Green Taxi

My brother, Michael, sends this Artic news.  After this summers record breaking extreme melting of the Artic Sea ice, CNN points outthat some scientists are now arguing that the Artic ice could disappear completely in five years, by 2012, a massive change against their previous estimates of this happening by 2040.

The current conference in Bali, calling for tougher limits on greenhouse gases, needs to finish with some astounding recommendations or changes if anything has a chance of being saved.  More and more, it is beginning to look like there are certain parts of our current climate that could be gone forever.

Here are some staggering facts from this article:

• The surface area of summer sea ice floating in the Arctic Ocean this summer was nearly 23 percent below the previous record. The dwindling sea ice already has affected wildlife, with 6,000 walruses coming ashore in northwest Alaska in October for the first time in recorded history. Another first: the Northwest Passage was open to navigation.
• 552 billion tons of ice melted this summer from the Greenland ice sheet, according to preliminary satellite data to be released by NASA Wednesday. That’s 15 percent more than the annual average summer melt, beating 2005′s record.

One of the worst points about this Artic summer is that this was supposed to be a mild summer in terms of the cyclical melting.