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Anorak News | Boffins Create Arctic Ice Melting Machine

Boffins Create Arctic Ice Melting Machine

by | 9th, April 2011

RICHARD BLACK, of the BBC, has news of “NEW WARNING ON ARCTIC SEA MELT“.

Scientists who predicted a few years ago that Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013 now say summer sea ice will probably be gone in this decade.

Two years to go!

The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski’s team a deal of criticism from some of their peers.

Now they are working with a new computer model – compiled partly in response to those criticisms – that produces a “best guess” date of 2016.

A boffin tells us:

“We can run a fully coupled model for the past and present and see what our model will predict for the future in terms of the sea ice and the Arctic climate.”

And one of the projections it comes out with is that the summer melt could lead to ice-free Arctic seas by 2016 – “plus or minus three years”.

Spotter: James Taranto: “Our best guess is that in 2015 they’ll have a new best guess of 2020; in 2019 it’ll be 2024.”



Posted: 9th, April 2011 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink