Glacier Loss Illustrated

Yet
another photo from href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17644">NASA's
Earth Observatory page, showing yet more evidence of what
carbon dioxide hath wrought.  

In
the past 125 years, the Athabasca Glacier has lost half of its volume
and receded more than 1.5 kilometers (0.93 miles), leaving hills of
rock in its place. Its retreat is visible in this photo, where the
glacier's front edge looms several meters behind the tombstone-like
marker that indicates the edge of the ice in 1992. The Athabasca
Glacier is not alone in its retreat: Since 1960, glaciers around the
world have lost an estimated 8,000 cubic kilometers (1,900 cubic miles)
of ice. That is approximately enough ice to cover a two-kilometer-wide
(1.2 mile-wide) swath of land between New York and Los Angeles with an
ice sheet that is one kilometer (0.62 miles) tall.

I wonder how long they will keep updating the exhibit?  Of
course I don't recommend that people fly a thousand miles to see an
exhibit about global climate change, but perhaps the following can be
just as enlightening:

To
understand what global warming means for humanity, it is necessary
to understand what global warming is, how scientists know it's
happening, and how they predict future climate. These ideas are
explored in the Earth Observatory's newly updated
fact sheet on global
warming. We invite you to read href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/GlobalWarmingUpdate/">Global
Warming, and then href="mailto:eo-contact@eodomo.gsfc.nasa.gov">send us your
questions
with "global warming" in the subject line. We won't be able to answer
every question that is sent to us, but we will address some of the most
frequently asked questions in a follow-up article.

One of the points they raise has to do with the distinction between
global warming and climate change.  Climate change is more
than just warming.  It is also an increase in the variability,
leading to weather that is even less predictable than it is now.
 Perhaps instead of global warming, or climate
change, we should speak of climate chaos.