All those doomsday effects of global warming that Bush thinks need further study? Yeah, they're accelerating:
The Antarctic ice sheet is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year in a trend that scientists link to global warming, according to a new paper that provides the first evidence that the sheet's total mass is shrinking significantly.
The new findings, which are being published today in the journal Science, suggest that global sea level could rise substantially over the next several centuries.
It is one of a slew of scientific papers in recent weeks that have sought to gauge the impact of climate change on the world's oceans and lakes. Just last month two researchers reported that Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, and a separate paper in Science today predicts that by the end of this century lakes and streams on one-fourth of the African continent could be drying up because of higher temperatures.
In other news, Alaska's famed dogsled race, The Iditarod, has had to move because Alaska's unseasonably warm weather has melted the snow below what the organizers deem safe. The state's winters have become 8 degrees warmer in recent years, a shift that seems pleasant, but is actually going to raise sea levels, screw up warm currents that keep Europe temperate, and generally destroy our world. Nice that Bush's paymasters have convinced him has picked this particular moment to deem paralysis-by-analysis a desirable condition.
