice is melting at a rate three times faster [my emphasis] than it was only five years ago. The estimate of the melting trend that has been observed for nearly a decade comes from a University of Texas team monitoring a satellite mission that measures changes in the Earth’s gravity over the entire Greenland ice cap as the ice melts and the water flows down into the Arctic ocean.
“We have only been watching the ice cap melt during a relatively short period,” physicist Jianli Chen said Thursday, “but we are seeing the strongest evidence of it yet, and in the near future the pace of melting will accelerate even more.”
The same satellites tracking Greenland’s ice cap also are monitoring the melt rate of Antarctica’s ice cover, and there too the melting is adding to the global rise in sea level, according to another team of scientists.
Next to Antarctica, Greenland, a self-governing Danish territory, is the largest reservoir of fresh water on Earth and holds about 10 percent of the world’s supply. The increasing flow of fresh water — most of it from glaciers melting on Greenland’s eastern coast — is already beginning to change the composition of the ocean’s salt water currents flowing past Northwestern Europe, the scientists say.
The result could be a critical change in the composition of the main ocean current that flows past Europe’s northern edge, blocking off warmer waters that normally flow there and — ironically — making Northern Europe’s weather colder than normal, at least temporarily, while the rest of the globe continues warming.
We are so screwed and Bush, Harper, Blair and all the other leaders around the world are doing as little as possible to do anything to ameliorate the growing problem. The time when things get so bad the masses will end pacifist action and take back the planet is fast approaching and I suspect their first actions will be to line up the politicians and corporatists and give them what they’ll deserve, a .45 caliber aspirin to ease thei pain.
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