Keep driving your 4x4s mugs. Man is cancer!

Where is your proof that the arctic ice at the North Pole has never melted before in human history? I believe that is a totally unsubstantiated statement. We are in a period of climate change, which means some areas are warmer than before, and some colder. The rise in global temperature has been only 0.8 degree C, over the last 100 years or so. Since 1999 there has been no warming, in fact a slight cooling. This type of sensationalism does you no credit.

So what? If I fill my G&T to the meniscus, including as many ice cubes as you like, when the ice cubes melt, my G&T does not overflow the rim of the glass. Hence, if the (floating) arctic ice cap melts, it has zero effect on sea level. It really does float, as evidenced by a friend of mine, who drove his submarine under it without bumping in to anything.

I wish the eco-mentalists would realise the gross exaggeration afforded to the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere, especially anthropogenic CO2. 3% of feck all is feck all. Why, why, do they never consider and accept the overwhelming influence of the dominant greenhouse gas, namely, water vapour. Time spent on the science of this, and its release and absorbtion from/by the vast sinks which are the oceans, would be time better spent.

Why is Greenland called Greenland? Because it used to be green. The Vikings farmed there. There are Viking villages beneath the white stuff. Then, the climate changed. All by itself. No power stations, cars, trucks, planes, eco-mentalists or tax-grabbing, feckless, politicians. Nature has a habit of hitting the reset button and giving someone else a chance, roughly every 100,000 years, it seems. Get over it.

Seems you all missed the French report of new volcanoes in the arctic, seems the ice is melting from the bottom up!

Ummm....

Perhaps the editors at the Independent ought to look into recent volcanic activity under the Arctic Ocean instead of reaching for the Anthropromorphic Global Warming bell.

It is documented in the otherwise trusted science journal Nature.

Perhaps some mention of this activity (which produces heat, by the way, which, it turns out, can melt ice) might find its way into future articles, given that this one is fraught with speculation as to what might happen whereas Vulcanologists have recorded the activity mentioned inthe Nature article.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v409/n6822/full/409808a0.html

How come Manhatten and Florida aren't submerged.

They told us when the ice melted people would die everywhere?

This is ridiculous. Do the people who make these claims actually research anything? Right now the temperatures in the arctic are far LOWER than they usually are at this time of year. As low as -30 degrees, in fact. It's this intense cold that's sparking the large number of tornadoes in the US (since, remember, storms like that are formed by clashing of cold air from the north and warm air from the south).

And last time I checked, ice didn't melt at -30 degrees.

Sorry gents, NASA photos show otherwise. Don't believe everything you read in so called "newspapers"

>"If it happens, it raises the prospect of the Arctic nations being able to exploit the valuable oil and mineral deposits below these a bed which have until now been impossible to extract because of the thick sea ice above."< This is a bad thing??? I am sick of being told that being human and using the resources of OUR planet is a bad thing.

This is another cynical Global Warmer's setup. The odds are already 1 in 10 at any given time in the average summer that there will be open water at the North Pole, so all they need do is wait until a polnya forms there and then scream "GLOBAL WARMING the sky is falling give us more power over your lives" - power for themselves being what the Coercive Utopians desire. For numerous pictures of subs surfaced in open water at the Pole search Google images for 'submarine "north pole" '.

"for the first time in human history"---this assertion is staggering in its audacity. there were no measurements taken of polar ice millions of years ago.
stop insulting your readers' intelligence.

This story is pure fabrication. Enough of this idiotic science.

You give reasons why it's a good thing (newfound access to oil and mineral reserves) and yet you ask me to worry. I think you have an unstated ulterior motive in the presentation of your story...

If all the ice has melted, why aren't we 4 feet underwater, that's what Al Gore told me would happen!

Phil

Now, now.

Just because the vikings called it Greenland and recorded grape vines growing in modern Newfoundland, you are forgetting one thing:

Eric the Red et al lacked the proper government grants to support their research and it therefore must be thrown out.

So sorry.

I find it rather strange that an email I received today with real and fake pictures from around the world contained the picture of the setting sun and moon from the north pole on the Drudge Report headline. The pictures stated that this was a "fake" picture". Do you really believe people are to buy into your theories about global warming with this kind of deception. You want to see real global warming....just wait until the Lord returns.

I wish people would remember that, in geological terms, the last ice age is just ending. The warming isn't unusal. The Earth has periodic cold spells (ice ages) then warms. We must also consider precession, which is the way the Earth rotates on its axis, like a top spinning. At maximum precession we experience more extreme seasons and harsher winters. At minimum precession (when the earth is tilted 0 degrees) we have a tropical, jungle, planet. The earth is now retreating from maximum (toward minimum) precession. Please see the wikipedia example of precession here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession

Geologically speaking, the Earth is a tropical planet, not one covered with ice. This climate change is both natural and beneficial to life here.

This is the best news I've heard all summer.
Congrats to all.

Now I'll only have to burn 50 of my 100 tires this year.

Have a great Summer All!!!

Really? First year ice versus second year ice? I better check my first year grass versus second year grass in my first year front yard that was the previous owners' fifth year grass depending on how you measure the wind in a teacup on a full moon, but only on second Wednesdays of first year months in odd years that have preceding days of early frost on third year leap years with late frost in shadows of morning sunshine..not evening sunsets which all expert scientists agree would change everything. I'm worried...perhaps beach holidays at the North Pole are already booked.

This is pure scare talk. Go to Cryosphere Today to see what is happening to the ice at both poles. Here's the url:

I wonder if journalists miss their credibility; or is it a relief to shed such cumbersome and unnecessary baggage? And they wonder why the 4th estate is loathed.

Dorothy:

It has always been within your power to have the world you seek...

Simply click your heels together 10,000 times, each time saying, "The earth is warming...The earth is warming...The earth is warming"

Glad to see lots of intelligent, skeptical comments here. And I agree with them all. To add another point, I quote from the article: "[T]he normally thick ice formed over many years at the Pole has been blown away and replaced by huge swathes of thinner ice formed over a single year." What does "The thick ice has been blown away" mean? Has it disappeared, or has it "relocated" nearby?

So seeing as NYC isnt submerged like we were all warned, I figured I could get some of you to worry about the next danger that is going to wipe out mankind. Global shrinking. Thats right. The Earth is shrinking because evil, cancerous man is pounding it down more and more every day. We keep eating all this grease and getting fatter and driving these big SUV's and building these huge, heavy buildings and it is making the Earth shrink. Pretty soon, the Earth will spin out of orbit and we will be eaten alive by our own sun. There is a bunch of scientific evidence of this. Although no measure has ever been taken in history, we can say with near certainty that the Earth is smaller today than it ever has been in history.
Now. You can stop it if you act now. I will sell you heaviness credits. I am skinny and I ride a bike everywhere. So you can eat as much as you want or drive a big car as long as you pay me to offset your extra weight.

What a load of bull squeeze. Temperatures have been falling since 1998 and in 2007 the average global temp dropped .7 degrees C. The larges single year swing ever recorded. Last winter there were reports of record ice pack in the artic. Get a grip Owl Bore. The world isn't burning up.