…and our head-in-ass politicians like Ted Stevens need to wake up and start doing something about it right now.

Vast ice shelf collapses in the Arctic
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

A vast ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic has broken up, a further sign of the astonishing rate at which polar ice is now melting because of global warming.

The Ayles ice shelf, more than 40 square miles in extent - over five times the size of central London - has broken clear from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic, it emerged yesterday.

The broken shelf has formed an ice island, in what a leading scientist described as a “dramatic and disturbing event”, citing climate change as the cause.

The news caps a dramatic year of discovery about just how quickly the polar ice is disappearing.

It comes as America’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, warns in today’s Independent that the Earth is being turned into “a different planet” because of the continuing increase in man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.

Read more here

I saw Al Gore’s filmed presentation on the effects of global warming last night. It’s really good and everbody should see it. There are moments when it is really self-promotional, but whatever, he’s been a politician for too long. Ultimately, it is frightening and overwhelmingly convincing.

While the media has been focusing on the section of the film where he shows what would happen if the ice shelf in either Antarctica or Greenland were to melt (a graphic image of the World Trade Center area is flooded), the most frightening part for me was not conjecture, but rather some simple reporting.

He shows satellite images of a huge section of the water-based ice in Antarctica just crumbling into the ocean over the course of just 35 days. Honestly, the entire theater just let out a gasp; it was pretty amazing to see it with those satellite images. Then he goes on to explain that the same process that caused this massive destruction of ice there is being recreated in Greenland this very moment.

If that happens (as it did in the past, causing the lasrt ice age in Europe) the oceanic currents that keep Europe warm would likely shut down again and plunge the world into a new ice age.