If you haven’t seen Nova’s joint effort with National geographic, Extreme Ice, it’s available online in clips. It’s a really distressing look at the melting ice up north, and its much more than anticipated speed of melting. 

I have no idea how we are going to reverse this. I almost feel some comfort  by being under employed and that we are living in this economic crises. 

Nova is doing some great online work of their media. Not only do they take these long shows and put them into clip form, they have closed captioning AND transcripts of the clip! here is a good segment from clip 4:

JAMES WHITE: This piece of ice is interesting, ’cause it has a couple of things you can see, right away. One is there are bubbles throughout here. These bubbles are little packets of air. It’s these bubbles we can take out and measure CO₂ and methane and nitrous oxide. It’s the only medium that really collects the atmosphere itself.

The other thing you can see in here, quite clearly, is you can see the layers, and the thickness is going to tell you how much snow fell that year, so you get a couple of pieces of climate information and a dating scale, just out of visually looking at this ice core.

NARRATOR: Most importantly, scientists have identified a direct historical link between increases in greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, and steep rises in global temperatures.

At every peak, big rises in sea level followed as Greenland’s ice sheet shrank.

The ice core records also reveal a particularly telling moment in Greenland’s history. Roughly 125,000 years ago, temperatures rose by about seven degrees Fahrenheit; the entire southern portion of the ice sheet melted, and global sea levels rose by over 10 feet.

It was caused by a change in the earth’s orbit around the sun, which increased temperatures and released carbon dioxide from the oceans.

The more recent ice core record shows the potential for a similar meltdown. Right now, greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are even higher than they were 125,000 years ago, higher than they’ve ever been in the last half-million years. Temperatures are already following suit.

The only explanation is the burning of fossil fuels.