August 11, 2008
August 19, 2008
For the second year in a row the fabled Northwest Passage through the wide and deep water Parry Channel is ice free. The Parry Channel route is much farther north than the route taken with much difficulty by Amundsen in 1903 (see accompanying text at bottom of Arctic Sea Ice News page.
Anyone can follow the day-by-day changes in Arctic ice, and compare them to the satellite record back to 1979 at Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis.
7 comments:
Sue,
Thanks for posting this. I've followed global warming science since I was a high school student. In college, I had a favorite professor who taught me a great deal about the evolution of climate modeling and the advances and controversies associated with temperature proxies. However, having earned my first degree in applied geography and having spent most of my career in remote sensing, ice has long been the most compelling evidence of climate change to me.
We can argue until we're blue in the face about temperature proxies, statistical methods, algorithms, and peer review. But, we can look at a series of aerial and satellite images depicting glaciers and sea ice and see much of that ice shrinking. Much of that ice is receding rapidly. As someone who thinks spatially, this simply clicks with me.
I wonder how the older, on-land ice sheets/glaciers are changing. While a main concern for arctic ice recession is the flip in albedo, melting of some of the older ice sheets pose the added danger of also releasing upwards of another billion metric tons of CO2 that is trapped in gaseous pockets.
Unfortunately, much of these processes are already set in motion (or even set in stone) as continued high levels of GHG's are pumped into the 100+ year cycle.
It is interesting - when I first started blogging, much of the arguments I had were over whether AGW was real. While I still have those discussions from time to time and there are those that won't recognize if it even drowned their home, most debates have moved to what policies are needed to fix it.
The third act, in my opinion, is how we should deal with it. Adaptation measures are a must, but have yet to really make it into a national discussion.
coldest temps in five years recorded this year... colder than normal weather forcasted for this winter... i say bring on global warmng, i can use it!!!.....
Thanks for posting this. It is very interesting to see the actual aerials of this phenomenon in action. I still think Al Gore can suck it.
P.S. I hope I didn't offend any Al Gore fans.
Pat Jenkins, remember, weather is not climate.
Jez,
I'll bite. Why such venom for Gore?
PJ,
A while back, I wrote something that addresses your question in response to a discussion on the Conscious Earth. This post also addresses some other issues, but it gets at the idea of central tendency a little. If you don't care to read the whole thing, the response to the reader's first question is the most apropos to the concern you've posted here.
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