[BartSimpson]

http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/11069 ... -snow.html

Reportedly about three to four inches of global warming has accumulated on the mountaintops in Tasmania.

In another story that was on CNN - a Toyota sponsored team has cancelled their plans to drive a pickup truck to the South Pole because it's too cold and too snowy.

Bear in mind it's the start of summer in the southern hemisphere.

[Gunnair]

$1:

Climate change blamed for warm Nunavut weatherClimate change is contributing to unusually warm weather in Nunavut and Nunavik, according to a senior climatologist with Environment Canada.

"I often say you don't see climate change when you look out the window. The exception is Nunavut," said David Phillips.

Temperatures are 10 to 12 degrees warmer than usual in many places, Phillips said, resulting in fall-like weather in many places in the region on Tuesday, the first official day of winter.

A high-pressure system stuck over western Greenland is causing warmer weather to move over Nunavut, but the warming climate is contributing, as well, Phillips said.

The temperature on Tuesday morning in Iqaluit was –9 C and in Baker Lake –3 C, far above normal.

'Warmest year on record'
"We clearly know this is going to be, in Iqaluit, for example, the warmest year on record," Phillips said.

Temperatures should be between –19 and –28 C over southern Baffin Island, Phillips said. But on Frobisher Bay, some hunters are still travelling by boat because the bay has open water at a time when they're usually crossing it on snowmobiles.

Some people in Nunavut would prefer normal winter temperatures.

"It's kind of crappy for snowmobiling, I guess. Makes it hard to get out on the land," Iqaluit resident Chris Lewis said.

Even those who enjoy the warmer weather are concerned.

"It's wonderful for us humans, but I don't think it's very good for the animals," said Monica Ell, also from Iqaluit.

Freeze-thaw cycles can make it difficult for caribou to reach vegetation locked in ice and may cause starvation, wildlife officer Mitch Campbell says. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)
Mitch Campbell, regional wildlife officer for the Kivillaq region, said the see-sawing temperatures make it especially hard for herbivores such as caribou.

When snow melts and it rains, a subsequent freeze-up makes it hard for them to get food, he explained.

"The vegetation is locked into ice, so in order to eat the vegetation, they'd have to eat the ice and that is not something … that the animals would even be able to do, so that can, in severe cases, cause starvation," Campbell said.

It's still too early to tell if the current warm weather has hurt wildlife, but the conditions have proved harmful in the past, Campbell said.

The unusual and unpredictable weather is expected to continue for the foreseeable future, Phillips said, with the long-range forecast showing rising and falling temperatures for some time to come.

"In many ways, what we see this year in Nunavut is about as strange as it gets," he said.


Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/20 ... z19LnxDfHs

[BartSimpson]

Nunavut looks icy enough right now.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

[Unsound]

Tsk tsk Gunnair, consistency of thought is not a requirement for climate debates.

[andyt]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Nunavut looks icy enough right now.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Were you trying to refudiate Gunnair's post? 'Cause you did a lousy job. From your link:

$1:

Slow ice growth leads to low November ice extent
Arctic sea ice grew more slowly than average in November, leading to the second-lowest ice extent for the month...

The loss of multiyear ice has contributed to low summer ice extents in recent years, because thinner first-year ice melts out more easily than older, thicker ice. Last summer, multiyear ice that had moved into the Beaufort and Chukchi seas during the previous winter largely melted out (see our October post).
Recent research from scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows that summer melt of old, thick ice in the Beaufort Sea has contributed substantially to the overall loss of thick multiyear ice in the Arctic. Using data from the QuikSCAT satellite, researchers Ron Kwok and Glenn Cunningham found that the Beaufort Sea lost 947,000 square kilometers (366,000 square miles) of multiyear ice during the summers of 1993 to 2009.
The study also showed that multiyear ice loss increased in the last few years. From 2005 to 2008, the Beaufort Sea lost 490,000 square kilometers (189,000 square miles) of multiyear ice, 32% of the total loss of multiyear ice in the Arctic Ocean during that time period.

[BartSimpson]

And if you look at the real time map it shows Nunvut is iced in.

[andyt]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

And if you look at the real time map it shows Nunvut is iced in.

I hope your thinking isn't always this shallow.

[Gunnair]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

And if you look at the real time map it shows Nunvut is iced in.

Interesting link.

$1:

According to scientific measurements, Arctic sea ice has declined dramatically over at least the past thirty years, with the most extreme decline seen in the summer melt season.

$1:

December 6, 2010
Slow ice growth leads to low November ice extent
Arctic sea ice grew more slowly than average in November, leading to the second-lowest ice extent for the month. At the end of November, Hudson Bay was still nearly ice-free.

$1:

Arctic sea ice extent averaged over November 2010 was 9.89 million square kilometers (3.82 million square miles). This is the second-lowest November ice extent recorded over the period of satellite observations from 1979 to 2010, 50,000 square kilometers (19,300 square miles) above the previous record low of 9.84 million square kilometers (3.80 million square miles) set in 2006.

Ice extent was unusually low in both the Atlantic and Pacific sectors of the Arctic and in Hudson Bay. Typically by the end of November, nearly half of Hudson Bay has iced over. But on November 30, only 17% of the bay was covered by sea ice. Compared to the 1979 to 2000 average, the ice extent was 12.4% below average for the Arctic as a whole.

$1:

November 2010 compared to past years
November 2010 had the second-lowest ice extent for the month since the beginning of satellite records. The linear rate of decline for the month is –4.7 % per decade.

Appreciate the moral support. My post wasn't focussed on a lack of sea ice though, more on the warm temperatures. You picked out the wrong point and fought it with some highly unhelpful facts.

Custer would have been proud.

[Gunnair]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

And if you look at the real time map it shows Nunvut is iced in.

$1:

Eastern Arctic warming trend alarms scientists

“We have dramatic changes taking place”
JANE GEORGE

OTTAWA— You might think of scientists as calm and cool.

But the first three presenters during the opening session of the three-day ArcticNet conference in Ottawa sounded alarmed by the increasingly visible signs of Arctic warming and the limited amount of money that Canada will spend to understand what’s happening.

Ice has cracked up — once in a while taking Nunavut hunters with it. Lakes continue to dry up, while permafrost melts and the tundra is greening, 650 scientists, officials and northerners heard Dec. 15.

Observations from the ground in the Eastern Arctic, from places like Iqaluit — where ice in Frobisher Bay is only now forming — and views taken by satellites at 500 kilometres above the earth’s surface showed ArcticNet participants that ice formation in 2010 is abnormally slow.

So far this winter, it’s been “very, very slow,” and like last year “very late in freezing up,” said Trudy Wohlleben, an ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service.

The most “unusual things [are] going on in the winter,” Wohlleben said.

Nothing is progressing as it used to, she said, listing a string of peculiar happenings:

• air temperatures 20 C above normal at the beginning of the year in the Baffin Island communities of Clyde River and Qikiqtarjuaq;

• large ice cracks south of Resolute Bay last January, which caused a hunter to float off on an ice floe;

• and other cracks in land-fast ice spreading throughout the High Arctic islands, endangering research stations, causing problems for polar trekkers and swallowing up a Twin Otter.

This past spring, ice on Hudson Bay broke up three to four weeks earlier, and the Nares Strait between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, which usually freezes fast from February to July, never froze up solid.

This year, looking ahead into 2011, may carry similar surprises, with recent air temperatures 20 C registering above average over the Foxe Basin, Wohlleben said.

Weak ice could also lead to more storms as ice cracks cause water temperatures to warm and then lead to even more ice break-up and more storms in a frightening loop.

What’s needed is more monitoring with more remote sensing devices like the buoys dropped on ice lands earlier this year, she said.

More monitoring of lakes and other fresh waterways also needs to be done, because they’re good indicators of climate change, said Frederick Wrona from the University of Victoria.

In the western Arctic he’s seeing lakes slumping into the water, drained lakes and new pools of water forming on the land when permafrost melts.

“We have dramatic changes taking place,” with the Arctic becoming a place of rain instead of snow, said Wrona, who predicted that there will be more extreme events like floods in the Arctic’s future.

With 60 Arctic lakes slated for study, he’d like to place more buoys in the water to better gauge the changes going on.

And more money for Arctic science would also help Greg Henry from the University of British Columbia keep his research project going.

Henry, who has been studying vegetation across Canada’s Arctic for the past 20 years, seeing a major portion of this money dry up this year.

Henry looked at climate change and tundra vegetation in his six-year “Climate Change Impacts on the Canadian Arctic Tundra” project, which received $8 million in federal International Polar Year funds and support from ArcticNet’s research network.

From Kugluktuk to Kangiqsualujjuaq, more than 600 researchers, elders, students and local researchers looked at berry-producing plants, people who live in the North, such as the mountain cranberry (kimminaq), crowberry (paurngaq), blueberry (kigutangirnaq) and the cloudberry (aqpik).

Now there’s a group of trained and interested local researchers in place, but the money earmarked for this project has ended and is unlikely to start flowing again until 2017 when a string of research stations— linked to the new Arctic research station in Cambridge Bay— start up.

Canada should be spending more money on Arctic science as it did during the International Polar Year.

“We should be doing as much as we were getting in IPY,” he said, when Canada set aside $150 million for Arctic research.

The good news for Arctic scientists eager to learn more about climate change is that ArcticNet, which funds projects involving about 150 researchers across Canada, can expect to see some more money from the federal government.

http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/141210_eastern_arctic_warming_trend_alarms_scientists/

[BartSimpson]

On the upside, heating costs are down.

[andyt]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

:lol:

http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/11069 ... -snow.html

Reportedly about three to four inches of global warming has accumulated on the mountaintops in Tasmania.

In another story that was on CNN - a Toyota sponsored team has cancelled their plans to drive a pickup truck to the South Pole because it's too cold and too snowy.

Bear in mind it's the start of summer in the southern hemisphere.

OMFG, it's snowing on the mountain tops in Tasmania in the summer. What, you guys never get snow in the Sierra Nevadas in the summer? I used to do a lot of backcountry trips in our mountains in the summer - we were always prepared for snow. I know guys that were snowed in for 3 days in June, had to keep digging their tent out so it wouldn't collapse. What are you, a flatlander?

[Brenda]

$1:

This is the second-lowest November ice extent recorded over the period of satellite observations from 1979 to 2010, 50,000 square kilometers (19,300 square miles) above the previous record low of 9.84 million square kilometers (3.80 million square miles) set in 2006.

See! This proves we are cooling again!

(yeah yeah, I know )

[ShepherdsDog]

How was the flax and wheat harvest in Greenland? ..oh wait that was a thousand years ago.

[BartSimpson]

andyt andyt:

OMFG, it's snowing on the mountain tops in Tasmania in the summer. What, you guys never get snow in the Sierra Nevadas in the summer?

As a matter of fact, the highest summer (June 21 to Sept 21) snowfall on record for the Western Sierra watershed was last year - 2009.

[BartSimpson]

This is interesting...

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/12/ ... _best.html