Blog Action Day: The Environment

As such, my contribution is this. The scientific consensus on global warming has been proven wrong. The actual Arctic sea ice loss is MUCH WORSE than all the scientists predicted. We are now looking at a complete loss of Arctic sea ice by 2030. The famed Northwest Passage is actually open again.

The current rate of sea ice melt is much faster than predicted by computer models of the global climate system.

Just last year the National Snow and Ice Data Center's Serreze said that the Arctic was "right on schedule" to be completely free of ice by 2070 at the soonest. He now thinks that day may arrive by 2030.

"There's talk of a tipping point, where we thin the ice down sufficiently so that at some point large parts of it can't survive the summer melt season anymore, so we see this very rapid decline in ice cover," he said.

"It's quite conceivable that that tipping point we talk about has already been reached."

I mean, just take a look at the difference in the ice from 1979 to 2007.



The evidence is in. The "debate" is over.

For those interested in learning more about the lies being spread by the right-wing and Big Oil, check out my 3-part series I wrote last year on debunking their lies.

Part 1: Carter & Harris: Gore "an embarrassment to U.S. science"
Part 2: Exposing "Friends of Science" as Big Oil mouthpiece
Part 3: How to debunk the Right's lies on global warming

BTW, that Carter in the first diary is Australian professor Bob Carter, who David Lazar referred to in last spring's BD/BR debate as having never taken any money from Big Oil interests. This is FALSE. He works for one of the ExxonMobil-funded astroturf groups, Tech Central Station. If you're working for one of those "think tanks", you ARE putting some amount of money into your pockets from Big Oil.

And Now, A Message From Preeminent Climatologist, Ted Stevens

Expert climatologist and Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens has confidently claimed that global warming is winding down. In a local news broadcast story on the effects of climate change on an Alaskan town, Stevens predicted that the end of bad weather conditions was at its end.

Stevens, while acknowledging the impact of global climate change, said he believes the worst may be over.

"We're at the end of a long, long term of warming. 700 to 900 years of increased temperature, a very slow increase. We think we're close to the end of that. If we're close to the end of that, that means that we'll starting getting cooler gradually, not very rapidly, but cooler once again and stability might come to this region for a period of another 900 years," Stevens said.

This was his way of telling the residents of Shishmaref, which is being washed away by rising waters despite the construction of massive sea walls, that they're on their own.

Stevens' statement also came as a surprise to Deborah Williams, the president of Alaska Conservation Solutions, who said that his theory is a "new one." It just so happens that the Senator's theory contradicts all previous findings of climate change scientists, including the IPCC study released a few months ago.

"I have not heard of any credible climatologist who believes that the earth is going to cool," said Williams. "To the best of my knowledge, every climatologist believes that the Earth is going to warm, in large part because of greenhouse gas emissions."

This is the same man who once described the internet as a "series of tubes" in reference to network neutrality. In his credit though, as the green-lifestyle blog TreeHugger points out, Stevens has come a long way from when he argued that man-made greenhouse gases do not contribute to global warming.