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NASA: Arctic Sea Ice 2nd-Lowest On Record (earthsky.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from EarthSky: NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said on September 15, 2016 that summertime Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual minimum on September 10. With fall approaching and temperatures in the Arctic dropping, it's unlikely more ice will melt, and so the 2016 Arctic sea ice minimum extent will likely be tied with 2007 for the second-lowest yearly minimum in the satellite record. Satellite data showed this year's minimum at 1.60 million square miles (4.14 million square km). NASA said in a statement: "Since satellites began monitoring sea ice in 1978, researchers have observed a steep decline in the average extent of Arctic sea ice for every month of the year [...] The sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas helps regulate the planet's temperature, influences the circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, and impacts Arctic communities and ecosystems. Arctic sea ice shrinks every year during the spring and summer until it reaches its minimum yearly extent. Sea ice regrows during the frigid fall and winter months, when the sun is below the horizon in the Arctic." The NASA/NSIDC statement explained why the melt of Arctic sea ice surprised scientists in 2016. For one thing, it changed pace several times: "The melt season began with a record low yearly maximum extent in March and a rapid ice loss through May. But in June and July, low atmospheric pressures and cloudy skies slowed down the melt. Then, after two large storms went across the Arctic basin in August, sea ice melt picked up speed through early September." NASA posted an animation on YouTube that "shows the evolution of the Arctic sea ice cover from its wintertime maximum extent, which was reached on Mar. 24, 2016, and was the lowest on record for the second year in a row, to its apparent yearly minimum, which occurred on Sept. 10, 2016, and is the second lowest in the satellite era."
For anyone interested in how this is being driven by increased ocean warming, here is an in-depth report which is worth a read!
https://www.iucn.org/news/global-warning-ocean-warming
Despite this trend, sea ice as a whole is decreasing on a global scale.
Hey, fuck ass. PROPOSE YOUR SOLUTION.
AGW is not some immediate problem that needs to be solved tomorrow. It will unfold over decades, and the solution will also take decades. Here is what we need to do:
1. Slow population growth, especially in Africa. Make sure everyone that wants contraception has it. Promote female literacy (literate women have fewer and healthier babies than illiterate women). Promote clean water, vaccines and peacekeeping. Families have fewer children when they are more confident they will survive.
2. Invest in alternative energy technology.
3. Invest in energy storage technology.
4. Stop building new coal power plants.
5. Stop shutting down working nuclear plants. It may or may not be economical to build new news, but to shut down working plants is absolutely idiotic. Fortunately, only Germans are dumb enough to do this.
6. Continue to research possible global engineering solutions, like oceanic iron fertilization, sulfate aerosols, etc. It would be foolish to deploy these now, but we need to better understand the consequences so we can make informed decisions in the future.
7. Use market pricing and "smart meters" to shift demand to fit intermittent supplies of alternative energy.
8. Invest in fusion research, and thorium reactors.
9. Figure out how to do carbon sequestration economically.
10. Shift to a transportation infrastructure that is not based on oil.
11. Conservation: LED bulbs, variable speed DC motors, solid state magnetic cooling for refrigerators and ACs.
12. Stop doing stupid crap that wastes resources for mainly political reasons: Ethanol subsidies in America, wood pellet subsidies in Britain, etc.
We are already making significant progress on most of these. None of them require us to live like the Amish.
For every arctic, there's an antarctic.
It was just two years ago that there was record ice in the antarctic area.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/an...
That certainly justifies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on bird-frying solar reflectors, or bird chopping windmills for a guestimated 0.2 degree reduction in the planet's temperature
There was record sea ice in the Antarctic a couple of years ago but the Antarctic Ice Sheet (that's the land based ice) continues to lose ice. Part of the reason for the record sea ice is that the melting of the ice sheet puts more fresh water in the ocean around Antarctica making it easier for the sea to freeze.