The Year in Review: The planet

The sheer scale of what happened hasn’t sunk in, it probably hasn’t sunk in at all, with most people. They’re not looking back on 2007 and talking about it, in the office, in pubs or over dinner. Listen to them: they’re talking about Brown taking over from Blair, or David Cameron’s prospects, or England failing to qualify for the European football championships. Or they’re talking about getting and spending, or love and hate, as they always have. But what happened in September dwarfs all that.

You might compare it, in its implications, to Hitler marching his troops into the previously demilitarised Rhineland, in March 1936


On Sunday 16 September 2007, the sea ice covering the Arctic ocean melted back to a record low point. It has always melted back in the summer, but in recent years it has retreated further and further, to new lows, strongly suggesting the influence of climate change. The 2007 retreat, however, shattered the previous record, set only two years earlier, by a quite colossal amount, an amount so enormous as to be scarcely credible. It exceeded the September 2005 low point by another 22 per cent