Heresy Snowboarding

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From the very excellent 2 year study International Polar Year we have this report on Arctic sea ice melt.

Why does this matter? More heat = less ice = more heat….you get the drift. Our planet is warming up. MY SNOW SEASONS ARE UNDER THREAT, and this does not make me happy, dammit.

They summarised:

Our main conclusions so far indicate that there is a very low probability that Arctic sea ice will ever recover. As predicted by all IPCC models, Arctic sea ice is more likely to disappear in summer in the near future. However it seems like this is going to happen much sooner than models predicted, as pointed out by recent observations and data reanalysis undertaken during IPY and the Damocles Integrated Project. The entire Arctic system is evolving to a new super interglacial stage seasonally ice free, and this will have profound consequences for all the elements of the Arctic cryosphere, marine and terrestrial ecosystems and human activities. Both the atmosphere and the ocean circulation and stratification (ventilation) will also be affected.

Continuing:

Unprecedented events have been reported during the past 20 years in the Arctic Ocean, mostly related to the Arctic sea ice summer minimum extent that retreated in September 2007, far beyond previous extreme minimum records. This is the first clear evidence of a phenomenon of importance on a planetary scale, forced by global warming, mainly caused initially by an Earth energy imbalance due to greenhouse gas concentrations increasing in the atmosphere.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a nice wrap up once again.

The NSIDC has been warning about this in an article which is REALLY worth the read.

Reteurs had this report in Aug 2008, with the NSIDC saying:

“No matter where we stand at the end of the melt season it’s just reinforcing this notion that Arctic ice is in its death spiral,” said Mark Serreze, a scientist at the center. The Arctic could be free of summer ice by 2030, Serreze said by telephone.

ClimateProgress summarises the NSIDC article here and here which detail Joe’s thoughts as well as the outcomes of this warming.

As Mark Serreze of the NSIDC says:

Even our early climate-change models developed in the late 1970s told us that the Arctic would suffer most from the surface warming that came with adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and that this would be intimately tied to the shrinking of its sea ice cover.

This is called Arctic amplification and when we look at our climate records, that is exactly what we see: the climate warming, with the strongest rises in temperature in the Arctic, and those rises linked to the loss of sea ice cover – just as projected 30 years ago.

We view the emerging Arctic amplification recorded in this study as but a harbinger of a more pronounced signal that will appear in the near future, with impacts that may extend well beyond the Arctic Ocean.

And now we have Arctic shipping through the usually ice-bound North West passage opening up.

The IPY project can be summarised:

IPY, organized through the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), is actually the fourth polar year, following those in 1882-3, 1932-3, and 1957-8. In order to have full and equal coverage of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, IPY 2007-8 covers two full annual cycles from March 2007 to March 2009 and will involve over 200 projects, with thousands of scientists from over 60 nations examining a wide range of physical, biological and social research topics. It is also an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate, follow, and get involved with, cutting edge science in real-time.

Basically, lots of scientists, and lots of projects to study the Arctic and Antarctic.

Similar Posts:

• The melting continues and Wilkins’ bridge collapses
• Study finds rapid polar ice melt
• The world is melting, faster
• Glacier NP to be glacier free 2020
• The Siberian Tundra melt – why this matters to you