Still waiting

In a quarter of a century something ‘could be’ happening – and that’s their most optimistic (?) guess. Others say a whole century, or more. Somewhat underwhelming, given that we’ve already gone past several years that were touted by alarmists as ones that could see the end of Arctic summer sea ice. The claim of a supposed correlation between the trace gas carbon dioxide and the global mean temperature looks to be fading fast if this is the best/worst they can come up with, effectively negating endless media stories about ‘the rapidly warming Arctic’.

It’s hard to imagine the Arctic without sea ice, says Phys.org.

But according to a new study by UCLA climate scientists, human-caused climate change is on track to make the Arctic Ocean functionally ice-free for part of each year starting sometime between 2044 and 2067.

As long as humans have been on Earth, the planet has had a large cap of sea ice at the Arctic Circle that expands each winter and contracts each summer.

The knowledge that sea ice is on the decline is not new: Satellite observations show that since 1979, the amount of sea ice in the Arctic in September—the month when there is the least sea ice, before water starts freezing again—has declined by 13 percent per decade.

Scientists have been attempting to predict the future of Arctic sea ice for several decades, relying on an array of global climate models that simulate how the climate system will react to all of the carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. But the models’ predictions have disagreed widely.

Among the current generation of models, some show ice-free Septembers as early as 2026; others suggest the phenomenon will begin as late as 2132.

The UCLA study, which was published in Nature Climate Change, focuses the predictions to a 25-year period.

Full article here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

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November 17, 2019 at 07:24AM