We’re Meltinggg….
Sep 28th, 2005 at 1:14 pm by Susie
Get these bastards out before it’s too late:
The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for a fourth consecutive year, according to new data released by US scientists.
They say that this month sees the lowest extent of ice cover for more than a century. The Arctic climate varies naturally, but the researchers conclude that human-induced global warming is at least partially responsible. They warn the shrinkage could lead to even faster melting in coming years.
The Canadian climate researchers are much more alarmed, and they have the data to justify their position. Melting permafrost, rising sea levels, eroding beaches, and habitat changes are a few of the topics I discussed with one last summer. All of this makes their artic regions a much more problematic place for their citizens to live.
Never mind - it probably is too late. This article is somewhat milder (pun intended) than others I’ve seen. A lot of scientists think we may have passed the Critical Point (tipping point, whatever) beyond which there is no “fix”.
Not to say we shouldn’t do anything, but it should be in desperate hope rather than expectation of success.
It’s the summer sea ice..I haven’t seen anything regarding changes in the extent of winter ice.
So just how much did sea level increase due to the melt? And how high does the levee in NO have to be in order to prevent constant flooding?
The summer sea ice is the winter ice that’s still there in the summer. The extent of the winter ice might not change for a while, but the thickness obviously is.
Because the ice in the Arctic is already floating, the sea won’t rise when that ice melts. However, if this warming leads to the melting of the glaciers covering Greenland, most of today’s coastal cities will be flooded.
I do not know how much the Artic Ocean has risen, and how much of what I was told was the result of the land becoming unstable as the permafrost melts. My information on this is mostly from a conversation with friends of my niece - all of whom know each other through McGill University in Montreal. Their comments about what they are seeing were much more alarming than what we read, even in the environmental press. They talked about villages having to relocate most of a kilometer inland on what was evidently a very flat slope, beaches slumping into the Artic Ocean, lakes disappearing underground as the underlying permafrost melts, and other dramatic changes happening in very short time frames. Quantitatively, the change in sea level or the change in average temperature may seem small, but qualitatively the changes are significant.
It’s all part of the plan to increase the real estate value of Kansas.
No need to worry. These are withing the parameters of historical long-term natural cycles.
I think that the normal limits for mean global temperature range between minus 78 F and +187 F. As long as they don’t reach the freezing point of oxygen or the melting point of steel, then we’re OK.