A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Miles Of Ice

An interesting story in the UK's Guardian today, the Obama administration has declassified several Bush spy satellite images, initially classified not for what they revealed about troop movements or terrorists, but what they revealed about shrinking arctic ice.

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One particularly striking set of images - selected from the 1,000 photographs released - includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.

The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice - a record loss - were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.

Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse.

Something's got to give eventually. The ice has been almost completely gone in the summer now for three years straight, and it doesn't look like it's coming back anytime soon. Enough events like this and the planet won't be able to rebalance itself without extreme instances of weather: super-storms, extreme heat and cold, ocean current changes, and more.

The effect on us will be devastating. But for years, Bush thought that nobody needed to know.