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Arctic Sea Ice Hits Record Low Extent
mdsolar writes "Arctic sea ice has hit a record low extent for the period of satellite observation. Further, this record has been set in August when the minimum annual sea ice extent (and the prior record) has always come in September. Further still, the ice is still retreating as rapidly as it was in June and July when normally the decrease of sea ice extent slows in August. It is thus possible the the final minimum sea ice extend for 2012 will be seen in October rather than September as has always occurred in the past. More than one monitoring effort agree on the existence of a new record."
...watching nature at work...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I expect this post will be full of the normal vitriol from barely-informed people.
The CB App. What's your 20?
If climate change is real and man-made, the human race isn't mature enough to react to it in time. The number of people that have a wishy-washy position on it despite the evidence is downright scary. Until the price of food goes up by 10x there isn't going to be a significant reaction, and by then it may be too late.
Not only air temperature but water temperature also has an effect on ice melt. With less ice the exposed water has more chance to absorb heat and warm up which may delay the start of freezing.
Translation: I have found a meme that I can continually repeat to rationalize away any disturbing finding. Now come on kiddies, let's BURN MORE OIL!!!!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Oil? We are already burning oil as fast as we possibly can.
Now, we must burn more fracked up gas!
Sometimes I wander if the loonies that oppose all and any nuclear energy projects (including ITER), are somehow not guided by the hand of big oil and big gas companies.
Without the same observations over a longer period, this data is meaningless in and of itself.
It could easily be part of a cycle we have not been able to observe because we've lacked the means and meaningful observational time frame to detect it. It's simply one point on a graph spanning millenniums.
Strat
Translation # 2: Let's stop doing meaningless science on things that that span millennia. let's BURN MORE OIL!!!!
Moral of the story: Invent time travel first so we can have at least 3 points on the graph to make climate change REALLY convincing.
What is really scary about this is that only a few years ago scientists were saying that the Arctic "could be ice free in summer before the end of the century" and the deniers were calling them alarmists THEN. Then in the last couple of years some of the most alarmist of these alarmists have been saying that the Arctic could be ice free in summer in the next couple of decades.
Now I look at the slope of the line on that chart and I think the Arctic is going to be to be pretty close to ice free THIS summer.
The Arctic sea ice is showing us how much more rapidly things can change than even the "worst alarmists" dare to predict when positive feedback loops kick in and tipping points are passed. What will be the ripple effects of this? Where is the next tipping point?
You'd be pretty amazed. There are tons of incredibly intelligent people that do all sorts of stupid things - deny global warming, believe in a god, vote republican, etc.
Translation: I don't like BlueStrat's perfectly calm, rational point, so I'm going to argue against it with emotion, wave my hands around, and come up with some meaningless term that sneers at his point without SOUNDING too sneery. oh, I know -- "meme." Yeah, that'll work.
So, I have a question for you. Do you consider yourself scientifically minded and skeptical? Do you think it's the OTHER guys who post on emotion, looking for anything that confirms their pre-existing notions? Because -- surprise! -- that's exactly what you just did. Kind of humbling, isn't it? BlueStrat made a perfectly scientific point -- this observation, in and of itself, doesn't mean much, because our data set is so small. We've only been making these observations since (I think) 1978 -- an eyeblink in geologic time.
There is nothing rational about saying we just do nothing about a bad situation because we haven't observed in the past how those situations play out. BlueStrat's post basically boils down to "this is probably just nature at work, and we haven't directly observed nature scientifically for a long enough period to know if this is a temporary condition".
We haven't directly observed arctic sea ice cover for very long, but the trends in our observations tie in very closely with other related more long term direct observations, and for much further back in time through indirect methods. The data is not meaningless, and accusing someone of being "emotional" when they post a sarcastic comment rather than regurgitate the thousands of rebuttals that have been made in the past is just you trying to sound reasonable about your cunning plan to do absolutely nothing.
That's the way it usually works. You get a dramatic year followed by more normal years but a bit lower than the previous normal years. Then you get another dramatic year. Meanwhile on average it just keeps going downhill.
If you're interested in graphs here's a bunch more.
The frustrating thing is that The Climate Change Deniers insist that the BEST plan for humanity is to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING until after The Catastrophe has struck.
I, for one, fail to see the wisdom in that stance.
Sure, I fully understand that behaviours less damaging to the environment will be expensive in terms of both money and politics.
But seriously folks this is pretty much the same thing as Your Doctor telling you that you need to do a significant amount of exercise and change your diet if you want to NOT DIE OF A HEART-ATTACK in the next ten years.
The Climate Change Deniers are sitting there in the consult room saying "but PROVE ABSOLUTELY AND CONCLUSIVELY that I will have a heart-attack, and be EXACT and SPECIFIC about when".
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Translation: I have found a meme that I can continually repeat to rationalize away any disturbing finding. Now come on kiddies, let's BURN MORE OIL!!!!
Nice strawman you built there. I never said anything about burning oil or touched on energy at all in my post.
I'm all for alternative energy sources where they make economic and practical sense.
Economic to the general populace or economic to those who benefit from not paying the for the full cost of their actions?
One data point on a scale covering millenia doesn't prove anything. It only tells us that, *right now*, there seems to be less arctic ice than there has been over the last decade or four.
We know that global climate has changed radically over the ages, from much warmer than now to much colder than now.
We simply don't have data spanning enough time to know whether this is natural or not.
At the timescales you are talking about, having enough data on the past is irrelevant. We would need instead to have data on a sample of similar planets with similar chemical compositions, in similar orbits around stars of similar age size and luminosity, with a similar distribution of landmasses and a similar ecosystem. Bit of a tall order. Just because something happenned in the past doesn't mean it will happen again, and the longer the timescale involved in any cycle, the more chance that things will be different the next time around due to different starting or external conditions to the cycle. We won't have a repeat of pre-carboniferous conditions. Even if we dug up all the coal and oil in the world that we can find and released them back into the atmosphere, tectonic processes will have slightly changed the chemical balance at the surface. The earths orbit will be slightly different, it's rotational speed will be different, the moon will be further away than back then. The amount of light hitting us from the sun will be different. If you want to talk about massive timescales, what nature decides to do to us should be given a judicious shove in the direction we want things to happen, because nature doesn't care about us.
Why don't you be honest and abandon all pretense that you're basing your opinions on science and the scientific method.
Whenever someone mentions unusually cold temperatures in a single winter or even a decade or two, well, that's just weather. Why isn't the reverse true?
What you advocate isn't science, it's evangelism.
Strat
Why don't you be honest and just admit that you are trying to say science doesn't know, so we should do nothing? I like your little "evangelism" dig. Suggesting that climate theory is a religion.... haven't heard that one before.
Whenever someone mentions unusually cold temperatures in a single winter or even a decade or two, well, that's just weather. Why isn't the reverse true? What you advocate isn't science, it's evangelism.
I have a feeling you're going to just scoff at any science anyway, but low and high pressures alternate. If there's been an unusually cold winter one place, other places probably had unusually warm winters. The whole globe isn't cooling down, it's warming up. And we do have other less accurate measures that go further back in time, you're the one claiming we don't have enough information but can't be bothered to find out if it's true. If you go camping and make a fire and a forest fire breaks out near your campsite and you go "it's not proven, forest fires can start by lightning strikes" yet nobody has seen a thunderstorm pass through your claim of natural causes starts looking pretty weak. Replace the campfire with the whole earth burning oil, the forest fire with melting ice and the lightning strike with natural variation and you have a pretty good analogy.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Extent can decrease without melting, for example by compaction of the remaining ice. If refreezing is delayed, extent may decrease into October while ice volume levels off or even starts to increase.
Yes, AGW is a serious problem, and denying it makes it costlier. However, the world is not ending. Green(tm) energy is getting cheaper and cheaper. It is predicted that solar will reach residential grid parity as early as 2015*. Not to mention next-generation nuclear. And, in a few decades, nuclear fusion. And if reducing emissions is not enough, we can cool Earth by increasing solar reflection** or by sequestering carbon*** or through some other action.
Also, how can people have such ridiculous short memories? The world was supposed to end in the 1970s though mass famines caused by overpopulation. Then the doomsayers changed their minds and predicted water wars. Then peak oil. Then the ozone layer hole (remember that?). Then acid rain. Then we very closely avoided Armageddon in 2000, due to the Y2K bug. Remember that? The mass societal disruptions, the nuclear wars that would be started because some digital nuclear weapon system misfired due to Y2K? Phew, that was close! But we survived.
Recently, we survived the Apocalypse in 21 May 2011, then 21 October 2011.
Now, of course, all the headlines are about climate change.
Do you know what is the single greatest cause of climate-change denialism? You. Doomsayers. Because you predict the Apocalypse every 5 years, people stopped listening.
Want to help the environment? Start talking straight.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/ff_apocalypsenot/
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
** http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/08/putting-the-breaks-on-climate-change-with-diamonds/
*** http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/08/25/2359234/a-modest-proposal-for-sequestration-of-co2-in-the-antarctic
Actually the most frustrating thing Climate Change Deniers have done is to frame the discussion around whether it's happening and whether it's anthropomorphic. Of course it's happening and who cares if it's our fault. All that's important is: 1. How will it affect us. 2. What are our options?
I've seen very little discussion framed as "It will cost us X trillions to execute plan A and if we don't, ignoring it will cost Y trillions." Instead, we get drivel like "We didn't take care of the planet and we ruined it, now we need to curb fossil fuel use." I've yet to see any specific plan that will both be likely to actually work and is likely to cost less than the cost of the disaster that it will avoid. Instead we get a bunch of people saying it will be the end of the world. The world won't end... hundreds of millions of people may die and previously valuable land may become worthless, but the remainder of humanity will get along just fine.
They want to see Capitalism and the US economy destroyed,
If they wanted to see Capitalism and the US economy destroyed, all they have to do is vote Republican.
Learn to love Alaska
"The hardening of my arteries is just a natural cycle".
"What do doctors know? They can't even tell whether you'll be alive next week, so how can they forecast a decade ahead?"
"What do doctors know? My Aunt Nellie's doctor was wrong about something fifteen years go."
"Well, of course doctors want to push this 'heart disease' and 'save your life' idea. Look how much money there is in it!"
"Well, I found a veterinarian who says just the opposite!"
And so on.
More liquidity means more economic activity.
More activity means more trade.
More trade means more development.
More development means lower GDP/CO2
Lower GDP/CO2 means faster accumulation of AGG.
Faster accumulation of AGG means greater human forcing of temperature.
If we wanted to go back to the pre-industrial era and live in a semi-permanent malthusian depression, we could end global warming now. The challenge is to maintain current economic growth, and improvement in living standards, within the bottlenecks we face at any given time. Sometimes this does mean temporizing with them – i.e. slowing economic growth by monetary means until technology has advanced sufficiently to substitute around the bottleneck – however if liquidity gets low enough, a self-perpetuating cycle of austerity begins, and capital falls into disuse entirely.
n.b. I'm not a gold bug.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
The VAST MAJORITY are ignorant about their cars but will take the advice of a certified mechanic.
This is called "sensible".
Those who insist their mechanic is on some government-led secret plot to sell "gas" (which you can't see! Can you see the air? No! That's a gas! See! PROOF!) and that cars run by pixies riding horses in the engine compartment, therefore place hay in their tank and insist that everyone else do so too are called "lunatics".