Arctic Sea Ice | 2013 Extent

How I See It

On September 12, 2013, noted climate scientist and showman Mike Huckabee reported that the melting of the Arctic ice must be over. He jokingly chided the scientific efforts to study the problem of global warming and sea ice melting. In his dismissive facebook report, he made several claims, none of which were substantiated with any evidence or links to it. He says…

Well, we’re coming to the end of the summer of 2013. So what’s it like up in Santa land? It’s freezing. The Arctic ice cap has grown by 60 percent in one year. There are almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than there were last year.

What is the truth? You won’t find it in his social media status update. You will find it in the report of the National Snow & Ice Data Center. Yes, there is more sea ice in 2013…

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Melting Permafrost | Links to Greenhouse Gases

For the full post on this important topic…

How I See It

Permafrost covers 24% of exposed land of the Northern Hemisphere.

From a NASA press release of 6-10-2013…

Permafrost (perennially frozen) soils underlie much of the Arctic. Each summer, the top layers of these soils thaw. The thawed layer varies in depth from about 4 inches (10 cm) in the coldest tundra regions to several yards, or meters, in the southern boreal forests. This active soil layer at the surface provides the precarious foothold on which Arctic vegetation survives. The Arctic’s extremely cold, wet conditions prevent dead plants and animals from decomposing, so each year another layer gets added to the reservoirs of organic carbon sequestered just beneath the topsoil.

Over hundreds of millennia, Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon – an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That’s about half of all the…

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