Friday, March 28, 2025

New Record Low for Arctic Sea Ice

The NSIDC says that Arctic sea ice just set a record for the lowest annual maximum. This is from their press release. I've abbreviated some of the units, which they choose to write out in their long-form, and made everything metric (because around here we don't dabble in the black arts):
On March 22, Arctic sea ice likely reached its maximum extent for the year, at 14.33 Mkm2..., the lowest in the 47-year satellite record. This year’s maximum extent is 1.31 Mkm2...below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum of 15.64 Mkm2...and 80,000 km2...below the previous lowest maximum that occurred on March 7, 2017.


But this is meaningless in the US now, because climate change doesn't officially exist. (They know it does, but practice fake denialism.) Trump recently said he thinks science don't know what's causing climate change.... NSIDC gets plenty of US federal government funding, so perhaps they won't exist for next year's annual maximum (not kidding), and maybe even the satellites will be turned off (also not kidding). After all, that's money that should properly be going to (more) tax cuts for billionaires (still not kidding). You don't know what you can't measure, and President Krasnov clearly doesn't want us to know.

3 comments:

Entropic man said...

There's magical thinking going on here.

In the New Right's philosophy climate change does not exist and you can make the delusion true by erasing the evidence to the contrary.

At the same Trump wants to control Canada and Greenland as buffers to protect the USA from the Russian and Chinese expansion into a warming Arctic.

Clearly the Wilsonian Western Civilization ideology does not require logical thinking.

Entropic man said...

There's something worse, an antiscientific delusion which will cost American lives immediately.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8r87z8vl0o

Peter Marks, a senior vaccine official, has been forced to resign from the Food and Drug Administration.

His retirement letter says that it is because

"It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,"

This was the Health and Human Services explaination.

"In a statement to the BBC, the HHS responded that if Mr Marks "does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of Secretary Kennedy".

David Appell said...

Yes, terrible things are going on in the US. I saw someone write, "Americans, whatever you think Germans should have done in 1938, do it now."