Last year I showed these two slides so that demonstrate that the Arctic ice cap, which formost of the last three million years has been the size of the lower 48 states, has shrunk by 40percent. But this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn’t showthe thickness of the ice. The arctic ice cap is, in a sense, the beating heart of the global climatesystem. It expands in winter and contracts in summer. The next slide I show you will be a rapidfast-forward of what’s happened over the last 25 years. The permanent ice is marked in red. Andas you see, it expands to the dark blue—that’s the annual ice in winter, and it contracts in summer.The so-called permanent ice, five years old or older, you can see is almost like blood, spilling outof the body here. In 25 years it’s gone from this, to this.This is a problem because the warming heats up the frozen ground around the Arctic Ocean,where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon which, when it thaws, is turned into methaneby microbes. Compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere, thatamount could double if we cross this tipping point. Already in some shallow lakes in Alaska,methane is actively bubbling up out of the water. Professor Katey Walter from the University ofAlaska went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter.She’s okay. The question is whether we will be. And one reason is, this enormous heat sinkheats up Greenland from the north. This is an annual melting river. But the volumes are muchlarger than ever. This is the Kangerlussuaq River in southwest Greenland. If you want to know how sea level rises from land-base ice melting this is where it reaches the sea. These flows areincreasing very rapidly. At the other end of the planet, Antarctica the largest mass of ice on theplanet. Last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance. Andwest Antarctica cropped up on top some under-sea islands, is particularly rapid in its melting.That’s equal to 20 feet of sea level, as is Greenland.In the Himalayas, the third largest mass of ice: at the top you see new lakes, which a fewyears ago were glaciers. Forty percent of all the people in the world get half of their drinkingwater from that melting flow. In the Andes, this glacier is the source of drinking water for thiscity. The flows have increased. But when they go away, so does much of the drinking water.In California there has been a 40 percent decline in the Sierra snowpack. This is hitting thereservoirs. And the predictions, as you’ve read, are serious.This drying around the world has lead to a dramatic increase in fires. And the disastersaround the world have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented rate—four times as many in the last 30 years as in the previous 75. This is a completely unsustainable pattern.