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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.
It would also be a great place for all the world's refugees to go and start a new life. Global Warming could turn out to be that best thing to happen to humanity in a long time.
And what a prime opportunity with all the new refugees this will create!
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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.
What? You can't transport oil via the Internet!
#DeleteFacebook
No progeny then?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
I don't think "fox news" and "science" belong in the same sentence, let alone the same URL.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/how-culture-clash-noaa-led-flap-over-high-profile-warming-pause-study
Aeris Died For Your Sins.
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 *
What? You can't transport oil via the Internet!
It is a fine transport mechanism for bullshit however.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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:
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.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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
Unless Greenland melts in which case the sea level rise is about 23 feet. Do ya feel lucky?
if we opt to do nothing and continue business as usual with the fossil fuels for example, we can make things a lot worse
And things will get worse - We'll help. It remains to be seen how much we'll contribute and how warm we'll eventually get, but global warming will continue. I'm not an expert, but that's something I believe based on what I've read. Along with minimizing the problem as much as possible, we'd best plan for the consequences.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
"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.
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 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. :(
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Not sure where your 8 C came from. It took about 11,000 years for the temp to rise 4 C. By contrast, we're up 1 C in just 100 years, and that's the issue. Nobody's saying the climate doesn't change naturally, just that this extremely rapid change is caused by humans.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
"It's just a flimsy excuse by the lib-left for bigger government."
No, it's just reality. How about, instead of denying reality you come up with a solution that doesn't require government to grow. I'll be all for it.
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.
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?...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
My interest levels of sea ice have gotten to an all time record low as well.
Translation: I'm the most important thing on the planet.
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.
But don't you see! It's a vast conspiracy with thousands of participants who all collectively are keeping the global warming hoax a secret!
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is a misrepresentation of the solution, the kind of thing that demonstrates the nihilism at the core of your argument. We need to start reducing CO2 emissions, with an eye on the next twenty or thirty years. Yes, we're going to cross some red lines, but we can still mitigate the worst of it, and no, it's not going to kill billions of people.
But if the lives of large numbers of people are of such great concern to you, why are you so willing to abandon all the people that are and will be affected by unconstrained climate change?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A quick Google search disagrees.
If the Greenland ice sheet melted, sea level would rise 6-7meters. https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/icesheets.html
Much as I hate "citation needed" tags, I would like to know where you got 15m-17m from.
Climate science is "systems science". It is very much a hard science; however, there'll always be uncertainties for political ideologues to talk up. We've got about a 10% of creating a disaster, and no second planet earth yo move to, and that alone means we should be talking about appropriate actions, and not *if* there's a problem. It's very easy for the oil industry to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt over the science, which is just a tried and true political game. The scientists themselves will not (by and large) explain what to do -- that's not their expertise -- but they are convinced that there is a problem, and their reasons are clearly explained. Skepticalscience.com has a summary of "skeptic arguments" and what scientists say. You can always read the peer reviewed literature yourself. But somehow I think you'll just retreat back to your blog and news sites, which give you the information you want to believe.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
"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
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
It's just sea-ice that's melted. When sea ice melts it doesn't change the water level. That's because it's floating in the water and the water level has already been displaced by it. For example, when the ice in a glass of water melts, does the water level in the cup go up?
Um, the point is, dare I say this, that there's very hard science and there's soft science. There's findings which are highly testable, repeatedly, and there's findings which are verging on the non-reproduceable.
No. "Soft sciences" refers to fields which arrogant scientists feel are less deserving due to subject matter, not reproducibility. Social sciences are described as soft science.
Your opinion on social science as a "real" science is up to you, but reproducibility is an issue no matter how "hard" the science is.
I used to believe global warming 100% and assume it was all correct, because I normally trust science, but then started to wonder why people were touting consensus and virtual certainty.
Because obviously scientific findings don't change society by themselves. At a bare minimum, you must publish your results or the scientific findings may as well have never been made. With even non-controversial findings, scientists need to do more, results simply don't speak for themselves, you need to write review articles placing the findings in context, issue press statements in journals, present it at a conference. And that's just to get it known within the scientific community in the absence of opposed nefarious interests.
With climate change specifically, you have powerful industries and motivated ideologues trying to cast FUD on the findings. There's an effort to convince the public that it's far from certain. This approach is having it's intended effects. Scientists and people who realize climate change is happening would be idiots to merely keep presenting dry papers when the public is convinced by scumbags in suits saying "Well, they don't REALLY know do they?"
They go something like this
There's nothing going on that would negatively affect our society
There might be something going on that would negatively affect our society, but nobody knows for certain. So, we shouldn't do anything different.
There's probably something going on that would negatively affect our society, but it would cost too much to do anything about it.
Our society is definitely in trouble, but it's too late for us to do anything about it. Everybody pray..
Of course, there are also societies described that didn't collapse, but they had a different response at some stage before the last on.
Solar variation between normal sunspot cycle and a "minimum" is only 1 Watt/square meter, on a total of more than 1300 Watts/square meter. It's not significant, and easily overwhelmed by the increase in CO2.
I like how they pretend to care about birds whenever the subject of wind power is discussed when it is obvious they don't care about the environment.
I don't think it's greed. I think it's wishful thinking.
And it absolutely would be great if there were no downsides to burning all the fossil fuels we can lay our hands on. Most people on this site are too young to remember the smog we had in the 1960s and 1970s; they're imprinted on a time when gas was cheap, air was clean, and anthropogenic climate change was (as far as the general public was concerned) undreamt of. Who wouldn't want that to be true?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
From yes prime minister
Bernard Woolley: What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
Bernard Woolley: What's that?
Sir Richard Wharton: Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
Sir Richard Wharton: In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
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