Earth Melts While Republicans Maintain Denial

Environmentalists, people left of center, dirty hippies and even moderates have been saying FOR YEARS now that human activity is increasing the rate of global warming.

Republicans have been steadfast in the commitment to deny human affected global warming. Calling it witchcraft ever since 2004 and beyond.

Bush Attacks Environmental Scare Stories (2004)
Republican Congressman Advised to Deny Global Warming (2004)
Conservative website arguing against global warming
GOP against Global Warming (2007)
"In 2006, the National Journal asked a group of Republican senators and House members: "Do you think it's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?" Of the respondents, 23 percent said yes, 77 percent said no. "

Until just VERY recently the hard right has denied global warming. Only until the majority of the planet and 99.87% of every single climatologist and weather scientist on the planet has screamed global warming has the Dubya administration and their sycophants finally started … talking about global warming.

This op-ed in the NY Times is, again, stating the obvious.

A Swiftly Melting Planet
By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON
Toronto
THE Arctic ice cap melted this summer at a shocking pace, disappearing at a far higher rate than predicted by even the most pessimistic experts in global warming. But we shouldn't be shocked, because scientists have long known that major features of earth's interlinked climate system of air and water can change abruptly.

A big reason such change happens is feedback - not the feedback that you'd like to give your boss, but the feedback that creates a vicious circle. This type of feedback in our global climate could determine humankind's future prosperity and even survival.

The vast expanse of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean always recedes in the summer, reaching its lowest point sometime in September. Every winter it expands again, as the long Arctic night descends and temperatures plummet.

Each summer over the past six years, global warming has trimmed this ice's total area a little more, and each winter the ice's recovery has been a little less robust. These trends alarmed climate scientists, but most thought that sea ice wouldn't disappear completely in the Arctic summer before 2040 at the earliest.

But this past summer sent scientists scrambling to redo their estimates. Week by week, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported the trend: from 2.23 million square miles of ice remaining on Aug. 8 to 1.6 million square miles on Sept. 16, an astonishing drop from the previous low of 2.05 million square miles, reached in 2005.

The loss of Arctic sea ice won't be the last abrupt change in earth's climate, because of feedbacks. One of the climate's most important destabilizing feedbacks involves Arctic ice. It works like this: our release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases around the planet causes some initial warming that melts some ice.

Melting ice leaves behind open ocean water that has a much lower reflectivity (or albedo) than that of ice. Open ocean water absorbs about 80 percent more solar radiation than sea ice does. And so as the sun warms the ocean, even more ice melts, in a vicious circle.

This ice-albedo feedback is one of the main reasons warming is happening far faster in the high north, where there are vast stretches of sea ice, than anywhere else on Earth.

Continue reading full article...

And yet, another fantastic article from the NY Times, way back in Feb 2007

"On Feb. 2, 2007, the United Nations scientific panel studying climate change declared that the evidence of a warming trend is "unequivocal," and that human activity has "very likely" been the driving force in that change over the last 50 years. The last report by the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in 2001, had found that humanity had "likely" played a role."