The most recent decade recorded — from 1999 to 2008 — was the warmest of the past 2,000 years.

Another study released this week by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) examines that problem and its potential future effects — and it's not pretty. The WWF researchers found that Arctic sea ice is melting at a faster rate than expected, and that the massive land sheets in Greenland and parts of Antarctic are vulnerable. The report predicts that global sea level will rise more than 3 ft. by 2100, significantly higher than scientists had previously believed.

SHOOT: It's happening more and more that I read about experts being 'surprised'. As far as I'm concerned, there are no experts.

clipped from www.time.com Icebergs that have broken away from the Jacobshavn glacier in Greenland. Climate change is happening everywhere, but nowhere faster than in the Arctic, where annual temperatures in the far North are warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Sea ice on the polar cap is shrinking and permafrost is melting, putting animals like the polar bear — and the Arctic people who depend on them — in increasing danger. While there's no doubt that the Arctic is warming — year after year, it becomes more clearly visible — it is actually a new phenomenon. Summer temperatures in the Arctic cooled by an average of 0.2 degrees C each thousand years, thanks chiefly to wobbles in the Earth's orbit around the sun that gradually reduced the amount of sunlight hitting the Arctic. Left unchecked, the Arctic would have continued that slow cooling for thousands of more years, until the Earth's orbit wobbled again. But then something else happened — us.