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This is what arises as the Arctic is melting much faster than the IPCC predicted in its report in 2007. ( I had blogged much about their findings during my first year of blogging here)
As Climate Progress notes : ” Far from being “alarmist,” predictions from climate scientists in many cases are proving to be more conservative than observed climate-induced impacts. “
So we thought the situation was horrible ? No problem, it is just turning even worse ! The fact we aren’t even really trying to avoid all this literally boggles my mind…
This is not surprising as I was blogging about it two months ago. To TreeHugger : ” After several months of reporting near-record or record monthly levels of Arctic sea ice melting, German researchers now report that a new yearly record low has been set.”
” The area covered by Arctic sea ice has declined to its lowest point since satellite measurements began in 1972. ” It’s also probably lower than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the researchers say. ”
” (…) One day before the German measurement was made, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that the average ice extent for August was 28% below the average for 1979-2000 “
I believe it is getting harder and harder for deniers to keep pretending climate change is a hoax (or a conspiracy…). Here are three articles that got my attention last week : First, Arctic Sea ice melt on track to set new record low in 2011.
The second was about the heat wave scorching the US Midwest. To CBS : ” Across the country, this month’s summer’s searing heat has tied or broken high temperature records nearly 900 times. “
But the most potent stuff I wrote on climate change was on the Huffington Post : “It’s hotter than it used to be; It’s not as hot as it’s going to be”. Isn’t it past high time to act ? It’s not as if we lacked options…
To the Daily Green “ there’s more ice in the Arctic than at any time in recent years.” To the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) specialists March was particularly cold in the Arctic. As they note on their website :
” Ice extent was above normal in the Bering Sea and Baltic Sea, but remained below normal over much of the Atlantic sector of the Arctic, including the Baffin Bay, and the Canadian Maritime Provinces seaboard.”
This shouldn’t deter our efforts in mitigating climate change as the threat is still all too real and as we still have to embrace a low carbon economy.
The UNEP and the World Glacier Monitoring Service published a report showing how glaciers all around the world are melting faster and faster, thus threatening the water supplies of hundred of millions of people.
The report then noted that “the average annual melting rate of glaciers doubled after the turn of the millennium.” This scary finding should trigger global action to prevent the worse from occurring.
To read out more on this interesting topic please check out the UNEP press release or download the full report in pdf format (26 Mb).
This is time for me to present my selection of the best pictures of the NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). As always, this month was packed with beautiful images. It was as always difficult to select just ten.
For the last post of the year (and of the decade) let’s have a look at what the NASA say about my favorite picture : ” Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, haunted skies over the island of Kvaløya, near Tromsø Norway on December 13. ”
I particularly like aurora borealis, a natural phenomenon that occurs generally during nights in the ionosphere of both poles regions. Continue »
This week no less than three news about the arctic hit my aggregator. First and foremost the WWF released a new report on how the melting of the pole could threaten no less than a quarter of the human population.
The second one is about Mr. Ban Ki-moon – the UN secretary general – who visited the polar ice rim to assess the melting and urge our elected representatives to seal the deal in Copenhagen.
Last but not least, a new research shows that Human activity and greenhouse gases emissiosn has stopped a 12,000 years cooling phase of this pole.
It has been a while I haven’t written anything on the Arctic. According to Bloomberg: “A Manhattan-sized chunk of ice may break away from a glacier in northwestern Greenland and fall into the sea within about two months.”
Furthermore, to Reuters a US governmental agency released hundreds of highly detailed pictures of the Arctic quickly after the National Academy of Sciences asked them to do so to help scientists study the impact of climate change.
These pictures will soon be available to the public and will be seen there. Don’t forget to watch the video available via the link above. It shows the warming of the Arctic since 1979.
As bad news came from Antarctica I thought it would be interesting to check out how the poles are warming. I wrote in December that Antarctica keeps on melting and it seems this phenomenon is aggravating.
As the BBC noted “Scientists say the collapse could mean the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of breaking away, and provides further evidence of rapid change in the region.”
The Arctic also warms significantly as recent studies carried out during the International Polar Year have shown. Both regions are warming more than any other. Continue »
The European Space Agency (ESA) reported a few days ago that new rifts have developed on the Wilkins Ice Shelf. This could lead to the melting of a lot of ice in Antarctica
Since it would take a melting of only five percent of the sixth continent for sea levels to rise by three meters, each sign of decreasing ice amounts there from has to be reported.
Even if these rifts won’t lead directly to such a phenomenon, they show a direct sign that something is wrong with our climate. Continue »
