Scientists link frozen spring to dramatic Arctic sea ice loss

Redsunset

I posted this in the links thread a couple of days ago. Worth a read if you missed it.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=84055232&postcount=9

Larbre34

By an awful coincidence a young climate scientist researcher I saw on TV a few times talking about this topic, Dr Katharine Giles, 35 of University College London was killed on the road in central London today when her bike collided with a truck. She is the second member of her acclaimed team to die tragically in recent times. Dr Giles was a hands on polar explorer as well as being involved in education and noted research. RIP.

hotwhiskey

Antarctic ice sheet melt 'not that unusual'.

If this is legit why was this not done 20 to 30 years ago. I thought we were paying extra taxes to stop this. Now we have a report from scientists saying don't worry its the norm..

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/15/western_antarctic_melting_nothing_unusual/

riffmongous

hotwhiskey wrote: »

Antarctic ice sheet melt 'not that unusual'.

If this is legit why was this not done 20 to 30 years ago. I thought we were paying extra taxes to stop this. Now we have a report from scientists saying don't worry its the norm..

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/15/western_antarctic_melting_nothing_unusual/

That's not exactly what the article the website quotes actually says

The researchers’ results are based on their analysis of a new ice core from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide that goes back 2,000 years, along with a number of other ice core records going back about 200 years. They found that during that time there were several decades that exhibited similar climate patterns as the 1990s.


The most prominent of these in the last 200 years – the 1940s and the 1830s – were also periods of unusual El Niño activity like the 1990s. The implication, Steig said, is that rapid ice loss from Antarctica observed in the last few decades, particularly the ’90s, “may not be all that unusual.”


The same is not true for the Antarctic Peninsula, the part of the continent closer to South America, where rapid ice loss has been even more dramatic and where the changes are almost certainly a result of human-caused warming, Steig said.


But in the area where the new research was focused, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, it is more difficult to detect the evidence of human-caused climate change. While changes in recent decades have been unusual and at the “upper bound of normal,” Steig said, they cannot be considered exceptional.


“The magnitude of unforced natural variability is very big in this area,” Steig said, “and that actually prevents us from answering the questions, ‘Is what we have been observing exceptional? Is this going to continue?’”