The Washington Post: Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released by the United Nations Environment Program...
The significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change... Sea level might rise by as much as six feet [1.8 metre] by 2100 instead of 1.5 feet, as the IPCC had projected, and the Arctic may experience a sea-ice [free] summer by 2030, rather than by the end of the century.
BBC News: Greenland and parts of Antarctica are losing large volumes of ice to the oceans as their glaciers get thinner, a NASA satellite has revealed... A full melt of the Greenland ice would push sea level up by about 7m (20ft)... The swiftness with which some of the glaciers now move towards the sea far outstrips the rate at which ice can be restored to the land through precipitation. As a consequence, these glaciers are shown in the Icesat data to be falling in height -- some dramatically so...
The findings re-affirm what many suspect -- that the reduced elevation of these glaciers is not the result of changes in precipitation or melt, but the increased speed at which they now move... In many places in both Antarctica and Greenland, glaciers are being confronted by warmer waters which are eroding their fronts... The break-up of floating ice shelves that would normally constrict glacier flow has also contributed to the observed acceleration. And in some regions, increased air temperatures are having an effect.
The New York Times: Data from three spacecraft indicate the widespread presence of water or hydroxyl... 'It's so startling because it's so pervasive,' said Lawrence A. Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a co-author of one of the papers that analyzed data from a NASA instrument aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 satellite. 'It's like somebody painted the globe.'...
The Chandrayaan-1 data looked at sunlight reflected off the Moon's surface and found a dip at a wavelength where water and hydroxyl absorb infrared light. Dr. Taylor estimated the concentration at about one quart of water per cubic yard of lunar soil and rock [approximately 1 litre per cubic metre}.
