Arctic ice disappearing 10 times faster than expected!

So we all know about the melting ice caps and polar bears losing their habitat. Global warming and climate change have been confirmed to exist now by just about everyone. While there is still some speculation on whether man causes this warming or not, at this point, it doesn't really matter much, the debate is really pointless.

This past week, science teams reported that they were expecting 8 square miles of ice to melt this summer in the Canadian arctic....when the measuring was completed, the actual number was 83 square miles! What this tells me is that we have no idea how to measure this stuff...smart people are really just guessing in their computer models, and the reality seems much worse than the conservative estimates.

What's all this melting ice got to do with you? Well, climate change, for one thing. While the melting arctic ice may not raise sea level like the Greenland ice sheets will, they will have adverse effects on the storms that travel around the globe. We're seeing increasingly violent weather here at home in the US, but also all over the world.

We are also losing important eco systems up north that help create balance on the earth's systems overall. The bottom line...we have no idea of the outcomes we are creating, or the speed at which they are happening.

It can all be a bit depressing I must say, which I think is part of the problem of why these things don't get talked about more often and in a serious manner. Solutions? Well, I always bring it back to our own footprint - what we each are doing to rein it in a bit. This problem though is going to need massive scale intervention in a Jerry Springer sort of way! World governments are going to have to put their best scientists and strong funding behind trying to slow the greenhouse gas effects.

Stay tuned for more updates...or post your own. We'll need political action on this front, and a lot of it soon. Talk with your communities and leaders, we need to keep this issue in the spotlight in America regardless of who is in the White House in 2009.