Extra Sunshine Blamed for Part of Arctic Meltdown

Extra Sunshine Blamed for Part of Arctic Meltdown

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Clouds were likely a culprit in this summer's record Arctic meltdown which temporarily opened up the fabled Northwest Passage, scientists announced Wednesday.

While Earth's rising temperatures fueled by global warming are certainly a factor in the Arctic melt, unusual weather patterns this summer also influenced how much of the sea ice melted.

One result of these patterns was a decrease in cloud cover, scientists said today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which would have allowed more sunlight to penetrate Earth's atmosphere and warm the Arctic ocean waters.

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New data from NASA satellites observing the western Arctic, where most of the ice loss occurred, showed a 16 percent decrease in cloud coverage this summer compared to 2006.

"There's been quite dramatic reductions of cloudiness this summer," said study member Graeme Stephens of Colorado State University.

The amount of sunlight from these clearer skies would

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Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
Antarctic Ozone Layer Nearly Gone

Jennifer Kay at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, CO is saying that the clearere weather over the arctic this summer was responsible for melting about 1 ft. of sea ice. Apparently global warming was not necessarily responsible. Natural variations in summer weather were responsible.

Personally I think they need to get some gamma ray counters over the polar area. There may be a correlation.


www.foxnews.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

While Earth's rising temperatures fueled by global warming are certainly a factor in the Arctic melt, unusual weather patterns this summer also influenced how much of the sea ice melted.

Yes, about a foot of it may be due to this, however, thats only a single foot... we're dealing with allot more than that, the rest is a direct result of global warming.

Aside : anybody catch the mistake in the article? "Earths rising temperatures fueled by global warming"... isn't that the definition of global warming? Earths temperatures rising?

"Clouds are conspiring, they're playing a role in this," said study author Jennifer Kay, a post-doctoral research fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

clouds are CONSPIRING acting alongside another force. and thats straight from the person fox news is getting this info from. so oviously even she believes that there is something else at work alongside the clouds.

Found this comment intresting.

By Waleed Abdalati, Head, Cryospheric Sciences Branch, NASA
The changes we are observing in the Arctic are tremendously important and of great concern because they are much larger and faster than we scientists ever really expected. There is uncertainty in models, and we won't always get our predictions totally accurate, but nearly all of the models that form the basis of future climate and sea level projections underestimate what is happening to Arctic ice today. That strongly suggests that the projections for the future are conservative, and we may see greater changes than we currently anticipate. I usually caution people against reading too much into a few years of data, but the data from the last few years, in the context of the longer-term trends, has very convincingly shown us is that the Arctic ice is undergoing dramatic and rapid change. Given the importance of the Arctic ice in influencing global climate and, in the case of Greenland, raising sea level substantially, it is imperative that we understand the nature of these changes and what they will mean for life on Earth. The Earth's ice cover is sounding an alarm - a climate alarm - and it is up to us as a society to figure out how we want to respond to that alarm. Our success as a civilization depends on that response, and we can't afford to get it wrong.

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