The Northwest Passage Opens:
Leading ice specialists in Europe and the United States for the first time have agreed that a ring of navigable waters has opened all around the fringes of the cap of sea ice drifting on the warming Arctic Ocean.
By many expert accounts, this is the first time the Northwest Passage over North America and the Northern Sea Route over Europe and Asia have been open simultaneously in at least half a century, if not longer.
While currents and winds play a role, experts say, the expanding open water in the far north provides the latest evidence that the Arctic Ocean, long a frozen region hostile to all but nuclear submariners and seal hunters, is transforming during the summers into more of an open ocean.
*Yawn*
Call me when you can actually sail a non-icebreaker civilian ship along this "passage".
Timethe MSM - assuming they're still around - threatening a new "coming ice age."What was that "global warming" problem again?
The biggest problem is we don't have a long term record of arctic sea ice area or volume prior to that time; our long term records are anecdotal.
Dang, I am mightily impressed with one of the commas in that sentence.
In theory, it's open.
Ground reality is a bit different.
That's why it's a passage and not an ocean. The "passage" is one shipping lane devoid of ice, and since these kayakers are heading to the North Pole they're not going along that path.
Experts also predicted we'd have won the Iraq War already. Does the fact that we've made progress but aren't done yet mean that those experts are discredited and we should listen to their adversaries who say we've lost?
If you want me (or I would think, anyone of ordinary caution) to believe anything about climate change, the experts are going to have be able to make routine, accurate weather predictions, e.g.:
• Will the temperature go down to 0°C this New Year's Eve in San Diego?
• How many hurricanes will there be 2009?
• How many days will reach about 40°C in New York next summer?
Until these kind of questions can be answered correctly 9 times out of ten, I'm not even listening to fantasies about "the average global temperature in 2100".
Great logic there! Because there are no random year-to-year fluctuations in climate. Instead we have long, hundred-year-plus monotonic, noise-free trends in global temperatures, rainfall patterns, and cloud cover. I don't know why anyone ever debates climate change when all they have to do is check the noise-free and unambiguous trend you've identified.
Anyway, this thread is another example of why anyone looking for reliable and informative commentary and analysis of climate change should not trust the uninformed commenters here. And I say that as someone who is fairly skeptical of many claims for AGW. The general pattern in the comments here, though, is that AGW "believers" overstate their case with shoddy data, and then AGW "deniers" debunk them, but then unfortunately pile on ridiculous claims about how CO2 is "plant food" and has never been correlated with global temperature*. It makes my brain hurt.
A place I like for reliable information is the blog Prometheus.
* Smokey, can you post a link to one of your charts? That way everyone could see what I mean.
And speaking of Canada, doesn't it seem like a bit of global warming isn't exactly all downside for them?
If lack of ice is a sign of warming, we've been cooling ever since.
Can you teach me how you do all these statistics when n = 1? It would make my life alot easier.
And didn't a ship then get stuck in the nonexistent ice?
Not much, as it turns out.
The University of Alaska, Fairbanks, determined a statistically valid temperature series for the Arctic. It goes back 133 years. There has been some warming in the Arctic over that period, nearly all of it in the 19th century. In the twentieth century, the warmest years were in 1930s and 40s.
So, it strikes me as singularly odd that not one story of how global warming is about to create an ice free Arctic Ocean don't include the most obvious thing of all: actual temperatures.
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