The current discussion in the scientific community concerning global warming no longer resembles a debate because science recognizes global warming and its immense consequences are real.

Tawdry politicians and Exxon Mobil can hide from profound scientific findings that correlate human causes such as burning fossil fuels and global warming for only so long.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides such overwhelming evidence in this correlation that global warming skeptics should not only be embarrassed, but ashamed.

Former physicist and current U.S. representative, Rush Holt affirmed in The Star Ledger “the debate over the existence of global warming is over, and science has won.” Likewise, Jerry Mahlman, retired director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab at Princeton University, is certain that the warming of the planet is incontestable.

Therefore, it is sufficiently reasonable to conclude the only scientific debate regarding global warming is that which concerns how much and how fast the change is occurring.

Time reporter Jeffrey Kluger, in his influential article, “Global Warming Heats Up,” proclaimed that global warming is “suddenly and unexpectedly … upon us.”

In 2004, the journal Science published an analysis which illustrated that out of 900 scientific journal articles on global climate change, zero disputed the evidence that global warming is due to human activity.

The American Geophysical Union defends such findings when it concludes natural influences alone are insufficient to explain the rapid increase of global near-surface temperatures since the 1950s.

Highly respected scientific organizations maintain that human sources, such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation to name two, are the primary causes of global warming.

In impressive fashion, the IPCC is “99 percent certain” that humans have caused global climate change.

The fact that 19 of the hottest 20 years on record have occurred since 1980 is a testimony to the rapid and reckless increase of burning fossil fuels.

Furthermore, the IPCC cites increases in global average air and ocean temperature as evidence that the Earth’s climate system has not been this warm for at least 1,300 years when a massive heat wave occurred in medieval times.

However, studies in the World Climate Report show this massive medieval heat wave was nothing in comparison with the warming that the earth is now experiencing.

Perhaps the most terrifying evidence of global warming is the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice and its potentially enormous hazardous consequences. More than 400,000 square miles of Arctic sea ice have melted in the past 30 years, thus raising the sea level profoundly.

The flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland has more than doubled in the past decade. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment released in 2004 illustrates in recent summers the Arctic ice cap has been shrinking to the smallest sizes ever recorded. Accordingly, the ACIA posits the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free potentially as soon as the summer of 2050.

Most recent projections from the journal Science estimate that global sea levels will increase by 20 or more with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica.

Analyses from European satellites conclude Greenland ice is melting so rapidly that in the last year alone 53 miles of water drained into the sea.

For means of comparison, one mile of water is approximately five times the amount of annual water usage in Los Angeles.

Some scientific estimates show if the entire Greenland ice sheet were to melt then the resulting amount of elevation in sea levels would devour much of coastal Florida, Bangladesh and many other coastal civilizations.

To put it bluntly, arctic glaciers are melting and melting fast. Once they melt completely, sea levels will dramatically increase and thus erode much of earth’s shorelines.

It is precisely estimated in the IPCC report that by 2080 an approximate 200 million people could be displaced from their coastal civilizations, not to mention the equally large number of people that will have perished from resultant natural disasters, thus creating global humanitarian disasters at catastrophic levels.

A few other imminent consequences of global warming include: thawing of permafrost, decline of certain plant and animal species, early emergence of insects, dramatic increase in duration of wildfire seasons and increase in geographic range of tropical diseases.

Earth is our only home, and we are rapidly killing it.

E-mail Warren your perspective of global warming at [email protected].