Every time one hears a bloviator like Rick Perry or Michelle Bachman states categorically that Climate Change is but a myth, something not to be considered by anyone of good faith, should consider this...
"The rapidity with which the planet is losing its northern ice cap continues to astonish experts. The defrosting northern pole is one of the prime drivers of Earth's climate system and is changing global weather patterns in unpredictable ways.
The Arctic ice melt is also accelerating the rate of climate change beyond what humanity is doing with every barrel of oil, tonne of coal or cubic meter of gas burned."
The frightening thing about Global Warming is the fact it's only just beginning...
"One consequence is the acceleration of global warming as the Arctic flips from all white to dark blue, with the ocean absorbing tremendous amounts of heat from the 24-hour summer sun. That shift in albedo - from white to dark - is expected to add an additional amount of heat energy of about 0.3 watts per square meter over the entire land and water surface of the planet, calculates Stephen Hudson of the Norwegian Polar Institute.
That's enough additional energy to power an LED night light for each square meter of the 510 million square meters that comprise the Earth's surface. That will raise global temperatures about 0.25 C, John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota told IPS.
Of course, most of that tremendous amount of heat will reside first in the Arctic, where temperatures are already an average of three to five degrees C higher than 30 to 40 years ago. This winter parts of the Arctic were 21 C above normal for a month.
All that additional heat threatens to light the fuse of the world's biggest "carbon bomb", the vast permafrost region spanning 13 million square kilometers across Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of northern Europe."
At this point in time, it looks like James Lovelock's dire view of the negative impact Global Warming is beginning to have on the world may be spot on even though a very sizable percentage of people (in this country) continued to deny its existence because of the subtlety of change, something vastly different from the speed of tv or the web where instant gratification is not fast enough.
Seen below is a video of Lovelock's take on the emergence of the 900 lb gorilla no one wants to talk about as we move further into the 21st century.
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