You may have experienced climate change for yourself. It’s easy to do these days. In most places on this planet, you just have to step outside for a while.
But it is not so easy to see the gradual accumulative changes that take place over years through annual cycles of ebb and flow. The short video below, mapping the destruction of Arctic Sea Ice over a 25 year period, put together from weekly satellite and surface data, allows us to see the effects play out in a time-span that we can relate to and grasp.
The original NOAA article presenting this video is here.
The ice that you can see melting and flowing in this video, mostly into the warmer waters of the Atlantic Ocean, will not be replaced in any of our lifetimes. The Arctic region is warming faster than any other place on Earth and that warmth is acting as an engine (fueled not only by the Sun but also by the release of underwater and underground Methane deposits) for the growing climate disruption that is being experienced as yet mostly through erratic weather patterns across all of the Northern Hemisphere.
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This will soon, increasingly, and is even now doing so, disrupt food production around the world. It will also speed up the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, land-based ice 2-3 kilometres thick, causing several metres, perhaps tens of metres, more rise in sea level than official reports are prepared to admit. Those are just two of the effects of climate change that we should be, but are generally not being, worried about.
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Please do not think, even for a second, that the Paris climate agreement will do anything to stop or even alter in any way the severity of those effects on life on Earth.
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