Guardian: 'Precipitous' fall in Antarctic sea ice since 2014 revealed

As usual, it's worse than expected and happening faster than expected.

Oh, darn, those pesky positive feedback loops! As mindful as I try to be, I just can't make matter and energy do what I want. I must meditate more--maybe another trip to Whole Foods to buy bespoke, gluten-free elderberries flown in from Pluto.

("But Pluto couldn't possibly grow elderberries, Doug, so...I don't get it.")

A nice snippet follows that'll make you drop everything, run into your child's room, and make sure she knows how to code already. Still on formula, but there you are, making sure all bases are covered so she can have a decent life.

The vast expanse of sea ice around Antarctica has suffered a “precipitous” fall since 2014, satellite data shows, and fell at a faster rate than seen in the Arctic.

The plunge in the average annual extent means Antarctica lost as much sea ice in four years as the Arctic lost in 34 years. The cause of the sharp Antarctic losses is as yet unknown and only time will tell whether the ice recovers or continues to decline.

But researchers said it showed ice could disappear much more rapidly than previously thought. Unlike the melting of ice sheets on land, sea ice melting does not raise sea level. But losing bright white sea ice means the sun’s heat is instead absorbed by dark ocean waters, leading to a vicious circle of heating.

[...]

“There has been a huge decrease,” said Claire Parkinson, at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the US. In her study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she called the decline precipitous and a dramatic reversal.

“We don’t know if that decrease is going to continue,” she said. “But it raises the question of why [has it happened], and are we going to see some huge acceleration in the rate of decrease in the Arctic? Only the continued record will let us know.”

“The Arctic has become a poster child for global warming,” Parkinson said, but the recent sea ice falls in Antarctica have been far worse. She has tracked Antarctic sea ice for more than 40 years. “All of us scientists were thinking eventually global warming is going to catch up in the Antarctic,” she said.

Kaitlin Naughten, a sea ice expert at the British Antarctic Survey, said: “Westerly winds which surround the continent mean that Antarctic sea ice doesn’t respond directly to global warming averaged over the whole planet.”

“Climate change is affecting the winds, but so is the ozone hole and short-term cycles like El Niño. The sea ice is also affected by meltwater running off from the Antarctic ice sheet,” she said. “Until 2014, the total effect of all these factors was for Antarctic sea ice to expand. But in 2014, something flipped, and the sea ice has since declined dramatically. Now scientists are trying to figure out exactly why this happened.”

Prof Andrew Shepherd at Leeds University in the UK said: “The rapid decline has caught us by surprise and changes the picture completely. Now sea ice is retreating in both hemispheres and that presents a challenge because it could mean further warming.” He said it would also be important to find if the ice’s thickness has changed, as well as its extent.

The rest; the actual study.

The basic upshot should make you react thusly:

But you won't. You'll order in, yell at your kids for not studying enough, and thrill to endless re-viewings of Mayor Pete speaking Norwegian while playing piano, or whatever it is he plays, other than rich pseudo-progressives.