Over the
past quarter -
century, both the extent of melting and the length of the melt season on the Greenland ice sheet have been growing, as
local temperatures have risen.6 Satellites measure the extent of melting by differentiating between areas of the ice mass that are fully frozen and those with surface meltwater.
You may wonder why the government finds the need to pursue such action since 1) U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have already topped out and have generally been on the decline for the
past 7 - 8 years or so (from technological advances in natural gas extraction and a slow economy more so than from already - enacted government regulations and subsidies); 2) greenhouse gases from the rest of the world (primarily driven by China) have been sky - rocketing
over the same period, which lessens any impacts that our emissions reduction have); and 3) even in their totality, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have a negligible influence on
local / regional / global climate change (even a immediate and permanent cessation of all our carbon dioxide emissions would likely result in a mitigation of global temperature rise of less than one -
quarter of a degree C by the end of the
century).