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What, us worry?

So the volume of ice is decreasing even faster every year as well; the ice is getting thinner and thinner. This is a very bad sign, as thinner ice melts more easily. No one knows when we’ll have the first ice-free Arctic summer — extrapolating into the future can be difficult — but one thing we can bet on is that it’ll be a lot sooner than the year 2100 as originally predicted just a few years ago. It could be in as few as 30 years. Although some deniers claim this Arctic loss is offset by growth in Antarctic ice, this claim, as usual, is simply false.

Of course, oil companies are already planning on exploiting an ice-free Arctic to drill for more oil. The irony is obvious, but there’s also the added point that while oil money is behind a lot of the denial, they themselves are ready to jump on the positive — for them — effects of global warming.
And, no doubt, the deniers will make lots of noise about this, calling me an alarmist and pointing to ever more cherry-picked data and misleadingly plotted numbers. But the fact is the Earth is warming up. That’s melting the ice at both poles, increasing sea levels. We’re still dumping gigatons of carbon dioxide in the air every year [PDF], and the amount increases at a steady and measurable level. That CO2 is warming us up.