ENVIRONMENT — REP. MARKEY SAYS GREENLAND ICEBERG HAS MADE ROOM ‘FOR GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS TO START THEIR OWN COUNTRY’: Last week, NASA satellite data showed that a giant ice shelf four times the size of Manhattan broke off from a glacier in northwest Greenland. “The new ice island has an area of at least 100 square miles,” noted University of Delaware climate researcher Andreas Muenchow, “and a thickness up to half the height of the Empire State Building.” Over the weekend, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), who has been leading the legislative effort to confront climate change, blasted his obstructionist colleagues in a statement about the news. “An iceberg four times the size of Manhattan has broken off Greenland, creating plenty of room for global warming deniers to start their own country,” Markey said. “So far, 2010 has been the hottest year on record, and scientists agree arctic ice is a canary in a coal mine that provides clear warnings on climate.” He added that it was “unclear how many giant blocks of ice it will take to break the block of Republican climate deniers in the US Senate who continue hold this critical clean energy and climate legislation hostage.” His urgency is warranted: a paper published in Science magazine last year found evidence “that the most recent 10-year interval (1999–2008) was the warmest of the past 200 decades” for the Arctic. And a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report found that 2010 Arctic sea ice extent was the lowest on record for the month of June. The startling decline in Arctic sea ice has been shown by numerous climate studies based on expert analysis to be a direct result of human activity.