October 9, 2008

  • The ice shelves in Canada have lost a huge amount of ice
    this year—ice which had been in place for thousands of
    years. Now almost one-fourth of it is gone. BBC News quotes
    researcher Derek Mueller as saying, "These changes are
    irreversible under the present climate."

    Northern Greenland was so far north in the Arctic that
    scientists thought it might not experience global warming, but
    now satellites show a giant crack—7 miles long and half a mile
    wide in a glacier there that seems to be spreading. Also, an
    11-square-mile chunk has fallen off another large glacier in
    the area. This could raise the sea level,
    drowning
    the country. It could also be dangerous
    in other
    ways    .

    In Yahoo News, Seth Borenstein quotes researcher Waleed
    Abdalati as saying, "[The crack] could go back for miles and
    miles and there's no real mechanism to stop it."

    As the weather changes, birds are moving north. A variety of
    bird
    species     are extending their breeding ranges to the north, a
    pattern that adds to concerns about climate change. We may
    soon not hear the birdsongs we're so familiar with.

    When researchers studied 83 species of birds that have
    traditionally bred in New York State and compared their data
    with data collected in the early 1980s, they discovered that
    many species have moved North—some by almost 40 miles.

    Researcher Benjamin Zuckerberg says, "What you begin to
    see is a systematic pattern of these species moving
    northward as we would predict with regional warming."

    Ecologist William Porter says, "There are a wide spectrum of
    changes that are occurring and those changes are occurring
    in a relatively short amount of time. We’re not talking
    centuries, we’re talking decades…Whether [these changes]
    are good or bad, whether they should be addressed, whether
    we should adapt to them, whether we should try to mitigate
    some of this, those are questions that really, rightfully,
    belong in the political arena."