Arctic ice coverage increases

My opinion is that there has been a good deal of exaggeration and hype by scientists, both 'armchair' and professional about the state of the Arctic ice. This hype seems to be a mix scaremongering, misinformation and misinterpretation. There could be grave cause for concern, of course, and I'm ready to be corrected. On the icebreaker I was on, sailing in the Arctic to almost 80 deg N there was continuous sea ice, fast ice and glaciers calving icebergs into the ocean. I saw perhaps ten individual polar bears all looking fat and sleek with many, many seals trying to avoid being eaten. It was my first Arctic trip so I have nothing to compare it with but it looked pretty icy to me!

Nigel Bewley has contributed a photo to this story.

My image of McMurdo station was taken from the site of the Pegasus Plane Crash just past the Pegasus Ice Runway.

To view more of my photos from Antarctica http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenklassy

A few photos from some glaciers (and a little bit of sea ice) on Spitsbergen, Arctic Norway.

alun w has contributed a photo to this story.

My image was taken when flying over the artic en-route from London to LA. It was a fantastically clear day and the views of the ice flows were amazing.

ImeldaNZ has contributed a photo to this story.

an amazing photo that makes you can't help but wonder not if, but when will the north pole be ice-free. for shizzle my dizzle baby, GreginSD@hotmail.com

realjock123 has contributed a photo to this story.

My images were taken in Spitsbergen in Aug 2006.

This picture was taken on august 16th 2008, from the Eureka weather station on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada or if you prefer, about 1100km from the north pole. In a mather of 2 days, ice drifting from the north with the tide, and the wind as filled Slidre Fiord all the way to Eureka sound. From my understanding, it is 3 weeks ahead of normal according to some of the station's staff.

Jonathan Delisle has contributed a photo to this story.

Good news. At least the situation is better than previously projected. A lot of work still needs to be done

I would like to report some first hand experiences living in Canada's Western Arctic.

Living in the Western Arctic of Canada has allowed me to experience first hand the effects of global warming. It was snowing lightly yesterday in Ulukhaktok, but this is August, we are not supposed to snap back into fall/winter yet. Hunters still need to travel for their subsistence, unfortunately the weather patterns have become so unpredictable in the circumpolar arctic that we are seeing tragedies involving families who go by boat (their only affordable means to hunt). The price of a can of pop is $5 here, until a barge arrives and the price drops to $2. I find it hard to agree wholeheartedly with the 'scientific' data reported in this story. I travelled through the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (Beaufort sea) for 5 days to four communities, and we did not see any summer ice. The captain of the ice breaker (which incidentally is now a research vessel for the Inuit Health Survey) told us that during his years traveling in this region, he has seen less and less ice. The people who live off the land here, who depend on the thickness of ice to sustain their subsistence living are also having increasing difficulty as ice is now thinner and less predictable (or not forming.)  

I took the picture of this Polar Bear (Ursus Maritimus) as he came out of the Arctic Ocean and was drying himself of the seawater.
The encounter was at 80.11' N, 16.28' E, a few miles north of the Svalbard Archipelago's (also known as Spitsbergen, or Spitzbergen), north of Norway. From my own point of view it was a marvelous encounter, one that I wish my children will be able to experience in person in the Arctic Ocean, and in a zoo.

As other people on this thread have commented, there is a lot of disinformation regarding global warming, and this is useful to no one. Mainstream media love being sensationalistic and talk about the Ice melting away, but the scientific reality is much harder and complex to understand. For one I'm a climatologist so I cannot speak professionally about it.
From my point of view the only reliable source of information are the proceedings from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and reports from reputable scientific research.

We cannot underestimate the impact of climate change, and we should be acting soon to reduce our pollutant emissions (not just CO2). Is the science perfect and are predictions perfectly accurate? No, no prediction can ever be perfect in science -- in fact even the IPCC reports have a state degree of uncertainty as to the degree to which global warming is impacting our climate, and they do provide different long term extrapolations based on different assumptions. This is not something that can be easily reported in a news bite, but this is all we get from today's mainstream media. The risk is either overstate the problem, and thus risk a backlash against global warming, or worse indifference, or to explain the minute boring details and ask people to act on something that is far beyond their attention span and requires immediate sacrifice. By the same token it is also very hard for politicians to act on something that will happen long after they will leave their elected office, even assume they care. I would bet that not many people will care about what will happen by 2050, which I think is the average estimate for an Ice-Free North Pole. And even this estimate is not certain by any stretch.

This was my first trip to the Arctic, so I cannot state anything firsthand. What I do know from a presentation at Washington's University is that the 2007 June Arctic Ice extent was the smallest ever recorded.

What I can say for certain however is that I have also been at Kongsbreen (King's Glacier) in King's Bay, Svalbard. That glacier has retreated so much that it is now split into two separate glaciers (with a huge rock boulder in the middle) and our ship was -- according to years old maps -- inside the glacier.

fiorenzo1963 has contributed a photo to this story.

Swedish icebreakers in the Arctic.

Like Zoe, I have lived in the Western arctic and support what she has written. If you speak with aboriginal elders who have lived decades in the area and know the land intimately, they will tell you that weather patterns have become unpredictable, and that the animals they eat traditionally have changed in terms of taste and texture.

cyborgess has contributed a photo to this story.

The environment failing to meet scientific predictions in a single year is anything but a trend, and should be taken lightly. Instead, look at the climate change and ice fluctuations over the past 60 or even 20 years, and then you have something to talk about. How many climate scientists actually publish their percentage of certainty anyway?!

jw_creations has contributed a photo to this story.

Thank you Zoe Ho and cyborgess for you first hand view points on the current situation in the arctic.  Though this was not intended to give an impression that climate change in the arctic is no longer an issue, I was hoping that maybe it was a tiny bit of good news.  I guess not.  It no doubt remains an extremely important issue for Canada. 

jw_creations, you're right on the money. No serious self-respecting scientist can possibly make year-to-year forecasts, insofar as I know the only reliable sources are the IPCC http://www.ipcc.ch proceedings (and cited studies) as well as the following research institutes (there might be more, but these are the only ones I am familiar with):

http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/   (British Antarctic Survey)

http://npiweb.npolar.no/ (Norway's Polar Institute)

http://www.polarcom.gc.ca/index.php (Canada's Polar Commission) and also

http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/

Most newspaper and mainstream media, even papers like the New York Times (for the U.S.) in my opinion do not carefully vet news, in particular when it comes to complex research topics. This goes either way, they either minimize or exaggerate the problem, depending on the position of the article writer.

Read the IPCC confidence intervals from year to year and you'll find that the anthropogenic origin of global warming went from "likely" to "very likely", and that the IPCC forecasts used for this year's updates were based on CO2 emissions which have shown to be underestimated.

Back to controversy.

The "Hockey Stick" curve theory has been debated to death, but even if its evidence were to be dubious (and frankly as a layman the best I can do is read summaries for dummies), it is not the only evidence we have, in fact it is probably the weakest. The current debate among serious researchers is on the nature and consequences of Global Warming -- as well as an unhealthy dose of political trash -- and not whether it does exist or not.

This articles from "Der Spiegel":

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,342376,00.html

gives a good glimpse of the political controversy associated to Global Warming as well as the difficulties for scientists in explaining what's really happening to the public. Notwithstanding the skepticism that transpires in the latter article, its author is Hans von Storch, a leading climate scientist who is vocally critical of the IPCC, and thus, very controversial.

However, Hans von Storch, in a testimony to the US House Committee for Energy and Commerce stated that "Based on the scientific evidence, I am convinced that we are facing anthropogenic climate
change brought about by the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere":

http://energycommerce.house.gov/reparchives/108/Hearings/07192006hearing1987/Storch.pdf

So the bottom line is that things are not as black and white as they seem, and for instance the IPCC forecasts calls for some regions of the Arctic to cool down, which is why the future of the Polar Bears population is very difficult to forecast, even though the overall trend is towards warming up (also some areas like Svalbard have seen a huge increase in Polar Bear population due their now protected status -- at this point I believe only Native Canadian people are allowed to hunt Bears).

If you had the patience to read so far you have by now realized that everybody and everyone takes a single scientist's words (like Hans von Storch) and uses them and distorts them to suit their political agenda, as if the future of our planet is not something to worry about.

Put it this way, even if the current IPCC estimates are wrong (I think their current confidence level is 90%+), are you going to do nothing and risk major environmental disruptions with possible wars as consequences (for access to natural resources, food and water in particular) with the only planet we have? This is the crux of the issue. No scientist in her/his right mind can ever give us 100% certainty, but to me 90%+ is convincing enough to do something about it.

Lastly, if you have a chance and the time you should watch "The Voyage of the Sedna" documentary:

http://www.nfb.ca/aventures/sedna/arcticmission/index.html

http://www.nfb.ca/collection/films/fiche/index.php?id=51596

For some people like Zoe Ho global warming is already here and has already affected their lives. Also, several native Alaskan people -- used to be called Eskimos -- had to relocate their villages because the permafrost is literally melting below their feet. Such permafrost is laden with methane, which is even a worse hose warming gas than CO2.

Thanks for reading.

I think the bigger issue is not about how much the ice coverage is increasing or surviving, but about the effect of our actions on our planet. It is clear that we effect the balance of our planet and as such have a responsibility to look after it.

Ashley Pollak has contributed a photo to this story.

It's a shot of an iceberg (I just dloaded it from the Net) in the Arctic.

Switch Productions has contributed a photo to this story.