Greenland is Melting - Democratic Underground

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Wed Jul-27-05 09:12 AM
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Greenland is Melting

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/greenhouse-effect-is-melting-g

Going, Going, Gone?
Greenhouse Effect is Melting Greenland
July 21, 2005

Greenland — In a stunning discovery aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise yesterday, scientists found new evidence that Greenland’s glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate. Global warming is no longer on the horizon, it has arrived at our doorstep, and if you live in a coastal city, that’s not just a figure of speech.

That’s because Greenland’s massive ice sheet locks up more than six percent of the world’s fresh water supply, and it is melting much faster than expected. If Greenland were to melt fully, it would cause sea levels around the globe to rise by nearly 20 feet. Even measurements of four to five feet of sea level rise could mean that cities like New York, Miami and Boston will experience flooding in low lying areas and increased threat of storm surge from hurricanes. More than 70 percent of the world's population lives on flat coastal plains, and 11 of the world's 15 largest cities are on the coast or bays and estuaries.

The Arctic Sunrise arrived in Greenland at the end of June, with scientists from around the world onboard. The ship and its crew have been documenting and measuring the impacts of global warming. Yesterday’s’ scientific discovery adds further proof that Greenland’s glaciers are melting far more rapidly than previously believed. All current scientific forecasts for global warming had assumed slower rates of melting from the Greenland ice sheet. This new evidence reveals that the threat of global warming is much greater and more urgent than previously believed.

In addition to the increased speed of the glacier, scientists from the University of Maine found that the Kangerdlussuaq glacier has receded more than three miles since 2001. Measurements from glaciers across Greenland are providing startling new evidence of thinning, causing the glaciers to speed up and decrease in overall mass, intensifying the flow of ice into the ocean.

Kangerdlussuaq glacier alone contains enough ice to fill the Great Lakes four times if it melts completely.

“The alarm is now deafening. We can’t stand back and watch our future go under, literally,” said Melanie Duchin, Greenpeace campaigner onboard the Arctic Sunrise. “We must stop generating global warming pollution."

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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=56&ItemID=8377

Faced With This Crisis

by George . Monbiot
July 26, 2005

One day we will look back on the effort to deny the effects of climate change as we now look back on the work of Trofim Lysenko.

Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist who insisted that the entire canon of genetics was wrong. There was no limit to an organism's ability to adapt to changing environments. If cultivated correctly, crops could do anything the Soviet leadership wanted them to do. Wheat, for example, if grown in the right conditions, could be made to produce rye.

Because he was able to mobilise enthusiasm among the peasants for collectivisation, and could present Stalin with a Soviet scientific programme, Lysenko's hogwash became state policy. He was made director of the Institute of Genetics and president of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He used his position to outlaw conventional genetics, strip its practititioners of their positions and have some of them arrested and even killed. Lysenkoism, which governed state science from the late 1930s until the early 1960s, helped to wreck Soviet agriculture.

No one is yet being sent to the Guantanamo gulag for producing the wrong results. But the denial of climate science in the United States bears some of the marks of Lysenkoism. It is, for example, state-sponsored. Last month, the New York Times revealed that Philip Cooney, a lawyer with no scientific training, had been imported into the White House from the American Petroleum Institute, to control the presentation of climate science.(1) He edited scientific reports, striking out evidence that glaciers were retreating and inserting phrases suggesting that there was serious scientific doubt about climate change.(2) Working with the Exxon-sponsored PR man Myron Ebell, he lobbied successfully for the sacking of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who had refused to accept the official line.(3)
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