Steamboat Springs – For a long time, it seemed the debate about global warming was moving at a – well, a glacial pace.
Then the glaciers started melting – as fast as 5 feet per hour in some places. Now, according to one speaker at a conference held recently in Steamboat Springs, it looks like the North Pole could be free of ice by the end of the century.
What exactly this will do to the conveyor belt of Christmas gifts, nobody said at the annual meeting of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society. But the speaker in question, Chuck Kutscher, did allow as to how it’s time to redefine “glacial pace.”
“It’s bad, and that’s an understatement,” says Kutscher, an engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, speaking of the changing climate. “It’s caused primarily by burning fossil fuels. It’s getting worse – fast. And it’s cheaper to address it now than to pay for the consequences later. But we’re running out of time.”
Change was the theme at the conference, with reports on everything from changes at ski areas, rural electrical co-ops, to the profits to be made from what Kutscher called the “mother of all crises.”
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