Now that the glaciers aren’t melting and the ice caps are melting slower than anticipated, maybe President Obama’s science advisor John Holdren can update this WhiteHouse.gov blog post for us?
Climate is changing all across the globe. The air and the oceans are warming, mountain glaciers are disappearing, sea ice is shrinking, the great ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are slipping, and sea level is rising. And the consequences for human well-being are already being felt: more heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires; tropical diseases reaching into the temperate zones; and coastal property increasingly at risk from the surging seas.
All this is happening faster than was expected. Sea level is rising at twice the average rate for the 20th century. The coverage and thickness of the sea ice in the Arctic at its summer minimum have been shrinking at a pace far faster than the projections of just a few years ago. The average area burned by wildfires in the Western United States annually has increased four-fold in the past 30 years.