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Global warming: A big problem for Santa?
By Jose Perez Firmat
(CNN) -- It was my son that finally drove home to me the gravity of the situation. With that innocence that children can only muster until a certain age, Lucas asked: "But Daddy, if the North Pole ice melts, where is Santa going to live?" I was sitting in front of my computer at home. On the monitor were way-cool maps, with complex patterns of colorful bands, the results of a NASA research project. The maps show that the part of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice at its minimum for an average year had shrunk 9 percent between the 1980s and the 1990s. And the NASA report warned that if the pattern continued, by the end of the century the Antarctic's permanent ice cover could disappear altogether. So that's what I was looking at when Lucas came up and asked, "What's that?" "A study showing the ice at the North Pole is melting," I replied. That's what led to his question about Santa. And it is a good question, because it underlines the tremendous challenge that the human race is facing from global climate change. Sorting out the answersSome people believe that climate change is something new. But our Native American ancestors arrived in the Western Hemisphere on foot. An ice age some 15,000 years ago made that possible. And the global climate has been changing ever since. Today the ice is retreating, it seems, on virtually all fronts. We know the ice over the Arctic Ocean is retreating because since the late 1970s we've had satellites watching the entire globe. And scientists fear the rate at which the ice disappears could accelerate. This is because ice and snow reflect a lot more of the sun's heat and light than liquid water, so the less ice there is in the Arctic Ocean, the greater the tendency for the zone to heat up. A lot of people immediately think that the danger is that the level of the sea will rise, flooding coastal cities from Boston to Buenos Aires. But in the specific case of sea ice that isn't true, because the ice displaces in the sea the same quantity of water as is contained in the ice. Ice over land keeps meltingBut ice over land is different. As it melts that does raise the level of the oceans. Recently I read in a newspaper that the glaciers atop some Venezuelan mountains don't exist anymore. In Bolivia they are retreating so quickly that the big question is not whether they will disappear, but when. In Africa, if current trends continue, in a few years the only thing that will be left of the snows of Kilimanjaro will be Hemingway's story. Some say that this shows human-caused climate change is an immediate danger. And it is true most scientists agree that human activity has contributed to global climate change by increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But it is also true that the global climate has always been changing, and there's no reason to think that just because we have appeared on the surface the Earth would stop evolving. Perhaps the most worrisome thing about all this is that the science of global climate and climate change is still in diapers. The reduction in sea ice detected by NASA satellites was much greater than climate models projected. But there have also been other changes that have been much smaller than projected. What can be done about it? "I don't know," I told my son Lucas. "But I'm sure Santa will figure out something." That answer satisfied what was only the passing worry of an 8-year-old. But it didn't satisfy me. Jose Perez Firmat is a producer with CNN en Espaņol.
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