Fiona Harvey -- Financial Times
Sept. 20, 2006 -- Scientists at Nasa, instead of staring into the skies, have been using satellites to look down at the world and track how it is changing. Within a year, the U.S. space agency disclosed this week, an area of sea ice "the size of Texas" has been lost from the Arctic.
Data pieced together by Nasa showed that Arctic perennial sea ice, which normally survives the summer melting season, abruptly shrank 14 percent. The report found: "Perennial ice can be 10 or more feet thick. It was replaced by new, seasonal ice only one to seven feet thick that is more vulnerable to summer melt."
The disappearance of Arctic ice, the retreat of glaciers from the Himalayas to Peru, earlier springs and hotter summers -- all these effects have been recorded by climate scientists in recent years. They form the basis of Al Gore's polemic on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, in which the former U.S. vice-president describes huge cliffs of ice breaking apart, glaciers dropping suddenly into the sea, and polar bears found drowned because they cannot swim between ice floes as they used to.
This, as everyone knows, is global warming. Even those sceptical about whether the warming is caused by fossil fuel combustion accept that world temperatures have risen and look set to continue upward. Mr Gore's film, which has been showing in the United States since May -- grossing $23 million -- and opened in the UK Wednesday, has raised American awareness about climate change in the face of the federal government's stance against the Kyoto protocol, designed to curb it.
U.S. 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.
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