North Sea Ice and Climate Change

Many scientists believe climate change has made it already too late to retain human kind as we know it on the planet. Let's hope they are wrong for the sake of our grandchildren.

From www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5014744.ece
"The Arctic icecap is now shrinking at record rates in the winter as well as summer, adding to evidence of disastrous melting near the North Pole, according to research by British scientists. They have found that the widely reported summer shrinkage, which this year resulted in the opening of the Northwest Passage, is continuing in the winter months with the thickness of sea ice decreasing by a record 19% last winter."

Thankfully most scientists, however, believe that we do have a few months left to get world leaders to take climate change seriously. Hopefully by 2012 we can start to reduce carbon emissions. (The estimate is that from 2012 onwards, developed nations must reduce by 9% a year, providing the undeveloped world keeps to 2011 levels.)

I refer to the Stern Review (2006), Al Gore’s DVD An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Scientific Assessment Report (2007) and Gabrielle Walker & Sir David King’s book The Hot Topic (2008). The recent research by Dr Kevin Anderson at the UK government-funded Tyndall Centre shows, however, that global warming is happening even faster than previously thought by the four references above.