Arctic not completely dark in winters anymore

[naturelover]

People in the High Arctic say their 24-hour darkness isn't as dark as it used to be, and a weather researcher says it's because of the warming climate ...... Wayne Davidson, a weather researcher in Resolute Bay, said warmer thermal layers over cold dense polar air cause light to bend and travel farther...... "We still have a daylight and there's still blue, green, red down there — there's sun sign still," ...... Inuit have been noticing changes during the dark season for years but the changes are becoming more visible as the climate warms, Davidson said .....

Jaypetee Akeeagok, who lives in Grise Fiord, Nunavut, said the weather has also been unusually warm there. "You can actually drive Skidoo around town without gloves on," he said. And people in Grise Fiord have also noticed there's more light in winter. "Twenty years ago, we wouldn't even be able to see the whole village, in high noon, which is only nine kilometres, but now we get to see some daylight," ..........

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...te-change.html

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[naturelover]

Climate change is contributing to unusually warm weather in Nunavut and Nunavik, according to a senior climatologist with Environment Canada ..... Temperatures are 10 to 12 degrees warmer than usual in many places, Phillips said, resulting in fall-like weather in many places in the region on Tuesday, December 21st, the first official day of winter..... The temperature on Tuesday morning in Iqaluit was –9 C and in Baker Lake –3 C, far above normal. Temperatures should be between –19 and –28 C over southern Baffin Island, Phillips said. But on Frobisher Bay, some hunters are still travelling by boat because the bay has open water at a time when they're usually crossing it on snowmobiles. "We clearly know this is going to be, in Iqaluit, for example, the warmest year on record," Phillips said.


http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story...#ixzz19LnxDfHs

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[texican]

No more Ice Road Truckers? Say it ain't so.

I'm wondering if any of the Inuit are complaining about it not being pitch black 24/7 in the winter?

[JuliaAnn]

I just realized something... global warming is caused by all the bed wetting going on....

[beccachow]

I bet the sun is getting hotter.

[naturelover]

Texican, I don't know about ice truckers but other consequences are more alarming. The warm weather is interfering with the Inuits normal winter hunting.

This report from the ArcticNet conference in Ottawa in mid-December is too long to take a lot of excerpts from it so you should go to the link, but it sounds like the ice is cracking up in a lot of places. It's warmer now in some places in the Arctic than it is south of the Canadian/American border and on the Atlantic coast. It's quite warm here in the PNW too as we're getting a Pineapple Express which normally doesn't happen during a La Nina year. Nobody on the west coast was expecting this turnabout.

http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/storie...ms_scientists/

"We have dramatic changes taking place." The first three presenters during the opening session of the three-day ArcticNet conference in Ottawa sounded alarmed by the increasingly visible signs of Arctic warming.

Ice has cracked up — once in a while taking Nunavut hunters with it. Lakes continue to dry up, while permafrost melts and the tundra is greening, 650 scientists, officials and northerners heard Dec. 15.

The most “unusual things [are] going on in the winter,” Wohlleben said.
Nothing is progressing as it used to, she said, listing a string of peculiar happenings:

• air temperatures 20 C above normal at the beginning of the year in the Baffin Island communities of Clyde River and Qikiqtarjuaq;

• large ice cracks south of Resolute Bay last January, which caused a hunter to float off on an ice floe;

• and other cracks in land-fast ice spreading throughout the High Arctic islands, endangering research stations, causing problems for polar trekkers and swallowing up a Twin Otter.......... continued.

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[JuliaAnn]

....all that warm, body temperature urine...

[arabian knight]

Originally Posted by beccachow

I bet the sun is getting hotter.

Sure it is, why are all the planets also getting warmer? Sure is not caused by man that is for sure.
And of course these global warming hyped up folks, say oh my it is colder then normal.Must Be GW, oh my hotter this year then normal, Must Be GW, More Hurricanes must be GW, less Hurricanes this year, we have GW to blame, Snowing in places that have not had snow for 130 years yuppers GW is to blame. And I can go on and on and on.
See what the problem is? Any Change in weather now is GW. Well folks you can't have it both ways. Either the earth is warming up or the earth is cooling down.
But what ever it is doing the Earth has always done it, and changing will continue to do so, no matter what man thinks he can do to make it stop, which is the most ridiculous statement yet from the GW folks.
Or could it just be climatic changes that have been happening for the last 4.5 billion years that there has been a earth.
And another point. What IS normal? And who gets to say what the Normal is? The earth is in constant change always has been always will. There is no normal.

[Ed Norman]

You should submit the stories to this list: http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm They try to keep up with all these stories.

The first missionaries to the far north descried the fires of hell to the natives. Then they had to make up a new story because all the natives wanted to sign up for hell.

[naturelover]

Hey you guys, I'm just posting what's being officially reported happening with the climate in the Arctic now for those people on the board who are interested in knowing about it. What you do with the information is up to you, I'm just posting the reports.

If some of you want to make snide comments or debate about it among yourselves I'm not interested about all that and I won't be discussing it.

Carry on .... I'll go look for more reports.

JuliaAnn, I think your juvenile comments about bed-wetters was very strange and irrelevant to the topic and definitely not age appropriate, it seemed more like something I'd expect from an ignorant 10 y.o. child who thought they were being clever.


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[Bearfootfarm]

If some of you want to make snide comments or debate about it among yourselves I'm not interested about all that and I won't be discussing it

And yet you did

JuliaAnn, I think your comments about bed-wetters was very strange and definitely not age appropriate, it seemed more like something I'd expect from an ignorant 10 y.o. child.

[Bearfootfarm]

Here's WHY it's being reported:

With 60 Arctic lakes slated for study, he’d like to place more buoys in the water to better gauge the changes going on.

And more money for Arctic science would also help Greg Henry from the University of British Columbia keep his research project going.

Henry, who has been studying vegetation across Canada’s Arctic for the past 20 years, seeing a major portion of this money dry up this year.

[naturelover]

That's not the reason why it's being reported but it's true Canada will not be contributing any more money for climate studies until 2017.



Here's another one, but not about the Arctic this time - this is from the international climate change conference in Cancun in November:

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/1...n-climate.html

" The brutal heat waves that killed thousands of Europeans in 2003 and choked Russia earlier this year will seem like average summers in the future as the Earth continues to warm, the UN weather agency said Tuesday.

The last decade confirmed scientific predictions from 20 years ago that temperatures will rise and storms will become more fierce — and those trends are likely to continue, said Ghassam Asrar, who heads the climate research centre at the World Meteorological Organization.

Although climate science is still evolving and learning from current patterns, Asrar said, government planners should prepare for a warming world.

In 2003, an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 people died from heat-related ailments or incidents in what was the hottest summer since 1540. Russia's summer this year was the warmest this century and ignited peat fires in the forests around Moscow that suffocated the capital for weeks. Temperatures, in degrees Celsius, soared into the 30s in normally chilly Siberia.

Several parts of the world experienced freakish or extreme weather this year, the WMO said. Records for low temperature were shattered in hundreds of U.S. locations, and heavy snowfall disrupted air and road traffic in Europe, the U.S. and China. Pakistan suffered floods that killed 1,700 people and displaced 20 million people. China also had unusually high temperatures, floods and landslides........."


Oh, oh, it looks like it's happening again this winter too!

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[naturelover]

Originally Posted by Bearfootfarm

And yet you did

Umm, no I didn't. That's not discussing the topic, it's a response to JA's personal bedwetting fixation which she commented on twice out of left field, which is not relevant to climate change effecting the Arctic. :baby04:

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[naturelover]

Further to the $$$$$ and cap and trade and GHG emissions thing:

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories...se-gas-101128/

Canada won't follow U.S. plan on greenhouse gases

"The Harper government has no plans to follow a U.S. initiative to slash the greenhouse gas emissions of big polluters -- even though Ottawa has pledged to harmonize its climate policies with the Americans.

The White House, stung by its failure to legislate a cap-and-trade bill before the recent congressional elections, has a Plan B set to be implemented within weeks.

The new U.S. rules -- passed by executive order -- are aimed at curbing emissions from large industrial facilities like refineries and cement factories. They go into effect Jan. 2.

Canadian climate experts say this country could contain the pollution growth from its own industries, notably the oilsands, by introducing similar standards north of the border.

Environment Minister John Baird downplayed the plans from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as "patchwork."
"It's very, very preliminary stuff on energy efficiency," said Baird, who said he hadn't heard about the new U.S. rules before being contacted by The Canadian Press.

"Any national standards in the United States on energy efficiency in GHG (greenhouse gas) reduction, obviously, we would very seriously look at adopting -- unless we're doing something that's better or higher in Canada."

The EPA rules will require tougher emissions standards when air quality regulators issue permits to industry.

The first step tightens rules for existing facilities planning any expansion that would increase emissions. Then, starting in July, the rules will be extended to include newly constructed facilities........." continued.



HOWEVER



Canada would support a binding international agreement with all major emitters of the planet.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/1...te-cancun.html

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Canada would support a binding international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases.

Harper spoke in Nova Scotia on Friday as delegates at a climate-change conference in Cancun, Mexico, scrambled to hammer out a number of deals in the meeting's final hours.

Harper, whose government is often criticized for its stance on greenhouse-gas emissions, said Canada would honour the pact if such an agreement is reached.

"Canada's objectives at this conference are clear and that is that we want to see the world achieve a legally binding agreement to regulate and control and reduce greenhouse gas emissions for all major emitters of the planet, including Canada," he said. "Canada is willing to participate in that."

Harper also called for an effort to push countries not interested in reducing emissions back to the table.

"There are other countries that do not support that objective. … In some of those cases, and I'm talking about very big emitters, they don't even support the measurement of greenhouse gas emissions let alone the control of them.

"I just say to anybody who is reasonably minded, let's focus on efforts on pushing the guys who aren't wanting an agreement to get to the table and get an agreement." ......... continued.


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[Shygal]

You are wasting your time, NL. Some people won't believe that man has had any effect on the planet no matter what. Yes the earth changes, it always has and always will. But to say man has had absolutely no effect on anything is absurd.

[naturelover]

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/SciTech/20...r-study-101215

" .......... A second study was to be presented Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. That research considers a future in which global warming continues at the same pace.

And it shows that a belt from the northern archipelago of Canada to the northern tip of Greenland will likely still have ice because of various winds and currents.

The sea ice forms off Siberia in an area that's called "the ice factory" and is blown to this belt, which is like an "ice cube tray," said Robert Newton of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

That "sea ice refuge" will be good for polar bears and should continue for decades to come, maybe even into the next century, he said.

Just how many polar bears could live there still has to be figured out, according to the research by Newton and Stephanie Pfirman of Barnard College.

Amstrup's study doesn't downplay the nature of global warming and its effect on polar bears, especially if emissions increase.

"The changes that are occurring in the Arctic are going on at a much more rapid rate than elsewhere in the world," Amstrup said. "So the changes that are occurring and affecting polar bears really foreshadow much more significant changes that are likely to occur worldwide."

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[naturelover]

Originally Posted by Shygal

You are wasting your time, NL. Some people won't believe that man has had any effect on the planet no matter what. Yes the earth changes, it always has and always will. But to say man has had absolutely no effect on anything is absurd.

Hey, that's okay Shy, I'm not worried about whether or not some people will or won't believe .... whatever it is they want to believe.

I'm just cruising through a bunch of recent Canadian environmental news releases tonight and posting a bunch of the most recent reports (like within the past 2 or 3 months) that I know some other people will be interested to know about. I know there are several other environmentalists on the board.

Oh, and if anyone's interested, (maybe some of the Canadians on the board are) there's other Canadian environmental stuff here besides just climate change stuff. Here's the link from my favorites list that has all the topic titles of the news releases I've been looking through tonight:

http://www.canadaka.net/news/topic/20-environmental



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[naturelover]

And last but not least before I say goodnight, here's a good explanation for why some of you are snowed under and freezing now, not in spite of global warming, but because of global warming.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/op..._r=2&src=twrhp

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[Shrek]

What's truly amusing about global warming is that over a decade ago scientists at NASA proposed intentially producing greenhouse gases on Mars through use of underground mining and industry once we have established an adequate transport system to begin migration colonization to that planet.

Once enough greenhouse gases have been set in place to form a polluted atmosphere on the surface, cleansing steps and surface oxygenation could be initiated to produce a surface environment capable of supporting Earth type flora and fauna.

The same actions attributed to humans and being blamed for destroying Earth today may very well be the key to terraforming Mars over the period of 3 to 5 generations after we have a colony there in the future under the hand of Mankind.


Colonizing and terraforming Mars using industrial waste greenhouse gases and atmospheric scrubber balancing___now that would be called modern homesteading