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Serial_Worrier wrote:The positive thing about COVID, inflation worries and Ukraine is nobody is talking about global warming/heating, climate crisis, whatever. We're focused on REAL problems.

mousepad wrote:

Serial_Worrier wrote:The positive thing about COVID, inflation worries and Ukraine is nobody is talking about global warming/heating, climate crisis, whatever. We're focused on REAL problems.

Are you sure? The West is absorbed in trying to figure out what a woman is. And absorbed in determining if 60 year old books are insulting to negros and must be rewritten immediately.

May 26, 2023
Since the late 1970s, satellites have been spying on Antarctica’s sea ice, watching the whiteness expand and contract with the seasons. But they’ve never seen the ice quite like it is right now. Or rather, the lack of it—levels have fallen to record lows.

“Every single day so far in 2023, we’ve observed sea ice that’s been below average,” says climate scientist Zachary Labe of Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who created the graph below. The dark-blue line shows the median area of sea ice between 1981 and 2010, a figure called the “extent” that researchers measure in millions of square kilometers. The red line below all the others is the extent so far in 2023.

“In fact,” Labe continues, “it broke its lowest point ever recorded in the satellite era. Which was striking, because last year, we also had broken that record.”...

Image Shows Antarctic Ice After Hottest Month Ever: 'Uncharted Territory'

New satellite images show just how little sea ice is left in the Antarctic after the hottest month on record.

The continent is currently in the depths of winter, but the images posted by NASA Earth Observatory show a drastically lower amount of sea ice than is normal for this time of year.

Data collected by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), one of NASA's Distributed Active Archive Centers, on August 7 shows that Antarctica's sea ice averaged 5.2 million square miles in July, which is the lowest ever observed since records began in 1978.

This follows July 2023—the hottest month globally that has ever been recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization. During this month, it was 0.72 C warmer than the 1991 to 2020 average for July.

"What we're seeing this year is uncharted territory in the satellite record," Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NSIDC, said in a statement to the NASA Earth Observatory.



This year, the sea ice is 579,000 square miles lower than the record low set in the same period in 2022.

Previous data released this year shows that the last couple of years have been unprecedented for the continent.

In July, data released on July 19 from the Climate Reanalyzer by the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute shows that there was almost 772,000 miles² less sea ice in Antarctica compared to the same point last year. Last year, there were about 9.4 million miles of sea ice cover on the continent.

Antarctica goes through seasonal ice trends. In normal years, the continent sees around 15 million square kilometers of ice accumulation before it melts, NASA reported. But in recent years the ice growth has been dramatically slowed.

A yellow ring around the map shows where the ice used to reach, in the years 1981 to 2010. During this time, the sea ice covered an area the size of Mexico, the NASA Observatory reported.

Antarctica has seen a sharp decline in its sea ice coverage since 2014.

Since then, several record lows have been recorded, including in 2017 as well as 2022 and 2023.

"Most of the months since 2016 have been well below average," Meier said in a statement.

Scientists are not sure what caused the sea ice extent to change so dramatically, but this could continue as the world continues to warm.

Climate change is believed to be the main driving force behind Antarctica's low ice coverage.

"Sea ice around the Antarctic has taken a nosedive in the last few years, plummeting faster than any other time since observations began," Ella Gilbert, a climate scientist and presenter previously told Newsweek. "It's still too early to say conclusively whether this is a blip in the record or part of an emerging trend, but we expect sea ice to decline in a warming Antarctic. Sea ice is sandwiched between a warming atmosphere and ocean, so is sensitive to changes from above and below, although it has previously proved difficult to predict because there are so many complex factors at play."

Antarctica's melting ice will have profound effects on the planet if this continues. It is contributing to global sea level increases, which is a major threat facing the world's cities. Scientists fear that if something to mitigate climate change is not done immediately, it could get out of hand.

"Ice sheets are contributing to sea level rise sooner, and more than anticipated," said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

That's because people have never seen the collapse of a huge ice sheet and therefore don't have good models of the effects, Rignot said.

theluckycountry wrote:Well that's not good news? Two record years back to back isn't supposed to happen. Perhaps next year will be back up, if it's not my sister better think of selling her house by the ocean. She's already concerned and watching events closely, as are many others no doubt. And I ask myself, what's all that low lying real estate worth when the levels begin to rise? Very little I assume.

"Ice sheets are contributing to sea level rise sooner, and more than anticipated," said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

That's because people have never seen the collapse of a huge ice sheet and therefore don't have good models of the effects, Rignot said.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... n-thought/

jawagord wrote:Except for when it happened in the 1960’s, conveniently before the period mentioned in the article.

[i]However, in August 1966 the maximum sea ice extent fell to 15.9x10 km ± 0.3x10 km . This is more than 1.5x10 km below the passive microwave record of 17.5x10 km set in September of 1986.

Anomalous Variability in Antarctic Sea Ice Extents
During the 1960s With the Use of Nimbus Data
David W. Gallaher, G. Garrett Campbell, and Walter N. Meier

...to search NASA archives for the original Nimbus tapes containing raw images and calibrations. Their first goal was to read and reprocess the data at a higher resolution, removing errors resulting from the limits of the original processing.

These tasks proved more challenging than expected, due to truncated data, missing algorithms, and other issues. But the result was a global image of the Arctic from Nimbus II, captured on September 23, 1966, in higher resolution than ever seen before from this type of data. This date falls around the time that Arctic sea ice would have reached its end-of-season minimum extent. The image demonstrates the possibility of reprocessing the entire available time series, supporting new scientific study of past conditions on Earth.

IV. ERROR ANALYSIS
The uncertainties in determining a sea ice extent from this
early data are primarily tied to the diffculty in distinguishing
homogeneous clouds from homogeneous ice. Fortunately, ice edges
generally appear different than cloud edges. additionally, clouds
tend to move faster than sea ice enabling edge detection
when utilizing multiple images of the same location. Another
diffculty in ice edge determination is the lack of independent
sources of sea ice edge data in the Antarctic during the 1960s...

But with today’s technology, Campbell simply worked with two undergraduate students to scan close to 40,000 frames, made sure the images had the right latitude and longitude, and stitched the photos together in his computer. With those images, Campbell produced the first satellite maps of the sea ice edge in 1964 and an estimate of September sea ice extent for both the Arctic and the Antarctic.

According to the data, September Antarctic sea ice extent measured about 19.7 million square kilometers. “That’s higher than any year observed from 1972 to 2012,” Meier said.

Tuike wrote:With enough emission cuts, Eastern Antarctica might be saved.

Tuike wrote:We can’t save the West Antarctic. So what now? -youtube
Latest data shows West Antarcica is doomed to melt. But how long it takes is not certain and co2 emission cuts might slow down the melt to postpone doom date. With enough emission cuts, Eastern Antarctica might be saved.

jawagord wrote:
Did you cry? It’s a definite maybe. I look for the unreported weasel words in the actual publication if it’s available and check for real studies to compare to someone’s model work...

https://news.agu.org/press-release/west ... t-ice-age/

Exxon’s Donations and Ties to American Geophysical Union Are Larger and Deeper Than Previously Recognized. Donations tied to Exxon have totaled more than $600,000 since 2001, and a former Exxon vice president sits on the AGU's board of directors. The board of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) sparked a protest among member scientists when it announced last month that it would keep accepting money from ExxonMobil amid new revelations the oil giant misled the public on climate science.

In December 2022, two scientists took to a stage and interrupted the start of a talk at an American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference, unfurling a banner urging their colleagues to embrace climate activism. The protest lasted just 32 seconds. As applause and cheers broke out in the audience, event officials pulled the banner from their hands. AGU expelled the scientists from the conference, removed their abstracts from the program, and opened an ethics investigation into their conduct and the AGU response.
Several thousand scientists signed a letter denouncing AGU’s handling of the protest. Now, leaders of AGU, the world’s largest society for earth and space scientists, have announced they will restore abstracts...