Global warming quickly melting glaciers in Greenland & Antarctica

Melting glaciers and ice caps have been in the news for a while now, but a NASA satellite just revealed that scientists had previously underestimated how fast it’s happening. The NASA satellite uses lasers to measure small differences in how thick the ice is in places like Greenland and Antarctica.

Specifically in Greenland, the satellite is showing a shrink rate of several fast flowing glaciers of about 3 feet per year. The previous estimate was much lower and was based on less precise measurements taken sometimes from boring holes into the ice.

More ice sheets continue to fall into the ocean, and that will most certainly raise sea levels. These new readings from satellites are alarming  scientists:

This report provides a much more ominous picture than we have had, and a depressing prospect of the potential for sea level rise," Inez Fung, a noted atmospheric scientist at UC Berkeley said Wednesday. "It's very much a cause for worry. According to the San Francisco Chronicle.

That means politicians meeting in Copenhagen soon will have an extra bit of motivation to create some sort of agreement. The Kyoto Protocol from 1997 highlights limits on greenhouse gas emissions and every industrialized country that was a part of the talks has ratified it except the United States.

The satellite is more accurate than previous measurements which used radar technology and human explorers, both of which provided summary results instead of specifics.

Global warming is a heated topic in the United States because capping carbon emissions to prevent it would cause significant changes for some businesses. Though there is a general movement toward green living in the country, the changes are coming late from the world’s political perspective, which is waiting for the United States to catch up.

Perhaps this sort of explicit data will provide extra pressure to innovate and create cohesion in a country still struggling through the end of a recession.