andygates

American boffins have reconstructed Arctic summer temperatures back to 0AD. Since then there's been a steady, gentle cooling as the Earth's orbit changes along well-known paths, until you get to about 1900 when it hikes way up. Yup, it's another hockey-stick shaped graph. Yup, it's more doom. Yup, it's good solid science. Well Def Jeff explains it very well, and NCAR have a press release. The paper is here in Science, and for that arse-clenching feeling of eschatological melting doom we all know and love, here's NCAR's graph:

Jeff mentions another snippet of Arctic melty news that I haven't heard elsewhere: This year's Northeast Passage is now open and a couple of commercial vessels are headed through it. Commercial shipping through seasonal melt passages? Check. Give it three years and it'll be on TV as one of those "Most Dangerous Jobs" shows: "Pyotr and the crew of the Barents Babushka are still two hundred kilometres behind Hans and Ludo but with the summer melt ended and the Passage beginning to refreeze, the Germans face disaster as the Kara 2 throws a cylinder in the middle of thickening frasil ice." You heard it here first.