I am from the Toronto Canada region. I do not have any credentials of any sort to help me in what I say, but I do find that those I talk to tend to fall into 2 camps. 1) The right who even if you can get them to agree that climate is changing think it is just cyclical and even if man has influence there is no way they would allow anyone to change the way things are because it would absolutely devastate the economy. Probably change their tune after everything collapses when the climate gets too far out of whack (tend to be an extreme pessimist about the political/economic leaders to get their act together before things really get bad). 2) They agree with me (maybe just to humour me) especially when I point out the window to our habour which used to be frozen so hard at least 3-4 weeks of the winter that the ferries could not run, and that the 1-2 week spells of -40C windchills no longer are present. Believe we might have had them in the -20C's 1 or 2 days this winter. The compounding problem in Canada is that other then the area around Vancouver, British Columbia. No high density population zones are in great danger of really severe weather. Note: Canada does not have much of that as the average pop/area is around 3-4 per sq mile. Cities are quite dense though.

Not directly related to cracking ice, but Dr. Jeff Masters has written 3 pieces on his blog that directly ties in what is happening in the Arctic due to AGW and what is happening to the the weather. Granted is US centric, but still applies the rest of the North. http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2373 http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2374 http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html link will change tomorrow.

A good analogy (I believe) would be a tree being blown by the wind. In its past it has faced many storms, but one day a storm happens by and it falls. There is nothing too unusual about this storm, in fact it was not even a very big storm. On investigation it was found out to be all rotten at its core from all kinds of factors, but the media and others reporting about it only say that the tree fell down in a storm. Those hearing/reading those reports would believe that it was the storm that brought the tree down. In fact it was the rot that brought the tree down and the tree experts all agree with it although they would also have to include that it was at this particular time the storm was indeed responsible for it happening at this particular point in time. Just as what is happening to the ice can be pointed at if such and did not occur at this moment then this happening would not have occurred just like this at this moment (hope you can follow that distorted logic) That is the constant battle that the majority on this forum are fighting. The reason the ice is in the shape its in is because of AGW, but for every little event that happens on the Arctic you can always find some other event that made it occur in exactly the way it did. I am no scientist, but do enjoy following you and congratulate all of you on the advancement of our understanding as to what is going on at the core. PS @Colorado Bob: See the avg temp map for Feb February 2013 the globe's 9th warmest February on record Note: Firefox has a very cool toolbar Text Formatting Toolbar that make tagging quotes, naming html links etc a breeze (wish I had found that a few posting back.

"According to the BBC's Andrew Neil in a presentation in the City of London on Thursday, "Windmills" are far too variable and the Good 'ol US of A will soon be pumping oil and gas to the Gulf for export, whilst the Poor 'ol Arctic Ice Cap melts quicker than ever, swiftly followed by Greenland." There is an issue that is neglected. Water. Most of NA NG and tarsand oil production depends upon large amounts of water. As seen last summer, because of the big stationary high over Greenland, a large portion of the US was in drought. Predictions for the future are long term drought and possibly long term flooding. Neither scenario is great for dependable water for oil/gas production. Also I would not bank on the AO as a help either as the big cyclone of 2012 showed ther could be big storms in that region, and predictions for that are bigger more frequent and longer lasting. All that is bad news for oil rigs as they may handle a 3-5 day GoM hurricane, but I do not think much can survive a 5-6 week AO cyclone. All this saying, I do not think NA oil/gas is dependable as the big oil companies would like us to believe. These events in Feb. just shows you that the Arctic should be the news centre of science for the next decades, because what happens there will impact the rest of the ice in the world and that will impact every nation directly. We then face the problem of how nations will react. Man in general has not shown itself to use the intelligence it was born with.

I am Late for this party. FYI @TenneyNaumer and anyone else. WGET which has a version for all operating systems (OS) is the simplest way of downloading pages. I am not going to give instuctions as it is very depended upon your OS and what you want it for. There are a lot of forums out there that can give you the help you need. As an example of above: you can set up a script that will download the jpg image however often you want it to an change the name of it at the same time. In this way you will not need to be at the computer at the time it is downloading the image. You can also use wget to download an entire webpage of images that are archived. It truely is one of the more useful downloading programs out there and it it free. The big problem is that you do need to have a certain amount of confort using scripts. On another note: This week is the 1st time I have seen a thin layer of ice in Toronto Harbour. (Ontario, Canada) 25 yrs ago it would be frozen hard enough for 2-3 weeks a year that the ferries could not move (not ice breakers).

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html Titled: Bitter cold and heavy lake effect snows continue in the Midwest and Northeast U.S. Is about the Great Lakes but does show very graphically that climate is changing dramatically. Can remember back in the 80's that Toronto Harbour was frozen so hard that the ferries could not move for a few weeks every winter. Now may see a very thin layer of ice a very few days every winter.

I was going to do a full rant then decided no. I do pose some questions and comments. Who is paying the piper? What are there biases? How much power and leverage do they have over the final results? In Canada it is getting terrifying what those answers are. Scientists are fired blacklisted, legally defamed and sued for giving the wrong conclusions. The agencies that are supposed protect the country and people from bad long term effects are neutered by watering down their powers and eliminating their budgets. All with policies that the Koch brothers would give a standing ovation to. The private media is more and more being taken over by big multinational conglomerates with the idea of using it as a mouth piece for there agendas and the public media is getting their budgets slashed and being cut off of their traditional information sources. I do think that this trend is happening in many other countries. So is it at all surprising that We are still seeing many papers still talking about post 2100. To me no. In fact I could see nothing changing until Manhattan Island is suddenly cutoff for a very lengthy time because a combination of storm damage and inability to repair the infrastructure because a permanent high water.

Sorry brain got ahead of me again. In case you are totally baffled by what I was trying to say. I believe that the changes happening in the Antarctic will effect the Arctic which then will effect the Antarctic ......

Do know that this blog is about the Arctic, but did find this report http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20804192. This is a feedback loop that is almost never mention. Reason is obvious that it is on the opposite side of the earth and the equator does separate weather systems because of wind patterns etc. Although I am a firm believer that nothing happens in isolation of the anything else. eg People can smoke out of doors, but when they come in my lungs still get congested just from what is coming from their breath and clothes. As we are finding out from the Arctic, it only takes very minor changes to make major impacts on what happens in the environment. Also the exponential effects seems to be far more the norm then linear.

@ Ron: There will probably be many things that will make the rise far slower then what you are saying, there are 2 articles I came across that do back up what you are saying to a point. http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2115 http://e360.yale.edu/feature/how_high_will_seas_rise_get_ready_for_seven_feet/2230/ In both cases the wording was carefully put in terms of conservative. You can bet your bottom dollar that they're best guesses are far far worse. They are also basically admitting that what is going on in the ice fields are not holding to traditionally to behavior because there are forces that are exerting changes on those glaciers that were not witnessed pre 1950's. The problem that scientists are having now is that the changes are so rapid it is almost impossible to discover what new forces and by how much are bring about the recent changes. Also from what I can infer is that most of the concentration has been looking at heat and possible melt from the ocean waters. Has any one been thinking about how much faster the glaciers will disintegrate into oceans as you start adding SLR to the picture. Let us say that you add 1 metre by say 2050. That would mean that ice sheets that are currently grounded could then become floating sheets and as in the case of Greenland the ice that is attached to the sides of fjords could then be broken off. On top of the the ocean then enters far farther upstream. All those stresses means that in both the of both GIS and AWIS you would not have to melt the ice at the source at all, just get it into the ocean currents and let them do the work somewhere else. As for the land based ice, it is then pushed into the vacated areas that are then kept vacated because the ocean carries it away as soon as it arrives, raising SL that much faster. The point I am trying to make is that all you need to do is get enough SLR from heat to break up the front wall of the ice before other forces such as pressure and kinetic energy take over. That is what I see different from land locked glaciers and sea going glaciers. Mechanical energy becomes a far more important factor once you get beyond a critical point. We saw that in the Arctic once the wall in Frams Straight broke up. It changed from a stopping point to an expressway for ice. Do not get me wrong. Heat is still very important, but we do tend to ignore the importance of mechanical energy and its impact on ice.

Am very late posting for this as it was being talked about a lot earlier on. As IPCC has major trouble reporting anything because of politics what we need more of is institutes similar to Ontario, Canada's Perimeter Institute. Objective is to bring together some of the best scientific minds in a large variety of subjects in close proximity of each other feeding ideas off of each other and see what comes out. You never know what will come out will be clarified and thought of when you get an astrophysicist, a geophysicist and an urban designer together in the same room talking to each other as what could happen on a daily basis at PI. Which is the origin intent of that institute. A provincial TV station has a weekly program that as broadcasts of some talk or other (subject matter has no limit) usually from talks given at PI. This blog actually accomplishes a similar roll in that you have people from all kinds of backgrounds all talking about ice.

Can not find any references at this time by googling (probably asking wrong info), but I seem to remember seeing a program about the problems scientist are now having getting good quality ice cores in Greenland because the deterioration of the ice even at depths. Is this true and if so would not that signal the the ice fields are in even greater trouble then we can imagine?

Found this: http://imbie.org/imbie-2012/results/ What is scary is that the curve of the charts at the bottom seem to following a similar trend as to the collapse of the Arctic Ice. This also shows beyond question that what is happening in the Antarctic is not the ice extent, but the ice balance. Not only that, I believe that although the East is looking great for now, it is hiding the fact that although still very cold is in fact warming and once it hits that magic temp will collapse there also.

OOPs sorry about that meant to post in the other one that had this as a topic, but forgot I had changed from where I was.

I do not have the studies on hand, this is all things I have heard from interviews on the radio and TV. What we do need to do is get away from the group think that the industrial complex can get us out of the mess they have put us into in the 1st place (with our blessing of course). Let us 1st separate the 2 major sources of CO2. Cities and agriculture. For cities: 1) Force every building over 4 stories high and also every one that covers an area of 3000 sq ft (town house developments get included) must cover 90% of their roof tops (slants included) with either energy creating devises (such as wind turbines, solar cells, solar heaters etc) or vegetation that meets targeted standards of cooling and water runoff control. In one interview a scientist studying the vegetation side said that if all building in a city covered their roofs with vegetation, the temps in the city would be lowered by over 2c and most runoff in a rain storm would be stopped by that vegetation. An example of what could be done is this http://www.greencareersguide.com/Toronto-Hotel-Embraces-Green-Energy-Sources.html and they really have not gone as far as one really could if forced to. Agriculture: Legislate reductions in pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceuticals by targeted amounts. Stop growing cotton (most inefficient plant fiber compared to costs in growing it around). Grow corn only for feeding animals or humans as all other uses it is used for (pharmaceuticals, chemical food processes etc is pure waste compared to other sources). Force return of rotation practices. Allow Growing of non THC hemp plants (one of the most versatile plants out there. Used for sails, rope, plastic (Ford made a plastic car with it), WW2 parachutes, floor, oil, building material, original jeans, paper for centuries, etc (a chemist claims he could find over 1200 uses from it). Force planting of trees along all waterways. All these would not increase costs that much but greatly reduce CO2 costs and possibly would start putting carbon back into the soil. Force all large farms to produce 100% of their energy on their land. These things could be done starting tomorrow and take less then a year to get completely in action all it needs is government action. Costs would be a fraction of any questionable geo-engineering solution and far more sustainable. What I am trying to point out is that to make real inroads into the CO2 problem you must let nature take the lead. It is best at doing it and if you give it half a chance will yield very surprising results. BTW I may sound hippyish, but if you knew my life style am far from it.

IMO the best geoE would be to get back to nature. Meaning encouraging mangrove swamps wherever we can get them to grow. stop the growing of cotton and corn and growing of non THC hemp. (seed also makes good flour and converting its cellulose to sugars oils and plastics is far easier then that of corn) The tap root on it is over 12 ft and therefore can be used to control flooding and you do not need herbicides (its a weed) pesticides (pests do not like it) and if rotated with nitrogen fixing plants fertilizer. That takes care of your CO2 worst agriculture problems. Side note: the seed is the only place you can get all your human needed amino acid variants in one package. Also there is one variety or more that can grow in just about any land conditions you can think of, and no tilling needed to grow it. (FYI spent a few months looking into it just out of intellectual curiosity.) Another big helper would be to to go to bamboo in place of trees for any wood usage. Again great for flood control as it also has a very long tap root. fast growing. there is more then one variety for almost any part of the world. As a building material has proven itself to be better then wood to survive earthquakes, hurricanes, floods etc. These are only 2 examples but I know there are a large number of others that are out there. Now how to deal with the CO2 that is out there already. Convert plant material into char coal and bury it in the holes we have created to extract coal and other raw material we have extracted. It has been proven many times if you give nature half a chance it can fix almost anything. The problem humans have is we consistently like to think we know it all and can fix things better. The other avenue

Would you not also run into other problems. With the weight of that water would that not push the land down even more? Is not that area near some depleting underground aquifers that could be collapsed and ruin all other adjoining aquifers? Is that near enough to Yellow Stones Super Volcano that then could add enough stress to it to make it blow? That would cool things down fast and considering what it would do to NA civilization could take out a lot of your CO2 emission problems at the same time. That also could show you that geoegineering always has a cost. All depends on whether or not the end cost are better then the former. A variant of that is humans need to solve solutions. One example is the Asian Carp put into the Mississippi to clear out the algae. Has done such a good job it also is taking out a lot of other fish at the same time.

OT Just finished watching PBS NOVA about Sandy. Very good coverage on what happened. On related links does go into effects of GW. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/inside-the-megastorm.html Video of whole program will be put on line but not there yet. Probably tomorrow.

Neven has mentioned the need to get to what shall we do about it? As I seem to have many very right wing friends around me (have no clue how that happened as I tend toward left myself), here are some of the issues that are going to be major road blocks to change. 1) As the world is in a major economic difficulty and all governments are under major debt problems we can not afford to spend any money on changing the status quo. 2) Everything that will reduce mans impact on the environment is not sustainable and therefore should not even be looked at. 3) The changes are going to happen anyway so why bother trying to make a difference. I could go on for another thousand but it really comes down to I am terrified of change, change costs a lot of money, we can not afford to spend any money so let us just keep things as they are. Unfortunately I am a pessimist about real action being taken until NY, London and/or The Netherlands get permanently drowned from high water levels which I fear could be a lot sooner then we care to think. As to what needs to be done. radically change from global to local economies. Change our energy usage from carbon to renewables plus reduce the amount of energy we use by multiple factors. Help 3 world rise to 1st world level of living without going carbon route. Get agriculture off the use of the chemical industry. Get products off the use of plastics and being throwaway to easily repairable non plastic. There are many more that can be added to it, but unless all these things are worked on at the same time the environment and therefore climate will not be in a position to have a chance to change. Only then can the world get to the point of working on repairing the damage. Unfortunately all I see will be the trying out of quick fixes that will all not work and just create a bigger mess to clean up because you have not stopped what is causing the trouble in the 1st place and the feedback loops will continue working off of that. I know this sounds very depressing but I remember watching a documentary based on a study some historian did on the fall of empires and the conclusion was that it was not war, economic failure, lazy work life or anything of that nature, it was environment damage that got to a point that that empire could no longer sustain what it had.

"What is more, thickness has not changed very much after the huge decline in 2010. Years 2010, 2011 and 2012 have very similar thickness at the end of summer." The thickness may not be changing, BUT the quality of that thickness is getting much worse. When a light weight ice breaker can break a 10m ice floe we really have to redefine thickness and also find out how those ice floes are influencing the condition of the water. Ignoring the fact of quality is just as bad as ignore the fact of loss of ice IMO.

OT but best place I could find to put this. http://phys.org/news/2012-11-massive-volcanic-eruption-climate-people.html Common presumption has been that Sulfuric Acid at high altitudes cool the earth. This study seems to call that into major question. To tie that into this topic, presumptions can lead you into wrong directions. Everything around us influences everything else. Even small forgettable things can have major impacts. For this reason focusing on our presumed impacts of a few things may brig us to totally wrong conclusions just because things are far more complicated then we will ever know.

Found this posting in wunderground Quoting AussieStorm:Some food for thought.Rising Seas a Real Threat to New JerseySea Level Rise Threatens Hundreds of U.S. Energy FacilitiesStudy: Comparing Hurricane Sandy to Hurricane Katrina; New Hurricane Scale ProposedHurricane Sandy Four Times More Powerful Than The 1991 Perfect Storm If some glaciologist prediction of possibly SLR of 1 metre by 2050 things could be very bad in the near future.

The one thing that is tended to be ignored about Antarctica that irritates me is that its ice should include land ice and that ice is shrinking. East side is growing but the loses on the west side is losing far more. We should also go back to Volume which the grounded ice sheets are losing especially the WAIS. As that thins out more sheets are going to have catastrophic collapses and that means the glaciers it is holding back will start racing to the ocean. That means disaster for everyone.

The Perfect Storm is the popular one because it is the most resent of this type of setup. The problem I see with this comparison is that it was over water which changes the interaction of systems quite a bit. That is why I picked Hazel as a better example. Although not quite the same, location and systems in play are much closer comparison. The interesting part of it as that it will come 3 weeks latter in the season. If you look at things from where plants and animals are now as to what they were 60 yrs ago, that shift would line up with the changes in climate. I agree with wayne in that you are now going to see stationary highs and lows as the norm, which could mean that you will see far more hurricanes either pushing out and wondering around the mid Atlantic or making funny left hand turns into the upper NA.

Although not close to strength (Hazel was a cat 4) a very famous storm in Ontario history was HUrricane Hazel See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Hazel. It was earlier in Oct but had run into a similar high blocking pattern and what is a little concerning due to run into a cold front that is hitting here today. Now what could be interesting is how this storm could move things around as far as the Arctic is concerned. If Sandy gets far enough NW, it could decide that its only move left is to exit north of Greenland, or just decide to park itself until it dies down in which case you are faced with a jet stream that will look very odd for a while.