NASA scientists: over 2 trillion tons of ice has melted since 2003

New satellite data presented by NASA scientists shows the loss of an estimated 2 trillion tons of ice from Greenland, the Antarctic and the North Poll: proof positive of global warming's dramatic effects, they claimed.

"'More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite,' said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke, in a report by the Environmental News Network.

The Greenland melting, added Luthcke, appears to be accelerating.

One immediate effect of this progressive melting is a spike in the intensity and frequency of massive wildfires in the American West, according to one expert who says more than half of the region could be claimed by fire in the next century.

Tom Swetnam, a leading fire ecologist at the University of Arizona, told CBS's 60 Minutes that a temperature increase in the West of just one degree had contributed to a four-fold increase in fires in the area.

A 2007 study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Georgia Institute of Technology determined that global warming's effect on wind patterns and sea temperatures nearly doubled the number of hurricanes a year in the Atlantic Ocean over the past century.

"Anticipated direct health consequences of climate change include injury and death from extreme weather events and natural disasters, increases in climate-sensitive infectious diseases, increases in air pollution-related illness, and more heat-related, potentially fatal, illness," claims a report presented at the 2007 congress of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

"Within all of these categories, children have increased vulnerability compared with other groups," it said.

President-elect Obama has said the application of science in the fight against global warming "is key to our survival," and appointed John Holdren, an award-winning environmental policy professor at Harvard University, to head the Office of Science and Technology Policy and co-chair the president's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Obama called Holdren "one of the most passionate and persistent voices of our time about the growing threat of climate change".

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