[continued from previous message]

Texas farmers fed their cattle cactus. Stretches of the Mississippi River flowed at less than one-fifth of normal capacity. Roughly 1,700 barges beached at Greenville, Miss.; an additional 2,000 were marooned at St. Louis and Memphis. The on-field
thermometer at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, where the Phillies were hosting the Chicago Cubs for a matinee, read 130 degrees. During a pitching change, every player, coach and umpire, save the catcher and the entering reliever, Todd Frohwirth, fled
into the dugouts. (Frohwirth would earn the victory.) In the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood on June 21, yet another record-smasher, a roofer working with 600-degree tar exclaimed, “Will this madness ever end?”

On June 22 in Washington, where it hit 100 degrees, Rafe Pomerance received a call from Jim Hansen, who was scheduled to testify the following morning at a Senate hearing called by Timothy Wirth.

“I hope we have good media coverage tomorrow,” Hansen said.

This amused Pomerance. He was the one who tended to worry about press; Hansen usually claimed indifference to such vulgar considerations. “Why’s that?”
Pomerance asked.

Hansen had just received the most recent global temperature data. Just over halfway into the year, 1988 was setting records. Already it had nearly clinched
the hottest year in history. Ahead of schedule, the signal was emerging from the noise.

“I’m going to make a pretty strong statement,” Hansen said.

***

In March, Geophysical Research Letters reported that the western part of Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at its fastest rate in at least 450 years. Some scientists believe that the Arctic hasn’t seen ice melt like this in 5,000 years. If the ice
sheet melts entirely, sea levels would rise 20 feet, leaving Lower Manhattan underwater. Jason Gulley, a geologist, and Celia Trunz, a Ph.D. student in geology, have been conducting meltwater research by releasing a fluorescent red
dye to determine how
and why more rivers form on the surface of the ice sheet and what will happen as a result of these new and turbulent flows. So far, they have found that the rivers lubricate the ice slab, making the sheets move faster toward the coasts,
which could cause
even more icebergs to calve into the ocean.

.

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