Arctic Sea Ice Death Spiral

With two weeks or so still to go before the annual minimum is reached, the record for lowest extent of Arctic sea ice has already been obliterated by a huge margin. The only question at this point is how much the ice cover will shrink. Frantic denial of reality by Anthony Watts, Marc Morano, and others has only made it obvious how ridiculous they are — they refuse to face the truth of this astounding consequence of global warming. You can smell their desperation.

Anthony Watts Breaks the Record

After a week of quite funny jokes, Anthony Watts has shown his real talent. In my opinion, what he’s best at is proving what an utter fake he is as a “skeptic.”

WUWT Follies

Anthony Watts’ blog has rolled out the comedy this week.

Two (or more) down …

As a couple of readers have already mentioned, sea ice extent according to IARC/JAXA has reached a new record low value. Sea ice extent according to NSIDC is “knockin’ on the door.”

The mean date of daily minimum extent in the IARC/JAXA data is Sep. 15.5, the earliest is Sep. 9 and the latest Sep. 24. So we can expect *about* 3 more weeks before the actual minimum is reached.

And we’ve already broken the record minimum for sea ice area. It’s looking more and more like this year will break the records for sea ice area, extent, and volume. For more information (including more broken records of specific data sets), see Neven’s excellent sea ice blog.

Risk

James Hansen recently published analysis showing that temperature has increased enough that the probability of extremes (in particular, extreme heat) is significantly greater than it used to be. This has consequences.

Is Climate Really Changing?

Average global temperature has risen by about 1.5°F (0.8°C) since 1910:

Warming hasn’t been the same everywhere. Land areas have warmed faster than the oceans, the northern hemisphere has warmed faster than the southern, and the Arctic has warmed faster still — just as predicted by climate scientists decades ago.

The Arctic is the “canary in a coal mine” for global warming, showing far greater change than most of the world. Arctic temperature has increased about 5.3°F (3°C) since 1880:

Meanwhile, sea ice in the Arctic is disappearing fast, not only covering less and less area, but thinning dramatically (click the graph!):

Not only are the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica shrinking, so too are the vast majority of the world’s glaciers. Because of this, and because warming makes the oceans expand, sea level is rising:

Temperature isn’t the only part of climate that has changed. Patterns of rainfall have altered, so some areas are now more drought-prone, others are more susceptible to flooding, and some regions have become more vulnerable to both drought and flood. Worldwide, total drought has increased since about 1970 (lower values indicate more drought):

When it does rain, it pours. There are more deluges than before, in large part because warming temperatures have caused the atmosphere to hold more water vapor:

Storms — especially damaging storms — have become both more frequent and more severe. According to the giant re-insurance company Munich Re (who sell insurance to insurance companies), weather-related disasters have more than doubled since 1980:

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Yes, climate is really changing. Rapidly. But unlike the changes which have happened in the past, modern climate change is not natural.

One Down …

Many have been watching with interest the daily changes in Arctic sea ice, to see whether or not the year’s melt will lead to a new record low for sea ice area, extent, and/or volume. According to Cryosphere Today, one of those records has been broken, that for sea ice area. And it’s not even September for another 12 days.

Hansen et al. 2012

A recent paper in PNAS by Hansen et al. (there’s also a recently released discussion paper on the topic) has caused quite a stir. The essential result is that extreme heat (beyond the 2-sigma and even 3-sigma level) has become so much more commonplace, that the only plausible explanation is global warming.

(Cryosp)here today, gone tomorrow

There’s a new kid in town, blog-wise, showing maps of Arctic sea ice concentration and thickness, called apocalypse4real (seems to be an appropriate name). It shows that all the ice thicker than 6m is gone from the Arctic (click the graph for a larger, clearer view):

Sea Ice Poll

Many of you are already aware that the WUWT blog regularly conducts a poll to predict the minimum sea ice extent we’ll see later this year, and their poll result is submitted as a prediction to ARCUS. What a great idea! Not only does it gauge the opinion of the WUWT readers about a very precise quantity, it’s also fun.