While most of our attention has of late been focused with good reason on the Trump regime’s efforts to dismantle the Great Society, New Deal, the Affordable Care Act, safety, health and environmental regulations, along with making the U.S. diplomacy a scary joke worldwide, climate change has not stopped for a breather. Indeed, the news on that front is, for the most part, deeply unsettling, with just occasional bright spots.
Bright is not latest word from the National Snow and Ice Data Center—one of those federally funded operations the regime would like to ax.
Every year, ice floating in the Arctic Ocean grows and shrinks with the season. The center has calculated that this year ice in the Arctic Ocean reached its maximum extent on March 7 and has now begun its decline, headed toward its minimum extent around Sept 10-15.
That maximum registered at its lowest level in the 38-year satellite record. Contributing to this, according to NSIDC scientists, was a very warm autumn and winter with air temperatures 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit above average over the Arctic Ocean. In addition to this general warmth, there were several extreme winter heat-waves over the ocean for the second winter in a row. The maximum has been declining by 2.8 percent a decade since 1979, and the minimum has been declining 13.8 percent a decade. While dwindling in extent, the ice has also been thinning.
From the National Aeronautics and Space Administration:
“We started from a low September minimum extent,” said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “There was a lot of open ocean water and we saw periods of very slow ice growth in late October and into November, because the water had a lot of accumulated heat that had to be dissipated before ice could grow. The ice formation got a late start and everything lagged behind—it was hard for the sea ice cover to catch up.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, Antarctica saw a record low sea ice minimum during the Austral Summer, down 71,000 square miles below the previous lowest minimum set in 1997.
“There’s a lot of year-to-year variability in both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, but overall, until last year, the trends in the Antarctic for every single month were toward more sea ice,” said Claire Parkinson, a senior sea ice researcher at Goddard. “Last year was stunningly different, with prominent sea ice decreases in the Antarctic. To think that now the Antarctic sea ice extent is actually reaching a record minimum, that’s definitely of interest.”
“It is tempting to say that the record low we are seeing this year is global warming finally catching up with Antarctica,” said Meier. “However, this might just be an extreme case of pushing the envelope of year-to-year variability. We’ll need to have several more years of data to be able to say there has been a significant change in the trend.”
On Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization released its annual State of the Global Climate. This confirmed several other reports that found 2016 to be the planet’s warmest year on record. The previous record-holder was 2015. WMO said temperatures were up last year by 1.98 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Even without a strong El Nino in 2017, we are seeing other remarkable changes across the planet that are challenging the limits of our understanding of the climate system. We are now in truly uncharted territory,” World Climate Research Program Director David Carlson said.
As we have seen in the two months that Donald J. Trump has been squatting in the Oval Office, there are those in high places eager to silence climate scientists at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as well as anyone else in any government agency who thinks climate change has an impact to be dealt with in their area of oversight. The climate-change naysayers seem to believe that ceasing to chart what we are experiencing globally will make the changes vanish not just from the public eye but from reality itself.
It would be heartening to believe that if they were presented with enough facts they would change their minds and consequently seek changes in policies. After all, even the president of the Flat Earth Society says burning fossil fuels is warming the planet. But, as has become obvious, facts don’t matter to the climate-science deniers.
Some of them deny out of greed, some of them out of ignorance, some because they are fossil fuel marionettes. But the whys don’t matter.
What does matter is that every minute they’re in power, every minute they delay taking aggressive action to ameliorate the impacts of climate change, they condemn us to a grim future. Unchecked, that future will not just be one of drought, sea-level rise, crop failures, killer heat waves, spread of disease, lethal ocean acidification and all the rest of the panoply of impacts scientists have predicted. Climate change is going to generate violence with it, too, conflicts the likes of which may make the world wars seem mild by comparison.
Only a resistance that includes direct action in its quiver can alter the wrongheaded course these leaders are choosing.