Arctic ice shrinks to near-record low

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-arctic-ice-shrinkage,0,5148777.story

By Julie Cart, Los Angeles Times

5:44 p.m. CDT, September 15, 2011

A blistering summer melted Arctic sea ice to near-record lows, and scientists say two more weeks of high temperatures could bring ice coverage in the polar region to the lowest since satellite measurements were first taken in 1979.

That's the grim assessment released Thursday by the National Climatic Data Center, which also calculated that last month's global temperatures amounted to the eighth-warmest August on record. Federal forecasters predicted a return to La Nina conditions, bringing slightly drier and warmer weather to much of the country.

[BeFree]

1. The real problem lies in this

As the ice melts in the northern regions it loses the ability to ameliorate the sea temps and when the sea temps rise down around the Antarctic region and the land ice melts we're in for rapid additions to the sea levels. Maybe as rapid as a few days and in the amount enough to raise sea levels 10 meters in days.

Move away from the coasts. Far away and get ready for refugees.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. The Day After Tomorrow was not a documentary, despite what you seem to think

No, there is absolutely no way sea levels could rise '10 meters in days'. Whoever told you that hasn't the faintest idea what they're talking about.

Here's what might happen in a bad case, from James Hansen of NASA:

Sea level rise is now going up about 3.5 centimetres per decade. So that's more than double what it was 50 years ago. But it's still not disastrous; it's a problem, but it's not disastrous. But the potential is for a much larger sea level rise. If we get warming of two or three degrees Celsius, then I would expect that both West Antarctica and parts of Greenland would end up in the ocean, and the last time we had an ice sheet disintegrate, sea level went up at a rate of 5 metres in a century, or one metre every 20 years. That is a real disaster, and that's what we have to avoid.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1870955.htm

One metre every 20 years is a disaster, in that it means large areas of Bangladesh and other low-lying countries become uninhabitable within decades, and many large coastal cities will get huge problems; but your talk of 'a few days' has nothing to do with reality.