And now, the good news….

With constant gloomy news about the economy the following picture reminded me that there are more important things than money…

This graph shows the average temperature difference globally for the month of September 2009 from the average September temperature for the period 1961-1990. As you can see there is a dramatic increase, particularly in the northern hemisphere.

There is also some good news about the Antarctic and the ice sheet over Greenland – thanks to a new satellite that measures the thickness of the ice sheet  from space by laser we now have excellent data about what is going on.

The bad news is that the data shows that the ice is melting rapidly, in what appears to be a negative feedback loop that we are now locked into. Even if we decarbonised our entire economy now, overnight, the CO2 thats already in the atmosphere means this melting process won’t be stopping anytime soon. You can read about it for yourself here.

Oh and in case you didn’t notice – the biggest news of all is that the areas that are showing the most rapid heating in the diagram above are the areas of permafrost where vast amounts of methane are trapped. If the permafrost melts, gigatonnes of methane will be released into an already warming atmosphere.

In terms of the greenhouse effect, methane is approximately 20 times stronger than CO2. Quite simply, game over.

To return to the constant gloomy news about the economy, perhaps its time to invest in Factor 1,000,000 Sunscreen Futures?