ANTARCTIC IS MELTING DOWN--DO SOMETHING USA!

In the same month that the National Geographic magazine showed America raping its own landscape rotten ('America, the beautiful....huh!?), and spewing a quarter of the world's planet-overheating carbon-dioxide out of its power-station chimneys, comes a report from NASA (reported on the BBC and in the Washington Post) that the Antarctic is losing a net of 152 cubic kilometres of ice per year (36 cubic miles for the metrically challenged). That alone causes the global oceans to rise 0.4mm per year, added to the 1.8mm we have so far from thermal expansion, and to the melting of the Greenland icecap (224 cubic kilometres a year--0.9mm a year) and glaciers all over the world.

If we lose all Greenland's ice, and all West Antarctic's, the oceans will rise about fourteen metres. And not in the few centuries' time that the optimists and the wilfully blind like to believe. A significant amount of it this century. The IPCC has just admitted that its previous predictions of only a 1-2 degree rise this century have to be revised up a tad, perhaps as high as 5.8 degrees Celsius. Computer models show even that to be optimistic. How long will it be before everyone realises that we are long past the point of no return,--that the normality on which we have predicated our decisions for 10,000 years has gone, because we have destroyed it. In the most scientific age that has ever been we have got the basic science of life on earth so hopelessly wrong that billions of people are going to die and vast tracts of the earth are going to be made uninhabitable.

America, please stop trashing the only planet humans can live on in the entire universe (even if there is another habitable one it would be such a vast distance away as to be unreachable). This is it. The only one. And you are trashing it. Look at that gas-guzzler at the head of that Washington Post page. Someone just does not get it.

Get a decent, planet-friendly car, and get it soon. You won't get that from GM, or Ford, or any of the other fossil-fuel dinosaurs that are bent on wrecking the planet. Dump them. They are in the way of human life. Get a workaround and get a life. ASAP.