This week’s visit to our comrades at Beijing’s People’s Daily give us this rather alarming news about the Arctic polar ice cap: it might be gone in 55 years or so.
Scientists, conservative by nature, do not know the exact cause (perhaps they should ask the “intelligent designer?”), but can come up with no alternative than the likelihood of the effects of accumulation of greenhouse gases and global warming.
In essence, as noted by the People’s Daily, the melting of the floating ice cap itself will not directly raise world sea levels, as the ice is already floating, but will (of course) be devastating to natural habitats of animals such as polar bears, seals, etc., and of course, will affect sea life… everywhere.
Of course, the loss of a lot of white ice replaced by open dark colored sea water will accelerate other global warming effects, which will doubtless help melt those annoying land-based glaciers in places like Greenland and Canada and so forth… that will raise sea-levels globally (estimated to currently rise, IIRC, at around an inch a year now.)
Anyway… just one more long term consequence of our collective actions that we can’t be bothered to deal with (I suppose). Until, perhaps, our (financial) overlords in Beijing tell us to deal with them…
tdog
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