US climate scientists revealed that computer models vastly underestimated the rate of polar sea ice melting. Eighteen models used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated a melting rate of 2.8% per decade for the period 1953-2006. Scientist at the Boulder, Colorado center for National Atmospheric Research said that actual measurements show an actual melting rate of 7.8% per decade for the same period. The observed rate means that arctic ice cap melting is 30 years ahead of what observers previously thought. They think that greenhouse gases are playing a significantly greater role in the melting of arctic ice.
This picture by Gary Braasch from the tiny island nation of Tuvalu, shows what the impact of rising sea levels is for inhabited coastlines. Eleven thousand people live on the coral atolls that are the dry land of Tuvalu in the Pacific Ocean. The tide is washing over the main road in 2005. Tuvalu was one of the nations that signed the Kyoto Treaty.
