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A Love Story And A Clearance Sale
These decades later, I've still not been much North of 50 degrees. But I watch the ice with satellite eyes: a high-tech stalker. And I'm losing the Arctic that was.
The ice pack has existed for millions of years, swelling and shrinking as glaciation alternated with warming in a vast, slow cycle. The pack had been growing in recent millenia; the height of post-glacial warming was reached perhaps 8,000 years ago, and the planet had been cooling, gradually and fitfully, yet seemingly inescapably, as the Earth's orbit shifted subtly toward the next glaciation.
But now humans have changed things. We've increased the carbon dioxide 'blanket' in our atmosphere by about 40% in the last century or two, and the planet has been responding—especially in the last four decades. The ice has been shrinking back, giving up land and sea to winds and tides and radiation.
We measure this, of course—measurement is as human as love.
http://doc-snow.hubpages.com/hub/A-Love-Story-And-A-Clearance-Sale
The ice pack has existed for millions of years, swelling and shrinking as glaciation alternated with warming in a vast, slow cycle. The pack had been growing in recent millenia; the height of post-glacial warming was reached perhaps 8,000 years ago, and the planet had been cooling, gradually and fitfully, yet seemingly inescapably, as the Earth's orbit shifted subtly toward the next glaciation.
But now humans have changed things. We've increased the carbon dioxide 'blanket' in our atmosphere by about 40% in the last century or two, and the planet has been responding—especially in the last four decades. The ice has been shrinking back, giving up land and sea to winds and tides and radiation.
We measure this, of course—measurement is as human as love.
http://doc-snow.hubpages.com/hub/A-Love-Story-And-A-Clearance-Sale
