Arctic Surprise

An article in Discover reports that early March sea ice extent in the arctic has collapsed, likely producing a new record low.

The article highlights a new plot from the National Sea Ice Data Center, contrasting the current year's sea ice extent (the blue line) with the thirty-year average (heavy black line) and the range of values (grey area) between the +/- 2 standard deviation bounds. 

 

A word of explanation to those who don't think of statistics as their native language:  Anything outside the two-standard-deviation bounds is something that any scientist will regard as surprising. In practice, we use much more technical metrics, involving p-values, significance levels, statistical power, and other arcana. But a very good, quick and dirty approximation is that anything more than two standard deviations from its average is surprising, "statistically significant". It's in the realm of things that are unlikely to have occurred by chance, so we generally take these occurrences as probably indicating that something systematic is going on.

In this case, the "something systematic" is climate change. As with all individual weather phenomena, this observation is not ironclad proof of global warming.

But this situation has clear physics: Ice reflects daytime solar energy to space and radiates night-time heat from the sea, resulting in net cooling. The less ice, the less cooling. The less cooling, the less ice. A positive feedback can result, contributing to significant warming of the polar regions, melting of glaciers, and thawing of permafrost, resulting in release of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide -- all of which results in more warming.

So it's especially galling that the other climate news story today (see this version from UPI) says that Florida officials, under Republican Governor Rick Scott, have clearly and unambiguously passed the word that Department of Environmental Protection employees are forbidden to use such terms as "climate change", "global warming", or "sustainability". It is telling that this policy was published only by word of mouth. Whoever gave this order did not have the guts to put it in writing. But a number of different DEP employees tell the exact same story, so I tend to provisionally accept it.

When the facts clearly tell one story but political or business or religious leaders dictate that nobody actually mention any of the facts, one conclusion leaps quickly to mind: Somebody has something to hide. Let's bring that out into the light of day and look at it.