Victoria's Green Matters 29th Sept 2011

Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury:

More evidence, if any were needed, on the devastating effects of climate change has come from daily satellite maps of Arctic sea ice. These show that the ice has melted to a level not recorded since these observations started in 1972 and thought not to have occurred for at least 8,000 years.

It is difficult to believe that if these trends continue, the Arctic will mostly be free from ice in the summer months within 30 years. This is some 40 years earlier than previously predicted and the last time it occurred was 125,000 years ago, during the last interglacial period.

Another area of the world where climbers and local inhabitants have noticed melting ice, is the Himalayas. The climb up the mighty Everest has changed considerably since the first ascent by Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953. Now climbers hardly need crampons to climb, there is so much bare rock. People who live with the mountains know that change is happening; they see evidence of climate change everywhere from trees growing at higher latitudes, house-flies living at 5,000 feet and monsoon rains arriving at unusual times. Melting glacial ice runs into milky lakes in the mountains and threatens to deluge villages below but scary though this threat is, even greater is the prospect that a quarter of the world’s population will lose the supply of water that it relies on each year to survive.

Cutting carbon emissions has become an urgent necessity if we are to have any chance of halting these dramatic changes.