Two excerpts from a discussion here by the author of the 3-part article I mentioned:

On Alaska:
Alaska is being very dramatically affected by climate change; the state is warming up just about as fast as any place on earth. This is producing a lot of problems in Native communities; several Native villages may have to be moved owing to erosion that is being caused, or at least hastened, by climate change. It's also affecting daily life in places like Fairbanks, parts of which are built on permafrost. As the permafrost degrades, people's houses are starting to split apart. The roads need to be repaired more often; sometimes they just cave in. Ironically, it's also affecting the oil industry. The kind of heavy equipment used in oil exploration is allowed out on the tundra only when the ground is frozen to a depth of twelve inches. Since 1970 the number of days that meet that condition has been reduced by half. Early on, computer models developed by scientists working on climate change predicted that global warming would have a disproportionate effect in the Arctic.

On Greenland:

Outside of Antarctica's, Greenland's ice sheet is the largest in the world. It contains enough water to raise global sea levels by twenty-three feet. There is a very real possibility that global warming will set in motion the destruction of the Greenland ice sheet. No one really knows how warm the world would have to get before that happens, but the signs are not encouraging. Scientists are already seeing changes to the ice sheet that suggest that it could occur at temperatures not much higher than today's. And although the process could take centuries, or even millennia, to fully play out, once the ice sheet started to melt it would become self-reinforcing and therefore impossible to stop.

On lay versus scientific opinions:

I think there is a surprisingly large—you might even say frighteningly large—gap between the scientific community and the lay community's opinions on global warming. As you point out, I spoke to many very sober-minded, coolly analytical scientists who, in essence, warned of the end of the world as we know it. I think there are a few reasons why their message hasn't really got out. One is that scientists tend, as a group, to interact more with each other than with the general public. Another is that there has been a very well-financed disinformation campaign designed to convince people that there is still scientific disagreement about the problem, when, as I mentioned before, there really is quite broad agreement. And third, the climate operates on its own timetable. It will take several decades for the warming that is already inevitable to be felt. People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.


More at the linked reference above.


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