Your kids....fucked!

I'd like to thank the Rush Limbaughs, the Sean Hannities, and, of course, virtually every Republican for displaying the kind of pure hatred for environmentalism that will cause the world to be one fucked up place. Not that it will bother them -- they'll be dead. Fortunately for me, I likely will get off this mortal coil just in time -- Yahoo!

Alarmed by an accelerating loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean, scientists are striving to understand why the speedup is happening and what it means for humankind.

If present trends continue, as seems likely, the sea surrounding the North Pole will be completely free of ice in the summertime within the lifetime of a child born today. The loss could point the way to radical changes in the Earth's climate and weather systems.

Some researchers, such as Ron Lindsay, an Arctic scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, fear that the polar region already may have passed a "tipping point" from which it can't recover in the foreseeable future.

Others, such as Jonathan Overpeck, the director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona in Tucson, think the Arctic ice pack is nearing a point of no return but hasn't reached it yet.

The National Science Foundation, a congressionally chartered agency, last month announced an urgent research program to determine what "these changes mean for both the Arctic and the Earth."

Here is my guess as to the short-term effect of this news...