There will always be cycles of extremes, in hot and cold, for various regions, as witnessed by the current El Nino event, but the trend line for arctic sea ice remains as it has been, on a steady decline. And as the Time article here makes clear, less ice means more seawater absorbing solar radiation on a full time basis. More heat into the oceans then means more melting ice beyond what we already have occuring; thus establishing a feedback loop of reinforcement which is quite beyond merely "not good."
And again the question needs to be asked: What are our priorities regarding national security threats? Do even a few, if any at all, seek to begin immediate measures to allow us to not only cope with the coming changes, but to also seek to slow that negative reinforcement loop down? Not so much.
What we are probably heading for is a great deal more spending on finding and killing enemies, or preparing to wage war on assumed enemies to come as the competition for resources increases. And the great pitty here is that A: We increase the number of people who hate us by remaining in geographic areas precisely because they have critical resources, and B: We could both change the critical resource equation, and reduce the tensions that create enemies in the first place, if we could simply use the need to replace these dwindling resources as opportunities to cooperate with others to find and implement solutions.
Even more pittiful, however, is the fact that most of these resources make a few people quite rich; and because of that there is oppostion to change. Which then ought to beg the next question: Why aren't we looking into, and talking more about, how greed is a weapon of mass distruction; and that those who wield it are as much, if not a great deal more, our enemies as Islamic extremists, or potential competitors who we fear will hedge us out of further access to substances we shouldn't be using in the first place.
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