For us, problems are not really problems until it's an emergency. That is, its not a problem until its a PROBLEM. The car is sputtering but, what the hell, it runs. Then it breaks down on the highway and the tow truck is your lift home. Or you feel some pain in your tooth but then it goes away and there's no way I'm going back to the dentist. Next week, you are in the dentist's chair and he's revving up what looks like an electric power drill.

Global warming? We get less snow during the winter. That's good, right? The summer growing season is longer. That's good, right? The Goddamned ice caps start melting and the sea level rises. That's good, right? Wrong.

Many years from now, our grandchildren will go the library to read about world history. They will wonder why the cities are under water. And why it's 70 degrees during the New York City winters.

Here are some global warming updates. Things are not getting better; they are getting worse.

Scientists see new global warming threat By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer September 6, 2006 New research is raising concerns that global warming may be triggering a self-perpetuating climate time bomb trapped in once-frozen permafrost.

As the Earth warms, greenhouse gases once stuck in the long-frozen soil are bubbling into the atmosphere in much larger amounts than previously anticipated, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature.

Methane trapped in a special type of permafrost is bubbling up at a rate five times faster than originally measured, the journal said.

Scientists are fretting about a global warming vicious cycle that had not been part of their already gloomy climate forecasts: Warming already under way thaws permafrost, soil that had been continuously frozen for thousands of years.

Thawed permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide. Those gases reach the atmosphere and help trap heat on Earth in the greenhouse effect. The trapped heat thaws more permafrost, and so on.

"The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it is to become a more vicious cycle," said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "That's the thing that is scary about this whole thing. There are lots of mechanisms that tend to be self-perpetuating and relatively few that tends to shut it off."

The effect reported in Nature is seen mostly in Siberia, but also elsewhere, in a type of carbon-rich permafrost, flash frozen about 40,000 years ago. A new more accurate measuring technique was used on the bubbling methane, which is 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than the more prevalent carbon dioxide.

"The effects can be huge," said lead author Katey Walter of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "It's coming out a lot and there's a lot more to come out."

Another study earlier this summer in the journal Science found that the amount of carbon trapped in this type of permafrost - called yedoma - is much more prevalent than originally thought and may be 100 times the amount of carbon released into the air each year by the burning of fossil fuels.

It won't all come out at once or even over several decades, but the methane and carbon dioxide will escape the soil if temperatures increase, scientists say.

The issue of methane and carbon dioxide released from permafrost has caused concern this summer among climate scientists and geologists. Specialists in Arctic climate are coming up with research plans to study the effect, which is not well understood or observed, said Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a group of 300 scientists.

"It's kind of like a slow-motion time bomb," said Ted Schuur, a professor of ecosystem ecology at the University of Florida and co-author of the Science study. "There's these big surprises out there that we don't even know about."

Most of this yedoma is in north and eastern Siberia, areas that until recently had not been studied at length by scientists.

What makes this permafrost special is that during a rapid onset ice age, carbon-rich plants were trapped in the permafrost. As the permafrost thaws, the carbon is released as methane if it's underwater in lakes, like much of the parts of Siberia that Walter studied. If it's dry, it's released into the air as carbon dioxide.

Scientists aren't quite sure which is worse. Methane is far more powerful in trapping heat, but only lasts about a decade before it dissipates into carbon dioxide and other chemicals. Carbon dioxide traps heat for about a century.

"The bottom line is it's better if it stays frozen in the ground," Schuur said. "But we're getting to the point where it's going more and more into the atmosphere."

Vladimir Romanovsky, geophysics professor at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, said he thinks the big methane or carbon dioxide release hasn't started yet, but it's coming. It's closer in Alaska and Canada, which only has a few hundred square miles of yedoma, he said.

In Siberia, the many lakes of melted water make matters worse because the water, although cold, helps warm and thaw the permafrost, Walter said.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Greenland is melting. The way I remember it, Greenland should have been called Iceland, and Iceland should have been called Greenland. While "Greenland" sounds like a bucolic and pleasant meadow-like island, it's actually very icy. But not for long.

Greenland's Melting Ice Sheet May Speed Rise in Sea Level Study Finds No Boost in Antarctic Snowfall to Mitigate Problem

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 11, 2006; A03

Two new scientific studies measuring Greenland's rapidly melting ice sheet and the pace of Antarctic snowfall suggest that the sea level may be rising faster than researchers previously assumed.

The papers, both published yesterday in the journal Science, provide the latest evidence of how climate change is transforming the global landscape. University of Texas at Austin researchers, using twin satellites, determined that the Greenland ice sheet, Earth's second-largest reservoir of fresh water, is melting at three times the rate at which it had been melting over the previous five years. A separate study by 16 international scientists concluded that Antarctic snowfall accumulation has remained steady over the past 50 years, with no increases that might have mitigated the melting of the ice shelf, as some researchers had assumed would occur.

Taken together, the two reports indicate that global sea level rise may increase more rapidly in the coming years, though the Greenland study is based on only 2 1/2 years of data. The melting of 57 cubic miles a year from Greenland's ice sheet could add 0.6 millimeters alone, which is higher than any previously published measurement for Greenland, according to University of Texas Center for Space Research scientist Jianli Chen.

"It's a very big number," Chen said, noting that for at least a hundred years the sea level has increased an average of 1.8 millimeters annually.

Byron Tapley, one of Chen's co-authors, said the ice loss along the sheet's eastern shoreline is particularly significant because it could help weaken the counterclockwise flow of the North Atlantic Current. The more buoyant fresh water from the ice melt could lower water temperatures and ultimately make Western European winters colder, he said.

"If enough fresh water enters the Norwegian Current and you interrupt return flow, then there could be climate effects in Europe," Tapley said.

But Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, questioned why scientists are drawing broad conclusions from data covering such a short time span.

"We now have 'the sky is falling down' on the basis of a few years of data," said Ebell, whose group is partly funded by the fossil-fuel industry.

The second paper, written by 16 scientists from seven countries, challenges computer projections that higher temperatures in the southernmost continent will spur greater snowfall accumulation and compensate for the world's melting ice sheets. Using satellite data that looked at both the West and East Antarctic ice sheets, the researchers concluded there has been no real increase in precipitation in the region in the past five decades.

Andrew J. Monaghan, a meteorologist at Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center, said in an interview that his findings suggest the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2001 prediction that Antarctic snowfall would increase 15 to 20 percent by the end of the century may not be borne out. Some researchers had hoped increased snowfall in the region would thicken the Antarctic ice sheets and help counterbalance any future melt.

"It's a much more complex situation than assuming a temperature rise is going to lead to a commensurate increase in precipitation," Monaghan said.