Thanks GTW, I'm sure that 4 just voices his own fears and then displaces them onto others?
I'm also sure that 4 accepts that this is the first ever summer of our recording that we see the ice being lass than 5 years old and thin across all the basin meaning that we can expect a lot more 'in-situ' melt and are less protected by synoptics when it comes to holding onto some ice?
June/July will be the month where we see if we have cause to worry about the melt as we will see this 'in-situ' melt revealing open swathes of dark water and isolate other areas of ice in a sea of warming waters.
Insofar as SC's 'warm water' I have to concur that the warming oceans do play a great role in the basal melt of the ice (plenty of which will be occuring right now!) but cannot follow his inference that this is all courtesy of the PDO+ve phase which ended over 10years ago as we have noted greater volumes of 'warmer waters' flooding through Bering and into the Basin/Canadian Archipelago. How would a PDO phase manage this increased flow rate???.
The melt out of the fast ice at Bering and through the archipelago may well increase the channel sizes allowing more water in but what would drive the increase in speed of flow??? In my mind only a loss in volume at some point in the basin would facilitate such (or could the thermal gradient work such a wonder?) Anyhow this is all 'new' observation and so we do not yet have enough years of data to bring forward a meaningful conclusion to the why's,how's and wherefore's.
Global catastrophe? Yeah , I'm sure that ,over time, this is possible from the melt out of the Arctic Ocean and the far reaching impacts such 'warming' brings to the land surfaces beyond (up to 1,500km inland studies show us). We need look no further than the permafrost and it's cargo to see how this could rapidly alter climate across our food producing regions leading to said 'global Catastrophe' but I'm sure it'll be more like watching a train wreck in slow mo than an instant continuous disaster of global proportions. I'm also sure that we'll have to endure plenty of 'can't ascribe single events to....' or the planet always is in such a mode of change' ,or how could us puny humans cause that!' type arguments as we see our changes ramp up. May the gods help us if N. USA/N.Europe keep suffering early winter cold snaps as the Arctic ocean's heat pushes cold air-masses our way (and WAA to the Arctic in response).
Originally Posted by: Gray-Wolf