Arctic summer ice could vanish by 2013

Warwick Vincent, director of the Centre for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover “appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models”, which call for an ice free summer in 2013.

The year “2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we’ve been wrong — each year we’re finding that it’s a little bit faster than expected,” he told Reuters.

…”I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The extent of open water is something that we haven’t experienced in the 10 years that I’ve been working up there,” he said after making a presentation in the Canadian Parliament.

“We’re losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much closer to reality.”

…Vincent told Reuters last September that it was clear some of the damage would be permanent and that the warming in the Arctic was a sign of what the rest of the world could expect. He struck a similarly gloomy note in his presentation.

“Some of this is unstoppable. We’re in a train of events at the moment where there are changes taking place that we are unable to reverse, the loss of these ice shelves, for example,” he said.

“But what we can do is slow down this process and we have to slow down this process because we need to buy more time. We simply don’t have the technologies as a civilization to deal with this level of instability that is ahead of us.”

Reuters