(I walked --in six layers and many pounds of sealskin -- on a still-frozen Arctic bay this past April. Much of this bay has already stopped freezing in the past 10 years.--All photos: my Austrian friend, Katharina Seiser.

 Al Gore, in An Inconvenient Truth, has projected that if we emit only twice the amount of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases we do now, and if the temperature increases by only a couple of degrees, the almost three-kilometer thick Greenlandic inland  ice will melt away, and global sea level will rise over twenty feet, causing world catastrophe.

The horizon for such a scenario is a few thousand  -- or even a few hundred years -- depending on which researcher you ask.

UPDATE: See the February 21, 2009 New York Times editorial  on newest stats about global warming. Frightening.

I’ve seen firsthand the frightening sight of the Poles melting right now. Last February, I cruised within a few degrees of 70 latitude south in Antarctica.  And six weeks later, I flew to northern Greenland at the same latitude north, 250 kilometers above the Arctic circle. (As my friends wryly note, I’m now bi-polar.)

Witnessing the silent white/blue coldness of ice shelves, ice caps, glaciers and icebergs in both our polar regions is life-altering. How can you not be moved to go green in every way possible, when the white of the world seems to be melting before your eyes?

Transportation emissions are among the major reasons scientists cite for global warming. When this industry goes green --leading the way in reducing climate change – the warming will inevitably slow. The melting scenario in thousands of years could be slowed to hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions of years.

Why has Greenland  become a major symbol for global warming? The Greenland ice cap, fourteen times the size of England, covers most of this largest island in the world, and contains ten per cent of the world’s total reserves of fresh water. The ice is constantly changing and moving, and every year sheds thousands of icebergs into the sea from glaciers in the central and north-western regions. These bergs consist of heavily compacted snow that fell up to 15,000 years ago.

The ice fjord I visited near Ilulissat is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Sermeq Kujalleq near here, the fastest moving glacier in the world, produces the most ice—twenty million tons a day. But since 1840 it has shrunk forty kilometers, and in the past few years alone, over fifteen kilometers —the equivalent of about ten meters, or thirty feet a day.

In 2007, Arctic-Ocean ice was half of what it was four years before, and some climate researchers from the Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder Colorado now believe that these warming Arctic waters could be completely ice free by 2012. (Scientists previously estimated this wouldn’t happen until 2040.) Global warming might trigger icebergs to break free from the leading edge of glaciers more frequently, opening the way for the glaciers to race even faster to the sea.

This past April I passed within a few hundred feet of icebergs big as battleships, fortresses and cathedrals, and thousands of chunks gently drifted past in the Arctic currents. Some of this ice will float more than 2,500 miles south before melting at latitudes of around 40 degrees, the latitude of New York.

(This is a glacier collapsing. It is both beautiful and horrible. The photo is taken from my boat.)

Openings in some icebergs seemed to tempt our little red fishing boat to sail through (we didn’t), and we crunched over ice the size of cars. Aqua water outlined the seven-eighths of ice below the surface, and small, clear bits -- frozen rain trapped maybe thousands of years ago and now freed -- float pure and sweet around us, like crystals in the sun.

Despite the warming trend, ice and snow surrounded me in Greenland. I gingerly walked on it, and dog-sledged for hours along steep, white, glistening fields behind a fan of fifteen Greenlandic dogs and an Inuit driver sharing my sledge. And from the little red Dash-7 Air Greenland plane I gazed down on thousands of bergs in the sea, white polka dots on blue velvet.

 (Greenlandic dogs, which outnumber the 56k residents of Greenland, wait to work. Behind them, in the unfrozen bay, the collapse of a glacier -- the view from my lodging.)

Looking inland, the vast icecap stretched as far as I could see. Near Kangerlussuaq, the air hub where we made connections, I stepped onto this huge remnant from the last ice age.

I’m no expert on global warming, but I did talk to dozens of locals, mainly fishermen, who make their living at the Royal Greenland fisheries from these waters. Some of what they said:

-- The water temperature is two or three degrees warmer than in the recent past.
-- Cod have moved to the area, and shrimp have moved further north. Fisherman have not been able to ice fish recently, but they can now sail into fjords year round.
-- Sealers and whalers in Qaanaaq in north Greenland, say that the sea ice is three feet thinner today than earlier.
-- For the past ten years the Ilulissat harbor has not frozen, and it always did before.

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Greenland is becoming a world center of climate research. Three Ilulissat warehouses will soon become Kangia Ice Fjord station, where scientists and researchers will study climate change on a regular basis. Condoleezza Rice, John McCain and Nancy Pelosi have already made the pilgrimage. They, like me, were probably shocked and moved by the sea of majestic floating ice, one of the most beautiful, yet bittersweet sights in the world.

This Polar Year -- which actually has been going on for two — more than a thousand researchers from sixty countries will report on polar climate change both in the Arctic and Antarctic. This should tell us more definitively about how much of the ice is melting, and the role of gases and emissions, in the future. For example, green transport such as hydrogen fuel cell cars and trucks would emit only water vapor and heat. If all vehicles were powered by hydrogen fuel cells, the melting in Greenland would slow dramatically, and perhaps cease.

I now have my personal, first-hand call to action from Pole-to-Pole warming: I’ve seen the iceberg-clogged Arctic waters, and, a couple of weeks after I returned from Antarctica and the southern polar region, the Wilkins ice shelf, 160 square miles wide, broke off near the western peninsula,  near waters where I had been cruising.

Questions still exist as to the speed of declining ice, but it is declining faster than ever recorded. The questions are: how much, and how long? We do know already that if transportation goes green, one of the major sources of carbon emissions will be modified, and we can assume the Poles will slow their melt.

Having had the privilege of experiencing the awesome ends of the earth, the idea of protecting this environment in any and every way we can -- including green transportation -- excites me beyond words.