The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It's been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going.
I don't like the term 'global warming,' because it's misleading. It implies something that's mainly about temperature, that's gradual, and that's uniform across the planet. And in fact, temperature is only one of the things that's changing.
The ice caps are melting, which we see over and over again. Yeah, they're melting on Mars, too!
Remember in 1973 the same science chatter said that the coming Ice Age is going to occur, we're going to lose millions of people. And the politicians knew how to solve it, they just didn't have the courage to solve it; they were going to put coal dust on the Arctic.
If the world was an etch-a-sketch, glaciers are the big shake.
The ice doesn't care who's in the White House. It doesn't care which party controls your congress. It doesn't care which party controls your parliament. It just melts.
Ice ages have come and gone. Coral reefs have persisted.
What people don't understand about the Arctic is that this isn't just about those other people, those Eskimos that have nothing to do with us. The Arctic drives the climate of the whole globe.
The prediction that glaciers will be gone from Glacier National Park has been moved up by 10 years to 2020, the same year it's predicted the Arctic Sea will be ice-free in the summer.
We need the science to continue. The heat, the storms, the sea level rise, the Arctic melting. These are all real facts that over time will sink in. The question is, will that be two years, or five years or 10 years?
Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate that we have been watching an ice age approach for some time without realizing what we are seeing... Scientists predict that it will cause great snows which the world has not seen since the last ice age thousands of years ago.
In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"
And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
The Earth would only have to move a few million kilometers sunward-or starward-for the delicate balance of climate to be destroyed. The Antarctic icecap would melt and flood all low-lying land; or the oceans would freeze and the whole world would be locked in eternal winter. Just a nudge in either direction would be enough.
The world cannot live without the Arctic; it affects every living thing on Earth and acts as a virtual thermostat, reflecting sunlight and cooling the planet.
Melting icebergs aren't beheading Christians in the Middle East.
You can't tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can't build a wall around the ice sheets.
We believe the ice sheet was not around all the time. It was only around during cool snaps of the climate.
It will not be a surprise to you to learn I'm more interested in the future of the Arctic Circle than the future of the Arctic Monkeys.
The North Pole will be ice-free during summer in years to come, and that itself will put the Arctic Sea basin on a very high risk of... environmental disasters that might be there.
When the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel.
By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.
The 'New Yorker' asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying.
He (Jeremy Clarkson) is the last man standing on the beach commanding the glaciers' melt waters to go back
I believe Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was... a large Arctic region covered with ice.
