29 April,2009 05:29 AM IST | | PTI
Nobel prize-winning climate champion and former US vice president Al Gore has called for rapid action to prevent the potentially irreversible melting of the planet's ice.
Gore told the first conference devoted to melting ice, held in the Norwegian town of Tromsoe ahead of the UN meeting in Copenhagen in December, that melting was worse than the worst-case scenarios presented by experts a few years ago.
"This conference is a global wake-up call," Gore said yesterday. "The scientific evidence for action in Copenhagen in December is continuing to build up week by week."
He explained why the melting ice posed such a threat to the planet. "Ice is important through the ecological system of the Earth for many reasons, but one of them has to do with its reflexivity," he said.
Ice reflects 90 per cent of the sun's radiation back into the atmosphere. If the ice were to melt, the dark water would not reflect the heat but instead absorb it, thereby accentuating the effect of global warming.
"As it disappears we have to keep in mind that it can come back only if we act fairly quickly," said Gore, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
He explained that "if we keep turning the temperature of the Earth up, then the heat will go to lower depths of the Arctic Ocean and it will be impossible for the ice to come back."
