Is the measure of sea ice one of the ways they measure the severity of Global Warming?

Question

What about the pack ice on Antarctica?

Answer 1

Yes.

Because of several factors, including the ozone hole, central Antarctica is warming more slowly than the rest of the planet.  But the edges are melting.  It's difficult to say which dominates right now.  Satellites can only measure the surface area of the ice, not it's volume.

Answer 2

Its one way, but there are others!!!

Answer 3

It's one way that rising temperatures are detected:

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Antarctica ice mass (along with Greenland and other major glaciers) is another way:

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environ...

http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/mbb/mbb9/su...

Answer 4

Yes, Arctic sea ice is a symptom worth monitoring.  

If you dig a little deeper than misleading blogs, you'd determine that the surface area is currently high, as expected, due to the strong La Nina weather influence (a cool Winter), but due to record warmth and melting during the Summers, the volume of the Arctic and Greenland ice is at the lowest levels ever recorded:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080424/sc_...

The volumes of the Greenland Ice Sheet and ice in the Arctic Ocean were estimated at 2.9 million and 4.4 million cubic metres respectively in September 2007 -- the lowest ever levels recorded, the organization said Wednesday.

The sea ice shrank to 39 percent below its 1979-2000 mean volume, it said.

"Recently observed changes are happening at rates significantly faster than predicted" by the 2005 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) and last year's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), WWF said.

The melting of arctic sea ice and the Greenland Ice Sheet was happening so fast that experts were now questioning whether the situation is close to "tipping point," where sudden and possibly irreversible change takes place.

We have a serious issue in the Antarctic as well.  Ice mass is being lost, and the loss is accelerating:

The Antarctic has recently been measured to be losing total ice mass as well.  

"Over the 10 year time period of the survey, the ice sheet as a whole was certainly losing mass, and the mass loss increased by 75% during this time. Most of the mass loss is from the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica and the northern tip of the Peninsula where it is driven by ongoing, pronounced glacier acceleration. In East Antarctica, the mass balance is near zero, but the thinning of its potentially vulnerable marine sectors suggests this may change in the near future."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

The warming in some parts of Antarctica is much faster than elsewhere in the world, and it even extends deep into the nearby oceans:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20...

"A new report from WWF, published at the UN conference on climate change in Bali, has found that global warming is occurring five times faster in the Antarctic peninsula than the rest of the world, and threatening the survival of the emperor, gentoo, chinstrap and Adélie penguins that breed on the continent.

The Antarctic peninsula is warming five times faster that the average rate of global warming and the waters of Southern Ocean have become warmer as far down as 3,000m, the report found.

Sea ice is now covering 40% less area that it did 26 years ago off the west Antarctic peninsula. "

We can even see that the melt rate is unprecedented for the last several thousand years:

New Research Confirms Antarctic Thaw Fears - Spiegel Online

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk...

"...the Pine Island Glacier has shrunk by an average of 3.8 centimeters annually over the past 4,700 years. But the Smith and Pope glaciers have only lost 2.3 centimeters of their thickness annually during the past 14,500 years. Satellite measurements taken between 1992 and 1996, though, show a loss of 1.6 meters in thickness per year on the Pine Island Glacier -- a figure that represents 42 times the average melt of the past 4,700 years."

42X faster melt than historic trends!  That's huge!!

You're right.  The truth about global warming is out there, you just have to dig a little deeper to find it.

Answer 5

yes its a good factor if the study is done by an impartial party and btw its melting in a few areas but freezing most others so booyah 'nother blow to global warming

Answer 6

If you live in Florida and you see an iceberg. Don't worry its just global cooling.

Answer 7

The ice samples alone are not enough to write a synopsis about global warming, but Al Gore whole theory relies on it. His graph shows two distinct graphs. One of temperature, the other of CO2, where he then makes a false statement based on comparing the two graphs. He states that the temperature increase is the result of increasing CO2, but closer examination of his data reveals the opposite. it’s the increase in temperature that over time causes an increase in CO2 levels. The seas are responsible for the delay or lag in data of CO2 which is approximately 800 years behind the temperature increasing trend.

He can’t or won’t report this right, because it does not support man-made global warming. It instead, supports the theory that the increase is from Nature, not man.