Get Ready For The 21st Century, It's Gonna Be A Scorcher

Stunning satellite photographs published this week provide the most visually arresting evidence of worldwide climate change yet.

The photographs, taken over the past decade, were kept classified under the aegis of "national security" during the Bush years, deemed too sensitive -- perhaps too damning? -- for public consumption. This month, the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the Obama administration declassify the photos, and they were released in a torrent of around 1,000 of the photographs the following day.

The photos show a stark array of before-and-after comparisons. The single most startling image (shown above) is a shot of Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost point in the United States, historically surrounded year-round by a sheet of solid ice which, during the summer of 2007, receded and finally vanished completely, leaving a coast cloistered by solid ice since time immemorial confronted quite suddenly by the facts of climate change. Other photos in the series show the gradual disappearance of the Bering Glacier and open water on the Beaufort Sea, another location historically covered in an ice-sheet.

With facts like these developing on the ground, it's hard to feel as though your personal effort to conserve energy and shrink your footprint is worthwhile. Climate science suggests that the rapidly accelerating effects of global warming are not only far removed along causal chains from carbon emissions, but are likely precipitated by slippery-slope feedback loops, a global climate in tumbling transit from the balancing-act status-quo of the Holocene interglacial towards a hotter and wetter planetary configuration that represents a great big question mark for life on Earth. In other words, the struggle to save the Earth might be too little, too late, but nothing is ever so certain. Only time will tell, and meanwhile it couldn't hurt to ride your bike to work for a change, eat a vegetarian meal for a week or buy carbon offsets.

(Source: http://gfl.usgs.gov/ArcticSeaIce.shtml)