It is so warm that snow had to be trucked in to run the Iditarod dog sled race in Alaska and that was after race officials moved the start 300 miles north from Anchorage to Fairbanks [photo credit: David Hulen]. When the Chena River failed to freeze over, the course had to be moved yet again. The Department of Energy concluded in a new report that the rate of warming has increased in recent decades and will increase even more in the 2020s as the warming feedback loop develops due to the loss of snow and ice. The rate of warming exceeds any in the last 1000 years. While shallow-thinking Alaska legislators are twiting about "making it work", the rest of the world wonders at the real news: Alaska is melting! Several Inuit villages are sinking into the melting permafrost and the Corps of Engineers says a seaside village will have to be evacuated in twenty years due to rising seawater.This past February was truly weird in terms of weather. The eastern seaboard froze under record lows and heavy snowfalls while the western United States experienced a very warm winter and continued drought conditions. Climatologists attribute the schizophrenic weather pattern to a polar jet stream that is meandering for the past two winters. In the west it bulges northwards bringing warm air from the south while it the east it veers south to bring frigid air from Canada down onto the Middle West and Northeast. This unusual meandering is thought to be caused by a radically warming Arctic.