Coastal Policy and Politics

Well Now We Are in a Pickle!

The latest finding on the melting of ice caps is not encouraging.

Today as I write this here is the gist of the matter

"Climate scientists may have significantly underestimated the power of global warming from human-generated heat-trapping gases to shrink the cap of sea ice floating on the Arctic Ocean, according to a new study of polar trends." New York Times , May 1, 2007.

The article continues by going beyond the last (and scary enough!) report on the effects of climate change on the planet.

"The study, published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, concluded that an open-water Arctic in summers could be more likely in this century than had been estimated in the latest international review of climate research released in February by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

Well if we screw it all up there is some interesting news about a new planet. The San Fran chronicle reports it thus:

"A rocky planet not much larger than Earth has been detected orbiting a star close to our own neighborhood in the Milky Way, and the European astronomers who found it say it lies within the star's "habitable zone," where life could exist - possibly in oceans of water.
The object is the smallest of all the 200 or more so-called "exoplanets" whose discovery around far-off stars in the past dozen years has sparked a burst of excitement worldwide among astronomers and astrobiologists." San Francisco Chronicle, April 24, 2007.

So maybe there is a polace for us to ship some of our species and some of ourselves to start over again.