In the Arctic Ocean as elsewhere, the full, destructive power of global warming appears unmistakable. Regional sea ice is retreating fast, threatening to raise global sea levels,
Ice floats, remember?
In the Arctic Ocean as elsewhere, the full, destructive power of global warming appears unmistakable. Regional sea ice is retreating fast, threatening to raise global sea levels,
Ice floats, remember?
Antartica is the place to watch not the Arctic.
Epic fail. Colossal geek and major skeptic that I am, I did this for a Year 8 science fair project, also demonstrating that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide stimulated plant growth…
¬_¬ yeah
Can’t help but wonder if these journalists ever read their own papers.
There’s been an ongoing story last couple of weeks about Russian icebreakers trying desperately to extricate shipping from ice packs off the Russian coast. The sea’s frozen to the bottom there for the first time in years.
Ice retreat => lower albedo => more solar absorbed => more warming => rising sea levels.
You’ve not heard of the ice-albedo feedback? Shame on you.
Of course, exactly how much they rise by is another matter. You’d need to ask a climate model.
Tim: you make an excellent point. I’d add that Roger Howard needs to tell the Russians that the Arctic sea ice is “retreating fast”. Perhaps then they wouldn’t have spent so much time and expense doing the incredible things they’ve been doing in the Okhotsk Sea over the last few weeks. Not that you’ve read about that in the D Telegraph.
It seems unlikely to me that nature would contain such a positive feedback mechanism like ice-albedo feedback. From my days? doing pole-zero diagrams in control engineering classes, it appeared that unstable systems tend not to exist in nature for prolonged periods.
PS. I’m not a troll. I have a healthy skepticism of both AGW and AGW-skeptics. I’m genuinely interested to hear or be pointed in the direction of a video that explains this anomaly of nature. (if it is an anomaly?)
It doesn’t work as simply as you might expect because there is daily, seasonal and interannual variation. There is a feedback, but it doesn’t immeadiately runaway to either rail.
So you could look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-albedo_feedback, which isn’t very exciting, it just says the obvious. But rather less obvious is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback#In_climatology (which I wrote)