Huffington Post: What if CO2 kills all polar bears overnight?

Gernot Wagner: All Polar Bears Gone, Overnight

We are literally slowing down the rotation of the globe and doing so at an increasingly faster rate.*

All are clearly linked to global warming, yet none of them are quite strong enough to spur us into action. What will it take to make that happen?
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But perhaps a dramatic yet not quite catastrophic event could act as a wake-up call? I'm at a loss to come up with examples that fit into that category.
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One possible candidate: a mass die-off of most polar bears.

Catastrophic? For Arctic fauna, yes; for the planet, debatable. Dramatic? Here's hoping.

* Think ice skater, whose spinning speed increases as she pulls her arms closer and slows down as she extends her arms. The same happens to the planet: As polar ice melts, water distributes to the equator, expanding the planet's bulge and slowing its rotation -- by fractions of a second, but amazingly it is already measurable. And we know it's happening at an increasing rate.

Gernot Wagner

Gernot Wagner is an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund and author of 'But Will the Planet Notice?' coming out in October 2011.

Gernot teaches at Columbia, graduated from both Harvard and Stanford, and blogs at www.gwagner.com. He doesn’t eat meat, doesn’t drive, and knows full well the futility of his personal choices.