British adventurer/explorer Ben Saunders spent a lot of time in the Arctic. On foot. Hauling his stuff behind him. He started in 2001. After three years, he could give a firsthand report that the Arctic was getting warmer. In May 2004, he gave up a ski trip from Russia via the North Pole to Canada in May because it was too hot: the average temperature was just -1.4°F, compared to -21.4°F just three years before.
NASA reported similar results. That same year, researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at my alma mater, the University of Colorado, reported that the extent of Arctic ice had hit a record low. Also in 2004 the Arctic Council’s International Arctic Science Committee issued its 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment showing a grim future for the circumpolar Inuit people as a result of climate change. All four of these assessments were ridiculed by climate change deniers and pretty much ignored by the media. All four were right.
NSDIC continues to closely observe what’s happening in the Arctic. There’s a good reason for that. Arctic temperature changes are an omen. Global warming and its impacts happen faster at the poles, the most sensitive regions to climate change on Earth. Arctic sea ice not only keeps the polar regions cool, it moderates the climate around the planet. Because sea ice is bright, more than three-fourths of the sunlight that strikes it is reflected into space, a ratio called “albedo.” Where the ice fully melts each year, the darker surface of the sea is revealed and more sunlight—90 percent—is absorbed, leading to warmer water. That, in turn, raises Arctic temperatures in general. And that affects global temperatures.
It’s not just the extent of the annual melt that is problematic. Old ice is rapidly dwindling. Which is ice that is 2-4 years old. Old ice forms a foundation. As less of it survives the summer melt, more surface ice melts in subsequent years, although this is not perfectly linear.
On Sunday, the center charted the year’s low point for the extent of summer Arctic sea ice—1.597 million square miles. That means the sea ice minimum this year is the second lowest on record, with 2012 being the lowest. You can see a larger interactive version by clicking here.
But while the minimum this year wasn’t lower than the record in 2012, the average extent of sea ice for the past 12 months was the lowest ever, as this chart by Grant Foster (aka Tamino) shows:
In the past two days, the Arctic Sea has begun to freeze again and is likely to continue to do so until the melting begins in mid-March (although it’s possible we might still see some melting over the next few days).
Tamino notes that prominent members of the denier crowd are practically crowing about the fact that the sea ice minimum this year was higher than in record-breaking 2012, but they ignore the fact that the average extent of summer ice this year is the lowest in the satellite record.
Not having had a wholly ice-free Arctic at the end of this summer gave Anthony Watts of the popular (among deniers) blog “Watt’s Up With That” another opportunity to bash Tamino and Joe Romm at Climate Progress for their commentary on this year’s melt. The key foolishness with this critique that ice-free summers in the Arctic Sea haven’t happened is the missing word: Yet.
Globally, we have just had the hottest 11 consecutive months on record. Not only did we have the hottest July in the 136-year record, but July was also the hottest-ever month. Period. And August tied July.
We were specifically warned about the Arctic a dozen years ago. That came on the heels of previous public warnings dating back to 1988. As we now know, Exxon-Mobil executives knew about the dangers decades ago. They didn’t issue warnings. They engineered a cover-up, replete with smears, paid propagandists and campaign contributions to marionettes in Congress and state governments.
Today we still have deniers spewing their lies.
We still have delayers telling us we musn’t move too fast or it will wreck the economy, even though unfettered climate change will wreck it a lot faster and more thoroughly than transforming our energy, transportation and agriculture systems.
We now have despairers who tell us, yeah, climate change is bad news but it’s too late to do anything about it.
They’re all wrong. And we need to work diligently—with our allies in industry and government—to show those who listen to these deniers, delayers and despairers just how wrong they are.