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."

Comments

Scary

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Scary

[the eric conspiracy]

> the human race isn't mature enough to react to it in time

This is exactly why I stopped worrying about it.

Re:Scary

[riverat1]

You're probably right. What the hoi polloi don't realize is that in the long run global warming is probably going to make all those other things that much more difficult.

Re:Scary

[baileydau]

In all seriousness, I think the climate is much more resilient than most alarmists are saying. We have had both much hatter times and much cooler times, and nothing tipped over then.

Of course the planet has. But that's got nothing to do with it. No one in their right mind is trying to say that the planet will end. The big thing is that it is going to create instability and conflict and cost a looooooooooooot of money.

The farm belt may move a lot closer to the pools... And with Canada as the new farm belt, the US corn subsidies may be less of an economic drain. (The out of work framers near me are another story) In other words, the change will suck for a lot of people and be a boon for a lot of other people. Just like most major change.

Just think about that for a bit. Those farms near you are now worthless. Who's going to pay for that? More banks go bust?? Who is going to employ the workers. How are you going to pay for the food you now have to import.

What about creating the new infrastructure required to farm these new areas?

What happens when various cities become uninhabitable / less inhabitable because of local climatic changes. How much does it cost to build a city including all of the associated infrastructure?

What happens when your country can no longer feed itself, but the neighbours have new farmland? Conflict is the normal resolution to these issues.

In general humanity gave up being nomads several millennia ago. We can't just follow the herds any more.

Why would the price of food go up? We will have that new Greenland orange crop...

All of the infrastructure changes that are required for that to happen will ensure that prices go up (massively). You may no longer even have access to the food source (eg: a blockade due to conflict)

Our civilisation absolutely requires stability and trust for it to work. The changes you agree are likely to happen mean that we won't have either. This is our greatest risk.

Just think about the grief and cost that the GFC has caused around the world in recent years. That was all because a handful of companies had some liquidity issues. Imagine what will happen if you multiply that by a million or more times.

The end result of climate change is the planet will still be here. There will be a significant number of plant and animal extinctions. The majority of people will probably survive, but that will depend on the level of conflict that ensues. One thing for certain is that virtually everyone's standard of living will go down (massively).

Re:Scary

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Poor people are going to be the hardest hit.

Rich people can move to high ground and outbid poor people for food.

Re:Scary

[baileydau]

The owners of the land, silly. That would mainly be Big Agriculture. Giant conglomerates that often also own the associated food processing industry.

???
Just because they are corporations doesn't mean it isn't real money. They've shelled out $$ for land that is now worthless, or at least worth a lot less than they paid for it. It doesn't matter at all who's money it is / was, it's still real money. Those costs are going to get passed on in some way, shape or form to the end users (us).

You mean like irrigation? Pave a road or two? We are constantly developing that sort of infrastructure already. No new expenses next year? Great.

I mean a LOT of infrastructure, not just a road or two and a bit of irrigation piping.
I mean things like:

Proper irrigation infrastructure, probably where none existed before. Dams, pipes / canals / pumps etc

Proper access and distribution infrastructure.
    Roads
    Rail
    Ports

Other infrastructure:
    Electricity
    Gas
    Communications

Setting up the farms in the first place. Buildings, fields, fencing, etc etc etc

Maybe you have to drain the land. Isn't half of Canada going to turn into one giant bog once all the permafrost melts?

And it mean *lots* of it.

That's a lot of $$$$. That's also lots of time required. It's highly likely we don't have that much time to work up the new infrastructure.

Also, who said the "new land" will be any where near as productive as the old land, or that there will be enough of it.

Like New York? Miami? The earth could burn up and dry out and still people would live in those places, because cities already are an artificial environment. Even rising oceans wont make cities go away. There might be some rough patches with some flooding, but even New Orleans is still on the coast, below sea level, and heavily populated. Cities just arent going anywhere.

Those cities maybe, but others will have problems. Many cities already face serious infrastructure issues (like enough suitable potable water supplies)

There's a hell of a lot of value / sunk costs in a city of any size. Hell in my city they are talking about building a new convention / entertainment centre. It will hold maybe 7,000 people. They're talking $100,000,000. That's just one dodgy building.

I don't know what homes go for where you live, but around here you are talking $400,000 - $500,000 each.

Don't forget the basic infrastructure to go with all that (water, roads, sanitation, electricity, gas, etc)

Now multiply that out by an entire city, then a number of cities. And remember, you aren't going to be able to sell your old real estate for anything much. So this is all cash you have to find from somewhere.

Most of the world already can't feed itself, and yet you are here telling us that one of the dire consequences of climate change is that most of the world wont be able to feed itself? You are describing the present, not the future.

This is an already solved problem, and proof of that solution are all the metropolises that we have erected. We wont have to follow the herds because we don't have to follow the herds. If Americans can pay China to produce gadgets for them, then the "distance problem" obviously has become a trivial afterthought. Stop pretending that its a problem, OK? Its intellectually dishonest at best.. blatantly willful ignorance at worst.

You're missing the point. The problem is about changing the current "haves" into the new "have nots". That's not going to go down too well.

As I said before the real issues will be around the costs of moving / changing. They are going to be massive. Of course we can engineer solutions to individual issues. It's just going to cost us. The other even bigger thing is the resulting conflicts that will arise from the changes. That is going to be one of the "engineering solutions". Take if from whoever has it now.

Re:Hmmm lets see

[riverat1]

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.

Re:Almost Meaningless

[MightyMartian]

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!!!!

What's really scary about this...

[jurgen]

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?

Re:What's really scary about this...

[Crypto Gnome]

Don't worry folks, as soon as the Climate Change Alarmists (NB not commenting on their correct-ness, just saying "them's whut 're ringing the alarm bells") are proved 100% RIGHT (in the Arctic becoming ice-free) the Wisdom Of The Deniers will suddenly perform an about-face and loudly proclaim "yeah well so what , now PROVE that this is absolutely and necessarily BAD".

The joys of being a RELIGIOUS FANATIC is that you can keep moving the goalposts in an endless "blind faith means you're never having to admit you're wrong" litany.

We're seeing EXACTLY this same behaviour here in Australia. The Glorious Leader of The Opposition INSISTED that The Carbon Tax would have an IMMEDIATE and DEVASTATING impact on the economy.

Now that he's been proved CONCLUSIVELY wrong on that specific count, he's turned about and is loudly claiming "Yeah Well trust me, I'm right and you're wrong, it'll be devastating just in the long term".

Re:Hmmm lets see

[riverat1]

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.

Re:NSIDC hasn't called the record yet

[Crypto Gnome]

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".

Re:Almost Meaningless

[Muros]

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.

Re:Almost Meaningless

[Kjella]

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.

The end is not nigh!

[INowRegretThesePosts]

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

Re:The end is not nigh!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You're downplaying dangers that are or were legitimate.

Y2K was mostly fixed due to a massive effort from the software industry. The ozone layer and acid rain have been significantly reduced by legislation.

Famines may become reality as climate change makes historically arable lands unfarmable. I suspect instead of undergoing a global famine, we'll compensate in various ways, such as eating less meat and localizing hardship via market mechanisms. Water scarcity is not yet a serious issue, but it may become one since water consumption has not been reduced.

Re:The end is not nigh!

[artor3]

The hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, and Y2K were all real problems that were solved because we did something about them.

The people saying the Apocalypse is coming on specific dates are loons who have NOTHING to do with the scientists predicting a man-made, dramatic shift in the climate.

But you know all that. You're just using a cynical, insulting debating tactic to shift the blame to the people trying to prevent the problem, and away from those who are making it worse.