GETTING WARMER.(The Talk of the Town)(efforts to pass Climate Stewardship Act, which would have protected the environment)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 17-NOV-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

During the debate last month on the Climate Stewardship Act, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, held up a map of the Arctic ice cap. The map, based on a series of nasa satellite photographs, showed the extent of year-round sea ice over the Arctic twenty-four years ago and the extent of that sea ice today. In 1979, the ice began halfway down the east coast of Greenland, extended over the North Pole, and stretched, uninterrupted, to Siberia. Now it begins above Greenland, and an expanse of open water extends north from Siberia for hundreds of miles. Altogether, the ice cap has shrunk by two hundred and fifty million acres, an area the size of California and Texas combined. According to nasa's latest calculations, it is continuing to retreat at a rate of nine per cent per decade and could well disappear by the end of this century....

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