Arctic Sea Ice Coverage 'At Lowest Level For A Million Years', Says Researcher (PICTURES)

If storm activity does increas in both frequency and ferocity, Frankie will be in his glory.

What about the north west passage? I am pretty sure that wasn't a million years ago, earth time.

And antarctic ice is at it's highest level ever recorded.

Bizzare.

meanwhile... at the south pole..

My knowledge on this subject is minimal at best. With that said, haven't they only been able to measure this stuff for 20 or 30 years?

Contrary to what all global warming deniers think, Antarctica has actually been warming in recent years.
Below there's an explanation about why the ice cap has not stated to decrease yet.
South Pole ice will be sharply decaying very soon and chaos and totally unpredictable catastrophe waits for us when this starts to happen!

In fact, the oceans surrounding Antarctica have warmed faster than the global trend, and there has been accelerated melting of ocean-terminating Antarctic glaciers in recent years as a result of warmer waters eating away the glaciers. There is great concern among scientists about the stability of two glaciers in West Antarctica (the Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers) due the increase in ocean temperatures. These glaciers may suffer rapid retreats that will contribute significantly to global sea level rise.

Despite the warming going on in Antarctica, there has been a modest long-term increase in Antarctic sea ice in recent decades. So, how can more sea ice form on warmer ocean waters? As explained in an excellent article at skepticalscience.com, the reasons are complex. One reason is that the Southern Ocean consists of a layer of cold water near the surface and a layer of warmer water below. Water from the warmer layer rises up to the surface, melting sea ice. However, as air temperatures warm, the amount of rain and snowfall also increases. This freshens the surface waters, leading to a surface layer less dense than the saltier, warmer water below. The layers become more stratified and mix less. Less heat is transported upwards from the deeper, warmer layer. Hence less sea ice is melted (Zhang 2007). As the planet continues to warm, climate models predict that the growth in Antarctic sea ice will reverse, as the waters become too warm to support so much sea ice.

Let us know when it hits the "billion year record." A million is just a drop in the bucket, so to speak. And 1979 is, well, ridiculous.

Indeed.... "climate change with both extremes"... quick video here:

True, but they take deep core samples and are able to tell the history of the region from that.

I am still not going to pay a carbon tax EVER!

Most of it is bull shit......

They have found many times that most of what the reaserchers find is BS. So they can still get money....

Any time an "expert" makes a bold assertion that he's extrapolated from much less evidence than is available, you know that it's just an attempt to gain some attention and grab for publicity.

That statement: "This is the smallest minimum ice extent we've ever had, and not just in the satellite record, but probably in the last million years." would be ridiculously exagerrated if made by a simple lay person. It's even more agregious having been made by a supposed highly-educated professor.

The only thing that can truly be said is that "This is the smallest minimum ice extent we've ever had in the the satellite record." Beyond that, it's all opinion.

It's sea ice for crying out loud. If it's not there, you can't with any accuracy or amount of truth state what it was or wasn't at any point in the unrecorded past.

Professor Yackel sounds like he's wanting to branch out into the celebrity side of "science", where the real money is.

Now that is funny.

They have been studying the Arctic for a lot longer than 30 years.
Geez, don't they teach anything in school these days.

Last Edited by Madame X on 09/26/2012 10:34 AM

BULLSHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

how low were the sea ice levels when Greenland was being FARMED?

WE ARE ALREADY SEEING AN INCREASE IN STORM FREQUENCY AND INTENSITY.
So we can expect severe blizzards, ice storms, and extended power outages this coming winter. Also the gulf stream currents are messed up and Greenlands ice is melting faster than ever.
I remember a documentary a couple years back that warned us about this, called - An Inconvenient Truth.

drill baby drill

Million years?

:Bullshit33:

How would they even know that? They are full of shit.

The best data we have is from satellite since 1979 for fucks sake.

:Bullshit33:

No such thing.

Suuuure.... everything is a carbon taxes conspiracy!



We're affecting our climate, HUMAN ACTIVITY IS PARTLY RESPONSIBLE, continue denying, soon enough there will be nothing to be denied anymore.

These guys never heard of the Medieval Warming Period when they were farming in Greenland and the Vikings were sailing around the North Pole...

Soon, very soon...

This is nothing but carbon mongering.

I've noticed something in the last say 10 years and everything is the worst weather in 300 years and so on, hottest weather in so many years and it goes on and on.

How could you show that vikings navigated the North Pole by water?

The warming period is clearly noted in glacier core samples from Greenland. That is part of the reason we know it existed. Are you suggesting that a warming period in relatively upper layers of glaciers cleared the ice fields? Those expanses of ice don't form over a few hundred years...

With the arctic ice shrinking and the antarctic ice growing, isn't that going to cause some response in the earth's movement through space? It seems that any mental model I can construct of the gravitational pull between the earth and sun, moon, etc. must be perturbed.

Sorry if you've been down this street before, but am pretty new here and don't recall seeing anything.

This asymmetric build up of polar ice was at the heart of Charles Hapgood's theory of earth crustal displacement, but have no clue whether later studies have supported this. Independent ideas on the gravitational pulls would be a good starting point.

The good news is that soon enough there will be no taxes at all to be paid, since everything will fall apart and there will be no functioning government to collect them! The bad news is that the money saved by not paying any tax will be worthless. It will be necessary to load wheelbarrows with packs of money to go to the grocery.
All this stupid global warming deniers have the arrogant assumption that we can just go about our day to day lives, doing our day to day work, having our day to day fun... and humanity will eventually heal itself, no matter how bad the injuries sustained. Unfortunatelly they're plainly WRONG and things are going to get really really ugly in a not very distant future. So it begins!

Could the earth tiiilting as it relates to it's position to the sun.. more so than it already does over a 365 day cycle? Exposing parts to more sunlight... and other parts to less. Hence, less ice -- more ice.

NOT. There is a study showing a clear oscillation ( or seesaw ) between one pole gaining ice and the other losing it.

[link to tucsoncitizen.com]


Also the ,recent, low ice extent has uncovered an old eskimo settlement. Which of course could only have been there if the ice wasn't.

And the AC who said the antarctic is going to heat up?

[link to weather.unisys.com]

See the bottom of the big picture booboo? All below zero anomaly.
And if it did it would have nothing to do with .3% of the atmosphere increasing 3% ( .0003% of the atmosphere ) anthropogenically. OK?
?

Exactly what I was thinking.