A Moment of Silence for the Arctic
Contributed by Jonathan M. Lilly | Tuesday, Oct 18, 2011

There seems to have been a big misunderstanding. What we have here is a warming planet. I am looking at numbers that I have a hard time believing. More than a third of Americans believe the effects of global warming will never be seen within their lifetimes, and half believe the seriousness of global warming has been exaggerated. At the same time, sea ice in the Arctic has receded to such an extent that you can now *drive a cargo ship* across it. A shipping route that has been dreamed of, and deemed impassable, for five hundred years has begun to open. Through what kind of logic is it possible to believe that this is somehow not related to global warming, despite the work of many researchers to the contrary, and indeed despite common sense about why ice melts? And what has happened so far is only the beginning---the predictions for when the Arctic Ocean will be more or less completely ice free in the summer range from somewhere between your lifetime and your grandchildren's lifetimes. To appreciate the magnitude of this change, imagine the entire continental United States covered with six to twelve feet of ice during every winter. The loss of Arctic sea ice, by itself, would probably tie with the desertification of the Sahara for the single biggest environmental change that civilization has ever seen---and yet we are talking now of only one of many facets. The climate is warming. It is very, very serious. Photo by Kathryn Hansen of NASA.

Caption by Open-Ocean Staff and Jonathan M. Lilly
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