[Terrapreta] Arctic Could be Ice-Free in 5 Years

[David Yarrow]

NASA Scientist Says Arctic Summer Could be Nearly Ice-Free in Five Years. 

By Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press, December 11, 2007

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=hEGZe7izzLppvKzTpe3MWuJdIHQoTYvk

"An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years. Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press. 

'The Arctic is screaming,' said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo. Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040. This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions'... 

NASA scientist James Hansen, the lone-wolf researcher often called the godfather of global warming, on Thursday will tell scientists and others at a meeting of researchers in San Francisco that in some ways Earth has hit one of his so-called tipping points, based on Greenland melt data." 
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