Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Climate Change Forum Aircraft Document Decline Of Arctic Ice Cover

Central Europe is not the only place where the past, warm winter has caused record temperatures. Unusually mild temperatures also prevented ice formation in the Arctic, specifically in the region around Spitsbergen. This is the conclusion drawn by scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). Both institutes are members of the Helmholtz Association of German research centres. They aim to span the Helmholtz-network to observe environmental changes. Measurement activities of the recent expedition were part of the project ICESAR, and accomplished in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA). For the complete article Click Here .

OTOH- Arctic sea ice coverage is known to be cyclic. Every 80 yrs the ice remains solid in the "NW Passage" all summer for a year or three, then 40 years later is remains ice free thru the winter. This fact was brought out in the recent History Channel program about that British expedition that got trapped around 1840.

We are in an interglacial period, so it would not be surprising to find "evidence" that the planet's permanent ice stores are diminishing. But, you don't need to make the bar room continually warmer to get the ice in your highball to melt, so that evidence doesn't necessarily imply warming is accelerating.

The avaerage summer temps at the poles is in the range of -20degF, so how does raising the world's temps by 1 or 2deg cause ice to melt there? If it is melting, it would have to be due to direct absorption of more radiant energy from the Sun, or due to warming ocean temps. We do have to account for increased surface soot and dust from Man's activities, volcanos and forest fires.

OTOH- how do you explain the fact that the planet's permanent ice stores seem to be in a stable dynamic equilibrium over the past several millenia? (gotta go to work now; I'll get you the references for that statement shortly)

I would suggest that we've peaked in our interglacial warming and are about to (in terms of geological time) get cooler again.

Are you old enough to remember the "New Ice Age" predictions of the 70s?

docT wrote:
"Arctic sea ice coverage is known to be cyclic."

And by stating this you want us to think that this information is somehow beyond the consideration of PhD climatologists?

Wow!

There are many papers in the literature confirming the dynamic status of polar ice. Some reports show it's increasing over some period of time, some show it's decreasing over some period of time.

"Publish or perish" results in much redundancy in the literature, and it is often necessary to edit data or conclusions in such a way that some crucial "problem" can be identified in order to ensure further research grants.

My point is that this paper just fits into the expected pattern, so it tells us nothing new.

Polar Bears are in jeopardy. That's something new. My Dad lives near Vancouver, BC, he's 80 years old. He doesn;t use a Computer, but he does clip things out of the paper that he thinks I'd be interested in. Last year the Vancouver Sun ran an article that he sent down here to me. Polar Bears, it seems, are running out of Ice Floes on which to hunt from. It predicted that by 2050, the only Polar Bears remaining alive would be in zoos.

But, of course, Global Warming is all a bunch of Hogwash dreamed up by a bunch of Tree-Hugging Liberals who collect Welfare for a living. Right doc?