Arctic Sea Ice: Less Bad But Not Good

Yes, the ice is melting. Temperatures in the Arctic have been rising faster than any other area on earth. There is no argument that each decade there is less a less ice covering the big blue ocean. Which also means there is no argument against global warming, because the melting of Arctic sea ice is vision evidence of rising temperatures. Nobody can argue against that. The Artic sea ice is going to

continue to melt whether we stop all emissions of greenhouse gases or not. Earth has been warming since before human existence, all we did was speed up the process. Although, even with a sped up process the Arctic ice is going to be around for a very long time. The average rate of decline over the past four decades has been about 4.1 percent per decade. As we have witnessed in the past, as carbon dioxide levels increase, that rate will do the same. During the summer months the rate of decline increases significantly, to an average of almost 11 percent per decade in September, its hottest month. That means that Earth has 11 percent less ice now than it did ten years ago. And, like I stated before, that rate is only going to increase, but even with the increase it is still going to take well past our lifetime before we see "nothing but open ocean" (McKibben 4) in the Arctic.

"That is, within a decade or two, a summertime spacecraft pointing its camera at the North Pole would see nothing but open ocean." (McKibben 4) This is off by a little bit. But McKibben is not at fault. You see, when Mckibben wrote Eaarth he was basing all the future trends off of the year 2007, as were many other researchers. And if you examine the extent of the melt in the year 2007 compared to any other year you will see a significant difference. Because he based his predictions off an outlier, the statistics he examined where not accurate. He ended up exaggerating the time it would take for all the ice in the Arctic to melt.

Now, as I was researching Arctic sea ice I realized that there weren't many graphs the accurately displayed the data I wanted to show in my presentation so, I created my own. I pooled all the data from satellite pictures on the National Snow and Ice Data Center website into excel and began to calculate. The pictures begin in 1979 and go up to the December of 2015. The information I used to calculate each measurement is the Sea Ice Extent. Below every picture is a single number with the units, million square kilometers. I used all the numbers from every month between 1979 and 2015 to get the most accurate calculations. I was reading a couple brief summaries on how the National Snow & Ice Data Center created each graph and I came across a sentence that I found interesting, "Scientists generally do not include data from 2000 forward because that period has seen especially sharp declines in sea ice extent." This is saying is that there has been unusual melting patterns in the years following 2000. Fast melts and quick freezes, both occurred during this time and because I didn't want to leave fifteen years of information out of my calculations, I did not listen to the scientists.