We interrupt this blog to mention……

Arctic ice may be history by 2040: study

Caramba! Global warming could melt the Arctic's ice during the summer as early as 2040, raising serious environmental as well as commercial and strategic issues, experts said on Monday.

"The effects of greenhouse warming are starting to rear their ugly head," said Mark Serreze, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Marika Holland, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, projects a slow, steady decline of Arctic ice as global warming continues, with a dramatic "tipping point" in about two decades.

The research, to be published by the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters on Tuesday, found that the extent of sea ice each September could be reduced so abruptly that, within about 20 years, it may begin retreating four times faster than at any time in the observed record.

"The ice is actually quite stable until 2025 and then boom, it goes," Holland told the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. That means that the famous white spot at the top of the globe could be ice-free in summer as early as 2040, according to modeling done on supercomputers.

In one simulation, the September ice shrinks from about 2.3 million square miles (6 million square km) to 770,000 square miles (2 million square km) in a 10-year period. By 2040, only a small amount of perennial sea ice would remain along the north coasts of Greenland and Canada, while most of the Arctic basin would be ice-free in September.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N11233481.htm