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Sea Ice Extent Sinks to Record Lows at Both Poles
- batushka 10y agoComments about climate are so censored here. Bottom is full of flagged out comments with replies. It's like reading CIA doc with half page black.
- mrspeaker 10y agoOnly one user's comments are flagged, and it's a new account with no other comments.
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoOnly the throw away accounts like yours.
- pastaziti 10y agoI find this sort of evidence very deceptive. Of course, if extent were truly an issue, we'd also have record sea levels right now. If the thickness of the ice is making up for extent losses, you only harm the climate change debate with this kind of 'half the story' reporting.
- pxeboot 10y agoSea ice melting doesn't cause sea level increases.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- vskarine 10y agoThat is not true, sea ice melting does cause sea level increases, you are forgetting that sea water is salt water: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18841-melting-icebergs-boost-sea-level-rise/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18841-melting-iceberg... "Fresh water, of which icebergs are made, is less dense than salty sea water. So while the amount of sea water displaced by the iceberg is equal to its weight, the melted fresh water will take up a slightly larger volume than the displaced salt water. This results in a small increase in the water level."
- pxeboot 10y ago'Sea ice' generally refers to ocean water that freezes during the winter though, not iceburgs that come from ice sheets and glaciers.
- flukus 10y agoTechnically correct, but a tad toward the pedantic side.
- cr1895 10y agoWhile icebergs are "ice in the sea" they are formed from terrestrial glaciers. Ergo, they are not sea ice. Sea ice is formed from the freezing sea surface from water that is already part of the ocean. You're technically right in some way though: sea ice is highly reflective. When it melts the surface albedo changes and the ocean absorbs more heat, which does increase its volume and contributes to greater warming (see: ice-albedo feedback).
- mirimir 10y agoRight. And it is another GCC impact.
- pastaziti 10y agoFunny, -4 points in 30 minutes, yet no one has disagreed with me. So I'm left to conclude that everyone knows it's deceptive reporting and harmful to the climate change debate, yet four people believe I'm a jerk for pointing it out. Is that really the level of discourse on this site? Was creating this account a mistake?
- mikeash 10y agoThe first reply you got pointed out that your comment was based on a faulty assumption. Yet you ignored that and persist in making your bad argument. What sort of reaction do you expect?
- M_Grey 10y agoI don't know about creating the account, but I would definitely recommend reading the site rules, which are more extensive than most other sites, but well worth reading and following. Assuming that you want to do more than the digital equivalent of a drive-by, you should probably take a breather.
- vacri 10y agoDownvoting = "I disagree with you" Flagging = "You're a jerk" It's funny that in your comments there's this thread where you take it personally, and only one other comment where you tell someone else to not take it personally. It's almost as if this was a purpose-made account.
- flukus 10y agoDown voted because you disparaged some/many people, accusing them of being deceptive, when it was your own lack of understanding of high school physics.
- sulam 10y agoAs multiple people have pointed out, sea ice does not itself appreciably cause sea level rise. It's like an ice cube floating in your drink -- it is already displacing the water, so that when it melts your glass is not suddenly more full. (Hopefully this makes sense to you -- clearly a glass completely full of ice and water does not overflow when the ice melts). Ice on land _does_ cause sea level to rise, and there has been sea level rise over the last century. Also losing sea ice has other effects, like causing the ocean to heat more rapidly (ice has higher albedo than the ocean). So you would expect to see water temperatures rising, disproportionally in arctic and antarctic waters where there is lots of sea ice coverage being lost. In fact this is exactly what the data show.
- peasdude 10y agoArctic sea ice thickness and volume are decreasing too. http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/ http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volum...
- pastaziti 10y agoOK then you agree, the article was poorly written and didn't give enough information despite that info being important to making a logical argument. Also, if true, then shouldn't sea level be rising? Why aren't we hearing about that?
- yongjik 10y ago> Besides shrinking in extent, the sea ice cap is also thinning and becoming more vulnerable to the action of ocean waters, winds and warmer temperatures. Did you read the article?
- yequalsx 10y agoSea levels are rising and been for some time. Sea ice melt doesn't increase water levels much. This is particularly true for the arctic. Now Antarctic continental ice melt and Greenland ice melt does increase sea levels.
- ori_b 10y agoSea ice is floating. That means that it is already displacing water. When it melts, it fills the volume that it was displacing, and total sea levels remain nearly constant (the difference coming from salt concentration) Sea level rise comes from glaciers on land melting. That is also happening, but more slowly, because convection moves heat more efficiently in the ocean.
- tedsanders 10y agoA significant, possibly majority, of the expected sea level rise will come from thermal expansion. Melting land ice may be a minority factor. https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/411.htm https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/411.htm
- scarmig 10y agoSo, you seem flummoxed by the downvoting. I'm not sure it's warranted, but here's an explanation so you don't run into it in the future: Most climate change denialists don't know how science works. Or, if they do, they cynically prey on the public's ignorance. I'm not up to date on sea level data, but even if what you say is true, you didn't just disprove climate change and proved that scientists are a bunch of conspiratorial UN socialists. Multiple lines of evidence all feed into AGW as a theory. No area of active scientific research has everything fit together neatly. Anyone who has spent a cursory amount of time genuinely researching the issue knows this. But the approach that denialists take is decontextualizing one piece of evidence and claiming that it disproves AGW, or at least makes it a 50/50 proposition. Your comment falls firmly in this tradition, if unintentionally. The scientist's response to seeing a crazy outlier isn't to immediately fall into spin mode; it's to go, wow, that's weird, what's the strongest explanation? It's akin to someone posting about an awesome new discovery at CERN about the standard model, and then someone else jumping in and going "well the Standard Model doesn't explain X perfectly, so this is just a conspiracy." It's unproductive and toxic to scientific discourse.
- aangjie 10y agoWhile I agree with you, I also agree with Dilbert(http://blog.dilbert.com/post/158159613566/how-to-convince-skeptics-that-climate-change-is-a http://blog.dilbert.com/post/158159613566/how-to-convince-sk...). He points out how much of a persuasion fail climate change has been. Perhaps by the nature of science, climate change, and the flaws in human reasoning(even if they're scientists) it is impossible to put a "good persuasive" front, but it should be attempted.
- flukus 10y agoI think a lot of that is due to a determined astro-turfing effort and I'd say this down voted commenter is a part of that. For genuine questions I think answering people is good, but paid astro-turfers always post genuine sounding questions. It's a newly created account that followers a standard denier strategy and labels scientists deceptive, the poster then implies there is a conspiracy. This has all the fingerprints of a paid astro-turfer.
- dzdt 10y agoLook at this graph of global sea ice extent for every year since 1978. It is insane how much an outlier the last 9 months are. Like sesame street level "one of these curves is not like the others" kind of outlier. https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/sea-ice-extent-area/grf/nsidc_global_extent_byyear_b.png https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/sea-ice-...
- drtz 10y agoIs there data available for this prior to 1978?
- dzdt 10y agoNo, there was no reliable measurement before satellites. Quoting wikipedia: Useful satellite data concerning sea ice began in December 1972 with the Electrically Scanning Microwave Radiometer (ESMR) instrument. However, this was not directly comparable with the later SMMR/SSMI, and so the practical record begins in late 1978 with the launch of NASA’s Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) satellite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_of_sea_ice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_of_sea_ice
- M_Grey 10y agoThe worst models have always had really nasty asymptotes near the end, and it would certainly appear that we've reached that point in at least one critical system. Given the other issues arising at the same time (permafrost melting, methane release, coral bleaching...) it's not hard to see this as the beginning of the end.
- mirimir 10y agoHave models tended to predict disproportionate high-latitude warming?
- johnny99 10y agoYes. "When climate warms or cools, the changes are generally much more drastic at high latitudes than they are closer to equator. Temperatures measured in ice core bore holes in Greenland show, for instance, that central Greenland temperatures during the Last Glacial Maximum were about 20 degrees lower than today while the tropics were only a couple of degrees cooler." http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/research/climatechange/modelling_dynamics/modelling_greenhouse_warming/ http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/research/climatechange/mo...
- bamboozled 10y agoOk, so this question has been asked before, but here goes! What are we going to do about it? I hear people say it's just too late to stop a catastrophe, but I find it hard to believe.
- zouhair 10y agoMost likely not much we can do now. Add to that the fact that the government of the most powerful country in the World straight up denies the science.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThere's always something we can do. If we can't prevent the problem from happening, we can try to slow it down, mitigate its effects and eventually reverse it. Can't imagine a worse reaction now than just giving up.
- zouhair 10y agoMost likely what will happen is the rich will create gated cities and private armies and leave the rest to fend for themselves.
- 7952 10y agoThe environment must become a political issue. There will be people on both sides of the argument. It has to be about more than science.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoIt's not too late to stop this. But if you try, some people who will be dead before the worst happens and so won't suffer or pay for the consequences, and who can profit in the short term by punting the problem into the long grass will fight to prevent you from doing so. In order to stop it, roughly $10 trillion dollars worth of fossil fuel assets will need to be left in the ground. As a historical parallel, the economic value (inflation adjusted) of the slaves in the southern US before the civil war was $10 trillion dollars. The people who owned those slaves opted to fight the most destructive war the planet had seen at that time rather than give up their property. Have you noticed that nearly all the big names pushing Brexit are climate change denialists? That Trump claims it's a hoax and chose as his Secretary of State the head of Exxon that discussed climate change on a seperate email alias which the company then "lost" when asked to provide them in a court case? It's not looking good, but it's not a technical issue.
- bamboozled 10y agoOk, so this question has been asked before, but here goes! What are we going to do about it? I hear people say it's just too late to stop a catastrophe, but I find it hard to believe.
- ideonexus 10y agoIn the DC area, we had two weeks of 70 degree weather in February. The cherry trees blossomed because of it, and then they wilted off the trees because temperatures dropped to normal. I saw Fox News manage to put a anti-global warming spin on it by only reporting that cold killed the cherry blossoms, leaving out the fact that they normally blossom in April.
- intended 10y agocivilization will fall because our ability to spend money and research on marketing and human manipulation will outstrip the field of perception of the people doing the manipulation.
- officelineback 10y agoI salute you for your commitment to watching Fox News. After Trump's election I said I was going to consume more of the other-side-centric media because I wanted to understand how this F'ing happened. I can't, though, it's too painful. So I salute you.
- skylan_q 10y agoIt has nothing to do with Fox News. Wrong place to look.
- leereeves 10y agoNearby, record low wind-chill temperatures in Massachusetts yesterday after a massive blizzard ten days ago. http://www.masslive.com/weather/index.ssf/2017/03/with_wind_chill_thursday_morni.html http://www.masslive.com/weather/index.ssf/2017/03/with_wind_... http://www.masslive.com/weather/index.ssf/2017/03/60000_power_outages_reported_a.html http://www.masslive.com/weather/index.ssf/2017/03/60000_powe... Anecdata.
- mkaziz 10y agoI don't understand it how they ethically manage to do that. What kind of journalism is that?
- Clanan 10y agoAlready, the discussion here swings toward the climate change vs. "denialist" debate. Instead of politicizing it, maybe read the article? According to those interviewed, the trend until last year was to see more ice. > “It is tempting to say that the record low we are seeing this year is global warming finally catching up with Antarctica,” Meier said. “However, this might just be an extreme case of pushing the envelope of year-to-year variability. We’ll need to have several more years of data to be able to say there has been a significant change in the trend.” Ironically, all those accusing others of being "denialists" are themselves failing to look at this scientifically, and resorting to the rudely unscientific tactic of name-calling.
- exergy 10y agoTo me, that statement sounds more like "Clutching at straws, it might be an outlier extreme case of year-to-year variability, but it's probably global warming; if you want a definitive answer, wait a couple years".
- scarmig 10y agoNo. Implying a single piece of decontextualized evidence--sea levels not rising--casts doubt on AGW is a classic denialist tactic. Multiple lines of evidence provide compelling arguments for AGW. It's an intellectually dishonest gambit to try to play a game of "gotcha" instead of trying to come up with the most powerful explanation for a phenomenon, and toxic to scientific discourse.
- Clanan 10y agoI did not say what you think I said. In a topic as complex (and contentious) as weather, climate, global warming, etc. I think we should focus on understanding the science and employing civic discourse. I simply repeated what the scientist said: no conclusions yet, need more data. And in response I receive the blatant accusations of "classic denialist tactic[s]"? You think that's not toxic to discourse? (Disclosure to pre-empt the common accusation of ignorance: I'm scientifically trained and work in renewable energy R&D.)
- Cerium 10y agoWatched "Chasing Ice", 2012, last night with my wife. It was her homework assignment. What a film! Great watch for anyone here who has not seen it. Its half climate change documented via changes in ice, and half behind the scenes look at how they made those. How to mount a camera in the arctic.
- grimmdude 10y agoOne thing I've always found interesting is that technically, by definition, we're currently in an ice age: "By this definition, we are in an interglacial period—the Holocene—of the ice age that began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland, Arctic, and Antarctic ice sheets still exist." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
- harwoodleon 10y agoPersonally tired of hearing the word 'record'. It's pretty obvious that every year is going to deliver new records. Why don't we/NASA start reporting on the effects. Then the denialist argument becomes moot. Perhaps the human effects too. Perhaps that will make this more real to the idiots who question the science.
- nojvek 10y agoThinking about the Fermi paradox and the great filter, I think due to humans being too selfish we will may be someday end up not making it through. Earth is the only habitable planet by a long shot and we are still treating global warming like a mad man's story. The current trump administration gives a strong vibe that they'll exploit the planet for their full term and leave the bigger problems for the next president to sort out.