The question being asked is, "Is this the albedo flip, the tipping point, for
arctic sea ice?"- and are the IPCC estimates 100 years off?
from:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/arctic-sea-ice-watch/Yikes!?
?When you run along the annual minima on this chart, we see we have another hockey-stick happening right before our eyes!
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re 232. The spread of broken ice is more clear at this site
http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_nic.png.?Flyers outside UN would be good. I am horrified by this development and shocked that it is not front page news. Albedo flip right now and a clear message that IPCC and politicians are way off. Do we still have 1000 days
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The Sept 3 update is out at NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data center. NSIDC Sept 4 Update
The sea ice extent continues to decline and is now down to 4.42 sq. km, or below what it should be by 2050, according to the UN climate report projections earlier this year.
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If the trend this year continues for the next few years, resulting in a mostly ice-free Arctic ocean in the summer, will the rate of global warming accelerate, and by roughly how much
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Browsing through an ancient volume of Science (March 16, 2007), I encountered this passage regarding what the models have to say:
Our analyses show that in the IPCC AR4 models driven with the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) A1B emissions scenario (in which atmospheric CO2 reaches 720 parts per million by 2100), a near-complete or complete loss (to less than 1 x 106 km2) of September ice will occur anywhere from 2040 to well beyond the year 2100, depending on the model and the particular run for that model. Overall, about half the models reach September ice-free conditions by 2100 (32).
Now I’m a complete donkey, so what do I know… but from my asinine perspective, it’s astonishing how quickly these models (possibly the ultimate achievement of computer science) are getting shredded by observation