An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.
Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.
“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.
Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.
Cue the Republicans:
Tonight on CBS Evening News, each of the 10 leading presidential candidates will be asked, “Do you think the risks of climate change are at all overblown?” According to an advance transcript, every single candidate acknowledges the threat — except Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson.
Huckabee responds that “scientifically,” he doesn’t know whether global warming is “overblown.” Thompson goes a step further, claiming that the “state of entitlements” and “extremists” who “want to do drastic things to our economy” are the real problems.
Maybe we should look on the bright side. 2 out of 10 means only 20% of the Republican candidates are environmental troglodytes, right?
Well, not so much. Rudy’s solution:
Giuliani never even returned calls to the forum organizers. While he admits to CBS that there “is global warming,” his solution is to rely more heavily on U.S. coal reserves. Giuliani has received more than $400,000 from employees of companies in the oil, gas, and energy industries. His law firm, Bracewell and Giuliani, also recently led the lobbying campaign on behalf of the utilities companies against the Senate energy bill.
Mitt? (Naked ambition caters to willful ignorance)
Orff had a question about the environment: “It’s eighty degrees today. What are we going to do about global warming?” Romney’s response was quick and concise. “We’re going to get ourselves off of foreign oil,” he said. “And to do that it’s going to take nuclear power, clean coal, more efficient vehicles, and then we’re going to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gases.” It was a good answer, but also a strange one. Not long ago, Romney released a glossy pamphlet detailing his positions on major issues. He sounded like Al Gore when talking to the environmentalist in New Hampshire, though his policy book’s treatment of global warming reads more like something from ExxonMobil. In it, Romney refers to the “debate” over “how much human activity impacts the environment”—code words for the global-warming-denial crowd. He offers no plan to “dramatically” curtail emissions of CO2, just an aside that “we may well be able to rein in our greenhouse-gas emissions.” As the governor of Massachusetts, Romney, in December, 2005, pulled out of a Northeast-state agreement on carbon reduction—a plan that he had supported the month before.
Cue Zippy:
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