During the eight years the Bush Administration denied that climate change was a problem, they were concealing spy satellite images showing the frightening loss of summer artic sea ice.

The de-classified images were released last week by the Obama Whitehouse in an effort to build support for the beleaguered Waxman Markey bill now moving through the Senate.

The satellite pictures clearly show how rapidly the arctic is vanishing due to climate change. In years such as 2007, more than one million square kilometers of summer ice disappeared and has never recovered.

The one-meter resolution images produced by the military spy satellites were far better than anything available to the world’s climate scientists. Too bad that few other than the military and the oil friendly Bush Administration ever saw them - until now.

NASA researcher Thorsten Markus of the Goddard Space Flight Center is thrilled to finally have access to better images than have ever been made available to climate experts. “One meter resolution is that dimension that has been missing…that is why web are so thrilled about it.”

There's big trouble at the top of the world according to a report released this month by US government scientists.

The Arctic Report Card is produced annually by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and this year the state of the climate in the arctic got an alarming F.

"Changes in the Arctic show a domino effect from multiple causes more clearly than in other regions," said James Overland, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle and a lead author of the report. "It's a sensitive system and often reflects changes in relatively fast and dramatic ways."