Oh Dear ...

Don't worry Suke​, there is no global warming. I have that on good authority from billc. Sleep easy mate, it's just a bad dream ... I hope ...
:hmm:
 
To restate Tgace and some others...no reason to worry, this happens all the time...

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/melting-at-north-pole-how-bad-is-it-16294

First, the cameras in question, which are attached to instruments that scientists have deposited on the sea ice at the start of each spring since 2002, may have “North Pole” in their name, but they are no longer located at the North Pole. In fact, as this map below shows, they have drifted well south of the North Pole, since they sit atop sea ice floes that move along with ocean currents. Currently, the waterlogged camera is near the prime meridian, at 85 degrees north latitude.

The second thing to keep in mind is that melting sea ice at or near the North Pole is actually not a rare event. Observations from the webcams dating back to 2002, and from satellite imagery and nuclear-powered submarines that have explored the ice cover since the Cold War era dating back several decades, show that sea ice around the North Pole has formed melt ponds, and even areas of open water, several times in the past.
The webcam depicting what seems like open water is most likely “just sitting in a big melt pond” that has formed on top of the sea ice cover, Serreze said. This melt pond started forming around July 10, and is likely close to its peak depth and extent. The occurrence of a melt pond at or near the North Pole is “just not that unusual,” Serreze said, and is even less rare at a more southern location such as where the camera is now.
“The whole Arctic sea ice cover does show melt during summer even at the North Pole,” he said, speaking of a typical melt season.
Serreze said it’s usually possible to walk through these melt ponds with hip boot waders on, as opposed to having to swim, since there is ice underneath the meltwater.

Since global warming has stopped for the last 15 years...I would hold on with my worrying...until the next ice age...that is when the stuff gets serious...
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23409404

Each of the last few decades has been warmer than the last. But start your graph in 1998 - which happened to be an exceptionally warm year - and there hasn't been much global warming at all.
Gradually the words 'pause' and 'hiatus' which first featured in the blogs have crossed to the media and then to the scientists professionally engaged in researching the global climate.
The headline - which the scientists will not thank me for - is that no one is really sure why the rate of warming has stumbled.
 
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As I understand things... there's no question that there has been a measurable warming in the global climate. However -- that doesn't give the cause of the change. The issue of anthrogenic global warming is still up in the air, as far as I know.

And, of course, a lot of the measures taken to fight it have exempted the guiltiest parties...
 
A small slice of recorded data (in global time scale) showing temperature increases hardly seems like evidence pointing at any particular "cause" that demands global, economic changing, political action IMO.
 
From another source...

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/03/open-water-at-the-north-pole/

Our global warming friends seem to believe that the Arctic data set began with satellites in 1978, and they appear to have difficulty interpreting even that time period in an objective fashion. Satellites (unfortunately) came on line right at the start a period of warming, after 30 years of cooling temperatures and dire forecasts of an impending ice age.
And this...

http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm

Taken as a whole, there is no significant Arctic-wide warming evident in recent decades. According to many station records there, the warmest period was around 1940, not the `warm' 1990s.

But now, a new spectre has emerged in the popular imagination - melting sea ice.


During an Arctic summer, the sun is in the sky 24 hours per day, giving the Arctic ocean more total sunlight than anywhere else on the planet, excepting the Antarctic during its summer season. The result is that large areas of the Arctic Ocean are ice free in summer at any one time, with large leads of open water and even larger `polynyas', stretches of open water tens of miles long and miles wide. This photo of three submarines visiting the North Pole in May 1987 shows the whole area criss-crossed with open water leads before the summer had even arrived.
NP1987.jpg

Fig.4 - HMS Superb, USS Billfish, and USS Sea Devil in a North Pole rendezvous in 1987
(U.S. Navy Photo)
By contrast, a similar photo taken 12 years later of USS Hawkbill (with the ominous number SSN-666) at the North Pole during the spring of 1999 shows a vast expanse of unbroken new ice. (Hawkbill was nicknamed `the Devil Boat' due to its number, and was decommissioned in 2000 shortly after its last Arctic cruise, much to the relief of those familiar with the `Book of Revelation').​
hawkbill.jpg

Fig.5 - USS Hawkbill at the North Pole, Spring 1999. (US Navy Photo) [19]
As early as 1959, the first US submarine to surface at the North Pole, the USS Skate, did so in late March, and surfaced at 10 other locations during the same cruise, each time finding leads of open water or very thin ice from which to do so. It did a similar cruise a year earlier in August 1958, again finding numerous open leads within which to surface. Here is a photo of the Skate during one of its surfacings in 1959. As can be seen in all three photos, the flat new ice is scarcely different between 1959 and 1999, while the 1987 photo shows the extent to which open water can occur.

I like the date on this one...


"It will without doubt have come to your Lordship's knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations."
President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817 [13]


Other scientists and experts on the Arctic environment quickly dismissed the McCarthy claims, pointing out that stretches of open water in summertime are very common in the Arctic [12]. Previous Arctic explorers even expressed frustration at being unable to proceed over the ice due precisely to unpredictable areas of open water obstructing their progress. The reason for the areas of open water is that the floating ice is subject to stresses from wind, currents and tides, causing cracking, ridging between slabs, and the creation of open leads of water between separating ice slabs. In winter, open leads quickly freeze over from the sub-zero air temperature, but in summer with the air temperature often above sea water freezing point (-2°C), such leads can remain open for extended periods.

 
And the human factor in science shows it's ugly head...

Furthermore, not all the Arctic was analysed in this way. For security reasons relating to the Cold War, only the `Gore Box' was involved, a roughly rectangular region of the central Arctic which the then Vice-President Gore moved to have de-classified for purposes of sea ice data analysis. The criteria for determining the boundaries of the `Gore Box' is not known but it does introduce another layer of human selectivity into the picture.

In other words, these latest studies claiming significant thinning of ice between the 1960s and 1990s are comparing conditions during an anomalously cold period with the more historically normal conditions which exist today. Had the first phase data been collected a few decades earlier in the 1930s, it is likely there would be little significant difference in ice thickness between then and now.
As to why the 1960s and early 1970s should be so cold in the Arctic, it should be noted that it was on the Russian island of Novaya Zemlya deep in the Arctic that most of the powerful Soviet H-bomb tests were conducted in the atmosphere during the huge Soviet test series of 1961-1962, these tests being particularly large and dirty, the largest blast there being a mammoth 60 megatons on 30th October 1961[11]. The cold plunge in Arctic temperatures occurred in the immediate wake of these tests, and it took about 12 years or so for temperatures to recover to their earlier levels. It is a strong possibility that the two events are connected.
Ice thickness is only part of the story. There is also the question of the areal extent of sea ice. This graph shows Arctic sea ice extent, based on satellite observation since 1973.

I hope this eases your mind Sukerkin...


 
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this from another source...

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weath...just-prove-north-pole-is-not-melting/15739869

Did the Media Just Prove North Pole Is NOT Melting?

July 25, 2013; 11:15 PM

UPDATE: I received a reply via email from Roger Anderson, who is one of the webcam scientists at the Universtiy of Washington. I had asked him if the media was using the webcams that were NOT at the North Pole, but rather drifting southward. He replied: "Yes, they are. The approximate position of the webcams today (obtained from PAWS Buoy 819920) is 07/25/1500Z 84.773°N 5.415°W." This is even further south than I had placed the buoy, because the data I had was one week old. This puts the webcam at approximately 350 miles south of the North Pole, closer to Greenland than Santa Claus! So no worries, folks, the North Pole is not melting.

The ice melting would be a natural consequence of the drifting webcam moving south during the summer; all we can say is that ice is melting during the summer between Greenland and the North Pole. We, as the media, have to be super careful in using scientific data that may not be what it seems -- even webcams.
 
I hope this eases your mind Sukerkin...



I thank you for your concern, Bill, tho you have to realise that, since Michelle died, I don't really much care about the fate of the world any longer ... or the foolishness of politics or religion or economics.

I try to take an interest but my hearts not in it. I take part in discourse more through habit than anything else and because, even now, it does prod me to comment when I see/read things that are signs of misinterpretation of the 'data'.
 
Were all gonna be done in by a meteor strike anyways....or the Yellowstone super volcano....the history channel or the discovery channel will be happy to provide you with any number of doomsday scenarios.

Sent from my Kindle Fire using Tapatalk 2
 
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Since global warming has stopped for the last 15 years...I would hold on with my worrying...until the next ice age...that is when the stuff gets serious...

Just out of interest, if you go by what defines an ice age, then technically we are still in the last ice age:

'ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres. Therfore by this definition, we are still in the ice age that began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistoncene epoch, because the Greenland, Antartic and Artic ice sheets still exist.'

Just thought this was interesting.
 
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