Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Gore's Global Warning: The Glaciers are Melting

Writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben has published a summary of the recently released report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the March 15 issue of The New York Review of Books.

McKibben's article is not optimistic. He notes that the international group of scientists who complied the report sacrificed the most current data for, in McKibben's words, "lowest-common-denominator conclusions that are essentially beyond argument." The sea level is continuing to rise, for example, at rates that are higher than even the IPCC report predicted. The icesheets of Greenland and Antarctic, McKibben notes, appear to be moving more quickly toward the sea.

If the details in the report aren't alarming enough, the New York Review has published two amazing photos of glaciers in Patagonia, Argentina, both from Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

The top photo, taken in 1928, shows a vast sheet of glacier ice stretching from the photographer off to distant mountain peaks. The lower photo shows the same scene in 2004. The glacier is gone, replaced by a large blue lake and a foreground of barren land. It's beautiful, but it's not a happy scene.

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