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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."
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.
> > the human race isn't mature enough to react to it in time
> This is exactly why I stopped worrying about it.
You're right, maybe Peril Sensitive Sunglasses are the way to go.
Hey screw you buddy! I went to the beach the other day and it was like totally freezing - more like global cooling I say. And what do scientists know anyway? They're always inside in labs and stuff. You can't test weather with a test tube - just look out your window, man! Anyway, I hope it does get warmer because then I can swim all year. The desert may be too hot, but I don't care because I don't live there.
... that if climate change were legitimate, the Earth would "shut down" and prevent any bad consequences.
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?
By October the air temp is around 13 degrees Fahrenheit. The max is 18 degrees and the minimum is 8 degrees. Days with Min Temp Below Freezing 31. http://www.climate-zone.com/climate/united-states/alaska/barrow/ Are you still gonna stand by your statement of melting in October??
Do you realize how much time and energy it takes to raise a mass of water even one degree? It's why water temperature is always behind air temperature. You can have 90 degree days all through June and still have cold water temperatures yet still be swimming in September when air temperatures are cold. Water is a wonderful heat sink.
Here's a paper about Arctic sea ice for the past 47 million years: "History of sea ice in the Arctic" (Polyak, et. al. 2010). It may have some of the information you seek. Here's the abstract:
Arctic sea-ice extent and volume are declining rapidly. Several studies project that the Arctic Ocean may become seasonally ice-free by the year 2040 or even earlier. Putting this into perspective requires information on the history of Arctic sea-ice conditions through the geologic past. This information can be provided by proxy records from the Arctic Ocean floor and from the surrounding coasts. Although existing records are far from complete, they indicate that sea ice became a feature of the Arctic by 47 Ma, following a pronounced decline in atmospheric pCO2 after the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Optimum, and consistently covered at least part of the Arctic Ocean for no less than the last 13–14 million years. Ice was apparently most wide-spread during the last 2–3 million years, in accordance with Earth’s overall cooler climate. Nevertheless, episodes of considerably reduced sea ice or even seasonally ice-free conditions occurred during warmer periods linked to orbital variations. The last low-ice event related to orbital forcing (high insolation) was in the early Holocene, after which the northern high latitudes cooled overall, with some superimposed shorter-term (multidecadal to millennial-scale) and lower-magnitude variability. The current reduction in Arctic ice cover started in the late19th century, consistent with the rapidly warming climate, and became very pronounced over the last three decades. This ice loss appears to be unmatched over at least the last few thousand years and unexplainable by any of the known natural variabilities. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
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.
Yes, That reflectiveness of the white ice as compared to the darkness of the deep blue sea is known as its albedo .
Being I first learned solid state linear design on germanium transistors, I am well aware of something we called "thermal runaway", in which the transistor would bias itself on more and more as it got hotter, yet being biased on was what was making it hot. The hotter it got, the more current it passed. Thermal runaway.
The result was a fused transistor.
The mathematics of thermal runaway on those old designs is nearly identical to the albedo-loss calculations of our ice caps. I find it a frightening scenario, as I can't simply change out the planet as easily as I can replace a fused transistor.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
With regard to the Arctic melt of recent years, the VOLUME has been on a steady downward trend with little to no recovery. Extent is probably the easiest to measure but, by itself, it can be very misleading and is heavily influenced by waves and winds.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
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).
Ever stop to think
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.
Slashdot is one of the oldest nerd/tech blogs in existence, before there even was a word for such a thing. For this reason, it's a bit peculiar:
1. Unbelivable as it may seem, the net had a higher share of libertarians before than today. Libertarians often (not always) deny global warming because a) it gives the uncomfortable feeling that strong government action may be needed to address it, and b) they have no problem assuming they're smarter than climate scientists, because they assume they're smarter than everyone anyway.
2. Since it is so old, many slashdot posters have actually had time to become quite rich from their geek skills. Well-off, established people don't want to believe the world is in trouble and that they need to change.
3. There are today a number of tech/geek sites which are arguably more interesting than slashdot. Most have moved on to these. Those who remain are weighted towards the kind of people who don't approve of unnecessary change, i.e. conservatives, who also tend to deny climate science for cultural reasons. (Not inherent reasons, if you ask me climate change is a prime example of unnecessary change).
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.