Chris Mooney, the environment and energy reporter for the Washington Post reports, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this’: Arctic sea ice hit a stunning new low in May:
The 2016 race downward in Arctic sea ice continued in May with a dramatic new record.
The average area of sea ice atop the Arctic Ocean last month was just 12 million square kilometers (4.63 million square miles), according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). That beats the prior May record (from 2004) by more than half a million square kilometers, and is well over a million square kilometers, or 500,000 square miles, below the average for the month.
Another way to put it is this: The Arctic Ocean this May had more than three Californias less sea ice cover than it did during an average May between 1981 and 2010. And it broke the prior record low for May by a region larger than California, although not quite as large as Texas.
This matters because 2016 could be marching toward a new record for the lowest amount of ice ever observed on top of the world at the height of melt season — September. The previous record September low was set in 2012. But here’s what the National Snow and Ice Data Center has to say about that:
Daily extents in May were also two to four weeks ahead of levels seen in 2012, which had the lowest September extent in the satellite record. The monthly average extent for May 2016 is more than one million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) below that observed in May 2012.
In other words, for Arctic sea ice, May 2016 was more like June 2012 — the record-breaking year. Going into the truly warm months of the year, then, the ice is in a uniquely weak state.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Mark Serreze, who directs the center. “It’s way below the previous record, very far below it, and we’re something like almost a month ahead of where we were in 2012.”
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The group also shared this NASA image, showing a highly broken-up field of ice in the Beaufort Sea above Canada, and a large gap of open water separating the ice from the coast:
This image taken on May 21 shows Arctic sea ice in the Beaufort Sea from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer sensor. (Land Atmosphere Near-Real Time Capability for EOS System, NASA/GSFC)
The May record was driven, naturally enough, by significant warmth — Arctic air temperatures were 4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit above average in the region, NSIDC said. Pockets of the Arctic had temperatures even more anomalously high than that.
Following an extremely warm winter for the Arctic, these temperatures suggest “that warmth has persisted through spring, and so we’re in a bad way right now,” Serreze said.
In 2016, Arctic sea ice has also experienced record low levels in January, February and April. In March, meanwhile, while the ice atop the Arctic Ocean was still growing rather than shrinking, it had the lowest peak extent yet observed in any winter since record-keeping began in 1979.
All of this has happened during a year that itself is blowing out old records for temperatures averaged across the globe.
And it matters so much because of the fear that we’ll see the warming of the Arctic continually feed upon itself — less sea ice, a darker ocean surface exposed to space, more heat absorbed, less sea ice … and so on, and so on.
Granted, Serreze says we still can’t be sure that 2016 will set an all-time-low sea ice record, besting 2012 — that still depends on summer weather.
“All we can say is that we are on a very bad footing,” he said. “However, this is also part and parcel of a longer trend … we’ve always known that the Arctic would be the place most sensitive to climate change, and that’s what we’re seeing.”
Think Progress adds, Arctic Sea Ice Plummets To Staggering Low In May, While CO2 Levels Hit Record High:
Climate models have always predicted that human-caused warming would be at least twice as fast in the Arctic as in the planet as a whole thanks to Arctic Amplification — a process that includes higher temperatures melting highly reflective white ice and snow, which is replaced by the dark blue sea or dark land, both of which absorb more solar energy than ice and lead to more melting.
We know the warming will continue for decades to come since atmospheric levels of heat-trapping CO2 are also setting records, according to NOAA. This year has seen a particularly big jump because the underlying trend of CO2 rise driven by the burning of fossil fuels generally gets a boost during El Niño years.
“Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years,” explains Dr. Pieter Tans, who leads NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “It’s explosive compared to natural processes.”
Humanity is creating an explosive change in the atmosphere, which is driving an explosive change in the Arctic. Unfortunately, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic — and the accelerated loss of Arctic sea ice drives more extreme weather in North America, while accelerating the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet and the defrosting of the permafrost, which contains more of carbon than the atmosphere currently does.
It is time humanity stops playing with matches!
There are multiple billions in the International Panel on Climate Change’s models. The models still aren’t valid and reliable. Yes, some scientists are making a killing on morons like you. Other science scams have lasted as long as 70 years. How long will the this one last?
Meanwhile, Exxon keeps delivering fuel to families that enable them to go to work, church and school for a measly profit of 6 cents a gallon.
You are on the side of the hucksters, carnival barkers and con artists.
Oh, Johnny John John, a few weeks ago, I mentioned that Exxon knew back in the 70’s that they were trashing the planet.
Your response was to call me a moron for believing Exxon scientists.
Yet the “facts” you cite to deny climate change are nearly always from Exxon funded studies.
So weird.
The problem Exxon has now is their lies have been exposed, and their stockholders are a might bit peeved.
Those rich folks you worship don’t like it when you mess with their money.
So we may not see Exxon held criminally responsible for trashing the planet, but we may see them held accountable for defrauding their stockholders.
It’s poetic, don’t you think? Capitalism being the bullet that takes down the climate deniers?
Screaming some more. The Arctic has a very small percentage of the earth’s ice. The Antarctic has 90% of the earth’s ice and is at an all-time record for total ice and therefore, the earth is at an all-time record (since recording began in the 70’s) for total ice.
Small samples can experience extremely large variations without having meaning. Surface ice is a small sample of a small sample.
We now know that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. In fact, it is a precious life giving substance that is the fuel for photosynthesis. If it falls to 150, we are all dead and, by historical norms, it is dangerously low. Our bodies were designed for CO2 levels of over 1,000. The standard for submarines is 800, the gas in our lungs is 40,000 parts per million CO2.
If CO2 rises to 400, as projected over the next 100 years, food crops and forests will grow more than 20% faster. Also, plant growth will take much less water, making far more land arable. These factors could put an end to world hunger.
The driving force behind the Climate Change hypothesis has been the IPCC models. These models have failed completely to meet the econometric standards demanded of models that purport to predict the future. There are seven of these standards. The most important standard is that they predict the past. These models don’t.
They have a very fundamental problem. They assume that CO2 is causatively correlated with temperature rise. It isn’t. In fact the reverse is true, temperature rise causes the oceans to release enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
When the author of the first IPCC report came to Arizona to accept an honorary degree, I turned and gave him a pop quiz asking “what is the total of all the earth’s ice?” I would have accepted the answer in cubic miles, cubic kilometers or gigatonnes. He did not have a clue. It was obvious that he had never encountered the concept of total ice either on a worldwide basis or ice shelf by ice shelf. This is a critically important number when you do analysis to determine whether any change in ice volume is statistically significant for policy purposes or to know whether any measured change has take place to analyze for statistical significance.
So, the author of the report itself did not have a profound knowledge of the issues involved.
The bottom line – the Global Warming hypothesis is just another way for morons like you all to support raising taxes and to achieve power over your fellow human beings.
But, you ought to be aware of the costs to young adults who are suffering sky high levels of unemployment. The regulatory morass created by the climate change hypothesis is a job destroyer of huge dimensions and a cost burden to middle class families who haven’t seen a pay increase in all 7 years of the Obama administration.
This sentence, “We now know that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.”
That sentence tells us everything we need to know about your ability to understand what you read, because in the context of climate change that sentence, and the entire third paragraph of your post, is gibberish.
You’re a parrot who does not understand what words mean.
For John the disappearing ice is being replaced by BS.
It’s those scientists, making billions off of this climate change scam.
Oh, wait, I keep forgetting to actually follow the money.
Scientists average 80 thousand dollars per year.
Pretty good, but not like yacht good.
Exxon made 1.8 billion dollars. Just in Q1.
So the average scientist only made 20 thousand dollars in Q1.
So, better to be Exxon than a scientist.
And it’s not better to be our grandkids.