But, hey, between now and 2100 there are a lot of other things to worry about, right? Unfortunately, it appears the IPCC’s timeline may be a tad off. A British Arctic explorer says he already encountered temperatures 10 to 13 degrees warmer than they were on a similar expedition three years ago.
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Summer temperatures in the Arctic have risen at an incredible rate over the past three years and large patches of what should be ice are now open water, a British polar explorer said on Monday.
Ben Saunders, forced by the warm weather to abandon an attempt to ski solo from northern Russia across the North Pole to Canada, said he had been amazed at how much of the ice had melted.
"It's obvious to me that things are changing a lot and changing very quickly," a sunburned Saunders told Reuters less than two days after being rescued from the thinning ice sheet close to the North Pole.
The temperatures were incredibly warm ... I had days when I could ski with no gloves and no hat at all, just in bare hands, because I was too hot," said Saunders.
Logs from an expedition in 2001 showed the average Arctic temperature at this time of year was minus 15 to minus 20 degrees Celsius (plus 5 to minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit).
Saunders said the average temperature this time was just minus 5 to minus 7 degrees Celsius (23 to 19 degrees Fahrenheit).
Saunders said he had also been struck by the almost complete absence of polar bears on the Russian side.
"That surprised me a lot ... that's historically been a very concentrated area for bears," he said.
"Whereas in 2001 we were attacked by a bear on day two (of the trek) and saw bear tracks nearly every day for the first three weeks, this year I saw four sets of tracks during the entire expedition."
Polar bears hunt out on the ice during summer months and are forced to retreat back to land when the ice is too thin.
Saunders said the weather had been poor for much of the trip with much more cloud cover and fog than he had expected. The fresh snow he encountered was soft and bulky, unlike the typical hard, fine-grained snow found in the Arctic.
"We'll all be dead then"
Re: 2100: "We'll all be dead then." - GWB Sums it all up for the anti-Kyoto contingent, the Far-Right and Our Dear Leader.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned, we stand passively by as all the science tells us we are destroying the planet, who is more at fault? Certainly the current anti-Kyoto GOP leadership, but we have all the info and do nothing to change attitudes, shame on us.
The Third Assessment of the 
