Some love to argue about climate science, by keeping the discussion to disingenuous to he said, she said, games. Always focusing on someone or other’s pronouncements. Hate it - especially since its usually a strategic rhetorical tactic to get the discussion away from looking at the down to Earth evidence, the physical reality of what is happening upon our one and only life supporting planet Earth. That’s bunch of bullshit, what about looking at the actual evidence and making one’s own provisional conclusion? {Provisional because new information always changes old understanding - of course, the Faith Blinded loop is dependent on excluding all new information, the endless. How people can live their lives confined to such a rut, I can’t imagine, but I digress.
Dr. Barber has been around and seen a thing or two, or seven, as the case may be, he obtained his Bachelors and Masters from the University of Manitoba, and his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo, Ontario. He was appointed to a faculty position at the University of Manitoba in 1993 and received a Canada Research Chair in Arctic System Science in 2002. Here’s an informed talk he gave a while back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofaoiHYKtlcThis talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. It is now well known that sea ice in the Arctic has changed in both extent and thickness over the past several decades. In fact the change in sea ice is seen as one of the key global climate variables confirming model estimates of global scale warming of our planet through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process. Extensive investigations at the leading edge of Arctic System Science have recently uncovered a number of surprises, many somewhat counterintuitive, each having significant consequences in the Arctic and through teleconnections to the rest of our planet. In this talk I will review the rate and magnitude of change in sea ice, put this into the context of our understanding of the ‘natural variability’ in sea ice over the past several thousand years.
I will then review seven surprising impacts of this change:
increasing coverage of young ice significantly changes atmospheric chemistry;
more snow both preserves and destroys ice;
Polar bear habitat can actually improve in some areas while deteriorating in others;
match-mismatch timing in the marine ecosystem increases vulnerability;
uncertainty as to whether the Arctic ocean will increase or decrease in overall productivity is a key unknown;
evidence that ice hazards are actually increasing while the world marshals to increase development of Arctic resources; and
evidence that our recent cold winters are actually linked to our warming Arctic.
