I have been closely following the end of the Artic ice the last few months. Oddly enough NOT A WORD ABOUT IT ON THE MSM, except the opportunity for new drilling, and new shipping lanes. Caught this today on an artic ice blog:
snip:
Another day, another analogy:
We now live on a planet that no longer has a north polar ice cap, by any remote definition of what that has meant (or what it has been for thousands of years, at least).
If you had a nice thick woolen cap and someone took it from you and replaced it with a few scraps of wet toilet paper, presumably you wouldn't be happy to just call that your cap, even though it still kind of covered your head and may have similar reflective properties to your hat.
This is our situation. What is left up there is just rot--the last of the thick ice vanished completely this year. There's nothing remotely as thick as the old multi-year ice anymore. And I hear that even the new one-year ice isn't as thick as it used to be.
I must admit to still being in a bit of a shock at the speed with which we lost that entire ice sheet. I wonder if anyone has calculated how many Hiroshima-size atomic bombs we would have had to detonate up there in the '70s to demolish all 17 or so thousand cubic kilometer of ice that were up there at that time. There's only 3 thousand k^3 left up there now, and you could hardly call much of that 'ice' in the sense that the old stuff was.
And it's never coming back.
Remember, with the forthcoming climate variations, drought and extreme rain will become the norm, and farmers will be unable to grow crops. (Never mind the 8C global temperature rise in the next decade.)
snip:
Another day, another analogy:
We now live on a planet that no longer has a north polar ice cap, by any remote definition of what that has meant (or what it has been for thousands of years, at least).
If you had a nice thick woolen cap and someone took it from you and replaced it with a few scraps of wet toilet paper, presumably you wouldn't be happy to just call that your cap, even though it still kind of covered your head and may have similar reflective properties to your hat.
This is our situation. What is left up there is just rot--the last of the thick ice vanished completely this year. There's nothing remotely as thick as the old multi-year ice anymore. And I hear that even the new one-year ice isn't as thick as it used to be.
I must admit to still being in a bit of a shock at the speed with which we lost that entire ice sheet. I wonder if anyone has calculated how many Hiroshima-size atomic bombs we would have had to detonate up there in the '70s to demolish all 17 or so thousand cubic kilometer of ice that were up there at that time. There's only 3 thousand k^3 left up there now, and you could hardly call much of that 'ice' in the sense that the old stuff was.
And it's never coming back.
Remember, with the forthcoming climate variations, drought and extreme rain will become the norm, and farmers will be unable to grow crops. (Never mind the 8C global temperature rise in the next decade.)
