Leatherhead Matters

Source: Beaufort Gyre Exploration Project

Al Gore has a lot to answer for but, so do politicians around the world who have jumped on the bandwagon, suggesting a climate apocalypse is upon us. One of the campaign images (above) used by Gore to dramatise climate change shows 2 polar bears on a melting iceberg. However, the picture was taken in summer 2004. The Arctic ice cap naturally recedes during the summer and then returns each winter.

Gore said in his stage show lecture series: “Their habitat is melting,”  “beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet.”

Then again in early 2007 the special interest groups & the media created a communication blitz that the ice caps and surrounding sea ice were definitely disappearing.

Rather than listen to political snake oil salesmen why not form your own view of whether the global ice caps are disappearing.

The university of Illinois site The Cryosphere Today hosts a great website full of interesting data, pictures and graphs.                                  

For example, this chart shows the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area returning to last year’s size, after the normal seasonal shrinkage but, smaller than the mean size for all  years from 1979-2000 (see red line).

Click THIS CHART to show the same data, recorded over a longer period, from 1979 to 2008, suggesting some receding of the N.H.sea ice area, starting from around 2003/4. This level of shrinkage over just 3-4 years is hardly cataclysmic. A similar graph for the S.H. sea ice area shows that this area has actually expanded in recent years and is above a 30 year mean.

If you have Google Earth installed on your computer you can visit the National Snow & Ice Data Centre at the University of Boulder, Colorado. Scroll down the maps available for viewing until you reach “Sea Ice” and take a journey through recent years, visually tracking the size of the sea ice.

Have fun looking at some of the other maps & data.

You may also find this Blog of interest.