Humans are melting the worlds ice.

Humans are melting the world's ice. DurkTalsma/Getty

Mount Rainier's glaciers have been melting surprisingly slowly, even adding ice in certain places, while Greenland's massive ice sheets melt at four times the rate of just 15 years ago. These two sets of recently reported facts seem to be contradictory but a closer look reveals that both signs point to the same thing: we're fucked.

The New York Times published details of a report on Monday that found Greenland's inland ice is rapidly melting, faster than researchers previously thought, and could become a major factor in rising sea levels in just 20 years. Those researchers said the data shows that Greenland's ice could be nearing a new tipping point where slight changes in temperatures can result in massive losses of ice, leading to coastal flooding around the world.

Something different is happening in the Pacific Northwest. Evan Bush of the Seattle Times has a story today that says researchers have, for the first time, cataloged the ice fields of the Northwest using satellite images and a supercomputer. They found that after shrinking heavily between 2000 and 2009, the glaciers in the Cascades rebounded and started to avert the worst of the thawing, thanks to changes in cyclical weather patterns.

Does this mean that Washington won't feel the effects of climate change? The researchers say the opposite is actually true. Those cyclical climate patterns have probably only covered up the negative effects of climate change, meaning when the cycle goes back and our mountains get their usual amounts of moisture we'll see an accelerated drop in local ice fields.

Which leads to the entire point of this post: Regardless of where scientists look they see the unequivocal fact that humans are warming our climate to dangerous levels. We're fucked.