The latest New Yorker magazine says: 

  "Disruptive impacts of climate change are already apparent. The Arctic ice cap, which has shrunk by half since the 1950s, is melting at an annual rate of 24,000 square miles, meaning that an expanse of ice the size of West Virginia is disappearing each year."

What a jolting image. Year after year, the polar cap shrinks by an area as large as the Mountain State. This stunning fact wipes out debate over whether global warming is real.

Actually, the debate already was over. The reality of global warming now is acknowledged by nearly everyone, even coal industry moguls who once resisted. Too many clear proofs make it inescapable that the planet's surface is heating in tiny, barely perceptible increments. All 10 of the warmest years ever recorded have occurred since 1995.

Debate likewise has virtually ceased over whether the warm-up is caused by fossil fuel combustion that spews carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse effect that traps heat in the living biosphere at Earth's surface.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, a division of the U.S. Commerce Department, issued a major new report June 19. NOAA's news release declared flatly: "Global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's largest body of scientists, previously declared: "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [manmade] greenhouse gas concentrations."

Melting polar icecaps are expected to raise sea levels, engulfing low coastal regions around the world. Weather extremes - storms, floods, droughts, etc. - are expected to worsen. (Devastating hurricanes are caused purely by heat.) Food supplies are expected to shrink as water shortages grow. Tropical diseases and insects are expected to travel northward.

  "Disruptive impacts of climate change are already apparent. The Arctic ice cap, which has shrunk by half since the 1950s, is melting at an annual rate of 24,000 square miles, meaning that an expanse of ice the size of West Virginia is disappearing each year."

What a jolting image. Year after year, the polar cap shrinks by an area as large as the Mountain State. This stunning fact wipes out debate over whether global warming is real.

Actually, the debate already was over. The reality of global warming now is acknowledged by nearly everyone, even coal industry moguls who once resisted. Too many clear proofs make it inescapable that the planet's surface is heating in tiny, barely perceptible increments. All 10 of the warmest years ever recorded have occurred since 1995.

Debate likewise has virtually ceased over whether the warm-up is caused by fossil fuel combustion that spews carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse effect that traps heat in the living biosphere at Earth's surface.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, a division of the U.S. Commerce Department, issued a major new report June 19. NOAA's news release declared flatly: "Global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's largest body of scientists, previously declared: "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [manmade] greenhouse gas concentrations."

Melting polar icecaps are expected to raise sea levels, engulfing low coastal regions around the world. Weather extremes - storms, floods, droughts, etc. - are expected to worsen. (Devastating hurricanes are caused purely by heat.) Food supplies are expected to shrink as water shortages grow. Tropical diseases and insects are expected to travel northward.

"Over the past 10 years, forests covering 150 million acres in the United States and Canada have died from warming-related beetle infestations," the New Yorker report says.

Famine-caused refugee crises and ethnic massacres like the one in Darfur may become worse. French President Nicolas Sarkozy told assembled world leaders in April: "If we keep going down this path, the Darfur crisis will be only one crisis among dozens of others."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls climate change "the defining challenge of our age."

A year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to determine whether the Clean Air Act could be used to reduce greenhouse emissions to protect human health and welfare. In December, the EPA declared that warming gases are a health menace. Three weeks ago, the agency concluded that the 1970 air pollution law could be effective against climate change.

However, the White House disavowed the EPA findings last week, forcing the environmental agency to reverse itself. Now it is clear that the Bush administration will take no action at all.

The president of Clean Air Watch protested: "EPA's approach to this has been completely thrown out by the White House, which is only attempting to stall any kind of cleanup."

House Global Warming Chairman Edward Markey, D-Mass., said: "The White House has taken an earnest attempt by their own climate experts to respond to the Supreme Court's mandate to address global warming pollution and turned it into a Frankenstein's monster."

With the Arctic icecap shrinking by one West Virginia per year, all Americans can do is wait for the disastrous Bush administration to end, and hope that the next president will get serious about "the defining challenge of our age."