April 6 (Bloomberg) -- The extent of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean grew until the last day of March, the latest the annual melting season has begun in 31 years of satellite records, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said.
Cold weather and winds from the north over the Bering Sea and Barents Sea meant that the area of ocean covered by ice expanded through last month, the Boulder, Colorado-based center said today in a statement on its Web site. That’s two days later than in 1999, the previous latest start to a melting season since satellite monitoring began in 1979.
Scientists have highlighted declining Arctic sea ice as an indicator of global warming. The NSIDC has said the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free during the summer by 2030. While this year’s melting season has started late, it probably won’t have an impact on the extent of ice in the summer, the group said.
“The ice that formed late in the season is thin and will melt quickly when temperatures rise,” the NSIDC said.
The peak ice extent of 15.25 million square kilometers (5.89 million square miles) “approached” the average for the years 1979 to 2000. It was 670,000 square kilometers more than the record low ice peak of 2006, the center said.
Melting started in March then reversed during a cold snap, prolonging the annual freeze.
In September, the researchers said Arctic sea ice shrank in 2009 to its third-lowest summer minimum on record, remaining “well outside the range of natural variability.”
Hypocrisy is the vice we find hardest to forgive, but it’s also the one we most enjoy discovering in others. And nothing piques our interest more than eco-hypocrisy as practised by the “green” celebrities who have been spouting green virtue but spewing out hundreds of tons of carbon from their private jets or multiple holiday homes around the globe.
There was Sheryl Crow, who had called upon the public to refrain from using more than one square of toilet paper per visit (“except on those pesky occasions when two or three are required”) and who was leading a Stop Global Warming concert tour across America. It was revealed that while Crow travelled in a biodiesel tour bus, her 30-person entourage followed in a fleet of 13 gas-guzzling vehicles.
John Travolta notoriously encouraged the British public to do its bit to fight global warming — after flying into London on one of his five, yes, five private jets (one of which is a Boeing 707). In 2006 his piloting hobby produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions, more than a hundred times the output of the average Briton, according to the Carbon Trust.
It is less well known that Tom Cruise — who has campaigned for the LA-based environmental group Earth Communications Office — also has an air fleet and a licence to pilot his five planes, including a top-of-the-line customised Gulfstream jet he bought for his wife, Katie Holmes.
Harrison Ford, who is vice-chairman on the board of Conservation International, voices public-service messages for an environmental federation called EarthShare, and once shaved his chest hair to illustrate the effects of deforestation, is another hobby pilot. He once owned a Gulfstream but now makes do with a smaller Cessna Citation Sovereign eight-seater jet, four propeller planes and a helicopter.
