From National Geographic, an amazing time-lapse video of a glacier near Valdez, Alaska between May and September of last year. Watch as it retreats a half mile or more:

Global warming is a topic I follow pretty closely, as I have mentioned before, but I haven’t posted on it in a long time. The real reason, I confess, is that there is so much bad news, and I felt worried that I’d chase readers away. (“Oh, God, there’s another grim post about the climate from Morgan.”) And maybe I feel a little overwhelmed, myself.

But the problem hasn’t gone away. Two weeks ago, a portion of the Wilkins ice shelf the size of Manhattan broke off and floated away. The rest of the ice shelf is barely hanging on, and only the fact that winter is coming to Antarctica may save it.

As the New York Times puts it:

Nothing dramatizes the urgency of global warming quite like a fracture of this scale. There is nothing to be done about a collapsing polar ice sheet except to witness it. It may be too late to stop the warming decay at the boundaries of Antarctic ice, yet there is everything to be done. Humans can radically change the way they live and do business, knowing that it is the one chance to find a possible limit to radical change in the natural world around us.

We have a lot of extremely important issues we need our political leaders to address. Climate change, because it is such a big issue, and so complex–and most importantly, a problem whose worst effects won’t be felt for decades–gets crowded out of our consciousness. But we really do need to act now. Our next president’s actions will have a real effect on whether global warming is a big problem we managed to tackle, or one we let run away from us.

Individual actions help, and collective action helps even more. Al Gore is gearing up for a major new campaign to push the fight against climate change to the front of the public consciousness. We need our political leaders to actually, y’know, lead on this one.

Come on, Clinton; come on, Obama*. Step up to the plate. Show us you have what it takes.

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*I’d name McCain, too; global warming affects everyone, and I’ve known plenty of Republicans who are concerned about it. But the far right seems determined to try to make climate change a partisan issue, and McCain will be too beholden to them to be effective on this issue, even if he wanted to. Yet another reason to vote Democratic this coming November, if you needed one.