back to article NASA snaps show Arctic melt

NASA’s latest study into Arctic sea ice concludes that the oldest, thickest ice is disappearing faster than the thinner ice at the edges of the Arctic Ocean. The Goddard Space Flight Center researchers say the multi-year ice is disappearing in a way that will make Arctic sea ice even more vulnerable to summer declines. The …

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  1. Martin Budden Silver badge
    Joke

    Looking at those pics...

    the loss is all on the Russian side. What are those damned commies up to?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Someone's spiced up the animation with a gratuitous fly-over

    This animation *looks* like it's a decline, but it also fluctuates enough that it might be but a dip. Who is to say the start wasn't a high? As such, this is suggestive, but not automatically conclusive.

    1. scarshapedstar
      Facepalm

      Re: Someone's spiced up the animation with a gratuitous fly-over

      It's cool. I mean, if it turns out to be the real deal, we can just suck that water up with a straw or something. We need at least another 200 years to decide.

  3. Barry Rueger

    What? Me worry?

    I'm just damned glad that global warming is a left wing hippie myth. Or at least so all of our North American "leaders" tell me.

  4. Michael Thibault
    Flame

    Are you serious?

    "Greenbelt, Md."! Come on; no one's going to believe that!

  5. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Stick this in your god damn greenietard pipe and smoke it!

    What the sacks of shiite are ommitting to tell you is that the earth is at is "coldest ever point" in 300 million years right here right now! It has been a *lot* warmer in the past and at the end of a cooling cycle it has no where else for temperatures to go but up. As the founder of greenpeace who quit the organisation (another fact greenietards forget to mention) the whole greenietard movemet have been taken over by politico's and businesses who can make a huge profit out of continuing to purvey this myth.

    Thats right, the earth has normally had no ice at its poles. Get over your greenie bent and find some other worthy cause to satiate your white middle class need to belong to something, anything, lust you are sick with.

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Stick this in your god damn greenietard pipe and smoke it!

      However,

      As it warms we will see cold first. Every single climate model I have seen predicts that a warming on average in the northern hemisphere will throw the winter temperature in Europe down by up to 12 degrees. A lot of them forgot to account for the side effects from having large open spaces in the Arctic - "lake effect" on a continental scale. They are hastily adding that one now..

      So in the grand scheme of things Earth may warm up. In our lifetimes however we will see snow, snow and snow. Freeze too. It is not going to be pretty.

      I drove across all of Europe from the UK to the Balkans at the height of the February "Hell Freezing Over" and I was really grateful that I had a good set of winter tyres and winter oil in the sump.

      For all practical purposes we got away easy in the UK this winter. If this trend continues next winter is not likely to be so forgiving. Less than 2% of cars have winter tyres, nobody puts in a winter oil change and under 0.1% (if not less) have engine block or sump heaters. So if we get the same stuff EU got this winter next year the pandemonium will be complete.

      It may be global warming - prepare for freeze :)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Re: Stick this in your god damn greenietard pipe and smoke it!

        And Antarctica? Global warming leads to colder temperatures in the northern hemisphere AND the southern at the same time?

        Wow.

        1. Scorchio!!
          Thumb Down

          Re: Re: Re: Stick this in your god damn greenietard pipe and smoke it!

          This winter the gulf stream altered position. The change in air pressures and wind thus facilitated the ingress of colder weather from Siberia. That's how it is done. Don't believe me? Go grep it out.

    2. Mike 29

      Re: Stick this in your god damn greenietard pipe and smoke it!

      I really shouldn't feed the trolls but...

      Of that 300 million years, how long did the planet support human life?

      Also "normal" != "comfortable"

      1. The Axe
        FAIL

        Re: Re: Stick this in your god damn greenietard pipe and smoke it!

        Over the last 300 millions years the earth supported a huge variety of life. And over the very short time scale of homo sapians, humans have survived wide swings in temperature.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Fail yourself, actually:

          >>"Of that 300 million years, how long did the planet support human life?"

          >"Over the last 300 millions years the earth supported a huge variety of life."

          You fail basic reading comprehension. Well, it's either that or you deliberately introduced an irrelevant point as part of a bogus rhetorical trick, but I'd rather assume an innocent mistake on your part than deliberate intellectual dishonesty. I'm just nice like that.

    3. Steve Knox
      WTF?

      Re: Stick this in your god damn greenietard pipe and smoke it!

      If the earth is at its coldest point in 300 million years, how do you explain this graph:

      http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png

      which clearly shows a much colder temperature average from 11,000 to 12,000 years ago?

      Read up on the current Ice Age, which we are in, and you'll find that its coldest average temperatures were approximately 20,000 years ago. Yes, we're still in the dip, but we're on the path up.

      All of that is irrelevant to the real concern about global warming. It's not about making the planet too hot. It's about the planet becoming too hot _for_us_to_live_on_.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Stick this in your god damn greenietard pipe and smoke it!

      That's a pretty ignorant post.

      It doesn't really even matter what Earth was like in the past before there was a world-wide dominant human culture. Dinosaurs et al might have been fine with whatever, but that's like comparing apples and oranges. We know that shagging up the environment -whoever's fault it is, and whyever it is- will be a massive, massive problem for humanity as it stands at the moment.

      And you can keep the racism, too. Because white middle class people are going to be a lot less screwed than poor African people about climate change.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "and at the end of a cooling cycle..."

      "...it has no where else for temperatures to go but up"

      So each cooling cycle ends at 0°Kelvin?

    6. scarshapedstar
      FAIL

      Re: Stick this in your god damn greenietard pipe and smoke it!

      Amazing. The less-than-100-years that mankind has the capability to measure the world climate just happens to be the coldest 100 out of the past 300 million. A 1 in 3 million probability.

      What crappy luck...

  7. poeg

    Arctic Oscillation

    Happens every 40 years or so and in big ways 80 years ago.

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120104142117.htm

    1. Tads

      Re: Read your own link

      It says nothing of the sort. Did you mean to link something different or is this a new Climate denier stooge tactic?

      1. NomNomNom

        Re: Re: Read your own link

        how did it manage to get 3 upvotes?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: how did it manage to get 3 upvotes?

          Delusional types voting according to what they wish to be true, without any knowledge of or even desire to find out the facts, such as by reading the posted link.

  8. Thought About IT
    Childcatcher

    If there's nothing to worry about ...

    ... how come the first and most persistent commenters on any blog about AGW are those who deny there's a problem? Standing on such thin ice must keep them awake at night.

    1. NomNomNom

      Re: If there's nothing to worry about ...

      half of them deny it's happening while the other half claim it always happens.

      That's not to say those two sets don't overlap...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: If there's nothing to worry about ...

      Perhaps they are first to comment because our entire economy and tax system is being hijacked by the green agenda, and IF the basis for the huge tax rises is not true (and I said IF) then it is all a huge financial con to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor.

      Maybe that is why.

      1. Pperson

        Re: Re: If there's nothing to worry about ...

        > Perhaps they are first to comment because our entire economy and tax system

        > is being hijacked by the green agenda

        Well, I wouldn't say *entire* - plenty of hijacking going on in the guise of bank bail-outs too. But yes, there's always room for more excuses to pauperise us plebs. Regardless of whether the justification is fact or fiction, they always find creative ways to make money from it.

        But that's money-making. It'd be a pleasant change if the rest of us just cut 'em adrift and started concentrating on the things that really matter. Why get sidetracked by how the ba*ds screw you over for pieces of paper (or numbers on a disk drive in a bank)?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Even when you say 'if' you still ignore possibilities.

        >"IF the basis for the huge tax rises is not true (and I said IF) then it is all a huge financial con to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor."

        Well, or it's a genuine mistake made by people making the best decisions they can in the light of limited knowledge available at the time. It speaks volumes about your mentality that the non-paranoid option didn't even occur to you. You have a default assumption of malice that is so strong it prevents you seeing any other (non-conspiracy-mongering) possibility.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Even when you say 'if' you still ignore possibilities.

          >>"IF the basis for the huge tax rises is not true (and I said IF) >then it is all a huge financial con to make the rich richer at >the expense of the poor."

          >Well, or it's a genuine mistake made by people making the best >decisions they can in the light of limited knowledge available at the >time. It speaks volumes about your mentality that the non-paranoid option >didn't even occur to you. You have a default assumption of malice >that is so strong it prevents you seeing any other (non-conspiracy-mongering) possibility.

          It speaks volumes about your mentality if you believe that in the current economic climate the government will not exploit any situation to be able to raise more tax under a guise that is hard to argue with. What hard heart would refuse to pay more tax if they thought it would "save the planet"? If however the planet does not need saving, and some believe that as vehemently as you believe it does, then it is indeed a con. Not malicious, but a con nevertheless. The rich get richer because they can avoid tax, the poor meanwhile get poorer because they don't have accountants to help them avoid the new taxes. If it wasn't green taxes they would be forced to tax something else and perhaps be more honest about the reasons for the tax.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Even when you say 'if' you still ignore possibilities.

            Erm... the planet doesn't need saving. Give it a few million years after humanity is wiped out and it'll be fine again. It's *us*. WE are the ones who are going to get screwed by any severe upset.

            As another poster stated: It'd be great if it was untrue. I'd love to not have to worry about it. Unfortunately that is demonstrably not the case. And even if it is 'normal' for Earth's environment to go whacky every few tens of thousands of years, then that's still not ok for us as a society.

            And it's a gamble to deny the potential problem. Even if you don't believe, let's say that there is a 10% chance that you are wrong. That gives a 90% chance of it being fine to carry on consuming, and a 10% chance of modern society being screwed in a hundred years. So that's nothing much to win, and everything to loose: Russian roulette with no prize. That's a bad bet to take.

            Furthermore, would it not be a good thing to just get away from our oil dependency? Let's appeal to the right wing, here: Get rid of oil dependency and replace it with renewables or nuclear power, and we no need to rely on those pesky little nations sat on the oil who hold you to ransom. The US/whoever would be energy self-sufficient and wouldn't need to send money elsewhere, to the benefit of it's own population. Take that a step further to CHEAP nuclear energy and you have improved standards of living for those in countries that can afford it, giving a further edge to the Western nations.

            If the government is so desperate for tax, there are better way to get it than an agenda that preaches austerity and which is unpopular. Just whip up another red-scare, or a few wars. Grab some more assets of some kind. Make China the enemy and raise import taxes in patriotic rage. Look to history and the manner in which taxes were raised by broke governments and you'll see plenty of better ways of doing it.

            Claiming that it's all a con to get money is a very ill-thought theory politically. Industry as a whole is opposed to green policies, and industry has enormous political sway and can throw a lot of money at lobbying and party support. If I wanted to be a successful politician, it would be far easier to succeed as anti-green, and ensure that the money of the corporations was behind me.

      3. Tads

        Re: Re: If there's nothing to worry about ...

        Climate deniers don't realise that we wish they were right. The planet would not be in danger, humans won't take millions of other species down with them, and we're not rushing headlong towards extinction while whistling dixie and saying "It all might be ok!".

        We got to be so successful by recognising threats and managing them. It seems the one danger we can't beat is the enemy within.

  9. Hugh Pumphrey
    Headmaster

    Nice article but ...

    ... slight remote sensing fail. The data certainly didn't all come from Nimbus 7 because it was launched in 1978 and switched off in 1994 (and the SMMR instrument may well have failed before that date). As with any 32-year satellite dataset, this one would have been made by merging data from several missions which overlap in time.

  10. Tads

    IT'S OK GUYS

    ANTARCTICA IS GAINING ICE! AMIRITE!

  11. Fading
    Holmes

    Journal of Climate.......

    OMG the ice's cubes in the drink are melting - quick fetch the paper towels, oh wait the water level remains the same....... Damn you Archimedes.

    1. Tads

      Re: Journal of Climate.......

      Antartica and Greenland are melting too, there's a reason the bulk of the rises come later in projections ie when the land ice melts.

    2. Steve Knox
      FAIL

      Re: Journal of Climate.......

      You forgot relative density. See http://nsidc.org/news/press/20050801_floatingice.html

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Journal of Climate.......

      Or:

      The ice cubes in my Whiskey are melting, oh bollocks, my Whiskey is all diluted now.

  12. Nameless Faceless Computer User

    It's all moot. We are entering the next ice age. All this fuss about ice melting will soon be a huge joke. http://www.iceagenow.com/

  13. Seanmon
    Meh

    Ummm...

    From the picture, I'm estimating about 50%-ish loss since 1980. I'm no expert, but I was alive in 1980. Can't say I've noticed any material changes in the climate, atmosphere, weather, drinking water etc in that time.

    (Except it were all fields about here, of course.)

    1. Volker Hett

      Re: Ummm...

      Here we had to raise the dykes because of higher floods three times in the past 20 years. We were at 6 meters in in the 90's and are now at 7 wit 7,50 planned for next year.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Your lack of observational skills proves nothing.

      So, you haven't noticed all the plant growing seasons starting earlier, the insects hanging around into the middle of the winter, the development of long late indian summers stretching well into november and other similar massive changes that have taken place since the '80s? All that shows is that you're not paying attention.

      1. The Axe

        Re: Your lack of observational skills proves nothing.

        "So, you haven't noticed all the plant growing seasons starting earlier, ..."

        Wow, I didn't realise that climate change was happening so fast. I thought it was only weather that changed so quickly.

        Us skeptics aren't denying that the climate is changing. What we're not so convinced about is if it due to man made CO2. Or even if the CO2 is causing the temperature changes or is a result of the temperature changes. Or even if the Sun is somehow involved. And all the climate models have not been proved to be stupdenously accurate up to now either. All combined with the tactics that the AGW groups use such as Gleick's recent affair then we remain to be convinced that it is not a huge global scam.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @The Axe

          A 20 year trend is fine for observing climate over.

          Spring is indeed coming sooner. There are regularly and increasingly regularly sightings of fish on British shores which would have normally not been able to tolerate the cold here.

          Oh and don't be under any illusions: There are many "skeptics" who say that there isn't any change in climate/temperature. Nigel Lawson is one who does it publicly, there are also regularly people on Reg forums trotting out the 1998 temperature being the same as now factoid as proof of climate conspiracy.

        2. Graham Bartlett

          Re: Re: Your lack of observational skills proves nothing.

          "Us skeptics aren't denying that the climate is changing"

          Erm, actually a lot of them (including El Reg writers) are doing just that. Do keep up, old boy.

      2. some vaguely opinionated bloke
        Joke

        Re: Your lack of observational skills proves nothing.

        "So, you haven't noticed all the plant growing seasons starting earlier, the insects hanging around into the middle of the winter, the development of long late indian summers stretching well into november and other similar massive changes that have taken place since the '80s?"

        That's weather, not climate.

    3. Pperson

      Re: Ummm...

      Wow really? You must live in a pretty nice place then. Or maybe it was awful back in 1980 too? Where I live the pollution is noticeably worse, visibility has gone down, the water now tastes kind of metallic / weird and hot-(40's)-but-humid days during summer are becoming the norm from the equally-hot-(40's)-but-at-least-dry days of 20-30 years ago. Boy, I really hate the hot+humid days...

      Be interested to see what anecdotes others have about the area they live in.

    4. umacf24

      Re: Ummm...

      I was alive in the sixties (SE England). We used to have cool wet summers and cold (but not frozen) wet winters. Now we have cool dry summers and freezing dry winters. It's still all fields around here, but they're brown now.

  14. John A Blackley

    Oh well

    The weather's going to get worse (or it isn't) and the sea level's going to rise a metre or so (or it won't). I'll be dead in >< 40 years so I don't really care.

    1. Red Bren
      Joke

      Zombie alert!!!

      "I'll be dead in >< 40 years"

      Does that mean you'll only be alive in exactly 40 years? Now I'm picturing you as some kind of bizarre zombie creature that will briefly come to life in 4 decades, then return to an undead state...

    2. ian 22

      Re: Oh well

      So no children (or grandchildren) for you then? Seems a bit of justice.

  15. The Axe
    Thumb Up

    Watts up with that

    A proper analysis of the NASA figures is at WattsUpWithThat at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/01/nasa-and-multi-year-arctic-ice-and-historical-context/

  16. Oninoshiko
    Joke

    Maybe it would stop melting if they stopped useing satellites to blast it with microwaves?

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