Silly Republicans. They think they can trash talk Climate Change and treat it like their personal punching bag. Despite all the evidence they keep badmouthing Climate Change calling it a joke, a “hoax,” a get rich quick scheme by Algore based on “junk science” and a plot by the UN and the EPA to steal our precious bodily fluids freedoms.
Well I have news for them. Climate Change doesn’t care what Republicans or Teabaggers think of it. It just keeps moving along at an ever increasing rate.
By just about any measure, global warming is matching or exceeding experts’ worst projections, and could bring drastic change to our planet, including a 19-foot sea level rise and the extinction of many species, according to a new report released [Nov. 24, 2009]. […]
The researchers point to a gloomy slate of evidence: Carbon dioxide emissions are 40 percent higher than in 1990. Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting at an accelerated pace. Sea level crept 80 percent higher over the last 15 years than projected in 2001. It is on track to rise twice as much by 2100 as the IPCC projected in 2007. […]
Scientists have learned a lot since summer 2006 — the cutoff for publication of research considered in the 2007 IPCC report. “What this report is an attempt to do is to provide an update of the current scientific understanding,” Mann said.
“We are all concerned that we are basically on target for changes that are in general larger than what was projected from the IPCC report,” he continued. “The observations are telling us that changes in many respects are happening faster than models projected.” […]
“Among the things we’ve learned that we were not so sure of three years ago is that there is an urgency to this problem that isn’t a political issue,” said report author Richard Somerville of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s Mother Nature herself.”
The science that has emerged since the 2007 IPCC report appears to point to accelerating climate change, said Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, Calif., who was not a part of the study.
You see, Climate Change isn’t running for political office so it doesn’t mind if you Republicans ignore it or if you need to pretend it isn’t real to get campaign contributions from Big Oil and Coal companies or to excite your base of Fox News watching zombies to vote for you in the primary.
Truth be told, Climate Change thinks that GOP denials of its existence on Fox News and elsewhere is the best “crazy sh*t people do” reality show on TV. Climate Change actually appreciates all that the Republicans do to make its life easier.
For example, this year, already the hottest 8 months on record has been another year where the ice at the North pole has melted so much that the Northwest passage (basically the route above Canada) and the Northern Sea Route (basically the sea lanes above Siberia and Scandinavia) are both navigable. In fact …
The Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route are largely free of ice, allowing the potential for a circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean. At least two expeditions are attempting this feat, the Norwegian explorer Borge Ousland and the Peter I yacht from Russia.
Not as cool as Magellan circumnavigating the globe in the 1500’s but something we’ve never been able to do before. Sort of a new frontier if you will. At least until the polar sea ice is completely gone in the summer.
Of course some might claim this is just one more of those weird weather anomalies that just happened to all happen this year — record flooding in the US, China and Pakistan), heat waves and massive wild fires in Russia, 100 degree temperatures along the Northeastern seaboard, the worst drought in Western Australia in 750 years, etc. etc. etc — that don’t really prove any thing. Are they right? Uh, not exactly:
Arctic sea ice generally reaches its annual minimum extent in mid-September. This August, ice extent was the second lowest in the satellite record, after 2007. On September 3, ice extent dropped below the seasonal minimum for 2009 to become the third lowest in the satellite record. […]
Ice extent for August 2010 was the second lowest in the satellite record for the month.
In fact, August sea ice measures of the extent of sea ice coverage have been declining since 1979 at a pretty consistent 8.9% per decade:
Yet measures of the extent of sea ice (i.e., how much of the ocean it covers) is not the whole story. Not only is arctic sea ice covering less surface area each summer, but it is also a lot thinner than it used to be, even in Winter, as well:
Until recently, the majority of Arctic sea ice survived at least one summer and often several. But things have changed dramatically, according to a team of University of Colorado, Boulder, scientists led by Charles Fowler. Thin seasonal ice — ice that melts and re-freezes every year — makes up about 70 percent of the Arctic sea ice in wintertime, up from 40 to 50 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. Thicker ice, which survives two or more years, now comprises just 10 percent of wintertime ice cover, down from 30 to 40 percent. […]
“Ice extent is an important measure of the health of the Arctic, but it only gives us a two-dimensional view of the ice cover,” said Walter Meier, research scientist at the center and the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Thickness is important, especially in the winter, because it is the best overall indicator of the health of the ice cover. As the ice cover in the Arctic grows thinner, it grows more vulnerable to melting in the summer.”
So the total ice volume keeps getting less and less as time goes by. No wonder those polar bears are pissed at all the swimming they have to do because the ice is too thin or just not there.
But that’s not all! Much of the ice that is at “The Top of the World” is rotten! No seriously, it is rotten.
Last year, Dave Barber, a researcher from the University of Manitoba, reported unusual conditions in the Beaufort Sea with large regions of rotten ice. Satellite imagery from the NASA Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer – Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) sensors suggest similar conditions this year in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, where there are large areas with unconsolidated ice floes and low ice concentration.
So what do scientists mean when the talk about “rotten” ice? About what you would expect, actually:
[F]loating ice which has become honeycombed in the course of melting, and which is in an advanced state of disintegration.
Which is maybe why these guys girls are hanging out at the crowded arctic beaches (for the third year out of the past four) rather than out on the ice like they used to do:
For the third time in four years, a dearth of sea ice has forced walruses ashore in Alaska.
The lumbering marine mammals normally spend their summers resting on the ice as it floats north, making periodic dives to the ocean floor to forage for food. But this year, as in 2007 and 2009, a lack of ice in the eastern Chukchi Sea has driven thousands of walruses to congregate on land instead.
Officials with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimate that at least 10,000 animals have gathered in a dense clump at Point Lay, Alaska. […]
The risk of injury and death is greatest for the youngest animals, which are dwarfed by adult female walruses that weigh about 1 ton each.
Last year, when walruses sought shelter on the shore of Icy Cape, Alaska, many of the 131 animals that were trampled to death there were juveniles, USGS found. Similarly deadly stampedes have also been reported in Russia in recent years (ClimateWire, Aug. 10).
I don’t care what you say, 10,000 walruses on a beach is too many. And doesn’t anyone care about the children? Imagine a holiday on a beach packed with people as tightly as sardines (oh, 10,000 mildly obese Americans perhaps with their offspring) and suddenly someone sees a shark and people started running around in a panic, trampling everyone underneath them, including small toddlers. That’s what Climate Change thinks is a good joke to play on walruses.
So Republicans, deny climate change all you want. Threaten (along with coal state Dems like Jay Rockefeller) to cut the EPA off at the knees with new legislation sharply limiting its authority to regulate greenhouse climate legislation (backed by — surprise, surprise, surprise! — The American Petroleum Institute):
Senate Republicans may use a markup of EPA’s annual spending bill Thursday to try and block the agency from implementing new climate change rules.
An amendment to thwart EPA could gain traction on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which includes five Democrats who have previously backed proposals to delay or scuttle limits on greenhouse gases from power plants and other sources. […]
A spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a member of the panel who opposes EPA rules, said no decisions have been made yet about a potential amendment.
But sources contacted by The Hill said Murkowski has draft language in progress that would not allow EPA to spend any funds for one year on regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other stationary sources.
Climate Change doesn’t mind what you believe or what you do. It doesn’t care if you are a not conservative enough Republican Senator Lisa Murkoski or a foaming at the mouth Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle who wants to disband the Department of Energy and withdraw from the UN because it’s “the umpire on fraudulent science such as global warming.”
“I’m a clean-air proponent,” Angle said in an interview. “I don’t, however, buy into the whole … man-caused global warming, man-caused climate change mantra of the left. I believe that there’s not sound science to back that up.”
Climate Change just sits back and laughs at the folly of poor pitiful human beings, too greedy and stupid to even attempt to stop it. Enjoy your rotten ice everyone!
Oh, and watch this video!