Ways of life have been thrown into flux in Greenland as sea ice thaws and new shipping routes into the Arctic open up.
That breathing space would be useful if something really bad, such as the collapse into the sea of part of the Greenland ice-shelf, was in imminent danger of happening, and the realisation of the danger led to a political agreement that climate change had to be stopped rapidly.
Mechanisms on the verge of being instigated include loss of Arctic sea ice, shrinkage of the Greenland ice sheet, loss of Antarctic ice shelves, and shrinkage of the Antarctic ice sheets.
These changes may have resulted in earlier snow melt and exposure of darker rocks, soil and sea ice, leading to warming throughout Greenland in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries when soot levels were at their highest.
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Very few scientists think Greenland would be stable in an Arctic with little or no summer sea-ice, and opinion is split as to whether it is past its tipping point already.
Sure, but even if Greenland and Antarctica melting is on ice for a while, what about that dreaded sea level-hiking runoff from those glaciers?
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Sea Level is largely a function of the size of the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica.
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During the Holocene, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been relatively stable, as reflected in the stability of the sea level.
This means that we can expect more than the one-meter sea level rise projected for 2100, a fact that the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet, as well as strong indications that the western part of the Antarctic ice sheet is also melting, strongly support.
Already, average sea level rise has doubled in a decade due to the destabilisation of the Arctic and Greenland ice shelves.
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