Posted on 08/13/2003 9:55:48 AM PDT by presidio9
Global warming (news - web sites) will melt most of the Arctic icecap in summertime by the end of the century, a report showed Wednesday.
The three-year international study indicated that ice around the North Pole had shrunk by 7.4 percent in the past 25 years with a record small summer coverage in September 2002.
"The summer ice cover in the Arctic may be reduced by 80 percent at the end of the 21st century," said Norwegian Professor Ola Johannessen, the main author of the report funded by the European Commission (news - web sites).
The Arctic Barents Sea north of Russia and Norway could be free of ice even in winter by the end of the century, said Johannesssen, who works at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway.
"This will make it easier to explore for oil, it could open the Northern Sea Route (between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans)," he said of the report, dubbed the Arctic Ice Cover Simulation Experiment.
Moscow and Norway reckon the Barents Sea could be a promising new area for oil and gas. The Northern Sea passage could save shippers about 10 days on a trip from Japan to Europe compared to traveling through the Suez Canal.
Johannessen said that the report, published on the Internet ahead of peer review, also indicated that a recent thinning of the polar icecap was linked to human emissions of gases like carbon dioxide blamed for blanketing the planet.
But the study showed a thinning of the icecap from 1920-1940 was caused by natural climate fluctuations, such as ocean currents and winds, rather than by a build-up of greenhouse gases.
Johannessen said the new survey added to evidence of a gradual thinning of the icecap and gave firmer signs that human emissions, such as exhausts from cars and factories, were mainly to blame.
Climate experts say that polar areas are heating up more than other regions.
That coincided with a warming of the tropical Pacific during the same period. Significant cooling began in the Pacific in the 1940s and lasted into the 1970s; warming started again in 1976--a natural phenomenon known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
Read more about it at:
http://tao.atmos.washington.edu/pdo/
Let's see, it was 75 degrees this morning when I woke up at 7am, it's already 90 degrees by 10am....HOLY SH!T!, it's going to be 350 degrees here by Friday afternoon!
I patiently await the coming of the next ice age.
I also have another theory that is just as sensible.
The total weight of the BS coming out of Europe is tilting the Earth on it's axis and causing the equatorial plain to move North/South as the world churns. Thereby causing warmer waters that cause melting.
They always wait till the hottest days of August to release this Speculative Fiction stuff.
Well, there is no land at the North Pole, but if we're to believe the global warming nazis, if you own any land in Kansas, hang on to it. You just may have a piece of ocean front property on your hands in 100 years or so.
LOL… I think you are on to something here.
Actually, if there was global warming one would expect the coldest areas of the planbet to heat much more than the rest. HOWEVER, there is no DATA to demonstrate this is happening.
As is usual, the article is printing debunked, erroneous climate model predictions as facts.
More and more data comes out debunking co2 levels as being a causal effect of global warming..
Which spawned the great 'global-cooling' scare of the '70's. When Reagan was running for office in 1980 the liberals would lampoon his voice saying 'I'm going to make this country what it once was -- a vast frozen wasteland!'.
But what the hey, thanks for the link, but I never fool myself into thinking that facts have any power with the global warmers, because they don't even believe it. When was the last time you ever met one who was going to skip buying snow tires in November?
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