Large glaciers are melting much faster than expected. the Pine Island Glacier, at the South Pole, is losing ice at a rate four times faster than 10 years ago. A research of of Leeds University in England also noticed that the ice is thinner in the interior areas of the glacier, that is as big as Scotland. The measurements have been possible thanks to the continuous satellite observations over the past 15 years.
The glacier is so large that a complete melting would have a significant effect on sea levels, and if this pace will continue the previous forecasts, that the glacier would take 600 years to melt completely, should be reviewed. In just 100 years in fact, the glacier will disappear, and obviously the rapid dissolution at Pine Island is likely to have a similar progression in all other glaciers in the world.
But the disappearance of the glaciers and the consequent rise of sea level is just the most visible effect of global warming, that ends up having many other effects throughout the global ecosystem. Another search, for example, has noticed how the heating impoverishes streams in American forests and ends up killing the life forms that inhabit them.
Meanwhile some seas are becoming increasingly acidic. The water absorbs the carbon dioxide that humans enter into the atmosphere with their industrial activities, and becomes more acidic, already 25% more in Alaska than 300 years ago. The result will be a medium-term decline of many small organisms and animals living along the coasts, with a depletion of marine life.
Around the North Pole other scientists have also discovered that the heating of the ocean is causing a release of methane from submarine sediments: methane contributes to making the seas more acidic and is also a greenhouse gas, and so the introduction of large quantities of this gas in the atmosphere will eventually worsen the global warming.
All these not very encouraging researches are an indication of what many scientists fear. Global warming could have dramatic and unpredictable consequences, much more rapid and devastating than the current forecasts indicate. Reports of IPCC, the UN intergovernmental body on climate change, are generally very cautious, according to some overly cautious. Yet the 2007 report has caused alarm because it has found an increase in average temperature by 2100 between 1.1 and 6.4 celsius degrees, where the minimum heating provides that all the world's nations will seriously commit to diminish the release of pollutants in the atmosphere. What no one knows with certainty is what exactly will be the consequences of a warming of 4 or 5 degrees. Many researches, such as those mentioned above, can guess that the damage will be huge and very serious. A warming of 6 degrees would submerge half of the plains of the planet.
But all this does not mean that the world's governments are taking serious efforts to do something.
The next important date is the summit on climate change scheduled in Copenhagen on December 2009. While the time to stop global warming is running out.
Francesco Defferrari
The next important date is the summit on climate change scheduled in Copenhagen on December 2009. While the time to stop global warming is running out.
Francesco Defferrari
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