Global Heating: Coming to a Neighborhood Near You

Recent reports (like this one ) from Science Daily indicate that global heating is occurring in the norther latitudes now with seriously negative impacts by 2050. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but two pictures of the same places taken decades apart takes the place of volumes of verbiage.










Here are a couple pictures of the McCall glacier in Alaska. On the left is a photograph of McCall Glacier from July of 1958 taken by Austin S. Post; on the right, a photograph taken from the same vantage on August 13, 2003 by Matt Nolan.


The photos are from the NOAA/NSIDC Online Glacier Photograph Database. NSIDC/WDC for Glaciology, Boulder, compiler. 2002, updated 2007. Online glacier photograph database. Boulder, Colorado USA: National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology. Digital media.

You can see many other similar photos here


NOAA's Arctic Change web site has a summary page in table form:























"Table of Indicators
This table of indicators provides an overview of the current status of the Arctic from 1970 to the present. Changes in the last decade are continuing, major and unprecedented.

Red colors indicate the large changes in recent years (largest 1/3 of values in the record). The middle third are shown in grey and the lowest third are shown in green.

Note the shift from green to red in recent years for many of the series, and that the primary time scale of variability is decadal."