Core77

Newly Winterhouse-designed enviro site Environment 360 out of Yale has some serious writers with some serious writing, and not wanting to rain on your weekend or anything, but you kinda have to read Bill McKibben's The Tipping Point. Let's cut to the chase:

Perhaps the most important, in the short run (though it's like picking which terminal illness you'd most want to contract) is the prospect of rapid melt on the ice sheets of Greenland and the West Antarctic. We used to think these ice sheets were stable on a time-scale of centuries, because how do you even start to melt a mile and a half of ice? I mean, it's inertia defined. But it turns out that nature may have a method. As temperatures warm, snow at the very top of that ice sheet is turning to water, and that water in turn is finding its way through cracks and fissures to the base of the ice sheets where it can grease the skids for their slide into the ocean.

Meanwhile, rising and warming seas can eat away at the glaciers along the sea's edge, which serve as corks in the bottle for the inland ice sheets. Add it all up badly enough, and there’s at least the possibility--or so Hansen testified recently in federal court under oath--for five meters of sea level rise this century. Which is another way of saying the end of civilization as we know it, since there's not enough money on earth to defend our coastal cities or the fertile plains near the sea--the places where the world mostly, you know, lives--from that kind of rise.

Kinda makes you wanna stick with the hot green girls post, doesn't it?