FT - How global warming could suddenly tip over and ignite calamity [View All]

The heat is on: how global warming could suddenly tip over and ignite calamity

by Fiona Harvey
Financial Times
September 20, 2006

Scientists at Nasa, instead of staring into the skies, have been using satellites to look down at the world and track how it is changing. Within a year, the US space agency disclosed this week, an area of sea ice "the size of Texas" had been lost from the Arctic.

Data pieced together by Nasa showed that Arctic perennial sea ice, which normally survives the summer melting season, abruptly shrank by 14 per cent between
2004 and 2005. The report found: "Perennial ice can be 10 or more feet thick. It was replaced by new, seasonal ice only one to seven feet thick that is more vulnerable to summer melt."

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But will that be soon enough? A growing body of scientific opinion suggests the world may be about to experience not a gradual rise in temperatures over several decades but a wild careering into climate chaos.

That is because some of the changes triggered by warming temperatures create a "feedback" effect of their own. These feedbacks can cause the warming trend to accelerate further or bring serious disruption to regions of the world (see box).

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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=56&ItemID=11008