LOLOLOL....so the paranoid conspiracy theory du jour on dingbat denier cult blogs is 'secret data', eh? More ice than is being reported? LOL. Jeez, you're gullible, walleyed.
Arctic Sea Ice Extent & Volume at Record Lows for the Date
Submitted by Nick Sundt on Sat, 05/29/2010 - 09:44
On 28 May, the extent of Arctic sea ice dropped to a record low for the date of 11,162,188 km2, surpassing the previous record low of 11,199,844 km2 set on 28 May 2006. Since reaching a seasonal maximum of approximately 14,407,344 km2 on 31 March, the extent of sea ice has fallen a staggering 3,245,156 km2 or 2,016,446 square miles. That is an area roughly half the size of the entire United States (including Alaska) and represents a decline of roughly 55,950 km2 per day (34,766 square miles per day). While the extent of Arctic sea ice normally declines during the "melt season" that typically begins in March and continues into September, the decline is unusually rapid for this time of year.
Meanwhile, the sea ice volume for the date is at a record low, falling 9-10,000 km3 below the average (1979-2009) values for the date. That volume, greater than that of Lakes Michigan and Huron combined (8,260 km3 or 1,980 cu mi), is the largest negative anomaly on record (i.e. for all dates since 1979).
In addition to being a very large volume in absolute terms, the volume also is large relative to the total volume of Arctic sea ice. According to a model developed by the University of Washington's Polar Science Laboratory (PSL), the average Arctic sea ice volume in late May averaged around 26,000 km3 during the 1979-2009 period. The current negative anomaly in ice volume therefore represents a loss of around one third of the average sea ice volume.
* © 2010 World Wildlife Fund
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Now what was that argument you said about biased sources there blunder. Seems to me the WWF is one of THE most biased and untruthful organizations out there
Yes, they found the WWF was getting payoffs from the polar bears to distort the science.......LOLOLOLOLOL. You are such a loon, walleyed.
I notice that you are unable to dispute the data and numbers in that article on sea ice extents and volumes. And I mean 'dispute' by offering scientific evidence to the contrary. You can't because there isn't any. All you've got is your nutso denier cult dogmas and myths.
..seems to me if I remember correctly some of their claims got into a certain IPCC report and were proven to be complete BS. GREAT SOURCE DOOD!
I know that you anti-science denier cultists love to denigrate all real science and reputable scientists but that is because your whole propaganda effort depends on confusing people about the reality of the scientific evidence and conclusions regarding anthropogenic global warming/climate change. In the real world the World Wildlife Fund is a well respected scientific research organization that produces a lot of sound science about the environment. A couple of things from their reports were improperly cited or referenced in the IPCC report.
One of them was a claim that the Amazon Rain Forrest is sensitive to droughts. Turns out that the claim is quite correct. The IPCC has been criticized for using the WWF as a source but that turns out to be a sort of clerical error. They were supposed to cite the original sources that the WWF report used, instead of just citing the WWF.
The IPCC got the science right about drought and fire threats to Amazon, but got its citations wrong
Union of Concerned Scientists
A sentence in Chapter 13 of
the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability states: "Up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation."
In other words, global warming may be putting the Amazon basin at risk of more frequent and severe droughts. In drought years, trees are more likely to die and forests become more susceptible to fires. In wet years, fires often stop at the forests' edge because the forest soil is so moist.
The passage cites a report from the
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an organization that includes
more than 1,000 government and NGO member organizations, and nearly 11,000 volunteer scientists in more than 160 countries. (News stories have inaccurately described the report as a sole product of WWF.)
It would have been preferable for the IPCC to have cited the original scientific peer-reviewed literature rather than the WWF-IUCN report. Further, the WWF-IUCN report was scientifically correct, but it did not cite the correct papers by
Dan Nepstad, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center on Cape Cod, and his colleagues.
John Cook, the editor of SkepticalScience.com,
summarized the citation error in the WWF-IUCU report:
"The WWF correctly states that 630,000 km2 of forests were severely drought stressed in 1998 -- this figure comes from
Nepstad et al. 1999. However, the 40 percent figure comes from several other papers by the same author that the WWF failed to cite. A 1994 paper estimated that around half of the Amazonian forests lost large portions of their available soil moisture during drought (
Nepstad et al. 1994). In 2004, new rainfall data showed that half of the forest area of the Amazon Basin had either fallen below, or was very close to, the critical level of soil moisture below which trees begin to die (
Nepstad et al. 2004). The results from these papers are consistent with the original statement: 'Up to 40 percent of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall.'"
It is also worth noting that Nepstad and other researchers further confirmed the link between drought and fire in papers published after the IPCC's deadline for research that could be included in this section of its 2007 report.
Cook continues:
"Subsequent research has provided additional confirmation of the Amazonian forest's vulnerability to drought. Field measurements of the soil moisture critical threshold found that tree mortality rates increase dramatically during drought (
Nepstad et al. 2007). Another study measured the effect of the intense 2005 drought on Amazonian biomass (
Phillips et al. 2009). The drought caused massive tree mortality leading to a fall in biomass. This turned the region from a large carbon sink to a carbon producer. The paper concluded that 'such events appear capable of strongly altering the regional carbon balance and thereby accelerating climate change.'"
While the IPCC should have cited the original peer-reviewed literature, not a summary of that literature by WWF and IUCN, the basic science was sound. And regardless of how the IPCC cited the references, tropical forests are increasingly vulnerable to drought and fire because of climate change as well as from forest degradation from destructive logging practices.
©2010 Union of Concerned Scientists
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
