Oh, the weather outside is frightful, let's mock Global Warming
In what has become an annual tradition, the onset of winter, and the cold weather that accompanies it, leads to the inevitable opinion articles that this somehow proves that "Climate Change" is so much bunk. To be fair, the flipside is true as well, with talk of Global Warming/Climate Change heating up during the summer months of heat waves, hurricanes, and droughts. It is an unfortunate measure of how scientifically illiterate our society is that the discussion happens on such an annual cycle for a lot of people.
Anyway, as to the article itself; Yes, it has been a cold couple of months, and yes, the Arctic sea ice has been recovering from where it wound up last summer, though that is only part of the story:
"The ice is about 10 to 20 centimetres thicker than last year, so that's a significant increase," he said.
If temperatures remain cold this winter, Langis said winter sea ice coverage will continue to expand.
But he added that it's too soon to say what impact this winter will have on the Arctic summer sea ice, which reached its lowest coverage ever recorded in the summer of 2007.
That was because the thick multi-year ice pack that survives a summer melt has been decreasing in recent years, as well as moving further south. Langis said the ice pack is currently located about 130 kilometres from the Mackenzie Delta, about half the distance from where it was last year.
The hard, multi-year ice is the key here. One cold winter makes little difference to it, and the long-term pattern here is that it is shrinking, during the summers when, you know, it isn't so cold.
And on the other side of the world, where, yes, it is summertime, scientists are seeing some other worrying trends.
UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica.
. . .
Satellite measurements have shown that three huge glaciers here have been speeding up for more than a decade.
. . .
Throughout the 1990s, according to satellite measurements, the glacier was accelerating by around 1% a year. Julian Scott's sensational finding this season is that it now seems to have accelerated by 7% in a single season, sending more and more ice into the ocean.
Hell, even the oil companies are ready to acknowledge Climate Change as an issue of importance, why can't the wingnuts get their heads around it?
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