While Phoenix was experiencing a cold weather front with temperatures coming close to freezing a week ago, parts of Antarctica (the South Pole) had a higher warming trend, approaching 70 degrees in the same period.
During this high temperature, an iceberg roughly the size of the city of Atlanta or the small nation of Malta has broken off from the southern polar ice cap.
The effect is also most pronounced on the portion of Anaratctica closet to Argentina where a research base from that nation recently took a video showing the surrounding area virtually without any traces of ice.
According to the World Meteorological Organization, the amount of lost ice has “increased six-fold” from 1979 to 2017.
High Temperatures like these, which historically used to occur every millennium, then a century apart are now happening once a decade.
Before long, Antarctica may become more of a spring break tourist attraction than Lake Havasu and Rocky Point.
These climate-changing events, taken with the melting ice sheets in Greenland and the Alps along with the recent wildfires in California, Australia, and the Amazon Rain Forest should only intensify the urgency to combat human-made pollution activity and seek ways to prevent future decay of the planet’s environmental and ecological systems.
Public Servants do not have the luxury of denying this anymore.
Science has said there is a clear and present danger to the only planet we live on.
There is no Planet B.
The time to act is now.