Last week, I flew over the coast of Greenland at 800 kph. As the northern sun glinted off the aluminum of the wing, I watched the ice floes — at first rare white specks on the Prussian blue sea — grow gradually more numerous until they ran in great streaks of broken ice where the waves were pushing them together. Gradually they grew closer together still, and more studded with icebergs, until in the distance I could see enormous sheets of ice, glowing white and blending on the horizon into clouds and fog. And then, rising steeply up, the mountains of Greenland, masses of ice and snow and dark brown rock. It was like watching a documentary on global warming in reverse. Except it wasn’t. That footage won’t run backwards. I have no idea if massive expanses of broken ice at that location are the norm or unusual at this time of year. But we do know that climate change is driving us towards an ice-free world, more quickly than we expected, and by flying home from Portugal, I was helping fuel that great planetary melting. As symbols, it doesn’t get much better than that: rocketing across the sky in… (more)
(Posted by Alex Steffen in Climate Change at 3:37 PM)