Home » Posts tagged 'arctic sea ice'

Tag Archives: arctic sea ice

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Why the Arctic Sea Ice Matters to All Complex Life on the Planet

Why the Arctic Sea Ice Matters to All Complex Life on the Planet

“President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’”

Clearly we have lost the Arctic as one of our major planetary thermostats.

Myself, Beryl Sirmacek, John Doyle and Arctic Oceanographer Jim Massa discuss the unravelling in the Arctic and the cascading consequences of lost albedo and habitat for the Arctic fauna and flora both above and below the ice

I mentioned the possibility of the Great Barrier Reef having another bleaching event unfold late in January 2022; Great Barrier Reef could face another mass bleaching by end of January, forecast says

Guy McPherson and I interviewed Jim Massa on our radio show Nature Bats Last;
“Natalia and Igor have done an enormous amount of work studying the methane issue. They have covered a lot of area between the Russian side of the arctic ocean as well as Siberia itself examining what is happening to not only the ESAS and Laptev but the permafrost in the tundra itself.

Those who are quick to dismiss their work, say they are being hyperbolic about the methane time bomb are really missing the forest for the trees. If they wish to debate their estimated levels, okay, have that debate. That’s a legitimate scientific debate. But to be dismissive of the threat posed by methane is imo a grave error in judgment.” Jim Massa We discussed the threat of methane in the ESAS and the work of Dr Natalia Shakova and Igor Semiletov Current rates and mechanisms of subsea permafrost degradation in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf

Science Talk with Jim Massa on Nature Bats Last
Beryl brilliantly mocked the delinquent corporate construct the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change..

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ice free Arctic could occur this year, warns expert

Ice free Arctic could occur this year, warns expert

The last time the Arctic was ice-free was 100,000 years ago. © Svebor Kranjc
Sea ice in the Arctic could be a thing of the past, a leading scientist has warned. For the first time in 100,000 years the chilling landscape known for its snow-capped mountains and polar bears may be without its sea ice either this year or the next.

Ocean Physics Professor Peter Wadhams from Cambridge University based his prediction on projected data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center showing that on 1 June this year there were estimated to be 11.1 million square kilometers of sea ice. This is below the average from the past 30 years of 12.7 million square kilometers, a difference of an area roughly the same size as the UK.


Arctic sea ice reading (red) shows 1 June well below the average (source NSICD)

Bill McKibben: The Planet’s Future Depends On Distributed Systems

Bill McKibben: The Planet’s Future Depends On Distributed Systems

One of the best ways to address climate change

To environmental activist Bill McKibben, it’s all about math. The planet has warmed 1 degree Celsius over the past few decades and is on track to rise another 4 to 5 before the end of the century. An increase of this magnitude is simply too much for the ecosystems we depend on to adapt to that quickly.

Much of the observed warming is due to the fossil hydrocarbons humans burn for energy and industry. McKibben predicts, whether by foresight or necessity, new sustainable energy and agricultural systems will emerge that will drastically reduce the greenhouse impact our modern lifestyle is having on the planet. These will be revolutionary not just for their “greenness”, but also because they will be distributed — disrupting the monolithic control of the current large energy and food producers:

In the late 80’s when I wrote the first book about all of this, we knew trouble was coming. The basic science is not that difficult: with its molecular structure, more CO2 is gong to trap heet that would otherwise radiate back out to space. What we didn’t know was how fast that trouble was coming or really on what scale.

Unfortunately, in the quarter century since, what we’ve learned is that this is happening harder and faster than we would of thought. 25 years ago, no scientist would have thought that at this point we would have melted most of the summer sea ice in the Arctic — they would have said that’s still 50 or 75 years off. No one would have even bothered to really measuring the PH of the oceans, because we didn’t think we could substantially alter something that vast. Certainly, no one would have worried that, as we learned about a year ago, the West Larsen Antarctic ice sheet seems now to be fundamentally destabilized and beginning its slide into the southern ocean. And I think no one would of guessed the degree to which we’ve seen perturbations of the hydrological cycle, the way that water moves around the planet.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress