The Bad News and the Good News

Arctic Ice Melting Rapidly, Study Says

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By SETH BORENSTEIN AP Science Writer

September 13,2006 | -- Arctic sea ice in winter is melting far faster than before, two new NASA studies reported Wednesday, a new and alarming trend that researchers say threatens the ocean's delicate ecosystem.

Scientists point to the sudden and rapid melting as a sure sign of man-made global warming.

"It has never occurred before in the past," said NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso in a phone interview. "It is alarming... This winter ice provides the kind of evidence that it is indeed associated with the greenhouse effect."

Scientists have long worried about melting Arcticsea ice in the summer, but they had not seen a big winter drop in sea ice, even though they expected it.

For more than 25 years Arctic sea ice has slowly diminished in winter by about 1.5 percent per decade. But in the past two years the melting has occurred at rates 10 to 15 times faster. From 2004 to 2005, the amount of ice dropped 2.3 percent; and over the past year, it's declined by another 1.9 percent, according to Comiso.

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The Bad News? We're really truly sincerely and inexorably fucked.

The Good News? The Northwest passage -- that imaginary shipping lane originally created in a 16th century novel, then assumed to be true -- might actually appear. Get your jet skis out, folks, and you can zip straight through from Newfoundland to Osaka.

(It's not Monkey Boy's fault. His moronic greed probably saved us from spending immense amounts of energy and money to little or no avail. How wise of him and the people with their hand up his open end to have just given it to their rich friends instead, eh?)