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Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

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Re: Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

#21
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I got out of it is what I usually see with my attempts at being objective; we know this is happening, we don't fully understand why, and we don't fully know the pros and cons. There are guesses and theories, many of which I'm sympathetic to, that too many people are willing to move forward without being cautious.

The house is burning down, and we should be cautious?!

Yes. A horribly mismanaged attempt at putting out a house fire can cause unnecessary problems for the rest of the neighborhood.

Re: Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

#22
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I got out of it is what I usually see with my attempts at being objective; we know this is happening, we don't fully understand why, and we don't fully know the pros and cons. There are guesses and theories, many of which I'm sympathetic to, that too many people are willing to move forward without being cautious.

I dunno, billions of people seem perfectly willing to "move forward" with burning fossil fuels even when we don't fully understand its pros and cons. (I also use a gas heater and conventional vehicles, so I guess I'm one of them.) Or does it not count as "moving forward" when we've been doing it for decades and there's a multi-billion-dollar industry that's interested in keeping the current direction?

Yep, I agree, and look how well the desire to move forward immediately with fossil fuels turned out. Thanks for providing an example of what I'm saying. It's not an evil aspect of the human race, it's just that we are extremely short sighted by our nature.

As for the corporations, of course they want to keep the current direction. It's how they make money. Regardless of the direction we choose in how to handle the situation, if we decide us doing something is warranted, I guarantee those same corporations will figure out a way to make money from it. The bad things you see them doing today against change will turn into bad things they'll do when they embrace change. My concern is that in our efforts to do something quickly we cause more harm than what we proposed to prevent or fix. In that vain, some of the accusations that I'm hearing about the diesel scandal in the EU is of a similar thought.

Re: Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

#23
post #3

Wow, The period of 2009 to 2012 was not kind for the ice at all. What caused such a large decrease?

One contributor is an increase in the amount of heat flowing from the North Atlantic into the Arctic ocean. Another factor is that the volume of old, thick ice has been declining as well, so the ice present in 2015 is younger than what was present in 2000. This ice is less likely to persist through the summer melt season.

Re: Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

#24
post #4

At the same time (well, within a couple of years) antarctic sea ice is at record high levels https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp...

Not this shit again. Sea ice in the antarctic is relatively thin because it's seasonal, although somewhat thicker than previously imagined. You also have to bear in mind that Antartica is an actual continent with a huge land mass underneath it, whereas if/when all the ice in the arctic melts, then that's it, there will just be seawater and you won't be able to visit the North Pole. The weather systems are totally different, there are no mountains in the Arctic for example.

Frankly I'm coming to think that the best hope for the future is if the Arctic ice melts comletely every child in the English-speaking world gets pissed about Santa not having anywhere to live.

https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/characteristics/differen...

http://www.livescience.com/48880-antarctica-sea-ice-thicknes... << which somewhat supports your perspective; I'm making an effort to be even-handed and include as much relevant info as possible.

Re: Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

#25

>The chart’s data comes from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a collaboration between NOAA and the University of Colorado. This is the oldest data set for sea ice available—it goes back to 1978. (That’s a pretty long time, at least for satellites: Landsat, the longest continuously operated satellite-data program, only started six years earlier.) The satellite era for Arctic ice did not start in 1979. It started…

Aaah the never ending debate about global warming. It's been proven to be a scam so many times and everyone has their favorites. To me when NASA came and admit the rising temperatures on Earth do match up with rise of temperatures on most other planets of our system, including Mars, because the Sun has its rising/declining activity patters and some go into thousands of years, this was clear indication humans are like…

Here is a chart of the cycles you are referring to, going back over 400,000 years. Look at the green one in the middle. You may have to look a little higher, all the way into the chart above it, in fact. Notice anything peculiar around the turn of the century?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/cHbKpLh.jpg

Re: Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

#26
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I got out of it is what I usually see with my attempts at being objective; we know this is happening, we don't fully understand why, and we don't fully know the pros and cons. There are guesses and theories, many of which I'm sympathetic to, that too many people are willing to move forward without being cautious.

The house is burning down, and we should be cautious?!

Yes, the house is burning down! We have a whole lot of gasoline on hand. We can dump it all onto the burning fire to try and put it out.

Possible outcomes:

1) We manage to dump enough gasoline on it to starve it of oxygen quickly enough and the fire is burnt out. We clean up all the gasoline. The day is saved.

2) The gasoline catches on fire and the whole neighborhood burns down from our attempt to fix it.

3) We manage to dump enough gasoline on it to starve it of oxygen quickly enough and the fire is burnt out. The gasoline left behind isn't cleaned up well enough and it catches on fire a day later causing a bigger fire.

Or we choose to do nothing:

1) The house burns down. The fire does not spread. We build a new house.

2) The house burns down and the fire spreads, burning down the whole neighbourhood.

Or maybe we watch the fire for awhile and find a better way to put it out. The climate isn't as simple as this analogy. This isn't a black and white issue where we can dump our whole economy down the drain and everything is guaranteed to be rosy.

Re: Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

#27

>The chart’s data comes from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a collaboration between NOAA and the University of Colorado. This is the oldest data set for sea ice available—it goes back to 1978. (That’s a pretty long time, at least for satellites: Landsat, the longest continuously operated satellite-data program, only started six years earlier.) The satellite era for Arctic ice did not start in 1979. It started…

Aaah the never ending debate about global warming. It's been proven to be a scam so many times and everyone has their favorites. To me when NASA came and admit the rising temperatures on Earth do match up with rise of temperatures on most other planets of our system, including Mars, because the Sun has its rising/declining activity patters and some go into thousands of years, this was clear indication humans are like…

There's no evidence that Mars is exhibiting long term warming trends, and most bodies in the solar system are not warming. The sun is currently in a cooling cycle, and all evidence indicates that solar forcing has a much lower impact on rising temperatures than increased greenhouse gases.

Explained here:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-other-planets...

It took me about 10 seconds of googling to find the answer explained easily for the layperson as to why you were wrong- and yet, you've never so much as taken that basic step, let alone examine any of the scientific literature on the topic, and you immediately jumped to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of scientists who study climate and Earth sciences worldwide are wrong. There have been hundreds of papers written on the topic, all by experts who reach conclusions that disagree with you, and you examined none of that research. It is the sheer arrogance of the climate change denier that is so startling to me.

Re: Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

#28

>The chart’s data comes from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a collaboration between NOAA and the University of Colorado. This is the oldest data set for sea ice available—it goes back to 1978. (That’s a pretty long time, at least for satellites: Landsat, the longest continuously operated satellite-data program, only started six years earlier.) The satellite era for Arctic ice did not start in 1979. It started…

Thanks for the 1990 ipcc link. The graph (page 7) of northern and southern hemisphere sea ice extent anomalies is interesting - they appear to have moved in rough opposition in most of the period from the early 1970s to 1990, as they are today.

Re: Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaah the never ending debate about global warming. It's been proven to be a scam so many times and everyone has their favorites. To me when NASA came and admit the rising temperatures on Earth do match up with rise of temperatures on most other planets of our system, including Mars, because the Sun has its rising/declining activity patters and some go into thousands of years, this was clear indication humans are like…

There's no evidence that Mars is exhibiting long term warming trends, and most bodies in the solar system are not warming. The sun is currently in a cooling cycle, and all evidence indicates that solar forcing has a much lower impact on rising temperatures than increased greenhouse gases. Explained here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-other-planets... It took me about 10 seconds of googling to find th…

>indicates that solar forcing has a much lower impact on rising temperatures than increased greenhouse gases.

Could be. But I would argue that sites like SkS, which are fairly partisan in their views like to look only at TSI and ignore other solar factors.

The Sun effects us in many unexpected ways. See for example here: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08...

And here:

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/5/054...

The last link (looking at the UV part of the spectrum) could explain the warming of the Atlantic we have been experiencing, See this graph of the AMO (yes, not the same as the NOA outlined in the paper - but related) and NH temperatures:

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/from:1960/mean:30/...

The AMO does seems to be "externally forced" I.e. not related to CO2, but probably/possibly some solar related mechanism.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140225/ncomms4323/full/nco...

The whole thing is damn complicated. Different parts of the spectrum impact on different parts of atmospheric chemistry (e.g. ozone), and inter-relate with components like earth and solar magnetic fields, particles, GCRs, etc.

Science is never settled (as SkS would have us believe) it's still in progress.

Re: Visualizing the Shrinking Sea Ice

#30
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The house is burning down, and we should be cautious?!

Yes. A horribly mismanaged attempt at putting out a house fire can cause unnecessary problems for the rest of the neighborhood.

But this is a house we can't actually leave. That changes the equation completely.
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