Glaciers Melting? Not my problem?

Based on reporting by Shankar Vedantum in The Washington Post:

"This is the kind of study that should make people stay awake at night wondering what we're doing to the climate, how we're shaping the planet for future generations and, especially, what we can do about it."
-- Vicki Arroyo, director of policy analysis at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

I don't usually cover the environmental news. As you will have noticed, we have a more qualified writer here at TBV, and so I usually stick to easy stuff. But global warming is getting to be easy enough, even for me.

Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth's oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said yesterday.

The new data come from satellite imagery and give fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data are mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that rising sea levels threaten widespread flooding and severe storm damage in
low-lying areas worldwide.

Our generation must face a challenge that has global implications, on a geologic timescale. Ours is the first generation to know about global warming, and perhaps the last that can act to mitigate its destructive effects -- effects that may last thousands of years.

Although we didn't start the fire, we have passively watched it burn, wondering if it might not consume us. But the fire is ours now -- our understanding has embraced it even if our politics will not. And in the wake of Katrina, we know it will indeed consume some of us.

We live such short lives that it seems wrong that we should hold such awesome responsibility for the condition of the planet for thousands of years to come.

But we do.