Climate change 'significantly worse' than feared as Arctic in Dangerous Meltdown

Switzerland (AFP) - Climate change is occurring far faster than even the worst predictions of the UN's Nobel Prize-winning scientific panel on climate change foresaw, Al Gore warned Thursday.

 
New evidence shows "the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC projections had warned us," the former US vice president and climate campaigner told delegates at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos.

The Arctic ice cap has shrunk by an area twice the size of France's land mass over the last two years. "The year 2008 promises to be a critical year on every level. Summer 2007 was marked by a major retreat in the ice-cap, one we were not anticipating. The rate of decline is also two or three times faster than (observed) beforehand." Disruption to the thermal layers of atmosphere stacked over Earth's far north was cited as the principal cause by Swedish researchers earlier this month.