News to make one feel Cold all over...

Our Warming World: Picking up the 'Glacial Pace' : Discovery News: "So the political argument that there are more important and more urgent matters to worry about (re-election, jobs, and re-election) finds a lot of people nodding their heads.

For climate scientists, however, among people actually doing work in the field, a lot of the argument and the thinking about the pace of change is going in the opposite direction -- global climate is changing faster, bigger, and sooner rather than later.

The biggest changes have come in features that have been seen as some of the slowest movers in the climate system: the melting of glaciers and the resulting rise in global sea levels. As recently as 2007, the conventional thinking by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected sea level rise as little as seven inches this century. Now all bets are off.

As Justin Gillis reported Sunday in the New York Times, researchers who once believed the loss of polar ice north and south would take thousands of years "have recently been startled to see big changes unfold in both Greenland and Antarctica."

Now many scientists are saying the resulting rise in sea level could be three feet during this century, he wrote, and maybe as much as six feet, a circumstance that "would put thousands of square miles of the American coastline under water and would probably displace tens of missions of people is Asia."

In Greenland, scientists are gathering measurements which show the ocean is warming more quickly than expected, eroding the base of big outlet glaciers, speeding up their flows to the sea."