As Arctic sea ice recedes, coastal residents, marine mammals feel the effects
Published Monday, July 28, 2008
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BARROW--On a warm night in September 2007, a walrus the size of a sofa hauled out on the beach in Barrow. He came ashore a little before dark behind Osaka Restaurant -- pretty much as close to downtown as you can get in the country’s northernmost city.
It wasn’t unusual to have a walrus to haul out, but to have one downtown was new, and people came to look.
As the moon slipped in and out of the clouds, people stood on the dirt street above the beach and watched the walrus. He was barely ashore, and small waves from the Chukchi Sea lapped at his flippers. His skin was thick and wrinkled, and at times he seemed to shiver.
“It’s tired,” said a man who stopped by in his truck.
When someone shined a spotlight down onto the walrus, the animal slowly raised his head, then sunk his tusks back into the sand.
It started to drizzle.
It was late in the month, but there was no ice in sight. There was no ice for hundreds of miles, in fact, and people in Barrow knew that -- they figured the walrus had just finished a marathon swim from the ice to shore. (Unlike seals, which can swim for weeks or months at a time, walrus need to rest occasionally.)
It had been a weird summer -- it was so warm people joked about getting tan -- and now it was a weird fall. There wasn’t enough ice on the rivers to go ice fishing, and geese were still hanging around town. A whaling captain’s nephew had shot his first walrus a few weeks before -- the Inupiat Eskimos hunt them along with seals and bowhead whales -- but when he cut it open there was nothing in its stomach. (Sometimes there are clams you can eat.)
Other people were saying they’d seen walrus that looked thin. And there were reports that lots of walrus were hauling out farther down the shore.
Hunters in Barrow and scientists in Boulder, Colo., noticed the same thing -- the Arctic sea ice was disappearing.
From 1979, when satellite records started, to 2000, the floating ice covered an average of 2.7 million square miles in the late summer. Last September, it shrunk to 1.7 million square miles -- almost 40 percent less than the average -- and smashed the previous record. At its smallest point, the ice cover was less than the previous minimum, set in 2005, by nearly twice the size of Texas. Open water stretched for hundreds of miles off Alaska’s coasts.
The summer ice cover had been declining steadily since 1980, which scientists blamed largely on human-induced climate change. (According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the decline couldn’t be explained by natural forces alone.) The ice was also getting thinner, and climate models predicted that summer sea ice would disappear almost completely toward the end of the century.
But last summer’s drop surprised even the scientists who studied the ice pack. The ice seemed to be shrinking faster than any of the climate models predicted.
No one could say for sure that climate change was melting the ice -- sea ice is affected by a complex mix of ocean currents, wind patterns, and air and water temperatures -- but scientists suspected it was playing a role.
In October, the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder issued a statement connecting the melt specifically to the increase in greenhouse gases.
“While a number of natural factors have certainly contributed to the overall decline in sea ice,” said the group’s senior scientist, Mark Serreze, “the effects of greenhouse warming are now coming through loud and clear.”
Serreze also offered a new prediction -- summer ice could disappear completely by 2030. (Because satellite measurements are based on a certain density of ice cover, some ice could remain.)
In the Bering and Chukchi seas and along the western coast of Alaska, the shrinking of the ice is already affecting people and animals. Walrus, polar bears and seals are losing the ice they live on. Shishmaref, Newtok and Kivalina are washing into the ocean. And people in Barrow are wondering just how much their lives will have to change.
A few days before the walrus showed up in Barrow, a state commission studying the impacts of climate change held a hearing there. Joe Sage, the whaling captain whose nephew had shot the walrus, came to testify.
It was a week before the start of the fall whaling season, when crews hunt with aluminum boats and outboard motors, but Sage was thinking about the spring season, when hunters drag lightweight boats made of wood and seal skins across the ice.
He wondered aloud how things would work if the ice started breaking up earlier in the spring. “Are we going to be going with outboard motors in the springtime?”
Wild foods were important to Joe and his wife, Mary. Their children had teethed on whale flipper and dried caribou, and Mary Sage liked to tell about the time their 1-year-old son cried and pointed at the freezer. She figured he wanted ice cream, but when she opened the freezer door, he went for the whale blubber.
“He was crying for muktuk,” she said.
A loss of habitat
The hearing happened on a Tuesday, and the walrus showed up Thursday night.
Friday morning, he was still on the beach, about 75 yards closer to the Top of the World Hotel. The moon was up, and a dusting of snow filled in footprints on the beach. Someone had thrown a fish to the walrus, but he hadn’t touched it. (Walrus mostly eat clams.)
A steady flow of people stopped by to look -- a mother and children on the way to school, hospital workers from the Lower 48.
It’s not unusual for walrus to haul out, and male walrus in particular will haul out in the summer further to the south. But females and newborns (and some males) ride the ice north as it retreats from the Bering Sea into the Chukchi Sea and stay on the ice for most of the year.
They feed on clams and other invertebrates on the ocean floor, and they tend to stay on ice over the continental shelf, where the water is only a few hundred feet deep.
Last summer, that proved nearly impossible. Winds and ocean currents pushed the already shrinking sea ice so far to the north that hardly any ice was left over the shallow feeding grounds.
“All of it, or virtually all of it, disappeared,” said Joel Garlich-Miller, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who studies walrus. The ice that remained was over water thousands of feet deep -- too deep for feeding.
So walrus hauled out.
One of the biggest impacts of shrinking sea ice is likely to be on marine mammals. Walrus, polar bears, and a few species of seals rely on sea ice for shelter, breeding, and access to food. As the ice cover shrinks, scientists expect that bears and walrus, to some extent, will simply rely less on ice and more on land.
But the switch is seen as problematic for a number of reasons. Some of the food sources the animals rely on, including polar cod and some crustaceans, are expected to decline with the shrinking ice. And studies done in Canada’s Hudson Bay have already linked earlier spring breakup dates with lower survival rates among polar bear cubs and poorer overall health among adults.
Before walruses started hauling out in Alaska last summer, most of the attention was on the bears. In January, 2007, the Fish and Wildlife Service had proposed listing the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because of the loss of its habitat.
The agency asked the U.S. Geological Survey to study the issue, and when the USGS offered its findings in September -- after reviewing data on bear populations and changes in sea ice -- the findings were startling. Using climate models to project the loss of sea ice in the future, USGS biologists predicted that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could disappear within 50 years.
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne agreed this May to list the animal as threatened. The Interior Department had delayed the decision for months, pointing to the complexity of the issue -- it would be the first time a mammal had been listed as threatened or endangered because of climate change. (Some corals have been listed because of climate-related threats.)
Last summer drew attention to walrus.
As the sea ice moved farther and farther from shore over deeper and deeper water, thousands of walrus hauled out on the shore from Barrow to Cape Lisburne, about 300 miles to the southwest. Tens of thousands hauled out across the Chukchi Sea in Russia.
Scientists worried the animals would run out of food or stampede.
On the drifting ice pack, walrus can feed over a wide area. On shore, they would only be able to feed as far away as they could swim.
The animals are also big -- they can weigh more than 2,500 pounds -- and they tend to be skittish. Biologists worried that a hunter, polar bear, or low-flying plane could cause a deadly stampede. The Fish and Wildlife Service rerouted flight paths over big haul-outs and encouraged hunters to stay away.
While no stampedes were found in Alaska, stampedes across the Bering Strait in Russia reportedly killed thousands of animals.
In February, a conservation group called the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the walrus under the Endangered Species Act. (A few months before, the group had petitioned the Fisheries Service, a sister agency, to list ribbon seals as well.)
“People focus on the polar bear,” the mayor of the North Slope Borough, Edward Itta, said last fall, “but I think the walrus is a good indication of just how tough things are getting for our animals.”
Midday Friday, the walrus in Barrow was still lying on the beach near the Top of the World.
Eugene Brower, a whaling captain who’s also been the borough mayor, stopped by in his truck to see it. He walked down toward the narrow beach and tried calling the walrus with deep, guttural grunts.
It didn’t work.
Eroding coastlines
A little ways from the Top of the World, a small hill rises from the beach to a place where old whale bones stick up from grassy mounds -- the remains of simple homes built into the ground with bone, driftwood and sod.
People have been living at Ukpiagvik -- “Place to hunt snowy owls” -- for at least 1,500 years and haven’t really stopped. Arctic Pizza is just across the street, and some of the biggest mounds are actually buried under modern homes, according to Anne Jensen, an archaeologist who’s worked on the North Slope since 1986 and lived in Barrow for the last 12 years.
There used to be a wide beach in front of Ukpiagvik, but now there’s hardly any beach at all, and the bluff is crumbling. Storm surges have flooded the beach and sent water up inland ravines.
“This has eroded horrendously,” said Jensen as she stood on the site last fall.
Coastal erosion isn’t new, and it isn’t happening only because of climate change. But coastal residents and scientists say beaches are eroding faster now with changes in the sea ice. As shore ice forms later in the year and breaks up earlier, coastlines are left vulnerable to storm surges and high waves for longer periods of time. As the summer ice pack recedes farther from the shore, it leaves longer stretches of open, allowing waves to grow bigger.
Both things can lead to more erosion, according to David Atkinson, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who studies storms and coastal impacts.
“It will increase with less sea ice,” he said.
Erosion is already threatening villages along the coast. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and coastal communities have spent millions trying to protect infrastructure from erosion, and a handful of villages have decided to move altogether.
In Barrow, coastal erosion has been a consistent and expensive problem. The ocean has eaten away at beaches and people’s backyards and knocked out the road between Barrow and the scientific research facilities north of the city.
At least one house had to be dragged back from the coast. A fall storm ate away so much of the bluff that the pilings beneath the house were exposed.
“It looked like some kind of beachfront property,” said Terri Ekalook, the borough’s risk manager.
People pinned the house back with a cable and later pulled it away from the shore.
The biggest storm on record hit the city back in 1963, when storm surges grew to 12 feet, wiped out dozens of buildings and four airplanes, and caused millions of dollars in damage.
Two storms in 1986 badly damaged Stevenson Street and other roads.
Rob Elkins, the borough’s deputy director of administration and former disaster coordinator, figures dealing with erosion could get harder as the sea ice shrinks.
“We don’t know if anything’s going to happen,” he said last fall. “But we do know our risk is greater than it was a decade ago.”
Barrow’s extensive infrastructure –- a utilidor, roads, power lines, and so on –- makes retreat from the coast an expensive option. So giant sandbags, dirt berms, and rock-filled cages line most of the beach. The Army Corps is considering a 10- to 12-foot sea wall as part of a larger study for dealing with erosion in Barrow.
Last fall, the disappearance of the ice added to concerns. The ocean was open all the way to Russia and beyond, and Itta, the mayor, worried about the waves coming from the west.
“We stand to have a hell of a storm,” he said. “It’s stressful.”
In mid-September, residents of Kivalina fled their homes in the face of a threatening storm that turned out to be not that bad. Residents were already planning to move the village because of ice damage and erosion.
A little north of Barrow, Jensen, the archeologist, is racing erosion to protect an old village site called Nuvuk. The site was largely ignored by archeologists until about a decade ago, when someone noticed a grave eroding by the shore and called the police.
Jensen, who helped recover the remains, found harpoon heads telling her the site was at least as old as Ukpiagvik. It was used by Thule people, ancestors of the Inupiat. Over the next few years, more graves appeared, and in 2000, Jensen and a group of high school students discovered a whole burial site.
In 2001, Jensen mapped the site.
By the end of last year, more than 160 feet of beach and bluff had washed away.
Jensen, who manages Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corp. Science, LLC, the local Native corporation’s science subsidiary, still works with local high school students at the site. They carefully gather remains, and once a year, the community holds a reburying ceremony at the new cemetery in Barrow. (UIC maintenance workers make the coffins.)
“These are people’s relatives,” Jensen said last fall. “We’re trying to get every last one.”
A way of life
Between Nuvuk and Barrow is Browerville, a neighborhood named after Charles Brower, a whaler who arrived from New England in the late 1800s and settled in the Inupiat community.
Eugene Brower, one of Charles Brower’s grandsons, lives there now.
On that September Friday, Brower was outside trying to cover his 27-foot C-Dory with a parachute to keep the snow off. The boat was on a trailer, and he was on the boat pulling on the giant piece of cloth.
Brower used to use a small aluminum skiff like other whaling captains but switched to the bigger boat when the ice started to shrink and the waves got higher.
When the ice was just over the horizon, the small skiffs were OK, he said. But now the waves get to be 6 or 8 feet or even bigger.
“The little 18-foot skiffs are going to take a beating, or they’re going to sink,” he said.
There are about 45 registered whaling captains in Barrow, a city of 4,000 people. Each has a crew, and proud crew members wear jackets showing their affiliation -- Patkotak Crew, Ahnatook Crew, and so on.
“It’s central to our culture,” said Itta, who is also a whaling captain. “This whaling has gone on since time immemorial.”
Now changes in sea ice are starting to impact that tradition.
In the spring, the ice isn’t as thick and safe as it used to be, Itta said. In the fall, crews are dealing with huge swells and choppy water, making an already dangerous activity even more so.
Ocean currents and wind patterns are also changing, according to Brower, who has served as president of the Barrow Whaling Captains’ Association for more than three decades. In 2007, the water was a lot warmer than normal.
Hunters are already adapting to the changes. They’re using bigger boats and being more careful, and last fall, they started the whaling season later than normal to let things cool off and make sure none of the whales spoiled on the way back to shore.
But the changes are happening fast.
As the IPCC put it, “The resilience shown historically by Arctic indigenous peoples is now being severely tested.”
By evening, people of all ages were down on the beach watching the walrus.
Makeshift wooden barriers surrounded the animal on three sides, but you could still get close enough to watch him breathe and see the thick whiskers walrus use to search for food on the ocean floor.
He looked around but hardly moved.
Small posters with pictures of the animal were tacked to the barriers, announcing a “Resting walrus.”
“The ice is hundreds of miles away and walruses are resting on our beaches,” they read. “For the safety of you and the animal please stay back and allow it to rest.”
Community Discussion
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October 4, 2007
A team led by Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., studied trends in Arctic perennial ice cover by combining data from NASA's Quick Scatterometer (QuikScat) satellite with a computing model based on observations of sea ice drift from the International Arctic Buoy Programme. QuikScat can identify and map different classes of sea ice, including older, thicker perennial ice and younger, thinner seasonal ice.
Son Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. "Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic," he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.
"The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century," Nghiem said.
Will MSM Report on 2008 Arctic Ice Increase?
By P.J. Gladnick
July 18, 2008 - 10:59 ET
Well, the latest information on Arctic ice conditions is just in from the National Snow and Ice Data Center and Maggie Rodriguez can breath easy:
Arctic sea ice extent on July 16 stood at 8.91 million square kilometers (3.44 square miles). While extent was below the 1979 to 2000 average of 9.91 square kilometers (3.83 million square miles), it was 1.05 million square kilometers (0.41 million square miles) above the value for July 16, 2007...
So why the increase in the ice shelf over last year despite the MSM hysteria on this topic? An explanation is given:
How is this different from what we saw in the record-breaking year 2007? In early July 2007, an atmospheric pattern developed that featured high pressure over the Beaufort Sea. This pattern promoted especially strong sea ice loss. The pattern that has dominated the summer of 2008, so far, seems less favorable for ice loss...
Monday, October 30, 2006
Ultimate Stupidity on Global Warming
On Sept. 28, after being introduced by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Al Gore told hundreds of U.N. diplomats and staff that cigarette smoking is a “significant contributor to global warming”(!) This is truly laughable. It is mind-boggling that someone who claims to be knowledgeable on this issue is so abysmally ignorant not merely of atmospheric science but of the truly insignificant magnitude of cigarette smoke compared to combustion from factories and automobiles—to say nothing of carbon dioxide production from natural sources. It is hard to believe he would say something so stupid.
Nice article, Stefan.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
IPCC Global Warming Report
Last week the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was issued. It was widely trumpeted as the “smoking gun” that proves global warming is occurring and is driven by human activities. But this is smoke without a gun. It is a 14 page “Summary for Policymakers” written by political appointees of the 150 countries in the IPCC; the 1,600 pages of scientific information supposedly underlying their summary will not be available until May 2007. As Senator James Inhofe, the ranking member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, put it: “This is a political document, not a scientific report, and it is a shining example of the corruption of science for political gain. The media has failed to report that the IPCC Summary for Policymakers was not approved by scientists but by UN political delegates and bureaucrats.”
The scientific corruption is provided for by the IPCC in its "Appendix A to the Principles Governing IPCC Work," which states: "Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter." In other words, the “Science” will be adjusted to agree with whatever the politicians and bureaucrats want it to say. It's happened before.
Nickeli,
remember when it snowed in June of 06? if that isn't proof that global warming is a hoax, i dunno what does.
also, in the future, please don't cite reports by NASA and the NSIDC. they're just evil government scientists bankrolled by communists and eco-terrorists.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/res...
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/res...
More evidence for a vanishing ice cap:
http://tinyurl.com/5t3bbf
Tom58 -
WOW! Where did you uncover that? It's fantastic! I love it! Full of actual information, not regurgitated rhetoric. And you can definitely tell it was written BEFORE the Great Dumbing-Down of America. Lots of actual info, not anecdotal crap. A must read! Journalists - take note, that's a news story well written, above 6th grade level English.
Earth Day Is Lenin's Birthday
Coincidence or Communism?
http://autarchic.tripod.com/files/earthd...
Good article Stefan. I lived in Barrow for 12 years, leaving there in 2004. Your article was truthful and accurate and extremely well written. it actually brought back many memories of my time there, which were some of the best years of my life.
Another double edge sword. Lack of sea ice changes the traditional life, however it also opens up the marine transportation route. This could result in goods that have had to be flown in being brought in year round at lower cost. Is the glass half full or half empty, it depends on how you look at it.
No need to build a gas line if the North Slope is ice free. Send in the LNG tankers.
The coastal residents and the marine mammals need to read the DNM comments section so they can learn that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by Al Gore.
I have learned so much from these comments!
According to some of the logic on here:
Global warming is hoax,
Global warming is communist,
Global warming is made up by Al Gore,
If I believe that Global warming is a reality,
I am a hoax believing Communist made-up by a Al Gore!
Fantastic! I can be all of this in spite of evidence presented by leading international scientists!
Thanks my fellow News-Miner commentors for all your wisdom and logic!
Some people do not like to listen to science. Overwhelmingly the science points to warming. If you want to debate the causes, that is understandable, but the fact remains, it IS warming. So, the question is, why am I wasting my time writing this comment? Well, maybe it because I wanted to remind republicans that Mccain said "The debate is over".
In McCain's own words:
"THERE IS NOW a broad consensus in this country, and indeed in the world, that global warming is happening, that it is a serious problem, and that humans are causing it. The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded there is a greater than 90 percent chance that greenhouse gases released by human activities like burning oil in cars and coal in power plants are causing most of the observed global warming. This report puts the final nail in denial's coffin about the problem of global warming."
Read it and weep.
What's amazing is that if this issue were about the inner workings of a nuculear reactor, I have little doubt people wouldn't be going `nope, nope, I don't buy it. It's all a communist plot.` No. They'd listen to the physicists. We're talking about rigorous scientific issue like every one's opinion is valid. It's not. Some opinions aren't even close to being valid.
And the ability to quite some Don Quixote of the Climatologists doesn't lend any credibility - if you'd like, I could quote a geologist who thinks the world is hollow. There is the occasional wackaloon in every field.
Frankly, I wish Gore never made the movie. Because all it's done is a big fat target to people who didn't like Gore to begin with.
A short notice of the Associated Press entitled "Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish And Icebergs Melt" reads:
"The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds."
This message was published by the Washington Post on November 2, 1922. As I already stated some weeks ago, nothing has changed.
My understanding is that there as been a lot of money quietly spent both researching and securing rights to shipping "over the top" in recent years. This is a response to the steadily decreasing ice cover.
All part of the liberal conspiracy, I'm sure. Just like the rest of reality.
How marvelous. And what are those inaccuracies?
The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government's expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that it was "not possible" to attribute one-off events to global warming.
The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that this was not the case.
The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant's evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.
The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.
The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.
Nickeli,
what "Government expert" are you speaking of?
by the way, the earth's surface is 70% water...water has a large heat capacity, hence it requires a considerable amount of energy to raise its tempearature even a degree...this explains the "lag" that you mention between temp and CO2. the concept is called "thermal inertia"..which is why the daily max temps don't occur when the sun is highest in the sky, but typically in the late afternoon.
regarding Katrina, one cannot blame global warming on any single event but the research shows a strong correlation between increases in water tempearatures in the tropics and the frequency and duration of "major" hurricanes (Category 3 and higher).
http://www.mindfully.org/Air/2005/Cyclon...
also, the melting of Greenland is not necessarily a gradual or linear process...the melting, which is accelerating especially at the lower elevations, is much greater than the the increase in thickness at the higher elevations. with less shore fast ice to prevent the continental ice from calving, and with more and larger "moulins", enormous holes that pipe liquid water down to the bedrock, opening in the ice, the ice becomes less stable, more likely to slide down into the ocean...a tipping point could be reached in which one day,a big chunk of the massive ice sheet could just "go" in a matter of days or weeks.
skewt...
your article proves nothing besides the fact that ocean currents between norway and greenland can affect the amount of sea ice in the arctic in one localized region of the arctic. yes, the gulfstream goes up thataway, and wind patterns can change its trajectory....
the fact remains, you cannot argue against the science of quantum mechanics...CO2 molecules interact with specific bands of outgoing longwave radiation making the earth less efficient at cooling itself...this is but one of many variables that affect our climate, a very complex system of nonlinear variables interacting with one another in complicated ways.
skinfish - the only "hoax" is that Al Gore TELLS us it is "man-made".
I, and others of the same opinion, do NOT deny the earth is warming. We just aren't convinced that it is again - "MAN-MADE". And if you are, then by all means START GIVING UP YOUR CARBON RELEASING TOYS NOW. I'm sick and tired of hearing that you sheeple out there believe the sky is falling. Do some reading on the subject and you will find it is NOT a consensus! AND, this sort of hoax has been tried before. The green party wants to control how much carbon you use, period. Where does that start, huh? Carbon taxes! Yes people your literally going to run to the govt to TAX you on your everyday usage of carbon. That will include things like- EVERYTHING YOU DO since EVERYTHING is made from oil. They'll tell you how many miles your "allowed" to drive. How many hours of electricity your alloted. Do you honestly want those sort of restrictions? Do you honestly want to hamper our economy? WAKE UP NOW America!!!
MrGreen
have you noticed the price of a barrel of crude these last few years? simple supply and demand, my friend. the demand for oil exceeds the rate at which new discoveries are being made...its a LIMITED resource!
you and all the other right-wing ilk are the ones crying "the sky is falling", believing that limiting carbon emissions will destroy the econmoy... while america continues to debate whether or not to swithc over to wind and solar and other renewables, the rest of the industrialized world caught on long ago...if we don't change our ways, rest assured our economy will get kicked down the gutter because of the stubborn ignorant idiocracy who can't get with the times.
its sad,really, how far we've fallen behind. global warming or not, it doesn't take rocket science to understand the incentive to get off fossil fuels.
An inconvenient factoid:
http://www.barentsobserver.com/?cat=1614...
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
patcaribou,
as shown by Igor Polyakov, a professor of oceanography with IARC, we currently have a warm water transport from the North Atlantic Ocean into the basis of the Arctic Ocean (see page 34 of Professor Akasofu's paper "Is the Earth still recovering from the Little Ice Age?" http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/pdf... ). In addition, last year the cloud cover over the Arctic Ocean was less than normal so that the solar radiation reaching the sea surface was higher than normal.
Your statements about tropical storms are wrong. Please see Kerry Emanuel's paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (ftp://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Emanuel_etal_2008.pdf ). Kerry Emanuel is a professor of atmospheric science at MIT and the world's leading expert in hurricane research.
patcaribou,
here is an excerpt of the website you listed:
"Arctic sea ice reflects sunlight, keeping the polar regions cool and moderating global climate."
This statement is sheer nonsense.
It is not forbidden to think.
Stefan
very good story, very important news. i sent link to Andrew Revkin science reporter at Ny Times. well done, sir
wonder if NOW you might get off your tuches (that's Yiddish for behind) and report on POLAR CITIES, the idea of, the concept of, and tell readers, show Fairbanks readers these two links of pics of WHITE WHITE NORTH at UAF in 2500 and
US CONGRESS RELOCATED TO ANCHORAGE. just a mind exercise, don't be scared.
http://northwardho.blogspot.com/2008/07/...
http://northwardho.blogspot.com/2008/07/...
http://northwardho.blogspot.com/2008/07/...
danny bloom
former Nome, Juneau resident
12 years in alaska
http://northwardho.blogspot.com
http://nnsl.com/northern-news-services/s...
Elders, scientists talk climate change
Herb Mathisen
Northern News Services
Published Monday, July 28, 2008
IQALUIT - With the mercury pushing far past 20 C and into record-breaking territory, the Planning for Climate Change Symposium in Iqaluit took on added significance.
The July 20-23 event was held to share how climate change is affecting the North, and for city planners, scientists, elders and politicians to discuss successes and concerns, share stories and build upon initiatives to slow down climate change.
Sunday's keynote speaker Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, has worked for the last 12 years as an Inuit rights advocate and has linked climate change to human rights.
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