I am among many with a specific sort of OCD - habitually fetching up the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado for the latest measure of Arctic sea ice extent. Sometimes I hunt further, to check estimates of the volume of the sea ice up there...
Category: Arctic Sea Ice
I am among many with a specific sort of OCD - habitually fetching up the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado for the latest measure of Arctic sea ice extent. Sometimes I hunt further, to check estimates of the volume of the sea ice up there. Those latter measures are scarier, but have bigger error bars. The maps of extent are from real data, from satellites, with only enough modeling to translate the percentage of grid squares that have ice on them into a sharp-edged map of the ice's expanse. They are easily read, whereas maps of ice thickness, however more disturbing, are messy things (The Polar Science Center at U. of Washington keeps such data).
Why bring this up? There is no objective news reason to round up media stories on the Arctic's climate markers rght now. But...
Hurray for the post that Faye Flam just filed for the tracker on polar ice and polar-opposite politics. It finely dissects the difference between the sort of thing that the AP's Seth Borenstein (and Mike Lemonick at Climate...
Hurray for the post that Faye Flam just filed for the tracker on polar ice and polar-opposite politics. It finely dissects the difference between the sort of thing that the AP's Seth Borenstein (and Mike Lemonick at Climate Central) writes about Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, and what the likes of Mark Morano puts up on the web on behalf of Senator James Inhofe. The senator, do we not all know, is fond of saying global warming is among the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated.
I had also, earlier today, read Seth's story. It pretty well sets straight why adding the sea ice of the Arctic to the sea ice of Antarctica is not a formula that negates global warming as fact. I was going to write a post, which comes up shortly, but did not know about Morano's contribution to this instance of political discourse on science until reading the Flam post. Of course, Morano is...
A salute, if not a 21-gun salute, to The Guardian and its enviro reporter John Vidal is in order. He's just back from moseying along the edge of the Arctic ice...
A salute, if not a 21-gun salute, to The Guardian and its enviro reporter John Vidal is in order. He's just back from moseying along the edge of the Arctic ice pack aboard an icebreaker as summer wanes and the re-freeeze season begins. The result is a solid series of reports on the ever-more not solid Arctic sea surface. Those aboard are telling him they they have had to go far north of the 20th century, mid-September norm to find anything but scraps of ice. But find it they do and, as the vessel moves slowly through a dense sea-fog with the temperature a few degrees below zero centigrade, the signs of new ice forming is all-around.
"From now until June, the Arctic sea ice will refreeze," he wrote in one dispatch last week. "First it will be glassy, thin, 'shuga', '...
On Friday, or a few posts down, we noted that the Arctic ice pack was and is headed for a remarkably small extent this year, the lowest since satellites started getting good looks at it 33 years ago. Some research institutes had already declared this a record low year and now the big kahuna in US polar ice...
On Friday, or a few posts down, we noted that the Arctic ice pack was and is headed for a remarkably small extent this year, the lowest since satellites started getting good looks at it 33 years ago. Some research institutes had already declared this a record low year and now the big kahuna in US polar ice studies, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, rang its bell. The new mark comes as the ice plot still carries a steep downward gradient and with a few weeks to go before the usual period when it bottoms out. Looks like it'll pass below 4 million square kilometers, something of a milestone if only for the dimension of it (ie, explicitly no miles in it).
A press conference underway at about the time I start writing this will spur plenty of stories. A few outlets got out of the gate a bit early, propelled by a press...
I was thinking of calling editors at the on line wing of the UK's Guardian stupid. But that is too harsh. I'll settle for carelessness behind this hed:
- Guardian Environment Network - Eric Steig (of RealClimate):...
I was thinking of calling editors at the on line wing of the UK's Guardian stupid. But that is too harsh. I'll settle for carelessness behind this hed:
- Guardian Environment Network - Eric Steig (of RealClimate): Is Antarctica's Warming Natural or Man-made? Antarctica is warming at one of its fastest rates in 2,000 years, shows a new paper in Nature, but it's still too early to call man-made climate change the 'smoking gun' ;
This is a little like a headline telling you that your favorite baseball pitcher is dead head to toe when all he has is a dead arm (that isn't dead dead, just weary, anyway). As even the shortest perusal of the actual story picked up from the RealClimate blog will reveal, the story is about the Antarctic ...
About a week ago a lively, well-reported article by Ed Struzik ran apparently simultaneously at the Calgary Herald and at Yale's e360 non-profit enviro news sites. He reported in vivid, anecdotal detail a remarkable series of recent sightings. Canadian biologists say they are seeing an upsurge in hybrid bears born of brown (aka grizzly) and polar bears, plus brown bears stalking game incuding seals at the high latitudes where the white bears are the norm but their big inland cousins had been exceedingly rare.
The swift vignettes of the animals are intriguing. Here is a short bio of...
Looks like...
Looks like Wynne Parry at LiveScience might have the same habit I do - maybe she looks in rather frequently on the mesmerizing day by day oscillations in the slope of a graph one finds at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder. Such federal outfits as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA pay for it while the University of Colorado runs it. This year's been weird. In late April the extent (not the volume, but the area) of Arctic ice reached a high for recent years - all the way up to the average for the years 1979-2000. I seem to recall a few bloggers of doubtful minds...
During the heat wave last month, the...
During the heat wave last month, the one that gripped most of North America and that, as one recalls dimly, lapped its hot breath into the UK as well, plenty of news outlets took note. They hardly could miss it. Records fell in droves. Now it's official - hottest March, ever, since before modern record keeping even started, and the overall first quarter was the warmest too.
Thus we have a big new round of reports on the extent of the heat. Reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provide a lot of new numbers. Also in the news is reporting of proximal as well as underlying reasons that might be behind it. The main. down-deep possibility is global warming. Not that anybody thinks...
Last week this site...
Last week this site posted on the amazing run of warm weather the central and eastern US enjoyed over the closing weeks of winter. Some said it was global warming. Some said can't be, because there's so much cold weather out there too. This week a duo of recent reports says the two responses are actually consistent with one another. One of the reports is from a prominent member of the American right-wing's list of devil (or is it merely socialist? Is that the same?) organizations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate...
Sometimes one gets behind on genuinely fascinating news with marginal...
Sometimes one gets behind on genuinely fascinating news with marginal for now, but potentially sizeable, importance. A week or so ago came a small splash about Atlantic and Pacific bowhead whales that traverse the Arctic coast of North America and Greenland. Researchers from Greenland, the University of Washington, and Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game tracked a few and found something surprising. In Biology Letters, pub. by the UK's Royal Society, they reported that in the summer of 2010 two male bowheads that had been affixed with radio tracking devices, and were from Atlantic and Pacific populations presumably isolated from one another in recent millenniums by unbroken Arctic Sea Ice, managed to follow the Northwest Passages from...
Those of us who have a compulsion...
Those of us who have a compulsion to check the National Snow and Ice Data Center's pages every day or three have suspected as much, and now Reuters brings almost-confirming word:
- Reuters - Gerard Wynne: Summer Arctic sea ice melt at or near record ; The Germans in Bremen say it is an all-time low. The US NSIDC in Boulder says tied for #1 or maybe #2 on the lowest-first scale. Either...
One supposes, if one is semi-deluded and of a conspiracy-vulnerable...
One supposes, if one is semi-deluded and of a conspiracy-vulnerable bent, the place to start on news that gov't researchers are tagging Alaskan walruses is to look at a reliably conservative news outlet. There one may find explanation from a reliably conservative, longtime exposer of collusion and confusion among scientists who are promoting what you intuitively suspect is fraudulent global warming.
- Canada Free Press - Steve Milloy: New global warming scare: Suicidal walrus stampedes ; Rationalists may find this mildly amusing, wholly ridiculous, and gnawingly depressing. Milloy does know how to compose punchy prose. For here we read...
The AP's...
The AP's Charles Hanley, credited as a special correspondent - which usually means freelancer given frequent jobs but in this case, I was just reminded, it means senior staffer (w/Pulitzer too) - has a classic piece of science reporting from an exotic locale. It is classic in that, like most such dispatches, it provides vivid detail on smart people with government grants working very very hard in harsh conditions. But it is not a report on a run of dramatic scientific results - but a snapshot of the process. Tax dollars at work on arcanely...
Here's something to get...
Here's something to get a broad spectrum of people with Arctic ice on their minds a reason to dance a little jig. Wherever one stands on climate change as a problem, from the likes of the Natural Resources Defense Council on the frantically worried side to the Heartland Institute that worries only about taxes and gov't regs but is smug on climate, this sounds good.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen reported Friday in Science that, from the evidence on and near Greenland where ice remains thick year around these days and for several millennia into the past, the region was largely ice free annually, for months at a time or longer, 5000 to 8000 years ago. That was during a stretch...
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