The Melting Arctic Is a Real-Time Horror Story
The thawing of the Arctic is one of the biggest stories of our time, even if it is playing out at a pace and in a way that virtually guarantees most people will pay little or no attention to it. What’s going on is not a future concern, or simply a tragedy for polar bears; the warming Arctic is already having a tremendous impact on our world and may help explain much of the extreme weather this summer, especially in the U.S. and in western Europe. To oversimplify this only slightly, you could argue that this summer’s historic wildfires in California were predicted by heat in the Arctic.