Ending Its Summer Melt, Arctic Sea Ice Sets a New Low That Leads to Warnings

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by tulianr, Sep 22, 2012.


  1. tulianr

    tulianr Don Quixote de la Monkey

    Excerpts:
    The drastic melting of Arctic sea ice has finally ended for the year, scientists announced Wednesday, but not before demolishing the previous record — and setting off new warnings about the rapid pace of change in the region.
    ………
    “The Arctic is the earth’s air-conditioner,” said Walt Meier, a research scientist at the snow and ice center, an agency sponsored by the government. “We’re losing that. It’s not just that polar bears might go extinct, or that native communities might have to adapt, which we’re already seeing — there are larger climate effects.”
    ……..
    Scientists consider the rapid warming of the region to be a consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases, and they see the melting as an early warning of big changes to come in the rest of the world.

    Some of them also think the collapse of Arctic sea ice has already started to alter atmospheric patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, contributing to greater extremes of weather in the United States and other countries, but that case is not considered proven.

    The sea ice is declining much faster than had been predicted in the last big United Nations report on the state of the climate, published in 2007. The most sophisticated computer analyses for that report suggested that the ice would not disappear before the middle of this century, if then.

    Now, some scientists think the Arctic Ocean could be largely free of summer ice as soon as 2020. But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions. To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil.
    …….
    At one point this summer, surface melt was occurring across 97 percent of the Greenland ice sheet, a development not seen before in the era of satellite measurements, although geological research suggests that it has happened in the past.

    The sea is now rising at a rate of about a foot per century, but scientists like Dr. Hansen expect this rate to increase as the planet warms, putting coastal settlements at risk.
    ……

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/s....html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120920
     
  2. Seawolf1090

    Seawolf1090 Retired Curmudgeonly IT Monkey Founding Member

    So, soon northern Europe will having a longer growing season, and will be able to grow their own grapes for wine..... as they did centuries ago long before the spectre of 'man caused global warming' was dreamed up by the globalists to con us into paying illegal taxes to finance the Third World. What is happening has happened many times before. "Adapt or die!"
     
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  3. tulianr

    tulianr Don Quixote de la Monkey

    The opposite possibility is also being bounced about, along the lines of something which appears to have happened eight to nine thousand years ago - fresh water from a melting glacier in Canada flooded out into the Atlantic and diverted the gulf stream, turning much of Europe into a freezer. We've had massive climate change going on for at least 780,000 years, after a dramatic magnetic pole reversal. The Antarctic used to be tropical, and the Sahara Desert used to be grasslands, dotted with many shallow lakes. This is just the first shift that we've been around to see.

    The only constant in our world is change. I agree, adapt or die.
     
  4. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    Isn't that tropical-arctic climate change due to plate tectonics, not axis movement? The magnetic poles are always moving faster or slower, but moving. The spin axis precesses, but I haven't seen anything indicating that it has shifted out of the precession mode.
     
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  5. tulianr

    tulianr Don Quixote de la Monkey

    From what I read just recently, some believe that there is a connection between plate movement and the movement of the poles. I'll see if I can dig up the article I was looking at.
     
  6. tulianr

    tulianr Don Quixote de la Monkey

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111021084539.htm

    Plate Tectonics May Control Reversals in Earth's Magnetic Field

    ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2011) — Earth's magnetic field has reversed many times at an irregular rate throughout its history. Long periods without reversal have been interspersed with eras of frequent reversals. What is the reason for these reversals and their irregularity? Researchers from CNRS and the Institut de Physique du Globe(*) have shed new light on the issue by demonstrating that, over the last 300 million years, reversal frequency has depended on the distribution of tectonic plates on the surface of the globe. This result does not imply that terrestrial plates themselves trigger the switch over of the magnetic field. Instead, it establishes that although the reversal phenomenon takes place, in fine, within Earth's liquid core, it is nevertheless sensitive to what happens outside the core and more specifically in Earth's mantle.

    This work is published on 16 October 2011 in Geophysical Research Letters.
    Earth's magnetic field is produced by the flow of liquid iron within its core, three thousand kilometers below our feet. What made researchers think of a link between plate tectonics and the magnetic field? The discovery that convective liquid iron flows play a role in magnetic reversals: experiments and modeling work carried out over the last five years have in fact shown that a reversal occurs when the movements of molten metal are no longer symmetric with respect to the equatorial plane. This "symmetry breaking" could take place progressively, starting in an area located at the core-mantle boundary (the mantle separates Earth's liquid core from its crust), before spreading to the whole core (made of molten iron).

    Extending this research, the authors of the article asked themselves whether some trace of initial symmetry breakings behind the geomagnetic reversals that have marked Earth's history, could be found in the only records of large-scale geological shifts in our possession, in other words the movements of continents (or plate tectonics). Some 200 million years ago, Pangaea, the name given to the supercontinent that encompassed almost all of Earth's land masses, began to break up into a multitude of smaller pieces that have shaped Earth as we know it today. By assessing the surface area of continents situated in the Northern hemisphere and those in the Southern hemisphere, the researchers were able to calculate a degree of asymmetry (with respect to the equator) in the distribution of the continents during that period.

    In conclusion, the degree of asymmetry has varied at the same rhythm as the magnetic reversal rate (number of reversals per million years). The two curves have evolved in parallel to such an extent that they can almost be superimposed. In other words, the further the centre of gravity of the continents moved away from the equator, the faster the rate of reversals (up to eight per million years for a maximum degree of asymmetry).

    What does this suggest about the mechanism behind geomagnetic reversals? The scientists envisage two scenarios. In the first, terrestrial plates could be directly responsible for variations in the frequency of reversals: after plunging into Earth's crust at subduction zones, the plates could descend until they reach the core, where they could modify the flow of iron. In the second, the movements of the plates may only reflect the mixing of the material taking place in the mantle and particularly at its base. In both cases, the movements of rocks outside the core would cause flow asymmetry in the liquid core and determine reversal frequency.
     
  7. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    I don't doubt that the magnetic poles can be influenced by land mass. The rotational axis is my question.
     
  8. tulianr

    tulianr Don Quixote de la Monkey

    Sorry, I wasn't talking about climate change as it relates to rotational axis. I missed your point. I was reading one thing, and thinking another. I was talking about regional climate change influenced by things such as the ice sheet melt offs, wondering if these melt offs are not the end result, but only the beginning.
     
  9. ghrit

    ghrit Bad company Administrator Founding Member

    No troubles, I do that all the time.
     
  10. tacmotusn

    tacmotusn RIP 1/13/21

    Hog wash !!! Global warming my fat butt. Talk about biased news.
    .
    As climatologists worry about the effects of global warming, Antarctica has quietly set a new record for the greatest sea ice extent ever measured at either pole, according to various sources.

    “NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Center) seems disinterested in their own data, choosing instead to write stories about Penguins being threatened by declining Antarctic sea ice,” states the web site Real Science. “If current trends continue, the earth will be completely covered with ice much faster than the climate models predicted.”

    “Anyone wonder why NOAA isn’t making a fuss about this?” adds the website Sunshine Hours.

    Steve Goreham, executive director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania” argued that the finding appears to challenge the theory of climatism, or a belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying earth’s climate.

    “It’s interesting that climate scientists are so alarmed by declining Arctic ice. The Arctic Icecap is only 1 to 2 percent of Earth’s ice, while the elephant, the Antarctic Icecap, contains about 90 percent of Earth’s ice,” he wrote on the website phillyBurbs.com.

    “The climate models underestimated the decline in Arctic ice, but they are confounded by the growth in Antarctic ice," he explained.


    Read more on Newsmax.com: Record Antarctica Ice Contradicts Global Warming Trend
     
  11. tulianr

    tulianr Don Quixote de la Monkey

    Yeah, I'm certainly not sold on man-made climate change; but we really can't deny that climate change does occur, and is occurring. It has been occurring though since the dawn of time, and I think it is an example of man's hubris to think that we can affect the earth to the degree that we can either cause or stop a naturally occurring phenomenon. God we are not.
     
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  12. Quigley_Sharps

    Quigley_Sharps The Badministrator Administrator Founding Member

    Yup
    I always point to Greenland.
    Why do you suppose they named Greenland like they did when its covered in ice and snow year around ?
    Read up on it.is what I tell the climate Algore wanna be's lol


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
     
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  13. tacmotusn

    tacmotusn RIP 1/13/21

    Man can and does harm mother nature. Willful polution merely for profit is wrong. Putting the snail darter ahead of the needs of man though can be overkill and stupid. There has to be a common sense balance. Various natural cycles come and go. The hand of man has little or no control or significant input into it. It has been that way for eons and will continue to do so. Other species have been wiped out by some of these more drastic uncontrolable changes. Man had no hand in that either. When our species time comes to go we may or not be the cause. Huge dirty Nuclear weapons or manmade super biological weapons may speed our downfall, but driving an old oil smoking junker or having a non epa approved woodstove is not going to be the cause of our downfall. jmho
     
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