Signs point to record summer ice loss at North Pole BY TOM KIZZIA Anchorage Daily News
New data this winter on Arctic winds and currents indicate that next summer’s ice loss at the North Pole may be even greater than 2007’s record-setting shrinkage. The last remnants of thick, old sea ice are dispersing, and the unusual weather cycles that contributed to last year’s loss of ice are continuing, said climatologist Ignatius Rigor, of the University of Washington. “The buoys are streaming out,” said Rigor, referring to the satellite-tracked markers used to monitor the flushing of ice into the North Atlantic. Such a pattern preceded last summer’s record ice loss but was not expected to continue so strongly. Scientists are watching the polar ice closely, trying to sort out the effects of global warming and natural cyclical changes. Formal projections of next summer’s expected ice loss won’t be made for another month or so. But all indications to date are that ice loss will equal or exceed last year’s, “unless the winds turn around,” Rigor said. The thin veneer of new ice now covering the polar seas is not like the older, thicker sea ice that once covered the region in winter, Rigor said. In 1989, 80 percent of the ice in the Arctic was at least 10 years old, he said. Today, only about 3 percent of the ice is that old. The new ice melts more quickly, and then open water absorbs more sunlight, warming the seas and making the next fall’s freeze-up come even later, he said. “Have we passed the tipping point?” he said. “It’s hard to see how the system may come back.” The prospect of a mostly icefree Arctic could mean a boom in shipping through the Bering Strait, several speakers said at the Alaska Forum on the Environment. But it is bad news for polar bears and other animals that may be bound for the endangered-species list. Polar bears prefer ice over the shallow continental shelf north of Alaska because it supports a rich food chain, said Steve Amstrup, a leading polar bear biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. But with last summer’s melting, some Alaska bears were pacing the ice as much as 600 miles north of Barrow, far from their preferred habitat, Amstrup said. Amstrup was lead federal biologist in a series of studies released last year depicting the Alaska bear as likely to disappear by 2050 because of global warming. A decision by the Department of the Interior on whether to list the polar bear as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act was due in January but has been postponed. The state of Alaska, among others, opposes the listing, arguing the forecasts of declining sea ice are too speculative. But scientists said this week that the forecasts are, if anything, too cautious. None foresaw the disastrous shrinkage of 2007. “Five of the 10 studies we used projected more sea ice at mid-century than we had this summer,” Amstrup said. The shrinkage is related to higher temperatures, scientists said, but also to shifts in a weather pattern known as the Arctic oscillation. When the Arctic oscillation is in a “high” cycle, as it has been recently, more ice is pushed past Greenland into the North Atlantic, Rigor said. Climate models have linked a higher Arctic oscillation to increases in greenhouse gases, but that relationship is still the subject of much study, Rigor said. “All these changes are very consistent with a climate system trying to cool itself off from greenhouse gases,” Rigor said.
Too bad, the article doesn't state how if the snow is melting during the summer, it's probably going to grow again in the winter. I mean, it would be logical, right? But does the news use logic? No, they use hysteria.
God has to be laughing like heck right now...don't ya think?
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
It’s 8 a.m., the temperature outside is minus-4 degrees Fahrenheit. I’m sitting at my desk with the baseboard radiators blasting away in order to keep my wife and me from frostbite. This latest blast of frigid air is once again sweeping down from the Arctic. But how can that be? Global warming alarmists tell us the Arctic is melting. Several weeks ago the TV program “Modern Marvels” had a series on icebreaking ships. The United States, Russia and Norway are investing millions of dollars on building bigger and more powerful ice breakers. What for? All they need to do is wait until the Arctic melts. According to Al Gore, it won’t be long before Manhattan is 20 feet below a new sea level. Nancy Peterson’s Feb. 2 letter paints a doomsday scenario worthy of a science fiction movie. Flood, drought, windstorms. Breadbaskets moving north, along with insects and weed pests. The only thing she omitted were fire and brimstone. There are people who are not content without something to fret about. The solar system is beyond our control. The Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history is replete with climate change. Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama, writes in the book, “Global Warming and Other Eco Myths” — “We know from relatively recent geological periods of warmth (e.g. 130,000 years ago) that sea level has been higher than it is today.” He is also a big fan of carbon dioxide. “In simple terms, CO2 is the lifeblood of the planet. Plant life largely evolved at a time when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was many times what it is today.” VITO SPINELLI Scotia
Mr Spinelli is correct this pattern of weather change has all happened b4 in the earths history when there were no cars or factories to blame the warming on. Scientists who have studied this problem seem to be split on what's causing this problem and many think that the cooling and warming of the earth is governed more by the sun and it's activity than by co2 emissions.
Times change, climates change....people need to know how to adapt!! They certainly knew how for centuries. Now we are living in the so called 'modern era' and everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to 'save the world'. JUST LEAVE IT ALONE FOR GOD'S SAKE!!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, February 25, 2008
Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."
China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
The ice is back.
Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.
"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.
But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."
He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.
I wonder if there was a news report or studies for the dinosaurs.....maybe their cars were too much for the environment then too......please are we THAT dumb???.....
There is nothing new under the sun....
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Vito Spinelli (Feb. 22 letter, “Overheated rhetoric on climate change”) is attempting to make the argument that because he was currently suffering (as were we all) from a cold snap, that global climate change is disproven. I beg to differ. To claim that a few days of cold weather disproves global climate change is equivalent to claiming that the existence Kate Moss and Calista Flockhart prove there is no obesity epidemic in America. Further, he mentions the work of Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama as a refutation. While Dr. Christy is somewhat contrarian to the typical views in climatology, he doesn’t argue that human activity doesn’t affect the climate. In an interview on National Public Radio, he said, “It is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into irrigated farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the air, and putting extra greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate has not changed in some way.” Yes, Dr. Christy does refute the greenhouse effect, but he does not refute man-made atmospheric warming. In one of his published works he said, “I showed some evidence that humans are causing warming in the surface measurements that we have but it is not the greenhouse relation.” As for CO2 being the lifeblood of the planet, I recommend very strongly that you don’t try breathing it in any concentration. I hear tell that doing so may have detrimental effects. GLENN C. LASHER JR. Schenectady
Congratulations to Vito Spinelli for his opinion Feb. 22, “Overheated rhetoric on climate change,” wherein he points out that the climate change rhetoric is overheated. I would like to offer additional information on scientific reports that also refutes man’s influence on climate change. The basic data, upon which the U.N. panel decided that CO2 [carbon dioxide] was the cause of the warming, was the “ice core” data that showed the CO2 level and global temperatures rose and fell in lockstep over the last 500,000 years. The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] panel assumed the CO2 was the cause of the temperature change. But now David Evans, a researcher at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, has reported on further research, using higher-resolution data that allowed scientists to distinguish which came first, the temperature rise or the CO2 levels. This showed that the temperature changes preceded the CO2 changes on average by 800 years. Thus, CO2 could not be the cause of the warming. In his “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore claims nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the last two decades. That was based on temperature data from NASA, and that data proved the trends of global warming. But a recent report by Toronto-based mathematician Steve McIntyre found errors with NASA’s temperature data. When the NASA data is corrected, the hottest year since 1880 becomes 1934 instead of 1998, which is now just second. 1921 is the third hottest. Four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, with only three in the past decade. This indicates that man-made carbon dioxide from the post-1945 era is not a likely cause of the warming. To NASA’s credit they quickly made corrections. One of the scientists who was an active member of the IPCC scientifi c panel is John Christy. In an interview published in the Wall Street Journal, Christy refutes Al Gore’s conclusions: “I’m one of the few people in the world that actually builds these climate data sets — we don’t see the catastrophic changes that are being promoted all over the place.” Also, according to Christy, the extent of Antarctic ice has just reached its all-time maximum. Christy explains that Mother Nature is so complex, and the uncertainties are great, that no one should speak with such certainty and such confidence about climate predictions. Therefore, while the Earth’s temperature is currently increasing, it’s probably the result of natural phenomenon that man can do little to stop. This heating and subsequent cooling has been ongoing for millions of years and it won’t stop now. If we look at it with level heads, we would not take extreme actions, like putting carbon caps on our industrial activity, which would cause a loss of American jobs. DON CAZER Niskayuna
After reading Vito Spinelli’s Feb. 22 letter, “Overheated rhetoric on climate change,” I would ask him to view the entire National Geographic documentary on global warning, and then make the same statements. RUSS POLLARD Johnstown
If there is global warming now---what happened to the dinosaurs and the ice age??? Was my public school evolutionary edumacation wrong? what foot shall I stand on now?......
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
The truth is that nobody can say with any certainty what causes global warming and the phenomena has be occurring on and off for millions of years so how can we say that mankind is causing all the global warming now when the earth has warmed up to even higher temperatures b4 we invented machines or cars. Too many facts are being derived based on junk science and not an accurate long term study.
There is big money to be made with this environmental stuff. Not to mention government taxpaid programs to support it. This kind of BS went around in the 70's too. They are just going to hit on a new generation and we can only hope that they don't buy into it!!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
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