Arctic ice Cap Melt Straight through to create first naval passage for the first time

[spotaneagle]

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosph....color.000.png

http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/...&sd=19&sy=2008

this is one reason why fuel economy is so important any one care to have a good global warming discussion

[GasSavers_Erik]

Cool site- I like the way you can pick which day to look at.

[spotaneagle]

hehehe this is why i hypermile

[bowtieguy]

it has been discussed @ length to no useful end here. the bottom line is that politics and money influence and dictate any data proving or disproving the degree of mankind's affect on climate change.

my view is that we should focus on pollution and conservation while not promoting industry destroying legislation until there's a level global playing field. best of luck trying to get china and india to submit to a theory that would adversely affect their growth and economic stability.

[Jetta90GL]

They forgot to air brush out the whole to middle earth.

[R.I.D.E.]

Compare April 30, 1979 to April 30, 2008.

regards
gary

[GasSavers_Erik]

Good find Gary. That comparison looks like a "tie" to me.

A little more ice in 2008 than 1979 between Alaska and Russia, and a little less ice north of Norway and SW of Kamchatka (sp?) than in 1979.

I am ignoring the white/gray snowcover since the page says that snowcover data is only displayed for more recent dates.

[1993CivicVX]

Amazing what difference 7 years makes....

http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/...&sd=20&sy=2008

[GasSavers_RoadWarrior]

I thought it had iced over completely again by March this year, and that they were attributing last years major breakup to wind conditions rather than temperatures.

I believe in conserving resources and eliminating pollutants like NOx and sulphur dioxide, to some extent reducing CO2 emissions reduces these very harmful pollutants. I'm scientifically trained, and the closer I look at anthropogenic warming "data" the more it smells of fudgery and agenda driven hype. There's error margins in a lot of the data, where you could draw a graph with twice as steep a negative slope as the positive slope that is taken as gospel and still be in the range of the errors. As an undergraduate I had an experimental assignment where the equipment was a little on the old and glitchy side and got relative errors about half as big as those, I plotted the data with the error bars, and had room to draw a sine wave, hyperbola or negative or positive gradient straight lines between them... I pointed this out in the conclusion and got graded well for that, but had the comment "More care needed with experimental technique!" ... maybe I should just have drawn a sine wave in there and sent it to Nature as proof positive of an unsuspected relationship...

Now this smacks of ad hominem, but it was also my observation that all the environmental sciences candidates in both schools I attended, were more similar to the arts students, than they were to the Biologists, Chemists and Physicists... very apt to slip into rhetoric to discuss a point rather than get into data or equations. This should be borne in mind, because although the journals they publish in are "peer reviewed" their "peers" in this case are not Biologists, Chemists, or Physicists, but fellow Environmental Scientists. Those that go into the discipline from another area, tend not to get into anything as imprecise as global scale measurements and generalities, but work on narrower relative microscale environmental problems... and will tend to be shouted down with the "What would you know if my global climate theories are hogwash, you only work on thunderstorms/desertification/oceanography."

It's a bit like the conflict between Biologists and Psychiatrists in the understanding of the brain, if Biologists assert that something "just doesn't work like that" the Psychiatrists get upset but 25 years later they'll happily be prescribing the drug that followed on from that insight.

[R.I.D.E.]

Don't think I could ever be classified as a global climatologist.

I live in an area where the land is very very close to sea level. I remember reading a long time ago that if all the polar ice melted, sea levels would rise 135 feet.

My brothers house is so close to sea level that a good northeaster makes it an island. Behind his house is marsh grass for probably a half a mile. The house was built in 1939, and was raised after a cat 1 storm put 2,5 feet of water in his living room.

A few years back 4 northeasters hit in rapid succession and took out a peninsula, leaving an island. The same peninsula my senior high school class use to escape police scrutiny for a party in June 1968, now is 5 feet deep in water. It was washed out in the northeasters, and a tidal bore I used to surf no longer exists.

In 1933 a storm hit here and did major damage when it stalled for a couple of days off the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and piled tidal surges up one after the other. The sea level is supposed to have risen 1.3 feet since 1933, but I would think those claims are difficult to prove, just like the claim of how high the sea level would increase with the total disappearance of the polar ice caps.

What I do know for sure is the way some proponents would like me to believe that they are absolutely correct in every prediction they make, and that I am some kind of moron if I do not accept their conclusion without question.

Considering some of our US governments history in future predictions, only a programmed mannequin would believe anything they said completely. I guess that is what they are working on now, trying to reprogram me into a blind follower of their agenda.

I do believe the CO levels in the atmosphere are rising, but I also remember living in the Florida Keys in the early 1980's when it got so cold there were concerns about the coral reefs dying as ocean water temperatures dropped below 60 degrees. That is the opposite of the current concerns.

I also remember reading about the mini ice age that "ended' in the late 1800's, so maybe global warming is part of a combination of cyclical events that are more natural than human creations. Krakatoa and Tambora were cataclysmic volcanic events that affected global temperatures and actually cooled the average earth temperatures for periods of time.

When you focus on a microscopic period of the earths history and declare a future catastrophe, I can only see the fact that you may be using to short of a sampling.

I do believe that we should make real efforts to reverse the CO2 emissions and I know it is possible without creating a world wide economic downturn. We need to carefully examine our history to rediscover the ways our ancestors captured energy and made it work for them naturally, as well as concentrate on truly carbon free sources, with investments that provide a real return in future energy independence. I also believe that we should pragmatically mitigate the dependence on oil for energy, by using it in a way that recognizes that it is a finite resource with dangerous consequences from unintelligent use.

I do not believe that doing that is within the intelligence capabilities of govt. I do believe that they should make decisions that would penalize excessive pollution sources, but the funds collected by such taxation should go directly towards resolving the problem.

Micromanaging vehicle emissions without regard to the fact that vehicle efficiency suffers as a consequence of a single tail wagging the dog regulation is stupidity at its worst.

To much special interest pocket lining greedy politicos with no long term agenda that leaves a better place for the generations to come.

regards
gary