Arctic melting Climate scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, outside Washington, say the Arctic Ocean could be entirely ice free in late summer 2013. "The sea ice is decreasing faster than all the models predicted," says Jay Zwally, the ice satellite project scientist at NASA Goddard, "We not only have the warming of the atmosphere, we have a warming of the ocean that is affecting this. It has been surprising to everybody, this decrease in area. This is a marked departure, and this is suggesting to us that maybe we are getting at this tipping point." http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-01-09-voa12.cfm http://www.voanews.com/mediaassets/english/2008_01/Video/wmv/ArticTippingPoint_bb.wmv Better build my "TUNNELS" Now!:shrug::shrug:
Greenhouse gas true believers have been citing the "melting" of Arctic Ice. A new study, led by Son Nghiem at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and appearing this week in Geophysical Research Letters, used satellites and buoys to show that winds since 2000 had pushed huge amounts of thick old ice out of the Arctic basin past Greenland. The thin floes that formed on the resulting open water melted quicker or could be shuffled together by winds and similarly expelled, the authors said. The ice is moving out through the deep water of the Fram Strait between Greenland and Norway. The Fram Strait is wide enough for ice floes to move through, unlike the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska. The direction of the wind caused by the surface pressure wave affects the degree and direction of movement of the ice. Currently the direction is toward the east . More recently there are indications this circulation pattern has reversed. The new study demonstrates the need to look at the actual systems that affect climate instead of taking the superficial approach of the greenhouse gas believers. these systems include an Arctic Oscillation as well as Atlantic and Pacific Oscillations.
This is just seasonal (summer) ice, but another paper (Stroeve, 2008, EOS) said by 2030 they expect no summer ice.
Probably the oil exploration companies and other industrialists, who are spending millions staking out claims in anticipation of ice free ocean. What fools they will prove to be, chasing after Al Gore's nonsense like that ! Clearly they watch too much public television.
Meanwhile the antarctic ice cap is still growing and much of Canada is having one of the coldest winters in years. Nobody knows wtf is going on with the climate.
Antarctic's ice 'melting faster' Guide to Climate Change Hunting climate evidence A team of UK researchers claims to have new evidence that global warming is melting the ice in Antarctica faster than had previously been thought. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (Bas) say the rise in sea levels around the world caused by the melting may have been under-estimated. It is thought that over 13,000 sq km of sea ice in the Antarctic Peninsula has been lost over the last 50 years. The findings were announced at a Climate Change Conference in Exeter. Rising sea level Professor Chris Rapley, director of (Bas), told the conference that Antarctica could become a "giant awakened", contributing heavily to rising sea levels. Melting in the Antarctic Peninsula removes sea ice that once held back the movement of glaciers. As a result, glaciers flow into the ocean up to six times faster than before. The other region in the continent affected by the changes is West Antarctica, where warmer sea water is thought to be eroding the ice from underneath. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4228411.stm
Antarctic Ice: A Global Warming Snow Job? A recent study, no shocker to real climatologists (but perhaps to climate doomsayers), demonstrates this simple physics. It appears in the latest SciencExpress, and it shows that the vast majority of the Antarctic landmass is rapidly gaining ice and snow cover. Obviously this moisture comes from the sea. And, being deposited in solid form on the land-way-down-under, this lowers the earth’s sea level. Like we said, this should shock no climatologist. But consider the “profession” of environmental journalism, which ran these headlines just one teensy month ago: “Antarctic glaciers shrink” –The Baltimore Sun, April 22, 2005 “Study shows Antarctic glaciers shrinking” –Associated Press, April 22, 2005 “Vanishing glaciers: Antarctica’s big melt” –The Australian, April 23, 2005 “New study points to big melt in Antarctica” – Sci-Tech Today, April 22, 2005 “Antarctic glaciers in mass retreat” –Nature.com, April 21, 2005 “Antarctic glaciers at risk of global warming” – All Headline News, April 22, 2005 “Antarctic glaciers are getting smaller faster” –The Times On-line, April 22, 2005 “Shrinking glaciers confirm the worst” –New Scientist, April 27, 2005 Suddenly the tune has changed: “As climate shifts, Antarctic ice sheet is growing” –Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2005 “Scientists link global warming to Antarctic’s ice cap’s growth” –Chicago Tribune, May 20, 2005 “Antarctica ice cap thickens” –Pittsburgh Post Gazette, May 20, 2005 “Warming is blamed for Antarctic’s weight gain” –New York Times, May 20, 2005 “Ice sheet confounds climate theory” – The Telegraph, May 20, 2005 “Antarctica ice cap thickens, slowing rise in sea levels” – Pioneer Press, May 20, 2005 http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2005/05/27/antarctic-ice-a-global-warming-snow-job/ Every couple years the outlook changes completely. One year it's shrinking, the other year it's growing, then it's shrinking again. Nobody knows what's going on. The most recent report I've see is from September 2007 and shows a new record high for the Antarctic ice.
Cranberry juice helps lower cholesteral...or is it that pouring juice over the ocean ice will revent melting? Wait.... latest study shows cranberry juice has no impact on ice melt but this is disputed by IPCC and Ocean Spray executives. IPCC announces that you should keep drinking cranberry juice to lower cholesteral. Orange juice researchers from Minute Maid growers dispute findings.A blind taste test by 100 figure skaters show that orange juice tastes better and improves performanc on ice...and Green Peace protests Ocean Spray offices. The above posting makes as much sense as anything the IPCC and it's members pronounce. The IPCC is a UN agency ....made up of bureaucrats from basketcase countries that need aid workers to teach them in 2008 not only how to dig wells but how to stick a rubber on their dick.
Xelios, part of the confusion may stem from reading wingnut sites like worldclimatereport. But, you need to distinguish between many things, and I suppose it can be confusing, and news articles are probably not best for the story. First, you need to distinguish between West Antarctica which is rapidly warming and melting, and East Antarctica which has cooled a bit recently; then, you can distinguish between the surface and conditions aloft (in the troposphere), where one can be warming, and the other cooling...a lot related to localized events like the Antarctic oscillation, or ozone loss. Then, you need to realize that "ice growth" may not be synonymous with "cooling" but could mean "warmer, but more precipitation" which looks like what is happening in some of the interior sites of eastern antarctica (see Davis et al. 2005, Science). Further, you need to realize that growth in the interior may be complemented by more melt (net melting) at the edges, since ice flows. The IPCC AR4 segment on Antarctica is a good place to start.
Climate change has been proved beyond doubt. A summery of the IPCC's climate science report can be see HERE The only debatable points are how much the human influence has added, and the speed of the change.
Try Ch. 4 pg. 364-366 The posts relevant to the Antarctic here will also be useful (http www)realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/index/#Arctic (fix the beginning, I'm not at 20 posts to do links yet)
That's what I was getting at. We're at the point where we can say the climate is definately changing, beyond that it seems to be a lot of speculation on both sides of the arguement. What I don't agree with is this doomsday forecasting that, mainly, the media is throwing out there. Everything changes over time, we'll just have to adapt. The real fantasy in all this is expecting climate to remain the same, and the idea that if it doesn't we must have broken it. I'll take a read through when I get home today, thanks.
It's all relative. Here in BC we haven't had a truly cold winter in over twenty years. Most of the pine trees in the province are dying from beetle kill because we no longer get the -40C and below weather needed to kill the little pests. What we do get is a lot more snow and some cold snaps in the -20-30 range. The rest of the time it's around 0C or above during the winter which is a big change in just my lifetime (I'm in my mid 40s). We may not have exact knowledge of the changes taking place within the climate but we do know the system is in flux and moving towards a higher overall global temperature with the most extreme effects seen in the Arctic. Both satellite imagery and observations on the ground indicate a real change in the coverage of sea ice in the Arctic which will accelerate as more open ocean is available to absorb solar energy in the summer months.
Nonsense. The only real argument on the other side of the global warming debate is being funded by big oil conglomerates like Exxon with the purpose of slowing any effective actions from being taken for economic reasons. They are also using some of the same people and techniques used by the Tobacco lobby in it's efforts to protect its economic future. And it's also foolish to claim we'll be able to adapt to conditions we can't even predict with any real accuracy at this time, clearly people living in low-lying coastal regions like Bangladesh and many other won't be able to adapt to living under water. Where are hundreds of millions of ecological refugees going to live? What we do know is that the heavy modification of not just the atmosphere by widespread human activity is having a severe effect on the environment. While the result is probably not going to be as fundamental as say the almost total eradication of life during the Permian extinction, there's clear evidence in the geological records of the dangers presented by rapid increases in the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The Earth may not see the extinction of 95% of species as it did at the end of the Permian, but it is the larger species that are most effected by extinction events and the last time I checked humans are fairly large organism. And it's our double edged technology that has helped get us into this predicatment, using it on on an even wider scale in an attempt to secure our survival could actually make things worse not better.
