This was formerly titled "BREAKING: Sarah Palin Nudes Revealed" - a bit of a psychology experiment coupled with getting the comment pump primed. Thank you for showing up to ogle, bristle, or whatever it is you do when presented with juvenile provocation :-)
And now ... the rest of the story.
The year I got my learner’s permit the Arctic ice pack covered 2.6 million square miles at the height of summer. My son will get his learner’s permit in two years and less than 1.8 million square miles of it will remain. Any child he might father will never know an Arctic with summer sea ice ... and I shuddered to think what this means, as the Arctic ice pack in the global ocean is the equivalent of an ice cube in a drinking glass.
I cribbed most of the information for this article from these guys:
Arctic sea ice reflects sunlight, keeping the polar regions cool and moderating global climate. According to scientific measurements, Arctic sea ice has declined dramatically over at least the past thirty years, with the most extreme decline seen in the summer melt season.
Read timely scientific analysis year-round below. We provide an update during the first week of each month, or more frequently as conditions warrant.
Please credit the National Snow and Ice Data Center for image or content use unless otherwise noted beneath each image.
The sea ice had been relatively stable as we watched with satellites from 1979 through 2000, then something changed. We’ve lost a massive amount of ice in a short period of time – this is climate change in action.
Extent is now within 370,000 square kilometers (140,000 square miles) of last year’s value on the same date and is 2.08 million square kilometers (800,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average.
I find that those of us from the Louisiana purchase have an easier time visualizing areas expressed in square miles; when I go home there are plenty of places where one can see a hundred fifty square miles of terrain by standing on tip toes and it’s all laid out in fields in a grid of gravel roads spaced exactly a mile apart. Some of you are not so lucky so I’ve prepped a few images to help you understand just how large a piece of ice is now missing:
This warming extends to other places that used to be cold. Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae drains about 10% of the ice that escapes from the island ... and it’s doubled in speed in recent years. A full 4% of the Earth’s sea level rise comes through the glacier’s passage to the sea and it’s doubling and irreversible acceleration due to anthropogenic global warming is a change in the blink of a geological eye.
The Arctic ice shelves are dying, one by one. Follow this link if you want more dramatic imagery, both satellite and direct, of this process.
I haven’t the heart to write the paragraph that goes with this image.
The Earth breathes. There is an annual cycle of rising and falling carbon dioxide, driven by the fact that the larger land mass in the northern hemisphere supports more plant life. Historically we know the Earth has cycled from 180ppm to 280ppm atmosphere CO2 in stately hundred thousand year cycles for at least the last six hundred thousand years. The concentration today is over 380ppm; we’ve done a hundred thousand years worth of changing in two centuries and that change began at the historical typical maximum and went up from there.
The 350 Campaign has the right idea. Not reducing carbon dioxide emissions by a smidgen at some point after the administration who makes the rule change leaves office, but an immediate call to reduce CO2 actually in the atmosphere. How we get there in the face of peak oil coupled with economic collapse isn’t clear yet.