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Subscribe to RSSA report from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows the Arctic's melting ice is resulting in the lowest sea ice levels since satellites started tracking the measurements in 1979. NBC's Brian Williams reports.
The amount of summer sea ice in the Arctic has reached a record low in three decades of satellite data, scientists reported Tuesday, with one of them describing recent warm years there as creating a "less polar pole." The decline was expected to continue for at least several more days before cold weather sets in and creates new ice through fall and winter.
The area of Arctic waters covered by sea ice was measured at 1.58 million square miles on Sunday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reported. That's below the previous record low of 1.61 million square miles set on Sept. 18, 2007, and in line with earlier expectations for the season.
"Including this year, the six lowest extents in the satellite record have occurred in the last six years," the center noted on its website.
"Parts of the Arctic have become like a giant Slushee this time of year" due to thinning ice, Walt Meier, a scientist at the center, told reporters.
That thinner ice also explains how a storm in early August made a significant impact in speeding up the decline this month, Meier said.
At NASA, which helps with the satellite data, scientist Claire Parkinson said the trend has been "strongly downward."
This visualization shows the extent of Arctic sea ice on Aug. 26, 2012, the smallest area in three decades of satellite records. The yellow line shows the average minimum summer ice coverage from 1979 to 2010.
The 2007 decrease "stunned" researchers since it was so large compared to previous years, she said, and "this year it's plummeting" further.
It's not just sea ice in summer that's been weakened, she added. "No matter what month you're in, it's less ice than it used to be decades ago," she said.
The researchers added that manmade emissions tied to global warming offer the best explanation for the decline.
Ted Scambos, a senior NSIDC researcher, told NBC News that no one weather pattern explains the downward trend. "Greenhouse gasses are the only consistent explanation for a persistently warming Arctic," he added.
"The Arctic was our refrigerator," he said, but the warmer weather of the last five or six years have meant "a less polar pole."
Scambos said the Arctic system is too variable to guarantee that each future year would show a decline, but over time he expects the decline to continue. "I think we can expect further declines to new records," he said, "and eventually, an ice-free North Pole."
Oct. 15, 2009: The Arctic Ocean will be an "open sea" almost entirely free from ice within just ten years. Thats the claim by a team of researchers. ITN's Tom Barton reports.
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Poor Santa!
LOL! Thanks for bringing some much needed humor and levity to the postings.
Poor Santa.....lol....and the elves and Mrs. Santa
What they intentionally leave out is that they are making the "lowest in decades" claim compared to what the ice area was in the mid 70's, the end a great cooling period when the climate experts swore the next ice age was upon us. The world has seen ice levels like this before and survived, nothing going on but the earth's natural cycle.
Yes, just IGNORE that it took 1.5 Billion years for natural processes to capture and contain the carbon we are putting back into the environment in less than 150 years. Get a clue.
Grow a tree, it takes 50 years. Burn a tree, it takes a few hours. Get it now?
Who here thinks the the USA can solve a global problem? Since it's global warming and all. Heck, the chinese have cars now and there's like a billion people there. But, keep stomping your feet and demand regulations that put every american comany out of business. That will solve the problem.
And China is building a new coal fired electric plant every week. You are correct it is a global problem, and it will cost us to process the emissions, but we must for the next generations sake do our part even if China will not. Kind of like mowing your grass even if the neighbors will not, you gain the benefit that the rats, mice, snakes and other vermin stay mostly away from you because they cannot hide in the tall grass.
Libs r idiots..."you make a moral asseration that "we must for the next generations do our part..." where do you base this moral statement on? WHY Do We HAVE to?
So you don't care if your children live in waste or an environment that is polluted? Good grief you are selfish and foolish.
Check out the tons of methane openly flowing into the sea and further into our atmosphere. No man punched these holes. They have always been there. Oil flows freely from cracks in the crust. Deep in the ocean where organisms eat it up and excrete and have unique ecosystems that man could never endure. We will not be the last species to be left standing folks. We are fading and will need to find a new home before this is over. Star Trek will exist before the end of the world occurs. The Chicken Little theorists of the "convenient" science world want us all to panic. "DO SOMETHING" even if it makes no rational sense. Do I think fossil fuel will last forever? Effectively yes. It will outlast this species or it's presence here on the third planet.
Another conservative that says there is no real problem and even if there is lets do nothing about it.
Picard? Is that you?
Old school Shatner. Beam me up Scotty.....................Ha Ha
The picture shows one thing that contradicts recent "scare" news: Greenland is totally covered with ice. Not bare as as been reported. Another interesting thing is that the coastal areas of the U.S., Canada, and Europe are not flooded. So much for catastrophic effects of melting the polar ice, which floats in the saltwater. Ice floats because it is less dense than liquid water. It displaces its own weight in the water. So when it melts, the resulting water surface is at the same level as when it was ice. Maybe if Siberia, Alaska, northern Canada , southern Argentina would warm up a little, they could even be used to grow crops to feed the world. Where's the down side? Oh, yeah. I forgot. The Polar bears. But the Polar bear population is at an all-time high. So maybe they don't thrive in a 100-degree below zero environment???
The temperature rises, the insect population grows exponentially. Hope you like bugs.
Good source of protein in many cultures across the globe. Crunchy goodness.
"Where's the down side?"
http://www.climate-emergency-institute.org/uploads/Sea_ice_loss_north_hemisphere_effects_2.pdf
Jerry - For the last 100+ years, man has been trying to over-engineer mother nature ("So...what's the downside of introducing a different species of plants or animals in other parts of the world to mitigate the negative effect of another?"...as an example) and almost every time mother nature spanks our ass.
earthman, you might die of flea bites before you got your sandwich made.
I'm dying from paper cuts right now with Barry's regulatory nazis/czars crushing my manufacturing output.
yea, I'm sure. really suffering there right? we got it so bad!
Oilman - Just because thing are changing that does not "automagically" mean they are changing for the worse. The world is overpopulated with people. There are hundreds of thousands of square miles of land in the Arctic, marginal temperate, and Antarctic regions where people have been unable to maintain a reasonable existence. If they became habitable it could well relieve the hunger and poverty of the overcrowded regions of the Earth where there is insufficient food, water, and just plain living space for all the population. Maybe it would at least delay implementation of the "Soylent Green" factories.
The increased melt would indicate that the earth lost about .006% more ice. Now you have to be pretty ignorant to think that the error in the measurement is less than .006%. There is another fact. The "record" goes back 70 years - satellites. Duh, would you want your doctor to declare your health after a 1 millisecond health exam? You'd be declared dead for no heartbeat!
The Chinese are laughing so loud I can hear them from here. They are burning fossil fuel at record pace to make our wind turbines and solar cells while we sit in our overflowing union halls full of idled lazy gangsters. They are planning to exploit the oil reserves in their neck of the China Sea and likely will spark some conflict with their neighbors there ass they do this. We will be too weak economically to support or defend our allies there. We will have the cleanest air and purest water that any graveyard has ever seen.
You forgot to mention the overflowing trading floors on Wall Street where the Mitt Romneys of the world bet on those laughing Chinese, and against America.
I think we not only should but must use all the oil, coal, and natural gas we can. I also think we can process the emissions, which is what we have not been doing, and that it will not make the costs as high as importing oil from the hostile Middle East. Use it all, use it now, but clean it up. It is not impossible.
We discovered lead in paint and in gasoline was bad, we solved that problem. We found the ozone was being depleted and changed from using CFC's as refrigerants and now use something else. We PROCESS OUR HUMAN WASTES because nature cannot handle it all. But we process and handle it and we can do the same with oil, coal, and natural gas as well ..... the question is will we.
The real problem is people politicize the problem, just like upstate john just did. Romney, nor Obama has anything to do with this issue. It is an APOLITICAL issue unless someone makes it a political issue.
upstateupyours,goober.
will we? fat chance, cost too much, not enough left over for vacation home.
I didn't build the politics of it. Talk to the deniers, or are you relly one of them? When we fully realized the dangers of lead paint, you are correct, we did something about it. When we began to understand the dangers of climate change, we started to do something about it until those on the right decided it was easier and more profitable to deny it.
I couldn't care less. I'm just tired of hearing about this crap. There isn't a thing that can be done about it and the alarmists have no answers.
I seriously don't care about climate change, global warming, greenhouse effect, or whatever you want to call it. I also didn't care about global cooling in the 70's and the Ozone layer in the 70's and 80's.
gotta love them wildfires out there, huh Co.?
record low in 30 years of records. wow , so amazing. the record keepers reach a new low in stupidity. now if the greenies can attach a crisis to it so they can continue their fkedup agenda.
Some people just love to live scared and need drama. Of course they do nothing about it.
Looking at the map, it would appear that the biggest problem is China, and Russia. Go tell them to stop it, right now!
It's a summer seasonal thing. More people enjoying cold drinks, ice supply decreases. Simple supply & demand theory.
"the smallest area in three decades of satellite records." Wow! Thirty years of record keeping proves manmade global warming? We must abandon the planet before we all drown or burn-up.
Whenever the science geeks rear their ugly heads, the political get flippant. Or is it that the flippant get political? I think we should do a study, maybe with some government funding. Anything to avoid that whole carbon into the atmosphere thingy.
The Southern hemisphere is another half to the planet that has seen the worst cooling in decades while antarctic sea ice has grown exponentially. The southern hemisphere is cooling while areas of the northern hemisphere have seen the worst winters in decades and even centuries. There has been no significant global heating for nearly 15 years. James Lovelock, founder of the Gaia theory (that Earth itself is an organism) was a vehement proponent of global warming, retracted his earlier doomsday predictions, saying him and people like Gore were alarmists. He still believes the Earth is warming, but much slower than he originallty believed. See also the Senate report on global warming, where nearly 800 scientists (including many renowned climate-related scientists and Nobel laureates) testified that either a) the Earth isn't warming at all, or b) what warming there is occuring is due to natural processes or c) that a warmer Earth is actually a healthier world for life. Much of the hysteria is goal-driven fear, for control and money.
hehe more "scare tactics" by the lefty loonies of the world, all that ice melted right? well why isn't NY underwater by now? why did the dinosaurs manage to walk on land and there was ZERO ice at the poles 200million years ago, hmmm? funny how all that is never discussed, how come the Arctic Ice is much thicker in the middle than 50yrs ago? what? didn't mention that one lately huh? sea levels haven't risen in decades, but I guess my SUV is to blame you blithering idiot environmentalist whatckjobs, where would you be without a crisis, and how come your black bitch of a false messiah didn't lower the sea levels like he promised?? guess he can't now, since he's got 2months left on his one man Kill the American Dream crusade, it's all over libs, even if there was such a think as global warming there's nothing we can do and no amount of cars in the world contribute to it, we all exhale carbon dioxide, the trees need it to give us oxygen and we're been "warming" for 12,000yrs since the ice age melted, so what exactly IS your prob you nutjobs!!
Johnny, you just don't understand science. I've tried so hard to explain it to you neo-cons over and over again, but you always come back to your anecdotal nonsense and sheer unsubstantiated beliefs.
Hey halfwitted Johnny - Sean Hannity called: he wants his pig-headed ideologic rhetoric back you clueless blowhard. What a tool!!!!!!!!
Global warming is the state of your own mind. If you want to believe it's warming, then go head. If you want to believe scientist are correct, go head. Everyone here is likely to live to be 100 years old. So no matter what, you will never know the truth. How about the truth? The sun has solar flares that warms up the earth evening more when its more active. The sun has a 11 years cycle of increase to decrease. The earth has a magnetic field that protects us from solar radiation. Not the Ozone like scientist would like you to believe. So if scientist are so correct, how come they make so, many mistakes. And for the ones who tries to make a political statement out of this.... Please do me a favor, just shut up!!! You are the ones that makes it worse for everybody to live on this wonderful planet made by God. Which the liberals don't believe in one. Unless God believes in them and their crazy ideas. So lets not go there!!!! P.S. Still have not heard anyone talk about planet X or Nibirus. That should big our biggest concern!!! The great 3,600 yrs cycle.
Really? You want us to take you seriously when you brink up a conspiracy theory about an overdue rogue planet that never existed, and should have been here months ago if the doomsayers had been right?
Man oh man, the liberal socialist/communist damocraps are all over this sight. Yeah, global warming is entirely the fault of conservative republicans. Not a one of you uses gas or oil to power your car or heat and cool your homes. What a bunch of biased idiots there are in this country. I'm pretty sure you all are sitting at home waiting for your next welfare check or your "stimulas" check so you'll know how to vote come November. Make sure you all tie up your horse and buggies when you go inside. And don't forget to pick up the droppings, you'll need them to heat your homes come winter. It's not any ones fault, it's everyones fault, including Al Gore. If only he'd shut his pie hole global warming would be stalled for centuries. Believe it or not people, this isn't the first time the earth has warmed up. It also cools down, those are called ice ages. The earth is a living entity that we happen to live on. The ozone is being destroyed, that lets in more sunlight, that heats the surface of the planet, that causes the ice to melt, that raises the sea levels. God works in wondrous ways doesn't he.
What a moronic shill.
The ozone is not being destroyed...since CFC's were banned around the world, the ozone has been thickening. Besides, ozone doesn't block sunlight. It blocks harmful radiation that gets absorbed when the particles collide with the ozone.
Great, let's move in and start farming.
Styro, your summation that everybody who does not think like you must therefore be a "neo-con" is plain evidence of your inability to think critically, which means you really don't think at all. There is nothing unsubstantiated or anecdotal about what I said (which you so carefully side-stepped), look it up. There is always a need to think of all possibilities, warming, cooling natural, man-made, etc. The evidence is not conclusive for any of it. Even so-called "laws" in physics are fallible, such as the latest discovery of speeds greater than light.
And that harmful radiation you mentioned, um, that is sunlight.
No, it's the ultraviolet radiation.
Conservatives don't dispute global warming, we dispute man has a SIGNIFICANT impact on the warming. The warm corresponds with the solar flare activity of the sun. Conservatives understand there are warming and cooling periods exist and are a natural part of our planet. Liberals some how feel if we use hairspray we will somehow kill the planet. Heck, I remember in the 1970's there were focus groups with scientists predicting the next ice age.
"Conservatives don't dispute global warming, we dispute man has a SIGNIFICANT impact on the warming."
So you disagree with the majority of scientist?
Your name couldn't be more WRONG! Solar flare periods last eleven years. It is BASIC SCIENCE: The more energy in the atmosphere, the more volatile the weather -- That is the issue. Global Climate Change means more severe weather, which is what we see.
They would have been right, if not for the increase in emissions (really, it's more about having a responsible number of children).
In any case, I fail to see why this matters. We are not as old as the planet. We could only survive in a fraction of the environments this planet has hosted in the past. We ought to be invested in preserving a human-friendly environment.
I'm not a doomsayer. I'm not a tree-hugger asking anyone to give up their air conditioners. I crank mine down into the mid 60's at night because I like a cold room. I also work in the oil industry, so I know who's paying for my shoes. However, I'm a realist, and I think you're fooling yourself or being disingenuous if you suggest that we're not harming the balance of things.
Yeah, someday Earth will cook in the sun, but someday your car will break down, too. Do you just stop changing the oil because it won't matter in the end? Or do you do your best to take care of it and get as much use out of it as you can?
There are so many different ways to measure the heating of the earth and to understand how it happens. But the science is complex, and the average person doesn't sit still long enough to understand how the chemistry of it all works. It's too easy to point to aberrant data like a record snow storm in New York and then suggest that warming has been disproved. Or it's easy to pull up non-specific anecdotes that don't require science at all, like, "Oh, the earth has heated and gone through multiple ice ages in the past, so don't worry." Which, to me, is like saying, "Wrecks always happen anyway, so go ahead and drink behind the wheel."
I don't think we need to drop everything and "SAVE THE EARTH!" I kind of like my job. I just think it's ridiculous that some people still believe that we're not having an effect on the heating of this world. It's very measurable in a host of real ways.
Let's face it, the conservatives cannot accept man caused global warming because if they did, then their entire, faith-based political stance would be threatened. The need to believe that all the scientists are lying because the truth would require that they accept that the Goebbels/Limbaugh "news" network was full of s*it. That would mean that a whole lot of what they believe, not just anti-global warming, was likely to be untrue. It would be likely that much of their mantra was based on completely false information. They can't accept that. So they won't. You will not dissuade them with scientific evidence. If both North and South Poles became tropical beaches tomorrow morning, they would not believe in global warming. They are the same people who believe the moon landing never happened and that the earth was created in six days. You can't reason with the unreasonable.
The real tragedy is that they are dooming the entire human race by their willful ignorance.
What's up with a lot of you fear mongers? The Artic Ice has been doing this since recorded times. It's cyclical as all of nature is. Al Gore a has made fools of you.....and that's one that is really documented
This is one of the classic strategies the right uses to dismiss the whole idea of global warming. Instead of addressing the idea itself, focus attention on one man that a lot of people don't like: Al Gore. Because Al Gore lectured about global warming, you can make everyone who understands global warming look like they are "believers" in Al Gore. Once they look really silly, you can call them sheep and dismiss them as ridiculous converts to a carbon offset religion.
The problem is that Al Gore is not global warming, and it is not a religion. If you want to hate Al Gore, fine, but global warming exists independently of anything Gore says or does.
As soon as you see a comment from a so called skeptic, that contains the words - Al Gore, be assured that they have no clue what they are talking about.
Al Gore has nothing to do with it.
Climate scientists don't work for him
Climate scientists don't work with him
Climate scientists also do not work for the IPCC
And they are not paid by the IPCC or the UN
Some volunteer their time to the IPCC, on top of their day jobs doing the research at academic and government research centers that have NOTHING to do with the IPCC.
I think we need to get something straight here: there is the age of the Earth, and the age of humanity. The Earth is over 4 billion years old. Humanity is about 100 thousand years old. That's over 4 orders of magnitude difference. For the vast majority of Earth's history, it has been habitable for life. For the same time period, it has been inhabitable for humans. We life in a very specific environment. A Jurassic Park could not happen because of the differences between our atmosphere today and the atmosphere a few dozen million years ago. The dinosaurs could not survive the air we breath. Life on earth is not endangered by global warming. Life has always made it work. This is not about the environment or your favorite endangered species. It is about humans. It is about keeping the planet friendly for us and our activities. Even if there never was any man-made climate change, this is still something we have to deal with.