ruin your day…

This will do it:

Greenland’s glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth’s oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said yesterday.

The new data come from satellite imagery and give fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data are mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that rising sea levels threaten widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide.

(A summary of the article in Science is here.)

If this wasn’t depressing enough, Jim Hansen, the NASA scientist who’s been prevented from speaking out about dramatic acceleration of climate change, had to publish his article in a newspaper in the UK:

a few weeks ago, when I – a NASA climate scientist – tried to talk to the media about these issues following a lecture I had given calling for prompt reductions in the emission of greenhouse gases, the Nasa public affairs team – staffed by political appointees from the Bush administration – tried to stop me doing so.

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