A unique partnership was introduced at a Washington news conference today, as a dozen evangelical and scientific leaders announced a new joint effort to protect the environment and defend “life on earth,” according to a press release received by RAW STORY.

The coalition’s leaders “shared concerns about human-caused threats to Creation – including climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, species extinction, the spread of human infectious diseases, and other dangers to the well-being of societies.”

The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime “glacial earthquakes” have been detected within the ice sheet.

“The general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets don’t react very quickly to climate,” said Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. “But that thinking is changing right now, because we’re seeing things that people have thought are impossible.”

The grandchildren of today’s skiers are likely to know the white peaks of Switzerland only from the wrappers of chocolate bars. A remarkable report on climate change that will be handed to European governments this week will say that the effect of rising temperatures will mean an end to snow across large areas of the Alps.

An unholy alliance of key fossil fuel corporations and conservative politicians have waged a sophisticated and well-funded misinformation campaign to create doubt and controversy in the face of nearly universal scientific consensus. In this, they were aided and abetted by a press which loved controversy more than truth, and by the Bush administration, which has systematically tried to distort the science and silence and intimidate government scientists who sought to speak out on Global Warming.

The world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007, the UK’s Met Office has forecast.

An extended warming period, resulting from an El Nino weather event in the Pacific Ocean, is likely to push up global temperatures, experts predict.

The forecasters also revealed that 2006 saw the highest average temperature in the UK since records began in 1914.