Climate Change: It’s getting hot in here

2005 was the year in which concerns about the stability of the climate regularly made the headlines; 2006 may be the year when demands to do something about it finally become irresistible.

..Another lesson of 2005 is that scientists can be wrong about climate change – though not in a way that provides any comfort to the dwindling band of sceptics. For several years, the consensus had been that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet would be a slow process, taking centuries or even millennia. But as Ian Howat, a Greenland expert, explains: “Current models treat the ice sheet like it’s just an ice cube sitting up there melting, and we’re finding out it’s not that simple.” Instead, thinning glaciers have been speeding up on the edges of Greenland, dumping more and more melting ice into the sea. Howat estimates that the changing dynamics could “easily cut in half the time it will take to destroy the Greenland ice sheet”, suggesting that sea-level rise predictions for this century may well have been underestimated.

The Independent