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Topic: Ice the size of New Mexico lost in a week
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| UGoGirl | Posted – 9/8/2007 9:57:26 AM | show profile I'm so sick of politicians and vested interests arguing about where and how we need to reduce greenhouse gases. Says one: we need to stop CO2 from coal-fired power plants. Says another: no, we need to make our cars more efficient. God damn it, we need to do this, that, and the other. We need all of them. In just a week we lost a section of arctic sea ice equivalent to the size of the state of New Mexico. And soon we may see the opening of the northwest passage. What's it going to take to get people to take this more seriously? A couple of category 6 hurricanes? A sudden rise in sea levels? A dustbowl in the midwest? ******* ...Figure 2 is the updated time series of daily ice extent for 2007, which can be compared to the time series for 2005 and to the 1979 to 2000 average. Compared to conditions cited in our last entry [one week ago], we have lost an additional 360,000 square kilometers (138,000 square miles) of ice, an area larger than the size of the state of New Mexico. ... Another notable aspect of August 2007 was the opening of the Northwest Passage (see red line in Figure 4 and August 22 entry below). During August 2007, the passage was the most navigable that people have seen since monitoring began. The Northeast Passage, along the Russian coast, is still blocked by fairly heavy ice conditions north of the Taymyr Peninsula (near the top of Figure 1). Might the Northeast Passage open in the next few weeks? We will be monitoring the situation. http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/20070810_index.html |
