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!

Politically disenfranchised in Idaho

Yesterday was the 2014 primary election.  For Madison County and Rexburg City, Idaho, this means that this was THE election that matters.  Now that the primaries are done the election in November is, for us, largely a formality where GOP candidates proceed to steamroll over the opposition, if any, in a tidal wave of "red" voting.  I'll get back to this later.

Idaho is politically inconsequential to most people in the United States.  Its population is so small and its political leaning is so overwhelmingly red that even Presidential hopefuls generally don't bother stopping by during their election years.  Republicans skip a visit to Idaho because they know they have the state all sewn up, and Democrats skip it because, well, it's largely a lost cause to them.

This brings us to yesterday's election and I'll use one race as the focal point of this posting:

Ron Nate vs. Doug Hancey (incumbent) for the State House of Representatives seat for Idaho District 34A.

Doug Hancey is a member of the GOP and a business man who knows what it takes to run a business, work with employees, etc., and who has a proven track record of working with house members on both sides of the aisle to get things done in the Idaho State Legislature.

Ron Nate is a also GOP, but with a stronger Tea Party flavor, who sells himself primarily as "the more conservative choice."  He is a professor of economics, and though he has been active in local political organizations he had never been elected to office.

During yesterday's primary election, as of midnight last night, Ron Nate earned 2710 votes to 2190 for Doug Hancey.  A story in today's Idaho Falls Post Register newspaper Doug Hancey said that he was disappointed, but that he was most likely hurt by low voter turn out.  Local reports also commented that voter turnout was low, and that they are at a loss about why this was so.

Why a low voter turnout?  This is no mystery.  A few years ago the Idaho state GOP voted to close all GOP primary elections.  Only registered GOP members are therefore allowed to vote in GOP primary races in Idaho.

I started thinking about this and I did some research.  District 34 includes Madison County and the northern rural part of Bonneville County, which does not include the cities of Idaho Falls or Ammon.  Rexburg is therefore the largest population center in this district.

According to the web site CensusViewer.com (http://censusviewer.com/city/ID/Rexburg), in 2010 Rexburg had a population of 25,484 with 20,289 over the age of 18 and therefore at least potentially eligible to vote.  Again, according to CensusViewer.com this is the breakdown of registered GOP and Dem voters in Rexburg in 2010:

• Republican 4, 944 
• Democrat 208

These numbers indicated that though this district votes overwhelmingly for GOP candidates, only about one quarter of eligible voters are registered as either Rep or Dem.

If we look at the voter turnout for the Nate v. Hancey GOP contest, we see 2,710 to 2,190 votes for a total of 4900 votes cast.  Is this a low turnout?  It appears to be when you compare this number to the total number of potentially eligible voters in the district (>20,000 of them), but it is probably an extremely high voter turnout when you consider the number of people would were ALLOWED to vote in yesterday's GOP primaries.  From the data above we know that about 1/4 of eligible voters in Rexburg are registered Republicans.  If we accept the assumption that about the same proportion of voters in the entire district are similarly registered we would probably see 6,000 to 7,500 registered GOP voters.  When we compare the number of votes cast in the Nate v. Hancey race to this number, the registered voter turnout is between 65% and 81%.  This is an incredibly high voter turnout.

What does this mean?  This means that the state GOP maneuvering to close its elections disenfranchises all but the faithful few in the state, and thus guarantees that at least in my part of the state that the few are deciding who the leaders will be for the many.

I wanted to vote, but it was illegal in Idaho for me to do so in the election that mattered to me - the GOP primary.  I am not a registered affiliate with any political party.  I'll say that again...it was illegal for me to vote.

As a political independent, formerly associated with the GOP, I am now disenfranchised and prohibited from voting in elections for my state and local political leadership.  Is this still America?  It doesn't feel like it.  At least it doesn't when less than 25% of the eligible voters are allowed to decide who sits in city, county, and state elected offices.

The goal of 350 ppm is now a pipe dream

Researchers at the Global Monitoring Division of NOAA recently released a report that the atmosphere has for the first time in modern history maintained 400ppm for an entire month.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html

The old goal of trying to limit atmospheric carbon concentrations to only 350ppm is now LONG gone!

That's what ongoing inaction will do when America, one of the two largest carbon emitters in the world, failed to act.

Is this all America and Americans' fault?  No, but we as nation sure didn't do hardly anything to stop it.  This makes me sad.

This is sad, sad, but somehow appropriate news for Earth Day.

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?

2014 Spring Climate Outlook | NOAA Climate.gov

NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just released it's annual Spring Climate Outlook report.  You see a video highlighting major expectations by clicking the link below.



What will Spring mean this year?  That depends where you happen to live.



2014 Spring Climate Outlook | NOAA Climate.gov



Welcome to Spring!  It's been a long winter, and it's about time we started to warm up.

New statement on climate change from the AAAS - 2014

There is a new statement from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, also known as the AAAS, on what we know about climate change.

The AAAS is the leading scientific body in the United States, represents the best of our scientific community, and is the largest scientific community in the world.

For one thing, multiple lines of evidence support the statement that 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are affecting the climate...I encourage you to take time to read the entire statement by clicking the link below.

http://whatweknow.aaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AAAS-What-We-Know.pdf

The link below is a 5 minute video in which the question of scientific consensus among other topics are touched upon.  It is also from the AAAS.

http://whatweknow.aaas.org/consensus-sense/

This statement and video do not represent the wild-eyed ramblings of some fringe scientific element, it reflects the mainstream scientific conclusions of the world's leading body of scientists on the topic of climate change, as well as an effort to disseminate information about what we know about it.

The AAAS is working deliberately to help people understand what we know, and calls upon governments to end the debate on a topic for which the science is settled, and move on to identifying  best approaches for dealing with the problem of climate change.

The debate is over...it's time to act.  What will you do?

Spring in the west, and deep freeze in the east

The Arctic Ocean usually reaches its maximum sea ice extent about this time of year, and we as start observing the annual spring/summer sea ice melt up north the sea ice extent is about 1,000,000 square kilometers below the 1981-2010 average.  Wow!   

This has also been a wild winter ride, and it's not over for people in the midwest.  As I type this entry schools including universities across that region are closed or running on a weather-impacted schedule.  Out here in the mountain west though it looks and feels like spring has already sprung.  We did have a dose of snow over the weekend...I had to shovel twice on Saturday and once on Sunday, but later on Sunday temperatures shot back up to 40+oF and it's headed back there today.

Normally where I live in SE Idaho is only starting the annual spring snow melt by now, but this year the snow is already all gone, except for small patches along the north sides of homes and buildings.  Wild!

Other signs of spring around here include daffodils and crocuses pushing up through the soil, motorcycles appearing in parking lots, and students walking wearing sweatshirts and even short-sleeved shirts.

 Why the early Spring-like conditions?  Well, the radical swing of the jet stream this winter has stayed north of us while it's swung far to the south over the Great Plains and Midwest.

The map below shows the current jet stream track.  Idaho is south of it, and the entire eastern part of the USA, except for the Everglades and Miami are north of it and still freezing.  Yikes!

Will this madness never end?

Cheers!