"How Global Warming Could Suddenly Tip Over and Ignite Calamity"

[leftchick]

This is it folks. The Issue that trumps them all.....

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=56&ItemID=11008

<snip>

US state governments and businesses are beginning to take action of their own to avert global warming by reducing the greenhouse gas emissions under their control. These measures, repeated across the globe, may by some estimates allow the world to stabilise emissions by the middle of the century.

But will that be soon enough? A growing body of scientific opinion suggests the world may be about to experience not a gradual rise in temperatures over several decades but a wild careering into climate chaos.

That is because some of the changes triggered by warming temperatures create a "feedback" effect of their own. These feedbacks can cause the warming trend to accelerate further or bring serious disruption to regions of the world (see box).

In this view, the rising proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, by creating feedbacks, is pushing the earth's climate through a series of thresholds or tipping points that threaten to bring cataclysmic consequences. Those could include a much more rapid melting of the Arctic ice and the Greenland ice sheet than previously predicted, the accelerated melting of permafrost, the cessation of the Indian monsoon, a rapid dying back of forest in the Amazon and a halting of the sea currents that help bring warm weather to Europe.



Scientists shocked as Arctic polar route emerges

PARIS (AFP) - European scientists voiced shock as they showed pictures which showed Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself.


The satellite images were acquired from August 23 to 25 by instruments aboard Envisat and EOS Aqua, two satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Perennial sea ice -- thick ice that is normally present year-round and is not affected by the Arctic summer -- had disappeared over an area bigger than the British Isles, ESA said.

Vast patches of ice-free sea stretched north of Svalbard, an archipelago lying midway between Norway and the North Ple, and extended deep into the Russian Arctic, all the way to the North Pole, the agency said in a press release.

"This situation is unlike anything observed in previous record low-ice seasons," said Mark Drinkwater of ESA's Oceans/Ice Unit.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060920/sc_afp/climatewarmingarctic_060920111816



Hand out picture dated August 2003 shows the North Pole-32 meteorological research station. European scientists voiced shock as they showed pictures which showed Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself.(AFP/HO/File)

[aquart]

1. "Could"?????

If we don't get that it WILL, we don't get anything.

[n2doc]

2. Frankly we are screwed

We really need to be undertaking forecasting and disaster planning on a global scale. Trying to reverse the CO2 trend would take enormous changes in our lifestyle, the way we operate industry, trade, etc. that we simply as a nation will not take. People will only do these things if they are slapped in the face, repeatedly, about the effects, and even an event like Katrina didn't do anything on a national or global sense. So instead of wishing and hoping and worrying, we need to face facts and begin to plan for the effects. Now.

[Uncle Joe]

3. Kicked for the sake of the human race,

we better wake up and smell the coffee people.:o

[leftchick]

4. global warming

good night kick.

:(