Global climate change is refashioning our planet’s very landscape, and our new topography is making us even more vulnerable to the sun’s rays. Which is to say, the worse it gets … the worse it gets.
And that brings us to our number of the day:
LESS THAN 1 PERCENT.
That’s how much of the earth’s surface was covered with Arctic ice by the end of August. This is less than half what it was 30 years ago.
Now, we all learned in grammar school that light colors such as white reflect heat, whereas dark colors such as black absorb it. So a generation ago, we had about 3 million square miles of white ice in the Arctic bouncing solar radiation off the earth’s surface. Now, more than 1.5 million square miles of that area is dark water, which is absorbing solar energy and pushing global temperatures even higher.
Cambridge Professor Peter Wadhams even told the BBC we’ve gained as much heat from this loss of Arctic ice as we did from 20 years’ worth of carbon dioxide emissions.
Yet prospects are slim that our government will take meaningful action.
Although the president mentioned carbon pollution last night, climate change is accelerating — and Republicans still refuse to admit it’s even a problem. But as the president said, global warming is not a hoax — and it’s gaining on us.
