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.

Comments

Re:In before global warming whiners...

[DontBeAMoran]

I don't think "fox news" and "science" belong in the same sentence, let alone the same URL.

Re:In before global warming whiners...

[Rei]

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/how-culture-clash-noaa-led-flap-over-high-profile-warming-pause-study

Rose's story ricocheted around right-wing media outlets, and was publicized by the Republican-led House of Representatives science committee, which has spent months investigating earlier complaints about the Karl study that is says were raised by an NOAA whistleblower. But Science Insider found no evidence of misconduct or violation of agency research policies after extensive interviews with Bates, Karl, and other former NOAA and independent scientists, as well as consideration of documents that Bates also provided to Rose and the Mail.

Instead, the dispute appears to reflect long-standing tensions within NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), based in Asheville, North Carolina, over how new data sets are used for scientific research. The center is one the nation’s major repositories for vetted earth observing data collected by satellites, ships, buoys, aircraft, and land-based instruments.

In the blog post, Bates says that his complaints provide evidence that Karl had his “thumb on the scale” in an effort to discredit claims of a warming pause, and his team rushed to publish the paper so it could influence national and international climate talks. But Bates does not directly challenge the conclusions of Karl's study, and he never formally raised his concerns through internal NOAA mechanisms.

Tuesday, in an interview with E&E News, Bates himself downplayed any suggestion of misconduct. “The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was,” he told reporter Scott Waldman. And Bates told ScienceInsider that he is wary of his critique becoming a talking point for those skeptical of human-caused climate change. But it was important for this conversation about data integrity to happen, he says. “That’s where I came down after a lot of soul searching. I knew people would misuse this. But you can't control other people,” he says.

At a House science committee hearing yesterday, Rush Holt, CEO of AAAS (publisher of Science and ScienceInsider) stood by the 2015 paper. "This is not the making of a big scandal—this is an internal dispute between two factions within an agency," Holt said in response to a question from Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), the panel’s chairman, and a longtime critic of NOAA’s role in the Karl paper. This past weekend, Smith issued a statement hailing Bates for talking about “NOAA’s senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion.”

Some climate scientists are concerned that the hubbub is obscuring the more important message: that the NOAA research has generally proved accurate. “I’m a little confused as to why this is a big deal,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth, a California nonprofit climate research group that has examined surface temperatures. He’s the lead author of a paper published in January in Science Advances that found Karl’s estimates of sea surface temperature—a key part of the work—matched well with estimates drawn from other methods.

Researchers say the Karl paper’s findings are also in line with findings from the Met Office, the U.K. government’s climate agency, which preceded Karl’s work, and findings in a recent paper by scientists at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, an alliance of 34 states based in Reading, U.K. And although other researchers have reported evidence that the rise in global temperature has slowed recently, they have not challenged the ethics of Karl’s team, or the q

Re:Similar

[Ol Olsoc]

Kiribati is going underwater. Does anyone else care? *sigh*

Many places will. As well, while a lot of folk are enjoying the warmer winters, and give not one tiny fuck about what is happening in other places, there are little issues that can crop up that might affect them.

Sea level rise is just one issue.

Local climate change is another. If the gulf stream is disrupted by Greenland glacier melt, the British Isles will actually get colder.

Some places will become more lush, and some places will become desert. The Sahara was once a nice place. If a natural climate shift can do that, it will be interesting to see what happens when we release all that sequestered carbon.

But especially in America, people don't give a shit about anything that isn't happening to them personally.

Re: Oh well

[Kiuas]

Nothing we can do now.

This is quite possibly the stupidest response to climate related issues I've ever seen. It's very very true that the change cannot be reversed or prevented altogether, but that still doesn't mean there aren't plenty of things we can - and should - do to mitigate the effects. We can't fix everything, but if we opt to do nothing and continue business as usual with the fossil fuels for example, we can make things a lot worse,

It's psychologically appealing to lift one's hands into the air and declare that it's all fucked already and we can do nothing but sit and wait for extinction, but it's also simultaneously the intellectual equivalent of 'well, my liver's already damaged from all this drinking, so might just as well keep drinking because who cares at this point?'

Call me an idealist if you wish but even though I may never end up having kids, I still care about the continued survival of the species past the point of my own death.

Re:Fake news, see the MASIE data for yourself

[randallman]

"several thousand people whom rely on the climate change scam, for their paycheck, are ramping up the BS so they can remain on the gravy train...."

It really blows my mind that people believe engineers and scientists from the best scientific organizations in the world, including NASA and NOAA are ALL in on a worldwide scam, while the companies that actually have skin in the game (oil, nat gas, coal, etc) are innocent victims. If you know any engineers (I'm an M.E.), you know they're often quite anal about technicalities and correctness. To even consider that a group, much less several groups across the globe would sacrifice their integrity for grants, or whatever, is absolutely ludicrous.

But then again, we elected Trump as president so it seems the majority of people aren't capable of rational thought.

Top four comments

[nightfire-unique]

The top four comments as I write this are replies to those looking at the bright side, claiming disinterest, or arguing against the observation or its significance.

This is on slashdot. This isn't some dopey AM radio comment forum.

That's .. concerning. :(

Re:Fake news, see the MASIE data for yourself

[haruchai]

Ice extent is the easiest variable to measure but can be misleading as there's no difference in a patch that 15% covered or 100% covered.
Ice area and volume are also very important but more difficult to determine but Arctic sea ice volume has declined dramatically in the satellite record and is 30%-50% lower than 2006-2007

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

We don't need to "stop" it

[ilsaloving]

You know, a thought just occurred to me.

If people can at least agree that climate change is happening (man-caused or otherwise), can we not also agree that some form of mitigation is necessary? It's not as if climate change is an unheard of thing on our planet. That's not even the issue.

Humans are unique in that we can modify an environment to suit us, but that doesn't make us any less dependant on the other species on this planet, and so it is *still* in our best interests to keep things on as much an even keel as possible.

Species evolve slowly over time. As conditions change, animals *will* evolve. But if conditions change too quickly, then there isn't enough time to adapt and species die. So we don't necessarily need to stop it... only slow it down as much as we can so that everything else can keep up and we don't risk getting ourselves taken out in the process.

This of course presumes one a) understands evolution, b) understands that climate *will* change and c) gives a shit about things beside short-term financial gain.

Re:Similar

[interkin3tic]

Your knowledge of how science works comes from sci-fi movies and conservative propaganda.

Science especially doesn't involve data that have been "adjusted" to benefit certain political movements or to increase the likelihood of getting grant money.

You've never read any primary scientific literature or grant applications...

And science really doesn't involve extrapolating a couple hundred years' worth of "adjusted" data across thousands, millions, or even billions of years.

You've never read any books on evolution or geology....

There are too much politics involved.

You've never read anything about medical research...

We want to discuss real science, backed by hard facts, non-adjusted data, and untainted observation.

You've evidently never talked to any scientists of any kind either and may have never talked to any real human before. There is no such thing as "untainted observation." If you're observing it, you have your own spin on it. "Non-adjusted data" similarly is a myth. Look out your window at the world. What does the world look like? WRONG. Unless you're on a boat in the ocean, that's not what most of the world looks like. In order to get a real understanding of what the world looks like, you can't just pick the first thing that you see, you need to... adjust it.

You come off like a kid who is telling people how adult relationships should go based on his extensive watching of porno movies. You're arrogant to be dictating on things you don't know about, you look silly, and you're in for real disappointment unless you persist forever in your ignorance.

Re: Oh well

[MightyMartian]

It's the new response. I like to call it the "Eat, Drink And Be Merry For Tomorrow We Shall Die" response, wherein the pseudo-skeptics finally concede that we're fucking up global climate, but just shrug their shoulders and go "Oh well", or pretend that they care about poor people because "OMG, if we move from oil, just imagine all those poor brown-skinned people that will be harmed!" as if they ever actually cared about vulnerable populations.

What it all really lays bare is the pure greed and nihilism of the fossil fuel lobby, oh, and the complete idiocy of morons on the Internet who follow them.

Re:FACT: Global Warming is bullshit

[Barsteward]

"We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around. The ozone hole width has peaked in 1993, he continued." - if this is his excuse of ignoring it then he does need to resign from science completely because those problems he lists were tackled and changes made to mitigate the problems, just because they are not so prominent now, doesn't mean they didn;t exist