Article Tags: Geoffrey Lean
Is this some really good news about climate change? One of its most worrying manifestations has long been the shrinking of the polar ice cap in summer. Concern reached unprecedented heights two and a half years ago when over 200,000 square miles were found to have melted for the first time, bringing the extent of the ice cap in September 2007 down to levels that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s models had predicted would not be reached before 2050.
Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado – probably the world’s leading institution in the field – then said that they feared that the ice had entered a ‘death spiral’. And, even though the extent of the ice has recovered somewhat in the succeeding two Septembers (always the month with the least amount after the summer heat) many experts still believed that a ‘tipping point’ had been reached, with some suggesting that the Arctic could be ice-free in summer as early as 2013. This, others added, could have catastrophic worldwide effects, including disrupting the Indian monsoon and causing prolonged drought in the American Mid-West, which helps feed over 100 countries worldwide.
But now reports of new research, due to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggest that much of the loss of ice may not be directly caused by global warming after all. They say that the research – led by Masayo Ogi of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama, Japan – has found that changes in wind patterns account for about half of the variation in September ice cover. In the years of higher loss, the scientists found, the winds blew large amounts of ice south through the Fram Strait between Greenland and the Svarlbard Archipeligo to melt in the warmer waters of the North Atlantic.
Source: blogs.telegraph.co.uk