“It is hard to capture the astonishment that the experts in the science of ice felt when they saw this,’’ said former US Vice President Gore, who joined Scandinavian officials and scientists to brief journalists and delegates. It was Gore’s first appearance at the two-week conference.
The group presented two new reports updating fast-moving developments in Antarctica, the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland, and the rest of the Arctic.
“The time for collective and immediate action on climate change is now,’’ said Denmark’s foreign minister, Per Stig Moeller.
But delegates from 192 nations were bogged down in disputes over key issues. This further dimmed hopes for immediate action to cut more deeply into global emissions of greenhouse gases.
Gore and Danish ice scientist Dorthe Dahl Jensen clicked through two slide shows for a standing-room-only crowd of hundreds in a side event at the Bella Center conference site.
One report, on the Greenland ice sheet, was issued by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, an expert group formed by eight Arctic governments, including the United States.
The other, commissioned by Gore and Norway’s government, was compiled by the Norwegian Polar Institute on the status of ice melt worldwide.
Average global temperatures have increased 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century, but the mercury has risen at least twice as quickly in the Arctic. Scientists say the makeup of the frozen north polar sea has shifted significantly in recent years as much of the thick multiyear ice has given way to thin seasonal ice.
In the summer of 2007, the Arctic ice cap dwindled to a record-low minimum extent of 1.7 million square miles in September. The melting in 2008 and 2009 was not as extensive, but still ranked as the second- and third-greatest decreases on record.
Last April, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that Arctic summers could be almost ice-free within 30 years, not at the 21st century’s end as earlier predicted.
