Arctic Sea Ice Thickness: Important Update
Important new information: New graphic from NSIDC showing Arctic sea ice thickness, plus a report on the successful launch of the European satellite CryoSat 2, also for measuring Arctic ice thickness
Must We Hack Our Planet’s Atmosphere?
The failure of recent efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions has built some momentum toward expanding research on geoengineering options. Although everything possible must be done to shift to a sustainable and energy-efficient economy – along with changing to simple life-styles and putting a cap on the world’s population – all this will not be enough to eliminate the danger of runaway climate change.
Somehow, we have to find a safe way to remove the huge amount of excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. To analogize, diet and medicine alone won’t cure our planet; surgery will also be required. Too much CO2 in our atmosphere not only contributes to global heating, sea-level rise, more severe storms and desertification; it has also caused a 30% increase in ocean acidification, and this too threatens the life of everything on Earth.
Why has the surface of the Arctic sea ice remained frozen this March?
Yesterday morning, March 30, I emailed James Overland with the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory/NOAA in Seattle asking him about the slow melt of visible Arctic sea ice, adding that this was certain to stoke the fires of the army of climate skeptics. This morning Dr. Overland replied that “the winds on the Atlantic side were [...]
Solar Minimum Induced Global Cooling? Don’t Bet On It
Will the media continue to ignore all the extreme weather that scientists have been predicting for years would become more common as we pour more heat trapping gases into the atmosphere? Given that we’ve only warmed about a degree Fahrenheit in the past half century and much of this country projected to warm 9°F or more on our current emissions path, it’s hard to imagine the kind of extreme weather we will ultimately be seen.
Disturbing New Information on the Arctic Methane Bubbling to the Surface
In the past two days, there has been many breaking news stories published on “a large but overlooked source of methane gas escaping from permafrost underwater”. Here is one report from the National Science Foundation and a commentary by by Will Steffen at World Changing.com From the NSF, March 4. (Click title for full story): [...]
Arctic Thick and Thin: A Warning About the Escalating Loss of Sea Ice Mass
Scant ice over the Arctic Sea this winter could mean a “double whammy” of powerful ice-melt next summer, a top U.S. climate scientist said on Thursday.
“It’s not that the ice keeps melting, it’s just not growing very fast.”
“We’ve grown back ice in the winter, but that ice tends to be thin and that’s the problem,” he said. “You set yourself up for a world of hurt in summer. The ice that is there is also thinner than it was before and thinner ice simply takes less energy to melt out the next summer.” – Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.
In January, Arctic sea ice grew by about 13,000 square miles (34,000 sq km) a day, which is a bit more than one-third the pace of ice growth during the 1980s, and less than the average for the first decade of the 21st century.
Arctic ice cover is important to the rest of the world because the Arctic is the globe’s biggest weather-maker, sometimes dubbed Earth’s air-conditioner for its ability to cool down the planet.
Audio: Climatologist Professor Andrew Weaver Answers Questions About “Glaciergate”
Anna Maria Tremonti hosts CBC Radio’s “The Current“. Here’s her program for Wednesday, February 10th. Dorothy’s note: Click on “Listen to Part One,” which after some teasers and commentary, leads off with Tremonti in a challenging interview with Professor Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, BC. She notes the erroneous IPCC prediction that by [...]
Revised Essay on Regional Cold Anomalies by Dr. James Hansen, With New Graphs and Photos
The Earth has been in a period of rapid global warming for the past three decades. The assertion that the planet has entered a period of cooling in the past decade is without foundation. On the contrary, we find no significant deviation from the warming trend of the past three decades. Weather fluctuations exceed the magnitude of average global warming over the past half century. However, the perceptive person should be able to notice that climate is warming on decadal time scales. The global temperature trend over the past few decades has been strong enough that there is a noticeable “loading” of the climate dice that define the probability of unusually warm or cool seasons.
Where in the World is the Worst Place for Cold Weather?
The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world.
