Konrad Steffen
Director
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Editor’s note: Follow this story on AC360° tonight.

The total volume of land-based ice in the Arctic has been estimated to be about 3,100,000 cubic kilometers, which corresponds to a sea-level equivalent of about eight meters. Most arctic glaciers and ice caps have been in decline since the early 1960s, with this trend speeding up in the 1990s. A small number of glaciers, especially in Scandinavia, have gained mass as increased precipitation outpaced the increase in melting in few areas.

The Greenland Ice Sheet dominates land ice in the Arctic. Maximum surface-melt area on the ice sheet increased on the average by 16% from 1979-2002 (Steffen et al., 2004), an area roughly the size of Sweden, with considerable variability from year to year, The total area of surface melt on the Greenland Ice Sheet broke all records in 2002, with extreme melting reaching up to 2000 meters in elevation. Satellite data show an increasing trend in the melt extent since 1979. This trend is interrupted in 1992, following the eruption of the Mt. Pinatubo, which created a short-term global cooling as particles spewed from the volcano reduced the amount of sunlight that reached the earth.

Ready for today's Beat 360°? Everyday we post a picture – and you provide the caption and our staff will join in too. Tune in tonight at 10pm to see if you are our favorite! Here is the 'Beat 360°' pic:

Queen Elizabeth II meets singer Lady Gaga following the Royal Variety Performance on December 7, 2009 in Blackpool, England.

Have fun with it. We're looking forward to your captions! Make sure to include your name, city, state (or country) so we can post your comment.

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Barbara Kiviat
Time

The Obama Administration is out to create jobs. Let's not get our hopes up.

The day before the Labor Department announced a second month of 10%-plus unemployment last week, the White House hosted a get-together to hear from executives, labor leaders and academics about how the Federal Government can jolt job growth. "We're looking for fresh perspectives," the President said. "I am open to every demonstrably good idea."

That may sound promising, but the truth is, drumming up new jobs on short notice isn't exactly in the government's wheelhouse. In the long term, what the government does and doesn't do is incredibly important to the health of the labor market. Trade policy, corporate tax rates, the structure of health care — these things all have a real impact on economic growth. But Washington's tool kit doesn't work nearly as well in the short run. Right now companies aren't hiring for a very specific reason: there's not as much demand for their products and services. Callous as it may sound, high unemployment at the front end of an economic recovery is perfectly normal.

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Program Note: Tune in tonight for Gary Tuchman's full report on James Arthur Ray's self-help program. AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

Families, friends, students and sympathizers light candles in Koronadal, Philippines, for the Maguindanao victims.

Maria A. Ressa
Head, ABS-CBN News & Current Affairs
Former CNN Jakarta Bureau Chief

57 people killed in broad daylight, 30 of them journalists. It was premeditated murder because even before they were ambushed, their graves were dug. It was the worst election-related violence we have ever seen and the deadliest single attack on journalists anywhere around the world.

This is a story about the courage of one anonymous Filipino – a citizen journalist – who risked his life three times on Monday, November 23 to tell the world about the massacre in the southern Philippines. His courage gave the world the first photograph of the carnage released to the public. It also shows how professional journalists and citizen journalists can work together to circumvent fear, prevent a whitewash and get the Truth out.

ABS-CBN’s citizen journalism program began during our 2007 elections. We called it “Boto Mo, I-Patrol Mo.” Translated it means, “Patrol Your Votes.” It was the first time globally that a broadcast media organization used the power of mass media and combined it with mobile phone technology and new media for a political purpose: to help ensure elections are free and fair.

It’s important in the Philippines because our elections have always been plagued by rampant cheating and violence. The Philippine National Police declared the 2007 elections the most peaceful in our history – with only about 130 people killed in 217 incidents of poll-related violence.

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Reporter's Note: President Obama will attend the global climate summit in Denmark. I hope he can get my daily letter to the White House while on the road.

Tom Foreman | BIO
AC360° Correspondent

Dear Mr. President,

Let me be candid. I am not particularly convinced that this Climategate issue is all that some folks are cracking it up to be. I’m sure you’ve heard how some scientists swapped e-mails which seemed to suggest they were massaging data to support claims for global warming. “Massaging,” being a nicer word than manipulating. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. Maybe we’ll find out for sure once the investigations are done. Maybe we won’t. Maybe my living room will melt tonight and it won’t matter.

Whether these guys played footsie with the facts or not doesn’t worry me much. So many scientists have studied this business of the planet getting hotter, that unless we find a much deeper and broader conspiracy at work, I don’t think the entire field of research should be unduly tainted by this episode.

What does concern me, is the ancillary notion that scientists would be pursuing a political agenda at all; that we even have pro-global warming and anti-global warming camps. I really believe in the power of science. I believe it can help us understand our world, can help us define and deal with our problems, and one day will possibly even explain why hula-hooping remains an insurmountable challenge for me.

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More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years.

Charles Duhigg
The New York Times

More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards

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Job candidates wait in line at a job fair in McLean, Virginia.

CNN

Two years into the current recession, Americans don't see economic conditions getting better any time soon, and the steady growth in optimism that previous polls measured throughout the year appears to have stalled, according to a new national poll.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Tuesday indicates that 34 percent of those questioned say that things are going well in the country today. That's 14 points higher than a year ago, but a dip of 3 points since November.

Full results (pdf)

"This the first time in Barack Obama's presidency that this number has gone down," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. Keep reading

John Lennon was killed on December 8, 1980 outside the Dakota building in New York City.

Bob Greene
CNN Contributor

Maybe if you're a New Yorker, you grow accustomed to the sight.

Maybe if you live in the city, it becomes just another part of the Manhattan landscape.

But if you're from somewhere else, visiting, and you're not expecting to encounter it. . . .

Well, you sense that you've been in front of this building before, even though you never have. You feel it before you fully see it.

So it was, early on a recent afternoon, that I was walking east on 72nd Street, approaching Central Park West.

I glanced to my left.

To say the building is spooky is perhaps too easy. Yet everything about it - the high gables, the balustrades, the gas lanterns burning even in the daytime, the black iron gates leading into the open interior courtyard - seems purposely designed to give off an aura of portent.

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Rape victims wait for treatment at hospital.

Sasha Lezhnev and John Prendergast
Special to CNN

Last year, the bus in which a young Congolese woman we met named Mary was riding was stopped by a militia. "They wanted to all have me, to rape me," she related haltingly to us. "I told them no, and then they took off my shirt and beat me. I have terrible marks now."

Mary's story is similar to hundreds of thousands of women's experiences in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where rape is routinely "deployed" as a weapon of war by the armed groups fighting over a nation that has some of the richest nonpetroleum natural resource deposits in the world.

Congo holds the numbing distinction of being home to the deadliest war in the world since World War II - with more than 5.4 million people killed during the past 15 years.

"This war is caused by the minerals," Mary told us. "Those [armed groups] control the minerals. I hear that they are used in mobile phones. ... If you talk to Obama or the phone companies, tell them what happens here."

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