2 March 2009

A Warm January- Too late to Save Arctic Ice?

Posted by Dan Satterfield

Two interesting Climate tidbits to leave for you today.

The first,  is a presentation by NASA top Climate Scientist James Hansen. He spoke at the December meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. This meeting of thousands of Earth science researchers, is one of the biggest, and best science conferences there is.

jas_hansen1Hansen gave a talk in which he says that he thinks we have already passed a level of Carbon Dioxide that will bring an end to the Summer Arctic sea ice. The only question is whether it will disappear in 20 years or 90. The presentation runs about an hour and is well worth watching. He brings up several subjects that will be the subject of posts here in the coming days.

HANSEN TALK TO AGU

The other Climate news is from NOAA. The numbers for January are in, and for the planet, the January temperature was the 7th warmest on record. The instrument record goes back to 1880 in this case. So much for Climate change stopped in 1998.

map-blended-mntp-200901-pgLater,

Dan