Faster and Faster

Joseph Romm has a post up about the Himalayan Glaciers melting. If they disappeared it would affect the lives of billions of people in Asia. At the end of his post he puts up a list of things that are happening faster than scientists thought.

• "The recent [Arctic] sea-ice retreat is larger than in any of the (19) IPCC [climate] models" [PDF] -- and that was a Norwegian expert in 2005. The retreat has accelerated in the past two years.
• The ice sheets appear to be shrinking "100 years ahead of schedule." That was Penn State climatologist Richard Alley in March 2006. In 2001, the IPCC thought that neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.
• Sea-level rise from 1993 and 2006 -- 3.3 millimetres per year as measured by satellites -- was higher than the IPCC climate models predicted.
• The ocean carbon sink is saturating sooner than expected.
  
• The subtropics are expanding faster than the models project.

It is going to be an interesting couple of decades.