Explore the world’s new coastlines if sea level rises 216 feet.
“There are more than five million cubic miles of ice on Earth, and some scientists say it would take more than 5,000 years to melt it all. If we continue adding carbon to the atmosphere, we’ll very likely create an ice-free planet, with an average temperature of perhaps 80 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the current 58” (Source: ngm.nationalgeographic.com).
GR: Just in case you haven’t seen this.
Global circulation of air and water influenced by factors such as latitude, land and sea size, altitude, and albedo determines climatic conditions. It explains, for instance, why the Atacama Desert is so dry. Melting sea ice and warming Polar Regions will alter circulation. What comes next? And when does it arrive?
Atop the world lies a thinning veil of ice. A gossamer lid covering a deep, dark Arctic Ocean. It is a reflector screen for incoming solar radiation during the months-long-day of Polar Summer. And a recent NASA study shows that this heat shield is starting to fail.
Ever since the late 1970s an Arctic warming at 2-3 times the rate of the rest of the globe has set off a 13.3 percent decline of sea ice at end summer during each and every following decade. And that cumulative loss is having an extraordinary impact. For the white, reflective ice cover by September has now, on average, fallen by nearly 50%. What remains is a thinner ice cover. One full of holes and interspersed with great and widening expanses of dark water.
Dark water and thinner, less contiguous, ice absorbs more of the sun’s heat. NASA notes that this added absorption…
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In the blue half-light of the Antarctic autumn, a thin film spreads across the continent’s coastal waters. It’s an embryonic form of sea ice: a mush of microscopic crystals that floats on the dense, salty water of the Southern Ocean.
Source: www.latimes.com
GR: This title from the Los Angeles Times is as silly as asking if Putin sending foreign aid to Ukraine negates invasion. Repeating the opinions of climate-change skeptics is as silly as repeating the invasion opinions of Russian troops in Ukraine. A better title might be “The Mysteries of Climate Change.”
It doesn’t take much to shove Arctic sea ice toward new record low values these days. Human caused climate change has made it easy for all kinds of weather systems to bully the ice.
In the case of the past seven days, three moderate strength high pressure cells churned away over the central Arctic, bringing with them clear skies, air temperatures in the range of average for 1979-2000 above the 70 North Latitude line, and a clockwise circulation favoring sea ice compaction and warm water upwelling at the ice edge.
The highs measured in the range of 1020 to 1025 hPa barometric pressure. Moderate-strength weather conditions that during a typical year of the last century would have been almost completely non-noteworthy. Today, instead, we have sea ice extent testing new record lows in the Japanese Space Agency’s monitor.
Source: robertscribbler.wordpress.com
GR: On the chart, the red line for 2014 intersects the 2011 & 2012 as it reaches July. Will it fall below them as the year progresses?
Huge tundra fire smoke plumes just to the right of the center.
“Atmospheric warming due to human-caused climate change. It’s the general measure we’ve used to track a devastating and ongoing heat amplification due to a terrible greenhouse gas emission. But if we were to look for where the greatest amount of that heat has accumulated, it would be in the world’s oceans. For from its air-contacting surface to its depths thousands of meters below, the World Ocean has captured 93.4% of the total heat forcing humans have already unleashed. The remainder is almost evenly divided between the atmosphere, the continents, and the ice.”
Source: robertscribbler.wordpress.com
GR: Don’t miss these informative discussions of global-warming events around the world.
GarryRogers Nature Conservation 
