To appreciate the true scale – if not horror – of what is happening in the Arctic read this:
Right now the Arctic ice is melting so fast we’re losing ice the size of Tasmania every day. This year’s melt has already smashed all records, and is still going.
The frightening part? Melting ice exposes seawater that absorbs more heat from the sun, making the cycle worse. Yet this story is not all over the front pages.
Arctic ice always melts in the Arctic summer, then freezes from mid-September. But when it melts this much, the world should take heed.
What can we do when the media ignore colossal news? Well, 13 million Australians are now on Facebook, and people reading this article could reach half a million of them. We can’t fix the lack of ice, but we can fix the lack of information.
Let’s step up where the media failed and spread this message everywhere. The Arctic melt is staggering new evidence of climate change.
As I said before, if stock markets crashed like this the response of government’s would be very different.
Share this link on Facebook and where ever you can.
Please.
Another local event portrayed as a tragedy. I say local because if it was global, then Antartica would be losing ice also… but it’s not. What does NASA have to say about Antarctica?… “Since the start of the satellite record, total Antarctic sea ice has increased by about 1 percent per decade.”
http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/sea_ice_south.php
If the Arctic is losing sea ice as a result of “man-made global warming”, then you’d expect the same at the Antarctic. This stubborn refusal of the Antarctic to play the global warming game is something you can’t just ignore. It shows that there’s something not quite right about the AGW theory.
And?
Antarctic sea ice growth is due to ozone hole reduction – the global Montreal Treaty did that – and changing wind patterns.
By the way, the western ice shelf near collapse.
Really.
Bored now.
*sigh*
Sea ice loss in the arctic massively outweighs the small gain in antarctic sea ice. This means globally, sea ice is on the decline. Furthermore, the loss of antarctic land ice is accelerating.
Only if you make the mistakenly believe that the effects of climate change will be homogenous across the globe. The same error is mad with glaciers – some glaciers have shown slight growth, but the overall trend for glaciers worldwide is reduction.
No. All this shows is that skeptics are lazy and don’t bother to examine their factoids in any detail. A cherry-picked data point suits their narrative and is spread throughout the denialist community without question.
Unpossible! Joe Bastardi says that the Arctic ice has been in a rapid recovery all month, and he’s never wrong, right?
He’s been posting stuff like this on twitter for a week:
What the nitwit didn’t realize is the map is of sea surface temperature, not ice extent. The website he’s using actually has a map for ice extent (called ice concentration):
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icedrift_anim/index.uk.php
He wonders why nobody is talking about a recovery that never happened…
That’s just brilliant… Ok there is post in that. Full hat tip!
While I did figure it out myself last week (not that it took more than a minute or two of simple googling), it was also picked up on RealClimate independently by J Bowers on the same day:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/09/unforced-variations-sep-2012/comment-page-1/#comment-247843
Also, I actually emailed someone at DMI/COI to verify that the light gray area was indeed sea surface temp. They (Jacob L. Hoyer) replied:
“Hi Robert,
I admit it can be difficult to see, but actually the light gray color is in the colorbar, in the triangle to the far left.
This means that all temperatures (including sea ice) below -1.7 are marked light gray.
Hope this helped.
Best wishes,
Jacob”