Polar Ice

[Evil Goblin]

From today's Torygraph:

 

 

The great Arctic ice scare melts away as Antarctic ice hits record highs

In September 2007, when the summer melt reduced Arctic ice to its lowest level since satellite records began in 1979, there were hysterical predictions that within five years, thanks to runaway global warming, Arctic summer ice would have vanished completely. When Nasa satellites showed last month that this year’s melt was about to break even that 2007 record, the same hysteria recurred.

All the usual suspects, from the BBC’s Roger Harrabin and The Guardian to Greenpeace and WWF, piled in to proclaim that the end was nigh. Prof Peter Wadhams, that tireless alarmist, intoned that “the final collapse… is now happening and will probably be complete by 2015/16”. But then, as the sea recently began to refreeze, Nasa itself put up a video showing how a severe cyclone in early August had “wreaked havoc on the ice cover”, pushing vast amounts of it into warmer waters further south where it melted. (Reuters headlined its report: “Nasa says Arctic cyclone played 'key role’ in record ice melt”.)

A Nasa surface temperature graph has long shown that the Arctic was considerably warmer in the late 1930s than it has ever been since. Furthermore, what the warmist scaremongers always forget to tell us is that polar ice at the other end of the world has been reaching record highs in recent years. Last week, Antarctica’s sea ice area was only just short of the greatest extent ever recorded at either pole.

A graph on the science blog Watts Up With That, charting the combined global sea ice area over the past 33 years, shows the overall extent having remained virtually constant ever since 1979. But isn’t the point about this warming that it is meant to be “global”?

 

And so the argument goes on.

[doc.fixit]

The climate change debate has created a thriving industry designed to remove as much money as possible from the sheep who believe the commentators without bothering to explore the situation more deeply.

Whilst it is fairly definite that the climate is always changing from extreme to extreme I don't think there is a concensus of opinion about its cause and therefore I sit happily on the fence until that situation arises, if it ever does.

[Chinahand]

Virtually constant? I think you need to look at the scale EG - it's between 1 and 2 million square kilometers lower. I totally agree there is a lot of noise in the figure, but to say there is no trend in that red line is disengenuous. More details here.

 

Here's a plot which expands the scale to see things more clearly:

 

Details Here.

But also please remember Ice dynamics are extremely complex with vastly different processes between the Arctic and the Antarctic - the Arctic is ocean almost entirely surrounded by land, the Antarctic land surrounded by ocean. That creates very different dynamics as climates change.

 

Most importantly you have to consider both sea AND land ice when talking about Antarctica - the evidence shows Antarctica is loosing Land ice mass as ice sheets calving into the sea accelerate more than snow fall builds up ice in the interior. Link

 

There is a lot of evidence Western Antarctica is heating and calving more ice into the Antarctic Ocean - the break up of ice shelves which are static ice structures holding the land ice back is serious and causing rapid changes in the Antarctic Ice cycle.

 

These sorts of issues are highly complex and not easily squeezed into political sloganeering but the changes in both the Arctic and Antarctic are both entirely consistent with the warming created by increased CO2.

 

There are quibbles, and nuances galore, and good science is all about looking at this, but the big picture is definitely of a warming world as CO2 builds.

[ballaughbiker]

Just mentioning in passing that submarines have surfaced at the North Pole on many occasions since the first time in about 1958.

[wrighty]

My difficulty with global warming is the link between man-made CO₂ and climate change. The earth has been through many cycles of climate change since long before we were around - in fact we're still technically in an ice-age. Why is the current, seemingly indisputable, global warming not just a natural event, rather than being Jeremy Clarkson's fault?

[Evil Goblin]

China - I am,like doc., firmly on the fence and do not know just what is to be beieved and what is not. Each side seems to stress those things which accord with its' beliefs whilst denigrating to opposition. I think much more data is required before anything but open-mindedness can be justified.

[Newty]

From what I understand, there is a direct correlation between accelerated change and industrialisation. The earth has been through changes but not so quickly. Even without scientific evidence which differs depending on the agenda, common sense must tell us that pumping dirty air into the atmosphere over a long period of time was never going to be a good idea. Common sense must also tell us that overpopulation would lead to scarce resources. It's happening now in front of us. But instead of the media taking the line that crop shortages mean that we must take more care of the environment, the headline reads how we will pay 15% more for our food which to me misses the point.

 

The human race is a plague and the planet must extract us.

[doc.fixit]

yup, I can't understand why the emphasis seems to be totally on CO2 when way back, probably in the sixties, I just don't re-call the exact year, the Norwegians were very concerned about methane release by animals. I understand that methane is many, many times more detrimental to the atmosphere than CO2.

 

Peat extraction and the un-freezing of the perma frost which releases methane, plus the gaseous expulsions from all animals is presenting a far worse scenario, as I understand it.

 

Just finished reading a current book about Iceland and it seems that they are totally unconcerned about CO2 emissions, (a car for EVERY driver apparently), as an example.

It seems to me that a lot of other countries, at the most, pay lip service to the concept of climate change unless they stand to make a load of profit out of it, plus, the band wagonners, the chattering classes and middle class intellectuals,who merely follow fashion in everything they do.

 

I truly am sorry if ya'all feel this is contentious but I feel it is equally contentious for anyone to be absolutely certain that man's excessive release of CO2 is the sole or main cause of global weather change.

 

Is it coincedence that the 1930's, mentioned by the Goblin, was also the time of massive flooding on the Isle of Man, (Glen Auldyn for instance was devastated) ?

[doc.fixit]

Whilst agreeing generally with Newty I suggest that there are many, many well recorded pre-industrial super severe weather events......So what caused them ?? and if one can explain them why can't that explanation apply to current events as well ??

[La_Dolce_Vita]

Natural events wouldn't happen so quickly, would they? And maybe it is simplistic but it would seem to correlate to the activities of people doing things which are known to do such things that could create a greenhouse effect.

[P.K.]

I was all for global warming until this summer. For me global warming simply meant more BBQ's - how good is that!

 

But it doesn't seem to have worked out like that....

[Newty]

This research is interesting for climate change sceptics. It's an excellent website for most things really.

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121001095903.htm

[Bombay Bad Boy]

Electric cars pose environmental threat

[Lisenchuk]

From Gizmag site:

A new development on compact solar voltaic generators that give 20 times output improvement.

http://www.gizmag.com/v3solar-spin-cell/24352/

[The Bastard]

Regardless of the mechanism by which it's happening, probably the best strategy is adjustment, rather than acts of taxation and self-sacrifice to make ourselves feel better whilst making no net long-term benefit to global CO2 levels.

 

Overpopulation is the elephant in the room, rather than industrialisation on its own. Whatever short-term measures are taken to mitigate climate change are likely to be dwarfed by the growth of global population, which is likely to hit 10 billion within a few decades, and the industrialisation of developing economies such as India, China and South America. In the past hundred years we've had billions of the earth's population living at a subsistence level, cooking food over the fire, but within a few decades a growing percentage will instead be driving BMW's to Starbucks, and their historically small contributions to climate change will soon overtake the largest.

 

Next time a green-wannabe hands you a flier about climate change, ask them how many kids they have, and the answer will tell you how much they've really understood the issue.

 

Unless there's another neo-black plague to knock off a few billion, whatever counter-measures are implemented are likely to be ineffective, since provisions for climate change are something that are worryingly high on Maslow's Heirarchy of needs. The newly-industrialised nations have other fundamental priorities before actualisation activities like worrying about climate change, and few of them are taking it seriously. It could be argued that by taking a policy of taxation and restriction in their ivory towers, all the "developed" nations are achieving is making themselves uncompetitive against the newly-developing economies, whilst climate change continues to happen regardless. We can't "fix" it with minor self-sacrifice, it will take something massive on a global scale.