A new report reveals an increase of about 60 percent or a million more square miles of the Arctic are now covered with ice. This is the opposite of earlier forecasts that the Arctic will be free of ice by 2013.
According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the Arctic sea ice in August 2013 has averaged by 2.35 million miles compared to the low-point recorded in September 2012 which was just 1.32 million square miles. A dramatic rise this year in the total ice cover within a couple of standard deviations of the 30-year average was already presented on a chart released on Monday.
One scientist considers this increase in the ice-covered part of the Arctic as a sign that “global cooling” has finally arrived.
Anastasios Tsonis of the Wisconsin University told Fox News on Sunday, "We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.”
Considering the rise of ice, NSIDC said that it is still less than the 30-year average. However, as argued by The Guardian, the noted year over rise of ice is hugely irrelevant and that more ice will be anticipated in the next few years.
Dana Nuccitelli, an environmental scientist at a private environmental consulting firm in the Sacramento, California told Fox News, “We should not often expect to observe records in consecutive years. 2012 shattered the previous record low sea ice extent; hence 'regression towards the mean' told us that 2013 would likely have a higher minimum extent.”
Meanwhile, according to the information from the U.K.’s weather watching Met Office, the global surface temperatures remianed stable for 15 years now.
Months have been spent by climate skeptics arguing about the weather pattern, with some even claiming that it is an evidence that global warming had slowed down or stopped.
In June, David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation wrote that the nonexistence of any remarkable change in the global yearly average temperature over the past decade and a half has become one of the most argued issues in climate science focusing on the relative significance of greenhouse gas forcing of the climate against natural viability.
