The Age Of Warming
60 Minutes Goes To The Bottom Of The World And To The Top of A Glacier To See The Fastest Warming Place On Earth
-
Play CBS Video Video Watching The World Melt Away In Full: Scott Pelley looks for - and finds - evidence of global warming in Antarctica where the bottom of the world is literally melting away.
-
Video Pelley's Reporter's Notebook Only On The Web: Scott Pelley discusses global warming in the Southern Hemisphere, where glaciers are receding in an unprecedented way, and how the study of ice helps understand climate change.
-
-
60 Minutes Scott Pelley perilously stands on an iceberg in Lake O'Higgins -- a lake formed by the melting of glacier O'Higgins in Patagonia, Chile. (CBS)
-
Penguins migrate up to 5,000 miles in the coldest water on earth. But, after millions of years of endurance, researchers say many of Antarctica's Chinstrap and Adelie penguins aren’t surviving anymore. (CBS)
-
-
Photo Essay A Warming Effect A behind-the-scenes look at the 60 Minutes team's trip to Patagonia, Chile and Antarctica.
-
Interactive Global Warming The greenhouse effect, a look at the Kyoto Protocol and a history of the Earth's climate.
-
Fast Facts Antarctica Learn about the people, economy and history of Antarctica.
The other reason one comes to the Warsaw Plateau is to see some of the most dramatic evidence anywhere in the world of climate change. Over the past 50 years, this region, the Antarctica peninsula, the northwestern part and the islands around it has been going up in temperature about one degree every decade and that makes the region the fastest warming place on earth.
Mayewski is on the plateau to drill an ice core because, when ice is laid down, it captures everything in the air. Drilling down is drilling through time.
"The ice cores are really the only way we have of demonstrating what greenhouse gas levels were like prior to their first measurement by humans," he explains.
By chemically analyzing the core, he can see what was in the air thousands of years ago. Back in Maine, Mayewski has a vault of hundreds of ice cores. He once led a team that drilled a glacier core two miles deep. He and his colleagues have found some of the most powerful evidence that man is changing the climate.
What do ice cores tell him about greenhouse gases?
"Now we know from the ice core record that the levels and the speed of rise are significantly, significantly greater than anything in the last 850,000 years," Mayewski explains. "And the levels that we expect to get by the end of this century are going to be double what we have today."
Mayewski and his colleagues have timed the sudden rise in greenhouse gases to the start of the industrial revolution about 150 years ago. If, as expected, greenhouse gas pollution doubles by the end of the century, temperatures are predicted to rise four to six degrees.
"You could very well see sea level rises on the order of several feet and perhaps even several tens of feet," Mayewski predicts.
Asked what that would mean for coastal areas around the world, Mayewski tells Pelley, “If sea level were to rise like that, that would be tremendous changes. Immense migrations.”
"It would be the largest catastrophe that the modern world would have experienced," he adds.
That rise in sea level would play out over decades. Some of it may be inevitable. It turns out that many greenhouse gases last a long time in the atmosphere—there’s a lot up there already.
"If we stopped every automobile every factory, every emission of a greenhouse gas, would the world continue to warm?" Pelley asks Mayewski.
"It would certainly for a while. And I think that’s one of the important thing for people to understand," Mayewski says. "It is important that everybody really begins to make reductions in greenhouse gases all the toxic elements that go along with it in order to impact or to have a change in the future. And once we start it’s not going to be an immediate solution. We’re going to have to pay for a while for what we’ve done."
Produced by Solly Granatstein and Catherine Herrick
© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
- 1
- 2
- next
See all 24 CommentsCBS 60 minutes it is 32 degrees. The south pole is not melting!
Thank you for your inspiring program!
Sincerely,
Dot Montaine
Sounds a bit like the stone age. If that''s where the liberals want to go, well, Gore might just talk them into it.
A few weeks ago, I had a dream that I wwas receiving a voice-mail and it was from the Chief Economist of the Universe. The subject was global warming and a solution to the problem was offered.Being a musician, I composed a song which I think captures the message. I''m wondering if you are interested in hearing the song?
Interesting climate changes have been occurring since time immemorial.
If climate change is deemed to be such an alarming problem, than why have not the seas risen even an infinitesimal amount in our recent industrial era history?
Certainly we should all be concerned about our environment; but the waters are being murkified and methinks the largest supplier of %u2018warming%u2019 is the hollow hot air emanating from profiteering pundits from each side of the issue.
http://hotairorrealconcern.blogspot.com/
The stories objectivity was wonderfully shown. That''s right, there''s only one side to global warming, now changed to "climate change".
Why the name change? It''s hard to talk about "Global Warming" when it snows in areas with global warming demonstrations (LOL).
Now that 60 Minutes has told the story from ONLY one side, let''s hear from the other side, those scientists who do not believe in the Global Warming Theory.
When the weather men start predicting the future weather patterns, correctly, then maybe we can look into "your science" into global warming.
Please let me know the airing of the other side.
Drinking the Kool-Aid
Be Good
YES, decidedly they do happen.
The question is: what percentage is us, and what percentage is this planet? I don't know the answer to that.
I don't live in an all-or-nothing world. Things are seldom just one cause, and never something else. They blend. For better, or for worse.
"Since our dependancy on eating meat is perhaps the single largest contributor to the climate change - even more so than driving cars, I would suggest starting there. Not even Al Gore wants to touch that one."
Not necessesarily so. Yes, the big bang meat-raising conglomerates are an issue, but sustainable meat ranching IS sometimes better on an energy-use scale than trucking in your (big bang) veggies from 2000 miles away. The artichokes I'm cooking for tonight's dinner came in from the other side of the continent. The venison I ate two nights ago foraged in the wild and didn't take any extra energy to get to my home (because the person who brought it to my doorstep was coming here anyway).
There's a lot of talk about moving to corn for our energy needs. One plus: it gets us off of immediate foreign oil dependency. The negative: we just drop that dependency back a layer or two. It's still there.
There's some talk about animals like goats, which can live in areas where human crops cannot grow, and free-range pasture. This source of meat would not be cheap perhaps, but can provide for sustainable protein production.
My point is that there are a lot of variables on food sources and environmental impact, and we should keep this in mind.
One thing though, there is no place on earth named Anartic. It is Anarctic - like the other side of the world from Arctic. I looked it up in the Reader's Digest World Atlas!
Another thing is, there are no polar bears in either the Anartic or the Anarctic. Check - it - out!
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/03/what_al_gore_really_wants.html
I am buying his book and movie to find out.
The sad thing is that it is too late to do anything about global warming. That's why there is little said about reversing the trend. I still advocate getting the world, especially America, off fossil fuels. It just makes sense to end our dependence on oil and be able to breathe cleaner air. But global warming is too far along to do much about in the short term. Whether human activity caused this or not, humans certainly can%u2019t do anything to reverse it.
- 1
- 2
- next
See all 24 Comments