Arctic sea ice shrinks, a sign of greenhouse effect

[WhiteTara]

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-09-13T214950Z_01_N13445710_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT-ARCTIC-DC.XML
and now something to really be scared about. The ice shrank 14% between 2004 and 2005

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Arctic perennial sea ice -- the kind that stays frozen year-round -- declined by 14 percent between 2004 and 2005, climate scientists said on Wednesday, in what one expert saw as a clear sign of greenhouse warming.

Researchers have been monitoring the shrinking polar ice cap with satellites since the 1970s. What is new, and remarkable to scientists, is that the decline has been observed in winter as well as summer.

"The greenhouse phenomenon is actually becoming apparent in the Arctic," said Josefino Comiso of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington DC. "The winter warming signal is finally coming out."

Perennial sea ice used to be fairly stable in the Arctic, with declines of about 1.5 percent to 2 percent per decade, Comiso said in a telephone news conference. But in 2005 and 2006, this perennial ice was 6 percent smaller than the average amount over the past 26 years.

Another NASA team based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used a satellite to calculate that Arctic perennial sea ice shrank by 14 percent between 2004 and 2005.

more

IMPEACH GEORGE BUSH AND SEND THEM ALL TO THE HAGUE WE HAVE WORK TO DO TO SAVE OUR PLANET

[Monkeyman]

1. Dam Dubba who you going to blame for this?

Its all the Democrats fault

[Lone_Star_Dem]

2. Nah, they don't even waste their "precious" time passing blame for this

They simply deny it exist. x(

[bdamomma]

13. nothing new from this ignore everything regime

[YankeyMCC]

4. Not blame - Credit

They'll think it's just another opportunity for finding new drilling locations. :puke:

[Parche]

3. arctic

This has all the markings of an Al-Kida plot...

[BattyDem]

5. I heard Brian Williams say ...

that scientists are not sure what the cause is. :eyes: (Did anyone else see that on the news tonight?)

[rodeodance]

6. which scientists would that be? the WH hired ones?

[hatrack]

7. Did he get that from his perky buddy, Katie Couric?

"Greenhouse gasses ROCK!!!!"

:puke:

[Wisconsin Larry]

18. Yes, I heard that as well and even worse, he added

that they were not sure whether is was due to greenhouse warming or not. By then I was screaming at my TV and wasn't hearing much else. After which I called NBC Nightly News and emailed mediamatters.org

Just checked in today to see if anyone else noticed. Guess my habit of tuning in the corporate nightly news will have to end. Can't watch CBS since KC signed on nor ABC after PT 9/11 and now NBC can't seem to bother with established scientific fact much like this administration.

[Pirate Smile]

20. He must have picked that up from listening to Rush.

Hopefully, Tom Brokaw goes after him since Tom did a Global Warming show on the Discovery Channel.

Brian needs to talk to Tom.

[lovuian]

8. And the Atlantic ocean's salinity is getting less

there goes the conveyor belt...

[DeepModem Mom]

9. NYT: NASA Scientists See New Signs of Global Warming

NASA Scientists See New Signs of Global Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: September 14, 2006

Scientists have long suspected that the recent melting of Arctic Ocean ice in the summer might be a result of heat-trapping gases building up in the atmosphere. But yesterday NASA scientists reported that higher temperatures and a retreat of the sea ice over the last two winters offered new evidence that the gases were influencing the region’s climate.

While the summer melting could be a result of a number of phenomena like the flow of warm water, the scientists said, the reduction of winter ice two seasons in a row is harder to explain without invoking the heat-trapping effects of gases like carbon dioxide.

Such gases block the escape of some heat radiating from the ocean or earth, like an insulating blanket, even in the depths of the dark Arctic winter, said Josefino C. Comiso, a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who uses satellites to study Earth’s frozen zones.

In the past two winters, the peak of sea ice growth in the Arctic has been 6 percent below the average peak since the satellite observations began, Dr. Comiso said. His findings are to be published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The observed winter changes occur after a string of years in which the amount of sea ice around the Arctic Ocean has steadily shrunk. Last year saw what some Arctic experts said was probably the most open water in the Arctic in a century, and the most since the satellite observations began in 1978....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/science/earth/14climate.html

[MidwestTransplant]

10. Can't believe Rove wasn't able to mark up this report before it was

made available to others.

[bhikkhu]

11. not to worry...

with our 3 or 4 trillion barrels of oil -

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2509908

- we can power up enough icemakers to put it all back.

[DoYouEverWonder]

12. 'Drastic' shrinkage in Arctic ice

14 September 2006

A Nasa satellite has documented startling changes in Arctic sea ice cover between 2004 and 2005.

The extent of "perennial" ice - thick ice which remains all year round - declined by 14%, losing an area the size of Pakistan or Turkey.

The last few decades have seen summer ice shrink by about 0.7% per year.

The drastic shrinkage may relate partly to unusual wind patterns found in 2005, though rising temperatures in the Arctic could also be a factor.

The research is reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the global average.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5344208.stm


Is it time to start building my ark yet?

[bdamomma]

14. this administration has got to go they are full blown assault mode.

they totally kissed off the Kyoto Protocol, what assholes they are.

[denverbill]

15. Where the hell is all the water going then?

I guess I figured that big of a melt off would flood the coastal cities. Maybe Artic melt doesn't do that, since the ice is floating on the oceans already, so it's kind of like an ice cube melting in a glass of water. But I would think the same amount of melting would be happen at the Antarctic and since that ice isn't all floating it would cause a significant rise in sea levels, and that just hasn't happened.

[rmgarrette64]

17. The Antarctic is much more complicated

You're right that Arctic ice melt will have negligable effects, as it is already floating in the water. The Antarctic could have much greater effect, but the melting there is much more complicated. One Antarctic sheet is experiencing dramatic melting, but that is one of the sheets that is also floating. The ice sheets on land mass appear to be gaining mass, rather than losing it, at least as observed by satellite measures (it's not an easy quantity to measure.) The real measure of that dispute is whether the observed height rise is due to ice or snow - how quickly does new snow compact into ice.

Weather is an incredibly complex problem, which makes separating causes exceedingly difficult. I have heard some on the right use the increase in Antarctic (and non-coastal Greenland) ice mass as a counterargument against global warming. That is a mistaken argument, though, for the same reason that we can't point solely to Arctic or coastal ice melt as proof of same. Because so much of weather is chaotic, we need to accumulate evidence over many different systems and points - no single data point will be proof of anything.

R. Garrett

[hogwyld]

16. * will try to blame those pesky Canadians

After all, it is their backyard. :sarcasm:

[Jcrowley]

19. At the breaking point

The web of life has been tampered with in some irreparable ways.

[donco6]

21. Arctic sea ice shrinking faster, NASA finds

A pair of new studies shows that winter sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk dramatically in the past two years and that perennial ice in particular is disappearing.

Two types of sea ice cover the Arctic Ocean: thick perennial ice that resists thaw year-round and thinner seasonal ice that melts during the summer and freezes again in the winter. Both types are experiencing decline, according to analyses of microwave satellite data.

Researchers led by Joey Comiso of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland found that the amount of ice covering the Arctic has declined by 6 percent over each of the last two winters, compared to a loss of merely 1.5 percent per decade since 1979.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14818649/

[Flying Dream Blues]

22. Uh, oh. How did this get past the censors?

I don't think Unca Dick is going to be very happy about this.

[donco6]

23. I dunno. I expect some heads to roll.

Or else the control is slipping a bit.

[leftchick]

24. We Have Ten Years.....

ten fucking years and a repuke run country with NO PLAN! Worse than no plan, we are on a track of surging greenhouse gases because we are using MORE FOSSIL FUELS!!!!!

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1603667.ece

Yesterday, Jim Hansen, the leading climatologist and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, issued a now-or-never warning to governments around the world, including his own, telling them they must take radical action to avert a planetary environmental catastrophe. He said it was no longer viable for nations to adopt a "business as usual" stance on fossil-fuel consumption.

"I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a decade, at the most," he said.

[PaulaFarrell]

25. Polar bears' hunting season threatened by break-up of ice sheet

The retreat of sea ice in the Arctic is forcing the world's wild polar bear population into an unnatural fast which threatens the species with extinction.

Scientists said yesterday that the earlier annual break-up of sea ice caused by climate change is cutting short the spring hunting season for the bears, which rely on floating banks of ice to reach their prey.

The disappearance of the sea ice in summer months is forcing hungry polar bear populations to spend longer on land, giving a false impression that numbers are increasing as they encroach on human settlements in search of food.

.....
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1603679.ece

[krispos42]

26. Glad I'm not an Eskimo right now...

Last thing I want to see is one of those bears looking at me through my bedroom window!