On Sunday, 1/20/08, CBS ran an hour special in the “60 Minutes” time slot on global warming called the “The Age of Warming.” Hosted by Scott Pelley, it expanded on a “60 Minutes” piece I’d seen a while back (link to original airing) . For anyone that saw this, especially combined with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” it’s quite a compelling argument for the effect we as humans are having on our planet. It’s one thing to see Al Gore giving a slide presentation. It’s quite another to see giant sheets of ice cleave off a glacier and fall into the ocean and polar bears struggling against the environment.

The special takes a far reaching look into the topic, with spectacular footage from Patagonia, Chile, Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic. Included with the visual impact of the images are interviews with some of the world’s foremost scientists on the topic.

Some of the statistics cited are especially startling. On glacier O’Higgins in Patagonia for instance, it’s receded 9 miles in the last 100 years and lost 2,000 feet of thickness. It’s receded 1,000 feet in the last 3 years alone. Antarctica, where 70% of the fresh water on Earth is frozen, is also the fastest warming place on the planet, with 5 degrees of temperature gain in the last 50 years. Scientists are now estimating that 98% of the world’s glaciers are now melting.

Here in 2008, it seems that we’re still in the debate over whether global warming is naturally occurring due to normal cycles or from man-made pollution in the atmosphere.  It’s hard to refute the evidence and the resulting impact on our planet. After seeing the dramatic evidence, it amazes me that there can be anyone left on the planet who believes that “global warming” is a phrase and not a reality.

 Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic, estimates that we have 10 years to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or risk going beyond a tipping point from which there is no return.

It seems like the time for debate is over and that it’s time for all of us to do what we can to save our planet.