If all the ice disappeared life would go on, no big deal.
The polar bears swim to the arctic ice because the seals consider the ice safe from most predators hence it's easy pickings for the polar bears. However the female bears who give birth have to wait for the cubs to build up enough strength for the swim so they have further to swim. With the ice receding, the mothers and the cubs aren't making it across and drown instead. The polar bears are not doing well.
As to the ice itself, ice reflects solar radiation. Without ice, more solar radiation is absorbed as heat. Pretty obvious, only an idiot would think it's not a big deal. It's amazing how selective you are in misinterpreting information.
Armundson made it through the northwest passage because he learned about sled dogs, animal skins instead of wool parkas and how to survive off the land while frozen in. It took him two years to make the crossing. The Northwest passage wasn't navigable without a winter stay frozen in ice till 2006, it's been navigable ever since and it's only now that countries like the US are challenging Canada over the sovereignty of the waters as commercial traffic is finally possible.
Parts of the Northwest may have been open, but that does not mean that there was no ice in the Arctic Ocean.This article below has the historical records of when the Northwest passage was open and the amount of cargo shipped. It clearly shows that much of the Arctic ice in that area has disappeared since 1930, when the entire passage was first opened by icebreakers.
The jet streams that influence most of the weather in the northern hemisphere are also affected by the temperature and the amount of open water in the Arctic Ocean. Changes in the Arctic have slowed the oscillations of the jet stream and have contributed to the extreme weather events that we have been experiencing in the last decade.
The Inuit, and many species of plants and animals have adapted to survive in the Arctic and hunt and fish on the Arctic ice. If the Arctic ice disappears, so will many of the species that have adapted to the ice, and the customs of the Inuit that have sustained them for centuries will be gone forever.
The second article below has satellite pictures showing how much of the Arctic ice has disappeared in the last 30 years and the third article explains how the disappearing ice has affected the life of the Inuit.
There are huge oil reserves in the Arctic. With an ice free Arctic, it would be much more cost effective to access these natural resources. That's a real big deal.
That sounds too reasonable. You have to have a calamity to scare people.
Quotes by H.L. Mencken, famous columnist: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed ― and hence clamorous to be led to safety ― by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." And, "The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it."
Quote by Sir John Houghton, pompous lead editor of first three IPCC reports: “If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster.”
So you get a lot of people to create a bunch of crises.
Quote by Jim Sibbison, environmental journalist, former public relations official for the Environmental Protection Agency: "We routinely wrote scare stories...Our press reports were more or less true...We were out to whip the public into a frenzy about the environment."
Remember, the Garden of Eden did not have ice caps and it was a paradise.
"The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot. Reports all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, while at many points well known glaciers have disappeared" - U.S. Weather Bureau 1922
The weather has always been unpredictable along with the climate. The emphasis on climate change/global warming came when Margaret Thatcher offered money to prove it back in 1988. There is now 100s of billions of dollars being thrown at climate change/global warming research. It's a big business that yields lots of information. According to climate scientists more money is needed to build a bigger computer for a better understanding of how our climate works and re-acts to human activity and to predict future possible states and outcomes. I guess that you could call that a "big deal" for them. It keeps scientists happy doing research and showing how smart they can be. To me it seems like all it does is boost their egos. You should hear (cyberneticly speaking) how they talk down to people here.
I think we can all agree that the Inuit are going to survive the warming. When you have a bunch of people who are all caught up in group think and they are trying desperately to invent any problems they can associated with warming, they start worrying about melting ice. I have called them glacier huggers. I think a better name might just be nuts. It is 50 below zero up there and they fret that the ice might melt in the summer. If it wasn't so weird it would be funny.
The polar bears will all end up dying and going extinct. And the hotter the earth is we will die out eventually.
Are you wanting to provoke someone into explaining the problem for you? If not, check your calendar; it's not 1900.
water levels will rise
Amundsen the explorer sailed the North West Passage there in the early 1900's and we did not have any problems after that. The ice comes and the ice goes, polar bears seemed to survive then.
