Slashdot Mirror
Extent of Antarctic Sea Ice Reaches Record Levels
schwit1 writes Scientists have declared a new record has been set for the extent of Antarctic sea ice since records began. Satellite imagery reveals an area of about 20 million square kilometers covered by sea ice around the Antarctic continent. Jan Lieser from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) said the discovery was made two days ago. "Thirty-five years ago the first satellites went up which were reliably telling us what area, two dimensional area, of sea ice was covered and we've never seen that before, that much area."
I think one thing is clear. All these studies are way to focused and fine grained. They look at micro aspects of the climate and then try to apply the observations to a system that is many orders or magnitudes larger.
It's like examining 1" square sections of the Sistine Chapel paintings and then trying to predict the color in the next 1" square based on the color in the current square. Hit and miss, misleading successes and baffling failures because you don't understand the totality of the entire painting.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
1.The land Ice is moving to the sea (due to warming, increasing sea level).
2. Fresh water run off and/or higher precip cause the sea to be slightly fresher, causing it to freeze at higher temperatures (still warming caused, and if from runoff still increasing sea level).
3. It is colder, causing more sea ice.
We know for a fact that on average it is not colder ( http://www.ipcc.ch/publication... ), so my money is on some combination of the first two.
More sea ice does increase albedo and thus reduce infrared absorption, which is a negative feedback, but is it enough to reverse the trend locally or globally? That is beyond my ability to predict.
Silence is a state of mime.
The problem here is that what's important isn't areas so much as volume. Please read and learn something.
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
Just another day in Paradise
Ignoring science in favour of conspiracy theories is ignorant.
Citing the errors of celebrities as evidence of the failings of science is... jibberish.
It's one of the lowest in history but not the lowest. It's very close to tieing with last year.
Sea-ice volume appears (it's harder to measure reliably although it's more significant that area or extent) to be up on last year which in turn was up on the previous year. That might be a good sign for Arctic ice feedbacks or it might not - 2-3 years is far too short a time to separate signal from noise. Volume is still exceptionally low compared to the historical record.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
But the summary made it sound like it would be, and that's enough for deniers to latch onto.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You jest but first it was global warming, then global cooling, than warming again and finally climate change. What it should be is "atmospheric CO2 level rise"
That is all the more we can really say in macro. All these attempts to predict outcomes have only damaged their credibility. Rational thinking people should still find it of great concern that we have ever increasing and never before seen (while humans have walked the earth) CO2 levels, and you follow that up with and their exist relation ships between solar energy retention, ocean currents, ocean acidity, and mean temperatures, etc with that.
Nobody really knows what will happen at least not on a short ( 0-50 year) time scale. If they just would have been honest up front about the fact that human activity is radically altering the composition of the atmosphere and that there will be consequences but those can't be entirely identified because its a hugely complex interconnected system maybe it would be taken seriously.
Instead we got decades of alarmist and bogus predictions. its no surprise that so many folks are so dismissive now.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Al Gore isn't just a "celebrity", he is also a powerful politician, author, lobbyists, and influential policy advocate. If he makes wrong statements about the policies he advocates, yes, it matters.
The Antarctic has land. The Arctic does not. Hence different processes occur.
"North Polar ice cap" is not "Antarctic sea ice". Wrong side of the planet. Note here that the one that is increasing is increasing because the Antarctic land ice is melting. That adds a lot of fresh water to the ocean around Antarctica, so it freezes at a higher temperature. Temperature is up a little, but the freezing point is up much higher, so the sea ice is forming more easily. Look up Freezing Point Depression to understand the science behind this.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
Somehow a quite conservatively formulated claim (subjunctive mode, "some models, 75% chance, 5-7 years, during some month of the summer") magically morphed into the strong claim "Al Gore said in 5 years time the Arctic will be completely ice free".
And two years ago the summer arctic ice cover dropped to the lowest level ever recorded, only 1/3 of the average cover from 1981-2010, which is a divergence of more than three standard deviations, with all of the ice coverages since 2010 being far below that long term average.
It is pitiful how the existence of random variation superimposed over a very strong long term trend seems to succor the fantasies of denialists.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Bringing up Al Gore does prove something. That there exists powerful people who have exaggerated the impact of climate change in order to accumulate further power and wealth. Of course, this doesn't change any scientific facts, but its an important consideration when evaluating any proposed policy changes.
You jest but first it was global warming, then global cooling, than warming again and finally climate change.
The greenhouse effect was first proposed by Fourier (yes, that Fourier) in 1825. Way back before modern technology and computers he already figured out the basic relationship between heat trapping gases and planetary temperatures. From his paper in 1827:
"The establishment and progress of human societies, the action of natural forces, can notably change, and in vast regions, the state of the surface, the distribution of water and the great movements of the air. Such effects are able to make to vary, in the course of many centuries, the average degree of heat; because the analytic expressions contain coefficients relating to the state of the surface and which greatly influence the temperature."[
In 1864, John Tyndall furhter refined Fouriers work to show that different gases had different absorption spectra, and that water vapor, methane, and CO2 specifically were potent green house gases.
In 1896, Svante Arrhenius (considered the father of modern chemistry) put forth the first climate model and was one of the first to quantify the impact of CO2 on planetary temperature.
Since then, the science has only improved. We've gone from basic physics models to complex integrated global climate models. And they all show the same thing.
There was never any "global cooling". There were a handful of discredited papers in the 70's that tried to establish a possible cooling scenario. However the overwhelming majority of papers on the topic were all discussing warming and it's impacts.
And warming, while accurate, doesn't really define what the real problem is. Warming isn't the problem. It's what happens as a result of the warming that's problem. The additional energy into the climate system shifts the climate, which we, as a civilization, depend on. Also, warming gives the impression that every place on Earth is going to get warmer, which is not the case.
Climate change is a more accurate description of what's happening.
What it should be is "atmospheric CO2 level rise"
That is all the more we can really say in macro. All these attempts to predict outcomes have only damaged their credibility. Rational thinking people should still find it of great concern that we have ever increasing and never before seen (while humans have walked the earth) CO2 levels, and you follow that up with and their exist relation ships between solar energy retention, ocean currents, ocean acidity, and mean temperatures, etc with that.
Nobody really knows what will happen at least not on a short ( 0-50 year) time scale. If they just would have been honest up front about the fact that human activity is radically altering the composition of the atmosphere and that there will be consequences but those can't be entirely identified because its a hugely complex interconnected system maybe it would be taken seriously.
Instead we got decades of alarmist and bogus predictions. its no surprise that so many folks are so dismissive now.
Incorrect. We can say quite a bit about the macro. There is quite a compendium of science out there. The problem is that people don't know the difference between a projection 100 years into the future about general climate conditions and the weather in their backyard. Ignorance is the problem, and there are those who hope people stay that way.
~X~