Harper govenment funds International Republican Institute

[vvalk]

Chuck chuck. Maybe do some research and see how much glaciers actually supply rivers. Insignificant. Also it wasn't a few hundred years ago there were no glaciers and then 20000 years ago we had a few miles high of ice all over Alberta? Which is it? Our human records are like a 100 years old and we know what climate change is?

[riders2010]

Man made climate change not likely, pollution yes
Big difference.

Bizarre to send money elsewhere look after ourselves first.

[macdon02]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsorship_scandal as long as we are on the topic of public money, anyone remember this? Is this how we want our taxes spent?

[tweety]

chuckchuck, the Antarctica has reached and is exceeding max ice levels ever recorded.

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum/

[Braveheart]

Just saw Kathleen Wynne speaking about climate change. She might be more of a dingbat than Trudeau. This country is soooo screwed!

[chuckChuck]

NASA Study Shows Global Sea Ice Diminishing, Despite Antarctic Gains

Sea ice increases in Antarctica do not make up for the accelerated Arctic sea ice loss of the last decades, a new NASA study finds. As a whole, the planet has been shedding sea ice at an average annual rate of 13,500 square miles (35,000 square kilometers) since 1979, the equivalent of losing an area of sea ice larger than the state of Maryland every year.

“Even though Antarctic sea ice reached a new record maximum this past September, global sea ice is still decreasing,” said Claire Parkinson, author of the study and climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “That’s because the decreases in Arctic sea ice far exceed the increases in Antarctic sea ice.”
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Parkinson used microwave data collected by NASA and Department of Defense satellites for her study, which was published last December in the Journal of Climate. She added Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extents month by month from November 1978 to December 2013 to determine the global ice extent for each month. Her analysis shows that over the 35-year period, the trend in ice extents was downward in all months of the year, even those corresponding to the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice maximum extents.

three graphed trend lines
Comparing Arctic sea ice loss to Antarctic sea ice gain shows that the planet has-been shedding sea ice at an average annual rate of 13,500 square miles since 1979, the equivalent of losing an area of sea ice larger than the state of Maryland every year.
Credits: NASA's Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens and Jesse Allen

Furthermore, the global ice decrease has accelerated: in the first half of the record (1979-96), the sea ice loss was about 8,300 square miles (21,500 square kilometers) per year. This rate more than doubled for the second half of the period (1996 to 2013), when there was an average loss of 19,500 square miles (50,500 square kilometers) per year – an average yearly loss larger than the states of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

“This doesn’t mean the sea ice loss will continue to accelerate,” Parkinson said. “After all, there are limits. For instance, once all the Arctic ice is gone in the summer, the Arctic summertime ice loss can’t accelerate any further.”

Sea ice has diminished in almost all regions of the Arctic, whereas the sea ice increases in the Antarctic are less widespread geographically. Although the sea ice cover expanded in most of the Southern Ocean between 1979 and 2013, it decreased substantially in the Bellingshausen and Amundsen seas. These two seas are close to the Antarctic Peninsula, a region that has warmed significantly over the last decades.

In her study, Parkinson also shows that the annual cycle of global ice extents is more similar to the annual cycle of the Antarctic ice than the Arctic ice. The global minimum ice extent occurs in February of each year, as does the Antarctic minimum extent, and the global maximum sea ice extent occurs in either October or November, one or two months after the Antarctic maximum. This contrasts with the Arctic minimum occurring in September and the Arctic maximum occurring in March. Averaged over the 35 years of the satellite record, the planet’s monthly ice extents range from a minimum of 7.03 million square miles (18.2 million square kilometers) in February to a maximum of 10.27 million square miles (26.6 million square kilometers) in November.

“One of the reasons people care about sea ice decreases is that sea ice is highly reflective whereas the liquid ocean is very absorptive,” Parkinson said. “So when the area of sea ice coverage is reduced, there is a smaller sea ice area reflecting the sun’s radiation back to space. This means more retention of the sun’s radiation within the Earth system and further heating.”

Parkinson doesn’t find it likely that the Antarctic sea ice expansion will accelerate and overturn the global sea ice negative trend in the future.

“I think that the expectation is that, if anything, in the long-term the Antarctic sea ice growth is more likely to slow down or even reverse,” she said.

Parkinson calculated and published the global results after witnessing the public’s confusion about whether Antarctic sea ice gain might be cancelling out Arctic sea ice loss.

“When I give public lectures or talk with random people interested in the topic, often somebody will say something in the order of ‘well, the ice is decreasing in the Arctic but it’s increasing in the Antarctic, so don’t they cancel out?’” Parkinson said. “The answer is no, they don’t cancel out.”

[image-169][image-184]

Maria-José Viñas
NASA's Earth Science News Team
Last Updated: July 30, 2015
Editor: Rob Garner

[chuckChuck]

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

If you are going to quote NASA about sea ice then you should look at the entire NASA story on on climate change. The above link from NASA explains it pretty well.


Scientific Consensus

Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.

Click here for a partial list of these public statements and related resources.
http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

A lot of you must still think you are smarter than NASA and the 97% of climate scientists in the world.

If so, then it is up to you to present compelling credible evidence that accelerated global warming is not human caused.

Hand picking the work or opinions of a few marginal climate change skeptics to back up your "opinion" is not compelling evidence.

[chuckChuck]

From NASA:

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

Climate change: How do we know?
This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Source: [[LINK||http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/||NOAA]])

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.)

The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years.1

Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. This body of data, collected over many years, reveals the signals of a changing climate.

The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century.2 Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many instruments flown by NASA. There is no question that increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.

Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. They also show that in the past, large changes in climate have happened very quickly, geologically-speaking: in tens of years, not in millions or even thousands.3
The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:

Republic of Maldives: Vulnerable to sea level rise. Credit: Chumash Maxim/Shutterstock.com
Sea level rise

Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.4
expand
Global temperature rise

All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880.5 Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years.6 Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase.7
expand
Warming oceans

The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.8
expand

Flowing meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet
Shrinking ice sheets

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.
expand

Visualization of the 2007 Arctic sea ice minimum
Declining Arctic sea ice

Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades.9
expand

The disappearing snowcap of Mount Kilimanjaro, from space.
Glacial retreat

Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa.10
expand
Extreme events

The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events.11
expand
Ocean acidification

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent.12,13 This increase is the result of humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the oceans. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year.14,15
expand
Decreased snow cover

Satellite observations reveal that the amount of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past five decades and that the snow is melting earlier.16
expand

References

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers, p. 5

B.D. Santer et.al., “A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere,” Nature vol 382, 4 July 1996, 39-46

Gabriele C. Hegerl, “Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method,” Journal of Climate, v. 9, October 1996, 2281-2306

V. Ramaswamy et.al., “Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling,” Science 311 (24 February 2006), 1138-1141

B.D. Santer et.al., “Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes,” Science vol. 301 (25 July 2003), 479-483.

In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized the Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first speculated that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.

National Research Council (NRC), 2006. Surface Temperature Reconstructions For the Last 2,000 Years. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.

The global sea level estimate described in this work can be downloaded from the CSIRO website.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/indicators/

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

T.C. Peterson et.al., "State of the Climate in 2008," Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, v. 90, no. 8, August 2009, pp. S17-S18.

I. Allison et.al., The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science, UNSW Climate Change Research Center, Sydney, Australia, 2009, p. 11

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20100121/

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/ 01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm

Levitus, et al, "Global ocean heat content 1955–2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems," Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608 (2009).

L. Polyak, et.al., “History of Sea Ice in the Arctic,” in Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes, U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2, January 2009, chapter 7

R. Kwok and D. A. Rothrock, “Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESAT records: 1958-2008,” Geophysical Research Letters, v. 36, paper no. L15501, 2009

http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html

National Snow and Ice Data Center

World Glacier Monitoring Service

http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei.html

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What is Ocean Acidification%3F

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean Acidification

C. L. Sabine et.al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2,” Science vol. 305 (16 July 2004), 367-371

Copenhagen Diagnosis, p. 36.

National Snow and Ice Data Center

C. Derksen and R. Brown, "Spring snow cover extent reductions in the 2008-2012 period exceeding climate model projections," GRL, 39:L19504

http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/snow_extent.html

Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, Data History Accessed August 29, 2011.

Scientific Consensus

Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.

Click here for a partial list of these public statements and related resources.

Latest resources

Infographic: Earth's carbon cycle is off balance
Infographic: Earth's carbon cycle is off balance
Infographic: Sea level rise
Infographic: Sea level rise
Ten coldest and warmest years
Ten coldest and warmest years

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[blackpowder]

OK. Help me. Greenhouse gases create change. Fine. So we stop using carbon all together???

[chuckChuck]

No we can still emit CO2 we just have to keep it below levels that will cause significant rapid changes that could lead to a tipping point where all hell breaks loose and the ice sheets melt relatively rapidly causing huge sea level increases.