CLIMATE TIPPING POINT IMMINENT

Arctic sea ice 'to melt by 2015'; Arctic sea ice could completely melt away by the summer of 2015, destroying the natural habitat of animals like polar bears, one of Britain's leading ocean experts has claimed.
Nick Collins, 8 November 2011 (UK Telegraph)

"Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, said the ice that forms over the Arctic sea is shrinking so rapidly that it could vanish altogether in as little as four years' time…The mass of ice between northern Russia, Canada and Greenland waxes and wanes with the seasons, currently reaching a minimum size of about four million square kilometres.

"Most models, including the latest estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), track the decline in the area covered by ice in recent years to predict the rate at which it will deteriorate…But citing research compiled by Dr Wieslaw Maslowski, a researcher from the American Naval Postgraduate School, last year Prof Wadhams said such predictions failed to spot how quickly climate change is causing the ice to thin."


A NASA Primer on Sea Ice From greenman3610 via YouTube

"While the IPCC suggests the ice will remain in place until the 2030s, Dr Maslowski's study also takes into account the rate at which it is thinning and calculates that it will vanish much more quickly…Dr Maslowski's model, along with his claim that the Arctic sea ice is in a ‘death spiral’, were controversial but Prof Wadhams, a leading authority on the polar regions, said the calculations had him ‘pretty much persuaded.’

"The ice would come back the following winter but its absence in summer would encourage more shipping and oil exploration in the Arctic and could threaten native species…"