Polar Bears Safe - Arctic Ice Back to Normal

We have come through a very cold January. Indeed, record cold has broken out all over, especially in China and Alaska. In the Arctic, the ice is back to the same level as a year ago.  Polar bears are at record levels, and can swim 100 miles; they were never at risk.  Nevertheless there has been a movement to put them on the endangered species list!  The idiocy continues. But this foolishness will soon be over - the sunspot cycle is showing almost no spots, which means the sun is cooling off.  Also, a La Nina has hit the Pacific, and they produce colder weather. The GW advocates will claim that cold is due to global warming (now called 'climate change') but their pretenses will seem shallow if the world noticeably cools for a few years.

PS - the report that the Antarctic is melting is bogus.  It appears that there is an active volcano under the ice.  Surface temperatures and water temperatures are not warmer. 

Comments

[Sibley]

Yelnick,

I'm rooting for you on this isssue. I hope to hell you are right, I don't think that is where the evidence points, but I am not really familiar with the Martian or sun spot theroies you have provided, or the evidence behind them, so I can't criticize them.

If you are correct and the co2 and other gases whose levels are increasing in the atmosphere due to human activities, are not causing the earth to warm, does your information/analysis point to any other potential harmful, benign or positive effects they might have, like the increase in acidity in the oceans that some fear will damage ocean ecosystems? Or is it your belief that humans are not and/or don't have the power to influence global climate etc.?

In other words should we stop worrying about our impact on the earth, and assume that it can handle whatever we throw at it, or is it just the warming we should stop worrying about?

[yelnick]

Sibley, I am a commentator not a scientist. Clearly human activity is having an impact at global scale - just the evidence does NOT point to carbon as the culprit. Something is hurting the oceans for example. Could be too much effluence which acts as fertilizer and creates too much slime and similar. Unlikely to be CO2. I buy the arguments that (a) peak oil is coming and we need to transition to new forms of energy and (b) coal is causing acid rain and other pernicious effects, and should be burned more cleanly. Some GW advocates really are focused on those issues not GW itself, and the use GW as a wedge issue. But it could backfire on them. I would prefer that the GW crowd did not connect everything to GW. It could be their Iraq, or Vietnam - the loss of credibility in the next few years will be huge and may damage the efforts to manage oceans better, or clean up coal plants, or get us into electric cars.

[Sibley]

Yelnick,

If so many are so wrong, so publicly, it won't just be a blow to other environmental issues. It will impact the status and role of science as we know it, for quite some time.

[Sibley]

Yelnick,

If so many are so wrong, so publicly, it won't just be a blow to other environmental issues. It will impact the status and role of science as we know it, for quite some time.

[yelnick]

I suspect science will survive, but politicized science will suffer, as it should. The IPCC should be disbanded for example. I would have preferred the climate scientists could have continued to do science instead of becoming the poster child for, well, about everything.

[Marc]

Hi Yelnick,

as an active amateur astronomer, I sadly I have to say, with more and better evidence coming, we have to assume, that humans have an impact on the climate and global warming is true. The problem is, our climate is changing in a speed, which is alarming and cannot be explained by sunspot cycles. Of course ice on polar caps is rising in winter, but the pack ice is gone. Look, meanwhile the Northwest Passage is ice free in summer and open for commercial shipping without the need of an icebreaker, even though our sun is at it's minimum right now and there have been almost no sunspots since months! So, less radiation and less high energetic particles (which can be measured), but earth as a whole is getting warmer nonetheless. In addition, melting polar caps decrease our planets albedo and by cutting down dark, tropical rainforest trees to replace them with even darker soil in order to grow crops, the average temperature of the area increases up to 5.4 °F year-round.
My implication is, that as long as we can't definitively exclude we are responsible for the climate change, we should assume we are. Why? Because we have only one planet. A wonderful planet which could support higher developed life forms for another approximately 800 million years before our sun eventually will start to slowly superheat our planet to death. Look at our neighbor and twin planet Venus. There is a high risk, that if all goes wrong, earth could be very similar to this 'hell'. Therefore, let's play the safe variant, not gambling with the lives of plants, animals and our succession. The stakes are too high.

cheers
Marc

[yelnick]

Marc, good thoughts. I will take issue with two points you make:

1) The evidence is that we are cooling fairly rapidly due to sunspot minimum - the latest satellite readings show us back to 1979 levels in essentially 2 years. The ice pack this summer was 30% higher at its minimum than 2007.

2) There is a danger in your core point of view that "as long as we can't definitively exclude we are responsible for the climate change, we should assume we are." We should certainly analyze that we are, but the danger is we take action based on emotion not facts. We could then spend trillions in ill-guided attempts that have no impact and distract us from other environmental problems, such as managing the impact of climate change (eg move people out of flooded zones if sea levels do rise).

[Marc]

Yelnick,

my core point is responsibility for the successive generations and showing respect for life as a whole. Please do not mistake this with emotions due to potential danger, since I don't see life-threatening risk for our generation and our personal lives.
Far from it! I think there is a great chance for a better future and a good time to take action is now. Burning coal and oil for example to produce energy is one of the worst things one can do, not only because of the carbon dioxide emission, but also because oil is a very useful resource in many ways and a lot of products are dependent on oil. We have to understand that it's just stupid to burn it up, since there are much better ways to produce energy:
Have a look at clean energy. It's easy to invest (e.g. wind parks in vast arid regions), it's safe, it could lead to new jobs and drive the economy. Also, gained knowledge could be exported. I can't see any danger here, but great hope for a better future! Isn't that a serious alternative as long as we don't have the technology for inexhaustible nuclear fusion power?

To your 1st point:
I'm not sure where you got this data from, but the National Snow and Ice Data Center titles this years low as "Arctic Sea Ice Down to Second-Lowest Extent; Likely Record-Low Volume":
"The 2008 season strongly reinforces the thirty-year downward trend in Arctic ice extent. The 2008 September low was 34% below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000 and only 9% greater than the 2007 record. Because the 2008 low was so far below the September average, the negative trend in September extent has been pulled downward, from –10.7 % per decade to –11.7 % per decade.
NSIDC Senior Scientist Mark Serreze said, 'When you look at the sharp decline that we’ve seen over the past thirty years, a ‘recovery’ from lowest to second lowest is no recovery at all. Both within and beyond the Arctic, the implications of the decline are enormous.'"

You can find the full report here: http://bit.ly/oeFps

Why not a new record low this year? This might be because of the remarkable sun's minimum right now. We are in the midst of an extended bottom (now slogging through its 3rd year), awaiting the delayed Solar Cycle 24. We are not sure, whether a weak or strong period of solar storms lies ahead, since space weather (have a look at http://www.spaceweather.com) is still in its infancy - hopefully a weak one to give our planet a calf packing to reduce the fever... :)

cheers
Marc

[yelnick]

Marc, I think your first point is terrific, and I would include natural gas in your list - we should not be using oil or gas as base electricity fuels, since we have better uses for them. Coal we may have no choice but to use that way, at least for a while. I favor a strip of thermal-solar across the desert southwest and a spine of wind down the great plains, but a lot has to be done to make this work (eg a new grid). I doubt that flat panel solar cells will prove out, and believe Germany has wasted money in their subsidies of rooftop solar. In effect, they have burned German tax money to fund Chinese solar factories powered by coal plants for an overall net negative on the green scorecard.

As to the Arctic, something odd is happening up there - maybe black ice (ie coal burnt in China is somehow darkening the snow in the Arctic). Or maybe he baseline chosen to show excessive melting (1979) was a peculiarly ice-laden year. I have not tried to get nto this at such a deep level. But as an indicator of GW, focus on the Arctic & polar bears is misleading albeit emotional gratifying. The Antarctic ice is thickening as much or more as the Arctic is melting. These could be local phenomenon more than GW.

More to the point, the trend of temperature is dropping very fast. The latest satellite data has global temperatures in the northern hemisphere back to the 1979 levels. This is likely a combo of the sun and the PDO (Pacific Decadel Oscillator) which is now in coolong mode. A few years does not make a trend, but the temp data looks flat since 1998 and is now dropping. If your solar minimum continues, watch for a 10-30 year cooling period (based on past PDO periods, now accentuated by a weaker sun).

[fahrrad]

Dies ist ein großer Ort. Ich möchte hier noch einmal.

[yelnick]

Fahrrad - danke. Wilkommen!

[mietwagen]

Sehr gute Seite. Ich habe es zu den Favoriten.