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Danish researchers warn of melting Arctic ice cap
Sep 3, 2007, 13:54 GMT
Copenhagen - Danish researchers have provided further evidence to suggest how the North Pole's ice cap is shrinking, reports said Monday.
'The ice cap is at an extreme low. For the 50 years we have data from, we have never seen anything like it,' Leif Toudal Pedersen of the Technical University of Denmark told the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.
A survey based on satellite imagery from Sunday suggested that the ice cap was 40 to 45 per cent less - or a reduction of 2.5 million square kilometres - than on average during the period 1997-2000, the newspaper reported.
The area would comprise Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Britain, Ireland, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.
Global warming was a contributing factor, but this year strong currents have also swept large masses of ice from Siberia via the North Pole past eastern Greenland and further south where it melted, Pedersen said.
Ice free summers in the North Pole area could be a reality in 15 to 20 years as opposed to previous projections of 30 to 40 years, he said.
Eigil Kaas, professor of meteorology at Copenhagen University, said the effects were 'frightening,' adding that it was now just a matter of how fast the sea ice would melt.
Danish Environment Minister Connie Hedegaard said the results proved 'further support' for the need to clinch an international climate treaty where the big players, the United States and China, were signatories, public broadcaster DR reported.
The melting ice poses a threat to animal and birdlife in the region, as well as low-lying areas worldwide.
A possible benefit would be access to hidden oil and gas reserves in the Arctic region as well as faster sea transports between Europe and Asia.
'If you for instance want to sail from Rotterdam in the Netherlands to Yokohama in Japan the sea route via the Arctic sea is 34 per cent shorter than via the Suez canal.
Shipping companies are definitely looking into this,' Hans Henrik Petersen of the Danish Shipowners' Association told Jyllands-Posten.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-AgenturCOMMENT
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'Danger lies not in what we don't know, but in what we think we know that just ain't so.' So reads the e-mail signature of Greg Holloway, a scientist with the Institute of Ocean Sciences in British Columbia. The quote, from Mark Twain, is appropriate. On April 24, Holloway presented a paper to an international gathering of Arctic scientists in which he argued that the Arctic ice cap is not melting.
Why is this important? Because reporters -- and a few alarmist scientists -- have spent the past few years telling us that the Arctic is melting. According to an oft-quoted statistic, the ice cap has already shrunk by as much as 43 percent. This is a crucial warning -- a 'clarion call,' as one New York Times op-ed put it -- that global warming is real and will dunk the globe under a flood of melted water.
But what the reporters say they know, it appears, just ain't so.
The claims of Arctic thinning are based on thin evidence. Satellite observations from 1978 forward show a decrease in the total area of the Arctic ice cap -- but area alone doesn't mean anything. It's the volume of ice that matters, and to figure that out, scientists need to know how thick the ice is. American submarines have made measurements of ice thickness since 1958, but to be useful these measurements have to be made at exactly the same place, at exactly the same time of year, over a period of many years. At best, there are only 29 locations -- throughout the entire Arctic -- where useful comparisons can be made. These few locations are the whole basis for the claim that the ice caps are melting.
And that's where Holloway's research comes in. The problem, he says, is that the Arctic ice is constantly moving, pushed along by Arctic winds. But there is natural fluctuation in the pattern and intensity of these winds. Sometimes they push the ice outward from the North Pole, causing it to jam up mostly against Northern Canada. At other times, the ice stays closer to the pole. This, Holloway argues, is the most likely cause for the apparent thinning. The submarine measurements, he says, were taken at just those spots mostly likely to be thinned by changing Arctic wind patterns. But the ice didn't disappear -- it just moved somewhere else. The total Arctic ice loss, Holloway estimates, is closer to 12 percent, of which maybe 3 percent can be attributed to warmer global temperatures. His conclusion: This small reduction is well within the range of natural variability and may have nothing to do with global warming.
Holloway is not, I should mention, a committed global warming skeptic. Like many conscientious scientists I have talked to, he tries to shy away from political issues. He talks about being 'sensible' and 'responsible' and recognizing the limits of current scientific knowledge.
But the issue is unavoidably political. The global warming hysteria is the basis for the United Nations-backed Kyoto Accord, which would require the United States to slash its energy use by as much as 25 percent over the next decade. That means a massive, self-inflicted energy crisis that would make California's blackouts look trivial.
Objective science reporting has become a casualty of the Kyoto crusade. Last August, for example, the New York Times hastened its slide from respected news source to leftist propaganda rag, by screaming from its front page that 'The North Pole is melting.' The story was based, not on scientific data or even computer models, but on the claims of a single scientist -- an apparatchik in the UN global warming bureaucracy -- who attended a summertime tourist cruise to the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker. The tourists arrived at the pole, the Times breathlessly reported, and saw open water. 'The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water,' the reporter declared, 'was more than 50 million years ago.'
Real scientists reminded the Times that stretches of open water in the Arctic are a normal summertime event, caused by shifts in the ice, and the paper was forced to publish an embarrassing retraction. But as recently as a few weeks ago, the Times still reported that changes in Arctic ice 'match computer predictions' -- i.e., the same old 43 percent figure.
The Times, you may be interested to know, has yet to report on Holloway's research.
Remember that next time the newspapers push the latest scare story. What you're told we know, in many cases, just ain't so.
And contrary to popular belief, the polar ice cap is not melting everywhere. In fact, the ice cover appears to be the thickest in places where it is relatively warm, namely off the coasts of Alaska and Canada. Surprisingly enough, the sea off the coast of Siberia, the Arctic's ice chest, contains relatively little ice. The problem is a scarcity of data on the weather at the pole. Scientists are observing changes and documenting what is clearly some form of climate change, and yet they are unable to predict it.
Satellite photos show that the surface of the ice is shrinking. But whether the North Pole will be ice-free in 40 years, 60 years or never is mere speculation. To this day, scientists are still unable to determine exactly how thick -- or thin -- the ice in the Arctic actually is.
...that ANTARCTIC ice is actually increasing. I wonder if this is true, or if the data is so sketchy that it's just another educated supposition...? If so, it wouldn't really prop up 'global warming' would it?
Regardless of the polar caps, the global temperature is rising. I've lived in Northern Scandinavia all my life, and areas where the fjords of Norway used to freeze every winter, and people used to go ice fishing have been more or less completely ice free for the past 30 years. The same goes for lakes and rivers in the same area. I am currently living in Härjedalen in the Swedish woods, and here they used to go ice fishing until early june/late may. The past 30 years the ice has disappeared from the lakes and rivers in the end of April in stead. No one can claim that a change in temperature like that is natural.
Minimum temperatures during the winter have gone from -45C to -36C. At the same time the summers have gotten colder. Less sun and more rain. This is not a swinging trend, but a constant that is getting worse every year, and that has been going on for the past 30 years. Scientists sit inside their labs and look at graphs and calculations, but are not out in the real world observing the situation over time.
There is only so much one can learn by running out to take a few tests, then hide in you lab again until next year when it is time to take another test. You have to experience the situation as it changes to really understand and see what is happening.
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SP4: Warning!Sep 3rd, 2007 - 23:17:19
Something you cannot control and does not affect you directly is about to happen! Run! Hide!
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