The year is 2025, only a very short 14 years from now. People are moving, en masse, to the various equatorial regions of the world. In our country, the United States, there is a mass exodus to places like Florida and Texas. Any location north of North Carolina is cold as ice. New York, my alma mater, is freezing all the time. Summer in the Northeast, which used to be mild, is now quite cold, with temperatures in August not exceeding 40 degrees. What happened and why did no one imagine such a future?

While the near future described above may sound like a famous Twilight Zone episode, sadly, it’s the very near future that is very likely. The reason for this dire prediction is facts that are based on facts, such as those described and discussed in a very recent New York Times article, on the front page. The article discussed the decline of the “arctic fence,” which is a protective barrier of swirling air over the arctic region. This barrier, or “fence,” serves to keep cold Arctic air in and keeps non-Arctic or warm air out. but surprisingly this “fence” is breaking down.

It is very likely that the cause of this rupture is due to the great increase in humidity in the Earth’s atmosphere. For complicated reasons, as humidity increases, the “fence” decreases. And why is there an increase in humidity in the atmosphere? It’s because the Arctic ice is melting, at a very alarming rate and FASTER AND FASTER. In the Times article, there were graphic photos of the Arctic ice, from 1979 and just a few months ago, 2010. In that time span, 31 years, the Arctic ice has melted by more than 30 percent! That is huge and it is leading to a much worse situation.

When the ice melts, as it has, it leaves more seawater exposed to direct sunlight. When there is ice, sunlight is reflected back into space. But without ice, the seawater ABSORBS the sunlight, and there is a concomitant rise in seawater temperature, causing MORE ice to melt. And this causes a vicious circle: more ice melts, less reflections, more temperature rise. This cycle causes a rate of ice melting that is EXPONENTIAL in nature. That is, the ice melts at an increasingly faster rate.

What this means is that although it took 31 years for 30% of the Arctic ice to melt, IT IS NOT GOING TO TAKE THAT LONG FOR THE NEXT 30% TO MELTE! And, when more than 50% of the Arctic ice is gone, logic will dictate that all hell will break loose. At that stage, where 50% of the ice is gone, there would, in all likelihood, be an irrevocable acceleration of total ice loss, complete melting, and a consequent massive amount of water in the atmosphere, triggering huge storms. snows and other really horrible weather phenomena. The alters of the world, our oceans and lakes, would also increase in temperature, since most of the sunlight would no longer be reflected by the ice.

There will, in all probability, be a large increase in the earth’s temperature. This temperature rise is ALREADY happening. the year 2010 was the warmest year ever recorded, and the last decade saw the largest temperature increase ever recorded.

One would think that what has been described here would be the biggest news of the year. Not jobs, not wars, not famines, not cancer, not AIDS, not the Oscars, not the Superbowl, not the Middle East conflict, not the housing crisis, not the subprime collapse and its aftermath close to depression. No, one would think that the disappearance of our planet could be a little more important.

In the famous Twilight Zone mentioned at the beginning, people moved towards the equator. But, in the main part of that episode, the earth was getting warmer, not cooler, and it’s the earth, like Venus, that’s probably the most likely future, based on the big ice melt. But strangely enough, 50% or more of the ice melted could, by some weird twist of fate, cause the earth to become super cold. That could happen if the huge increase in moisture in the atmosphere causes a huge, huge increase in the amount of snow. This large amount of snow could supercool the earth, causing TOO MUCH light reflection and thus sending us all into a new, terrifyingly cold Ice Age.

The key to knowing is that all of this is happening RIGHT NOW, and whether we end up as Venus (super hot) or Pluto (super cold), either way is too horrible to even contemplate. And yet, for our own good, we should contemplate it all, because very, very soon, just a few years, we will all be facing a very different reality, and that horrible reality is underway and may well be irrevocable. . Maybe some important politician or citizen group will talk about this terrifying situation. I hope so, because we, and our children, will have nowhere to hide when the world changes.