The Polar Bears Are Still Out of Luck

Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places, but it sure seems to me that this is a story that's been underplayed. Sea ice in the Arctic is the lowest level recorded since satellite measurements were started during the 1970s. It's roughly 1.5 percent below the previous low measured on September 21, 2005. That measurement was taken at the end of the melting season, but given that that was in September and now it's only August, that means that we've got another month of melting yet to go this year.

Have we become inured to the idea of global warming? It's been over a year since Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth galvanized our concern, but a year can be a long time, and we've got other things to worry about. The announcement of this fact was made on Friday, so it was bound to get lost over the weekend, but it seems like it had an even lower profile than we might've expected.

Although the AP article I linked to has this in the bottom of the story, the most striking facts comes from an interview with Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Although there are some natural processes at work, what Serreze calls "greenhouse warming" must be factored in, as well. Perhaps even more significantly, the melt rate is currently faster than computer models had projected. Where the prediction had once been a complete melt off of summer ice in the Arctic between 2070 and 2100, Serreze said that the current rate would result in an absence of ice in the summer by 2030. That's right, scientists are now suggesting that in a little more than twenty years from now, there will be no sea ice in the Arctic during summer months. Sure, that sounds significant now, but the mainstream media couldn't quite find its way clear to provide prominent coverage. Maybe worrying about such things is too 2006.