Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
"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.