Global Warming :: The New Yorker

"In the same way that global warming has gradually ceased to be merely a theory, so, too, its impacts are no longer just hypothetical. Nearly every major glacier in the world is shrinking; those in Glacier National Park are retreating so quickly it has been estimated that they will vanish entirely by 2030. The oceans are becoming not just warmer but more acidic; the difference between day and nighttime temperatures is diminishing; animals are shifting their ranges poleward; and plants are blooming days, and in some cases weeks, earlier than they used to. These are the warning signs that the Charney panel cautioned against waiting for, and while in many parts of the globe they are still subtle enough to be overlooked, in others they can no longer be ignored. As it happens, the most dramatic changes are occurring in those places, like Shishmaref, where the fewest people tend to live. This disproportionate effect of global warming in the far north was also predicted by early climate models, which forecast, in column after column of fortran-generated figures, what today can be measured and observed directly: the Arctic is melting."

I'll find some pictures that I have of cdn glaciers to illustrate this point. Granted, my geologist dad thinks lots of it is hokum, and points to the palliser triangle as evidence that these things regularly go haywire - because our timeframes aren't geological - they're much shorter. That said, I'd still like to climb Kilimanjaro while there are still glaciers on it.