Global ice is melting fast, with major sea level rise and extreme heat locked in unless emissions fall sharply. The window to act is closing.

Having just achieved the hottest three years in recorded history, humans are well on the way to returning the planet to the ice-free state it experienced when dinosaurs last ruled.

The result will be flooding on a Biblical scale, the progressive loss of most of the world’s great cities and coastlines, storms of appalling ferocity, vast dumps of rain and almost continual heatwaves in the most populated regions. Great rivers will empty, deserts will sprawl, wildfires, famine and drought will prevail. Extinctions will multiply and sea life suffer a major die off.

These are the conditions that science now agrees will accompany the loss of the Earth’s ice, that humans have now set in train.

“Global ice losses will likely continue with ongoing climate warming, culminating in an almost ice-free planet analogous to that which persisted throughout much of the Cretaceous, “ an international team of scientists working for the Tibetan Laboratory of the China Academy of Sciences has warned.

“Given ongoing and anticipated global warming, reductions in Arctic and Antarctic ice are expected to continue, potentially leading to completely ice-free polar regions. Despite uncertainties in these predictions, we transition from a world with perennial glacier ice to one with only seasonal ice or shifting from a predominantly white winter planet to a blue one,” they added.

Indeed, the first ‘blue water event’ – an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer – is predicted to occur as early as 2027, and almost certainly before 2030. Not only will the........

© Pearls and Irritations