Uphillbothways

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A warming world could reduce levels of Antarctic sea-ice, but the current dramatic reduction could also be due to local weather conditions or ocean currents, explains Dr Caroline Holmes at the British Antarctic Survey.

She emphasises it is not just a record being broken - it is being smashed by a long way.

"This is nothing like anything we've seen before in July. It's 10% lower than the previous low, which is huge."

She calls it "another sign that we don't really understand the pace of change".

Scientists believed that global warming would affect Antarctic sea-ice at some point, but until 2015 it bucked the global trend for other oceans, Dr Holmes says.

"You can say that we've fallen off a cliff, but we don't know what's at the bottom of the cliff here," she says.

"I think this has taken us by surprise in terms of the speed of which has happened. It's definitely not the best case scenario that we were looking at - it's closer to the worst case," she says.
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Climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels, is unequivocally warming the Earth’s temperature, NASA scientists said.

And El Niño, the natural climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that brings warmer-than-average sea-surface temperatures and influences weather, has only just started in recent months and therefore is not having a huge impact yet on the extreme heat people around the globe are experiencing this summer, said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Melting ice on a small tundra pond in Greenland. Long-lost Greenland ice core suggests potential for disastrous sea level rise “It’s really only just emerged, and so what we’re seeing is not really due to that El Niño,” Schmidt told reporters. “What we’re seeing is the overall warmth pretty much everywhere – particularly in the oceans. … The reason why we think that’s going to continue is because we continue to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Until we stop doing that, temperatures will keep on rising.”
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