The Hot Topic [antikvár]

Preface The North Pole of planet Earth is an extraordinary place. It's a smudgy circle of frozen ocean, hemmed in by the surrounding land masses of Siberia, North America and Europe. Cracks occasionally appear in its surface, where the ice has been torn apart by winds above and currents below. But for the most part, its grey-white façade is as unyielding as rock. You can walk on it, stamp on it, even land planes on it. When you're there, the Arctic sea ice doesn't seem remotely fragile, just motionless, silent and strong, as if water had been turned irreparably to stone. And yet, photographs taken from satellites have now shown conclusively what scientists have been fearing for decades: the North Pole is melting. Each summer, the spread of the sea ice shrinks a little further. It is vanishing from beneath the feet of the Arctic's polar bears. If we do nothing to stop it, by the end of the century the ice, polar bears, and all, could be gone. The story of global warming has progressed in the past few years from conjecture, to suspicion, to cold, hard fact. We now know for certain that in every inhabited continent on Earth, year by year and decade by decade, the world's temperature is rising. Something, or someone, is turning up the heat.