Arctic Ice Loss Driven By Natural Swings, Not Just Mankind, Says Study (reuters.com)

Alister Doyle, reporting for Reuters: Natural swings in the Arctic climate have caused up to half the precipitous losses of sea ice around the North Pole in recent decades, with the rest driven by man-made global warming, scientists said on Monday. The study indicates that an ice-free Arctic Ocean, often feared to be just years away, in one of the starkest signs of man-made global warming, could be delayed if nature swings back to a cooler mode. Natural variations in the Arctic climate "may be responsible for about 30-50 percent of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979," the U.S.-based team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change. Sea ice has shrunk steadily and hit a record low in September 2012 -- late summer in the Arctic -- in satellite records dating back to 1979. The ice is now around the smallest for mid-March, rivaling winter lows set in 2016 and 2015. The study, separating man-made from natural influences in the Arctic atmospheric circulation, said that a decades-long natural warming of the Arctic climate might be tied to shifts as far away as the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Comments

I smell a rat...or alternative facts

[passionplay]

Why does it take 37 years to show nature is responsible? Something doesn't smell right.

Re: I smell a rat...or alternative facts

[NatasRevol]

I think you mean arguing against facts, because that's all that xkcd comic was. Which sounds exactly like something an anonymous coward would do.

Re:I smell a rat...or alternative facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, he's got to say anthropogenic is biggest, otherwise no more funding.

Hopefully Trump will make these guys able to tell scientific truth instead of toeing a IPCC party line.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/03/14/arctic-ice-loss-driven-by-natural-swings-not-just-mankind-study/

There has been historically both more and less arctic ice. Antarctic ice is at very high levels now.
The satellite record only goes back to 1979, lots of earth history before that. ;-}

Re:I smell a rat...or alternative facts

[Gadget_Guy]

The article doesn't need to prove anything, other than cite the study, because it isn't science. It is just news about the science. I am sure that the study itself, which was made by scientists and published in a scientific journal, would actually show their workings; otherwise they would not get published. But the fact that we haven't seen the study is not itself evidence that the figures were based on "no science what-so-ever".

If you walk into a room with your eyes closed, you cannot definitively say that there isn't a red ball in the room. All you can say is that you can't see a red ball. Similarly, if you haven't read the paper, you can't say that the percentages are unproven. All you can say is that you haven't seen the proof.

Should the original poster have read the study before discussing the percentages? If this were an academic discussion or an official policy document then absolutely. But this is just a forum on the internet, occupied by deniers who make no effort to prove their own claims. Regurgitating figures from the article is a step up for a lot of people around here who never get past reading the headlines.

Scary stuff

[reginaldo]

I have some future oceanfront property in Kansas if anyone is looking. One question I have is: At what point does global warming become so evident that there is no more argument as to whether it is occurring, and the argument becomes what do we do about it? I'm pretty sure we should already be there, but we aren't.

Re:Scary stuff

[Computershack]

One question I have is: At what point does global warming become so evident that there is no more argument as to whether it is occurring, and the argument becomes what do we do about it? I'm pretty sure we should already be there, but we aren't.

Harldy anyone disputes the fact there is global warming. The dispute is over how much of it we're causing and whether or not its actually abnormal given that in the history of the planet it has been far warmer many many times over the millennia. Then there's what we should do about it and given how almost every other month something new is being found out about our climate and what affects it I hardly think we're in a position to be deliberately messing about with it. Sure reduce/eliminate what we put in the air etc but when you start doing things like schemes to reflect the sun, artificially forcing rain etc then we may find we're doing more harm than good.

Re:Scary stuff

[Archangel Michael]

certainly we can use less of them

I can't tell you how many liberals I know use Amazon Delivery for something they forgot at the store ... because they are too lazy and can't wait till the next time they drive by.

Rich Liberals who love to tell us the world is burning/melting because of AGW, but still fly around the world on private jets to private islands and gated communities, who arrive in three car SUV entourages.

The only authentic liberal I know of is Ed Begley, who lives like he preaches. I don't agree with him on much, but at least he does what he says.

Re:Scary stuff

[khallow]

They all like to disguise the argument "we do nothing, and fuck everyone that isn't me" as "well, the evidence really isn't very strong, I mean, I'm not convinced it's really happening"

I agree those people exist. But we also have people who want to fuck over billions of people to show how much they care about the environment. Those people tend to wax poetic about how much future harm they're supposedly preventing.

We know this, everyone in the world says.

[Anonymous Coward]

The natural swings are evident with the seasons, periodic shifts based on geo-solar geometry, probably sun cycles and everything else in the universe - *BUT the base/background temperature before those variations *IS* increasing *AS* we have measured C02 and greenhouse insulating gases, methane etc, reaching historic (in paleological terms, during all of human civilization and a long time before that, millions of years) proportions of our atmosphere. We know we've caused some acidifying of the oceans, which with warming dissolves further frozen/captured methane and such gasses at the bottom of the ocean and brings that into our atmosphere in a positive feedback loop which we can never control...

What of this one study exonerates BILLIONS of tailpipes in the world and TRILLIONS of tons of coal burned ongoing? None of it.

But watch them try to run with this deliberate, intentional misunderstanding of what actually was confirmed by this study. Watch and see.

Re:We know this, everyone in the world says.

[reginaldo]

I agree. This is something of a glass-half-full study. So 30-50% of arctic ice cap melt is natural. What of the other 50-70%? It is already misunderstood. It's interesting how different media sources are covering this study: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...

percentages

[OlRickDawson]

Finally a study that shows percentages.The politicals have have claimed that climate change is either 100% man-made or 100% natural, depending upon which side of the argument they were on. Reasonable people knew that it had to be a bit of both, but there never seemed to be any studies that showed what the percentages of each it was.

Re:Snow storm?

[Midnight_Falcon]

I'm pretty sure I learned in high school (graduated 2002) in Earth Science (1998, freshman year) that global warming was part of a tropical age-ice age cycle, an ice age being defined as there being ice at the poles of the Earth. That said, I was also taught that climate change is due to greenhouse gases etc causing this to accelerate far faster than the historical record for transition into a tropical age.

So, I don't know what's new about this theory aside from the fact it can be diced up into "alternative facts" that say hey! look! climate change (somewhat) natural! ... but we've known all along manmade climate change is most of the problem.

Re:Science versus politics

[pointybits]

Point 1: Scott Adams pointed out that when asked the question "how much of global warming is caused by humans, and how much is natural" in debates and televised interviews, no scientist had an answer.

Getting your climate science from people yelling at each other on TV (or Scott Adams for that matter) is a bad idea.

From IPCC AR5, back in 2013: It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.