Arctic Ice Melting a Bit Faster

"So what?" you may ask. That is, if you don't care what kind of world your children live in. This means more than just a tough adaptation process for polar bears and walruses. It means that almost every habitat on Earth will be different, and some of it will be uninhabitable.

Serreze and others said at the conference. Greenland could begin to rapidly calve off glaciers in the North Atlantic. Ocean water levels around the world could rise 13 to 19 feet during the next several centuries. As the ice disappears and the Arctic Ocean warms, more of the microscopic plant life stays on the surface. Thus, bottom-feeders like crab and shellfish die off. Pollock and salmon, however, would do better. Sea lanes would open up above Russia and Canada.

Serreze joked that Russian colleagues tell him that global warming is good for them. "But on the balance, there are more losers than winners," he said.

There are already dead zones, and in the future there will be more dead zones. Perhaps many species will adapt, or just be happenstance contain just the right genetics for a hotter planet with much different biological characteristics. Some of it will be fun, some will be ghastly, but if past extinctions are anything to compare our situation with, most of it will be death to any species that is living in a narrow adaptation range, such as coral that expects a nice 71 F for most of the time, or humans that have difficulties with 117 degrees in the shade, every day , except when it rains 42 inches in 2 hours and washes everything away.