A Carbon Tax Is Absolutely Essential

So, what do a major investment from Verizon Wireless and the melting of our polar ice caps have in common? A lot more than you may think.

On Monday, America's largest wireless provider announced that it will be making a $40 million investment in solar power at eight of its facilities across the United States.

According to a press release from Verizon, new solar installations at facilities in California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York will nearly double the amount of energy that Verizon gets from solar power.

Speaking about the $40 million investment, Verizon's chief sustainability officer James Gowen told Bloomberg that, "Solar is a proven technology. It didn't hurt that the technology is getting better and prices are coming down."

Last year, Verizon announced a similar $100 million investment in solar power and fuel cell technologies.

These types of investments in clean and green forms of renewable energy from major US corporations couldn't come sooner.

That's because new research suggests that climate change and global warming are happening a lot faster than we first thought.

According to new data from a European space probe, our planet's two largest ice sheets -- in Greenland and Antarctica -- are melting at unprecedented speeds.

The CryoSat-2 space probe has discovered that the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are losing a stunning 120 cubic miles of ice each year.

That's A LOT of ice that's going from being frozen ice up on land into being river water flowing into the rising oceans.

But more importantly, the rate of sea ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica has more than doubled since 2009, which shows just how fast the processes of global warming and climate change have become.

Speaking about the new and alarming data, Mark Drinkwater, mission scientist for the European Space Agency's CryoSat mission, said that, "These results offer a critical new perspective on the recent impact of climate change on large ice sheets. This is particularly evident in parts of the Antarctic peninsula, where some of the more remarkable features add testimony on the impact of sustained peninsula warming at rates several times the global average."

And, it's not just the sea ice in Greenland and Antarctica that's melting at astonishing rates.

Arctic sea ice is melting at unprecedented rates too.

In fact, as Gaius Publius pointed out over at America Blog, just about every reputable projection on the loss of Arctic sea ice has been wrong.