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Sea Ice Extent Sinks To Record Lows At Both Poles (sciencedaily.com)
According to NASA, Arctic sea ice appears to have reached on March 7 a record low wintertime maximum extent. On the opposite side of the planet, Antartica ice hit its lowest extent ever recorded by satellites (since satellites began measuring sea ice in 1979) on March 3 at the end of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Science Daily reports: Total polar sea ice covered 6.26 million square miles (16.21 million square kilometers), which is 790,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) less than the average global minimum extent for 1981-2010 -- the equivalent of having lost a chunk of sea ice larger than Mexico. The ice floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas shrinks in a seasonal cycle from mid-March until mid-September. As the Arctic temperatures drop in the autumn and winter, the ice cover grows again until it reaches its yearly maximum extent, typically in March. The ring of sea ice around the Antarctic continent behaves in a similar manner, with the calendar flipped: it usually reaches its maximum in September and its minimum in February. This winter, a combination of warmer-than-average temperatures, winds unfavorable to ice expansion, and a series of storms halted sea ice growth in the Arctic. This year's maximum extent, reached on March 7 at 5.57 million square miles (14.42 million square kilometers), is 37,000 square miles (97,00 square kilometers) below the previous record low, which occurred in 2015, and 471,000 square miles (1.22 million square kilometers) smaller than the average maximum extent for 1981-2010.
The oil was going to be drilled whether or not Keystone was green-lighted. It was only a question of whether it would be shipped by tube or by ship.
My interest levels of sea ice have gotten to an all time record low as well.
Science is nerdy, climate records are science news. And the climate changing does in fact matter. I would say that such an article ticks all boxes of "news for nerds, stuff that matters".
If you don't like hearing about it, feel free to go to another website or simply not read and comment on the article.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The thing we need to remember is that this has happened before, during the so-called "Medieval Warm Period". This global rise in temperatures happened between 950 AD and 1250 AD, which is kind of a problem because it means that the trendy explanation of post-Industrial Revolution human pollution being the cause of this rise in temperatures can't be used. So it tends to be downplayed today because, well, you can't really justify lucrative (for governments; awful for everybody else) carbon taxes when it's solar activity, decreased volcanic activity, or changes to wind circulation patterns that are responsible for the increased temperatures.
What angers these experts more is that humanity actually did quite well during this period of time. These higher temperatures allowed Europe, for example, to flourish agriculturally, which allowed for accelerated social development. The Norse were able to navigate to places like Iceland, Greenland, and even to the east coast of North America during this time. It was thanks to these temperature changes that Europe exited the so-called "Dark Ages" after the fall of the Roman Empire, and was set on the path of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and today's modern society.
Of course, it wasn't just Europeans who benefited. There was also significant social growth in places as diverse as South America, Central America, Japan, South-East Asia, and India.
So we shouldn't fear temperature increases. Historically, they have been what has allowed societies around the globe to accelerate their development and to progress to new heights both technologically and socially.
The medieval warm period did not affect sea ice at all. It also did not affect the global temperature at all. It was a localized effect in such a small area that the global average didn't even move.
Nope, nothing like this has ever happened before.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Yes, because when dealing with a complex topic, rather than listening to professionals and peer-reviewed research, I like to play amateur scientist and get all my info from blogs.
FYI, you can make your own comparison graphs here. On the about page it has links to all of the datasets, which you can download: Sea Ice Index, Near-Real-time DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS Daily Polar Gridded Sea Ice Concentrations, and the NASA-produced Sea Ice Concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I Passive Microwave Data.
As for MASIE:
You're not wrong about the past glacial extent. And no, the glaciers didn't disappear because of humanity, they receded well in advance of the first permanent human settlements (roughly the dawn of civilization, though humans were around well before that). And interestingly enough, global temperatures were in a (slow) cooling trend from about 7000BCE onward.
But that stopped around 1900, and the global temperature average has begun to swing sharply, at a rate that ought to be alarming, because as the graph shows, it is quite literally without precedent, in terms of the speed of the change, and shows no signs of stopping unless we take action to affect it:
https://xkcd.com/1732/
The medieval warm period did not affect sea ice at all.
Probably.
It also did not affect the global temperature at all.
On your weird definition of global?
It was a localized effect in such a small area that the global average didn't even move.
No it wasn't. We just have no data about the _global_ temperature at that time, but we have reports from many places of the world, notable China and Japan that it was warmer than normal there, too. So: very likely it was at least on the northern hemisphere a global phenomenon.
So: the lack of written evidence, because we have none from Inka, Australians, Africans, does not mean it did not happen there.
And: if you talk about a/the medieval warm period, it would be cool to add which one you mean. There where three AFAICT.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Translation: I'm a delicate snowflake, only report things that make me feel good.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.