Holy Cow! Look at that decline in Arctic sea ice!

I haven't posted anything about much here lately, though there has been a lot going on.  For example the launch of the Carbon Observatory Satellite (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/02/carbon-observatory-2-satellite_n_5550826.html?utm_hp_ref=green), but I just had to place a short post when I checked the Arctic sea ice extent today at the NSIDC.org site.

The graph below shows the relationship between the current sea ice extent (blue line) and the extent in 2012 (green dashed line), the year that generated the smallest sea ice extent so far, and the long-term average sea ice extent (dark gray line).  The rate of sea ice melt through mid-June 2014 wasn't really much out of the ordinary, just 500,000 km2 below the long term average (just!?), but over the past couple of weeks the sea ice extent has plummeted!  It's now about 1.2 million km2 below the average extent for this time of year.  

Yikes!

If this sea ice melt rate keeps up we could see another record low extent or close to it.  And yet another indicator from the high Arctic that the effects of climate change are not going to be going away anytime soon.

This is also the second month running where the atmospheric carbon dioxide level did not dip below 400 ppm, the second month it's ever been this high in human history...at least for the last several hundred thousand years.

Hang on, it could get interesting and exciting to see just how far things will go before there is general acceptance and outcry that something be done, at least in the USA.

Think green!

The 2014 Arctic Sea Ice Melt is ON!

Every summer some of the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean melts.  And, it's once again that time of year.  The Arctic sea ice melt is on! 

There is no way to know how much sea ice will be left at the end of any melt season, but there's one thing we can be pretty sure of, and that's that there will be less sea ice up there at the end of this melt season than the 1981-2010 average of 6.3 million square kilometers.  

2001 was the last year the sea ice minimum was greater than long-term average.  

The data below show the annual minimum sea ice extent for the Arctic Ocean between 1979 and 2013 (data courtesy of the NSIDC.org).  There is a lot of variability in the data (which is normal for any natural system), but the interesting and worrisome thing is that on average the amount of sea ice remaining at the end of the summer melt season is dropping at an increasing rate (see the trend line through the data).   

The increasing steepness of the slope is what worries me.  These data indicate that not only do we have a trend of increasing sea ice melt in the Arctic, but that the rate ice is melting is accelerating.

Climatologists have long projected that the effects of global climate change will be observed earliest and most clearly in the Arctic.  The rate of melting sea ice is just one of those indicators, but it's a powerful one!

Global warming is not just some wild-eyed idea; the reality of global warming is a scientific conclusion based on decades of multiple lines of evidence.

Will we see a new record Arctic sea ice minimal this summer?  No one can know this, but science can with a high degree of confidence predict that there will be less ice on average this summer than we've seen in the past.

The data below show the current sea ice extent and recent extent history comparing 2014 and 2012, the year with the current minimum sea ice extent) so far.

So what!?

The answer to the so what question is this.  Global warming is real, and unless we get busy doing what we can to mitigate the effects of climate change we are in for some serious trouble.

America...the alarm clock is ringing.  Are you waking up?