A new study from NASA has revealed how Arctic sea ice thinned between the winters of 2004 and 2008. The study utilized NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite, known as ICESat, to allow researchers with NASA and the University of Washington in Seattle to, for the first time, measure ice coverage over the entire Arctic basin.
In the winter, Arctic ice thickens due to the sun setting for several months and ocean currents lessening. In the summer, there are long sunlight-filled days, stronger ocean currents, and wind to melt the ice. A lot of ice melts each year, but each year some thicker, older ice survives. This older ice is 9 feet thick, typically, as opposed to the single-year ice which is on average 6 feet thick.
According to the satellite measurements, the ice has been thinning at a rate of 7 inches per year for a total of 2.2 feet in the last year. Multi-year ice, meanwhile, shrunk by 42 percent. Ice cover, meanwhile decreased 595,000 square miles — nearly the size of Alaska’s land area.
It’s not all bad news:
A melting ice cap may unlock new oil deposits and shipping routes.
Guess we’ll soon be like the Dilbert characters, the Elbonians, whose land is under water and mud.
#58, adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will increase temperatures by a little over 1C. The question is whether you believe there will be a factor of 5 or more positive feedback as the scaremongers say? They are very good at finding one positive feedback after another, which all sound good in theory, and in some cases can be observed as well. They just don’t seem to put as much of an effort into finding negative feedbacks. Even aerosols got added to the mix after Mt Pinatubo erupted, and the chemists’ arguments could no longer be ignored.
#51 dano
Good catch. I’m surprised that no one caught that sooner.
Proves that the climate change people are a bunch of lying bastards. Algore and the ilk like him will stop at nothing to line their pockets and do it on the backs of the people paying taxes.
Sorry, I’m going to have to go with the observations and opinions of the people who’ve lived up there for many thousands of years. If they say it’s changing bad, it’s changing bad.
No arguments by scientists or people with agendas quoting scientists or morons on blogs who know nothing whatsoever, hold quite that much weight with me.
Even the giant oil corporations you all seem to worship for whatever utterly insane reasons are getting into the new oil rush. If you can’t trust a bunch of oil corporations to tell you the truth when profits are involved, who can you trust?
Oh, yeah, the Northwest Passage is navigable pretty much all year now, for the first time in human history. Hey! Maybe that’s a big fat lie, too? We’ll have to warn all those ships.
Idjits.
By the way, those aren’t photographs of the ice. They’re representations of where the ice is now compared to where the ice used to be. Nobody said it was a photograph or a representation of how the clouds have changed.
Unimaginative idjits, too.
#64 WhereIsDead
I would be the first to agree with you except for one small detail about the satellite images in the article. It clearly says in the caption that they are images, from a satellite, not a representation of the ice melting. That implies two images (plural) and not one.
That means one was doctored for effect.
Idjit
Well clancys_daddy? You said “All scientists agree with the physical model of global warming.” As it turns out at least 30,000 disagree including 9000 of which hold doctorates.
#64 I didn’t realize the Inuit were immortal.
According to http://climateaudit.org/
the northern hemisphere ice extent in June is at its average level for the last 30 years, and during the last 30 years, there has been no decrease in ice, with the Southern Hemisphere showing an increase equal to the decrease in the Northern Hemisphere.
Media tend to doomsday when addressing environmental issues.
http://tinyurl.com/lgm6b5
This site seems to have figured that out already.
#65 Mr. Diesel
That means one was doctored for effect.
Exactly!!!! What’s your point? Don’t read the cutline added by the publication or web site, look at the label on the image:
Sea Ice September 21, 2005
Sea Ice September 16, 2007
Is it your point that’s NOT where the sea ice was on those dates? What possible evidence could you have? Did you take your own measurements from your own satellite?
Are you saying NASA is a giant conspiracy, designed to do nothing but fool you? From what I can see, it wouldn’t take the resources of NASA.
Unimaginative, uninformed idjits.
#67 MikeN
I didn’t realize the Inuit were immortal.
Thanks for the intelligent and useful contribution.
Some peoples have an oral tradition and memory that lasts longer than five to seven minutes.
You’d best think about that real quick now – before you forget it and it’s gone forever.
# 49 MikeN said, “Note the detail on multi-year ice. That is thrown in because ice levels increased instead of producing an ice-free arctic as some predicted. ”
The same applies as to why it is now called “climate change” rather than global warming. When the warming was debunked, they shifted marketing/pr gears and rebranded it as “climate change”.
So what have we learned today?
Climate changes…it cycles from cold, to hot and back again – much like the sun rising and setting everyday, just not as fast.
Some people don’t like change.
Other people are greedy.
The greedy people like to make the people who don’t like change, feel guilty. To make them believe that the change is all their fault. The greedy people know that once these people feel guilty, they’ll want to ‘fix it’. The greedy people tell you that the only way to resolve this guilt (and ‘fix it’) is to do what they say.
Other people may or may not like change, but they tolerate it.
They show patience and compassion towards those who are afraid of change.
They call the greedy people crooks.
For this effort they are given all sorts of mean nasty labels by the greedy crooks who stay in power by keeping everyone ignorant.
The sun will rise, the sun will set. Man does not need to pay extra taxes or do other silly things because of this ‘change’. If you do as the crooks tell you, you will still watch the sun rise and set, but you will be poor and the crooks will be rich.
#66 pardon me, which part of the fundamental model do they disagree with? Look again at my statement. “External radiation is either reflected back into space, or enters the earths atmosphere. At this point some of the energy it either trapped or radiated back into space. The trapped radiation plays a part in warming the planet allowing the relatively stable climate, that allows the planet to support the multitude of life that we have.” I stand by my statement and will place my doctorate up against theirs. The only real argument is again, is man changing the climate: which is still an open debate. I am not taking a side simply showing the general public’s lack of fundamental science knowledge, and critical thinking skills. The two arguments are either the sky is falling or gee no problem. Neither is the true statement. The absolute worst thing that can happen is the human race becomes extinct and we take some species with us. The planet will continue to orbit the sun until it uses up its fuel and expands to the point it incinerates the plant. Since barring some major catastrophic change in the sun, the human species as we know it will be extinct anyway. Don’t buy into the scifi crud as knowledge star trek, and BSG were fun shows but were fiction. Man will go the way of 99% of all the species that have ever existed. The question is will we do it to ourselves, are we doing it already, or will time do it for us? Any which way humans are toast.
Where, if I asked you what the record temperatures or snow level were for your area, would you have any idea? How could these Inuit know that this has never happened in hundreds of years? How many oral histories talk about what has not happened? This is just activists using the Inuit as an authority.
#75 – MikeN
Do you believe what’s in the Bible?
I guess that’s just religious activists using an oral history as an authority.
Which is a BAD thing, right? Now I’m confused.
I trust scientists on these matters far more than Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter. None of them as far as I know are degreed experts in the Climatology field.
#77
Understand your logic. But don’t forget, it’s ‘scientists’ working for government agencies like the FDA who can’t decide from one year to the next if a particular product is good or bad.
Ya know, Cheerios now have to be labeled as a drug. Coffee causes strokes, but now is now a good defense for Alzheimer. And of course Vitamin C, it’s good, but it’s also worthless.
It seems that some scientists, while smart and talented, are so caught up in their little world, their vision gets limited so ya end up with, “…man is bad, green is good, but too many trees is also bad”.
It’s hard to plan for the future with that kind of scientific information.
What “Al Gore Inc.” is preaching is nothing more than a scary story based around a cyclic event which has been coming around time & again since the big-bang. The fact is that ice will melt, seas will rise, food will become scarce and some species will die out /some may not of course.
Exactly the same model as the dinosaurs, ice-age…hell, even Pompei. Natural disasters have occurred throughout time, why is this so different?
The only real disaster here is that oil/gas/coal companies are a static target and the science community are shooting with both barrels to create a lot of fervor and hike up the research funding – scientists gotta’ eat dude…!
I don’t dispute that the environment is being polluted but so what? It’s inevitable that the human race implodes and kills itself due to it’s collective aggressive greedy nature, what does the earth care. The planet will rejuvenate itself once the infrastructure is given time to naturally.
The only real positive, effective and sustainable way to cut down pollution of the planets’ ecosystem is to restrict the growth of the populous! Stop the uneducated, young, elderly, poor, middle-class, wealthy, religious and stupid classes of society having children at will/accidentally! Bring in enforced abortion where countries cannot sustain the growth of it’s population – in every nation. Cut the amount of unnecessary births which result in over population and a massive drain on the resources available. Lower the numbers overall.
People are the problem not the technology [possibly one in the same] – just halt the rabbit like spread of the human race instead of flying all over the world and pontificating, over-taxing companies or berating corporations that are only doing what’s natural to companies – making money!
To effect the message of global decay, stop producing the damaging element to the environment – people, not CO2!!