What is your overall opinion of the article? At this point in time, describe your own personal opinion about the global

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What is your overall opinion of the article? Atthis point in time, describe your own personal opinion about theglobal warming controversy.
Come with me to the bottom of theworld, Antarctica, the highest, driest,windiest, and yes, coldest region on Earth -- more aridthan the Sahara and, in parts, colder than Mars. The iceof Antarctica glows with a light so dazzling, it blindsthe unprotected eye. Early explorers rubbed cocaine in theireyes to kill the pain of it. The weight of the ice issuch that the entire continent sags below sea level, beneathits weight. Yet, the ice of Antarctica is a calendar ofclimate change. It records the annual rise and fall ofgreenhouse gases and temperatures going back before the onsetof the last ice ages. Nowhere on Earth offers us such aperfect record. And here, scientists are drilling intothe past of our planet to find clues to the future ofclimate change.
This past January, I traveled to a place called WAISDivide, about 600 miles from the South Pole. It is thebest place on the planet, many say, to study the history ofclimate change. There, about 45 scientists from the Universityof Wisconsin, the Desert Research Institute in Nevada andothers have been working to answer a centralquestion about global warming. What is the exactrelationship between levels of greenhouse gases andplanetary temperatures? It's urgent work. We know thattemperatures are rising. This past May was the warmestworldwide on record. And we know that levels of greenhousegases are rising too. What we don't know is the exact,precise, immediate impact of these changes on naturalclimate patterns -- winds, ocean currents, precipitationrates, cloud formation, things that bear on the health andwell-being of billions of people.
Their entire camp, every item of gear, was ferried 885miles from McMurdo Station, the main U.S. supplybase on the coast of Antarctica. WAIS Divide itselfthough, is a circle of tents in the snow. In blizzardwinds, the crew sling ropes between the tents so that peoplecan feel their way safely to the nearest ice house and tothe nearest outhouse. It snows so heavily there, theinstallation was almost immediately buried. Indeed, theresearchers picked this site because ice and snow accumulateshere 10 times faster than anywhere else inAntarctica. They have to dig themselves out every day. Itmakes for an exotic and chilly commute.
But under the surface is a hive of industrialactivity centered around an eight-million-dollar drillassembly. Periodically, this drill, like a biopsyneedle, plunges thousands of feet deep into the ice toextract a marrow of gases and isotopes for analysis. Tentimes a day, they extract the 10-foot long cylinder ofcompressed ice crystals that contain the unsullied air andtrace chemicals laid down by snow, season after seasonfor thousands of years. It's really a time machine. Atthe peak of activity earlier this year, the researcherslowered the drill an extra hundred feet deeper into the iceevery day and another 365 years deeper into thepast. Periodically, they remove a cylinder ofice, like gamekeepers popping a spent shotgun shell fromthe barrel of a drill. They inspect it, they check it forcracks, for drill damage, for spalls, for chips.
More importantly, they prepare it for inspection andanalysis by 27 independent laboratories in the UnitedStates and Europe, who will examine it for 40 different tracechemicals related to climate, some in parts perquadrillion. Yes, I said that with a Q, quadrillion. Theycut the cylinders up into three-foot sections for easierhandling and shipment back to these labs, some 8,000miles from the drill site. Each cylinder is a parfait oftime.
This ice formed as snow 15,800 years ago, when ourancestors were daubing themselves with paint and consideringthe radical new technology of the alphabet. Bathed inpolarized light and cut in cross-section, this ancientice reveals itself as a mosaic of colors, each oneshowing how conditions at depth in the ice have affected thismaterial at depths where pressures can reach a ton persquare inch. Every year, it begins with a snowflake, andby digging into fresh snow, we can see how this process isongoing today. This wall of undisturbed snow, back-lit bysunlight, shows the striations of winter and summersnow, layer upon layer. Each storm scours theatmosphere, washing out dust, soot, tracechemicals, and depositing them on the snow pack yearafter year, millennia after millennia, creating a kind ofperiodic table of elements that at this point is morethan 11,000 feet thick. From this, we can detect anextraordinary number of things. We can see thecalcium from the world's deserts, soot from distantwildfires, methane as an indicator of the strength of aPacific monsoon, all wafted on winds from warmerlatitudes to this remote and very cold place.
Most importantly, these cylinders and this snow trapair. Each cylinder is about 10 percent ancient air, apristine time capsule of greenhouse gases -- carbondioxide, methane, nitrous oxide -- all unchanged from theday that snow formed and first fell. And this is theobject of their scrutiny. But don't we already know whatwe need to know about greenhouse gases? Why do we need tostudy this anymore? Don't we already know how they affecttemperatures? Don't we already know the consequences of achanging climate on our settled civilization? The truth is, weonly know the outlines, and what we don't completelyunderstand, we can't properly fix. Indeed, we run therisk of making things worse.
Consider, the single most successful internationalenvironmental effort of the 20th century, the MontrealProtocol, in which the nations of Earth banded together toprotect the planet from the harmful effects ofozone-destroying chemicals used at that time in airconditioners, refrigerators and other cooling devices. Webanned those chemicals, and we replaced them,unknowingly, with other substances that, molecule permolecule, are a hundred times more potent asheat-trapping, greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide.
This process requires extraordinary precautions. Thescientists must insure that the ice is notcontaminated. Moreover, in this 8,000-mile journey, theyhave to insure this ice doesn't melt. Imagine juggling asnowball across the tropics. They have to, in fact, makesure this ice never gets warmer than about 20 degrees belowzero, otherwise, the key gases inside it willdissipate. So, in the coldest place on Earth, they workinside a refrigerator. As they handle the ice, infact, they keep an extra pair of gloves warming in anoven, so that, when their work gloves freeze and theirfingers stiffen, they can don a fresh pair. They workagainst the clock and against the thermometer.
So far, they've packed up about 4,500 feet of icecores for shipment back to the United States. This pastseason, they manhandled them across the ice to waitingaircraft. The 109th Air National Guard flew the mostrecent shipment of ice back to the coast ofAntarctica, where it was boarded onto afreighter, shipped across the tropics toCalifornia, unloaded, put on a truck, driven across thedesert to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver,Colorado, where, as we speak, scientists are now slicingthis material up for samples, for analysis, to bedistributed to the laboratories around the country and inEurope.
Antarctica was this planet's last empty quarter -- theblind spot in our expanding vision of the world. Earlyexplorers sailed off the edge of the map, and they founda place where the normal rules of time andtemperature seem suspended. Here, the ice seems a livingpresence. The wind that rubs against it gives itvoice. It is a voice of experience. It is a voice weshould heed.