A new United Nations-backed report says that the world’s glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate because of global warming caused by human activity.
Between 2000 and 2006, the world’s glaciers melted at a rate that was 1.6 times faster than the rate at which they melted during the 1990s and three times as fast as the melt rate in the 1980s.
The study is released days before the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to release the summary of its fourth assessment report, a summary which is expected to conclude that global warming is real, that it is accelerating, and that this phenomenon cannot be explained by natural causes.