Screenshot of video showing oceanic ice from 1987 through November 2014. (Climate.gov)
January 28, 2015
In case you missed it, earlier this week, a blizzard buried parts of the United States in deep, deep snow. Areas of Connecticut and Massachusetts saw as much as 30 inches, and New York City was preemptively shut down to keep people safe.
But of course, as is almost always the case these days, the snow storm brought out the climate change skeptics. The world can’t be warming if we’re getting epic snow, right? So, just as a refresher, here are three stats from NASA about climate change:
- According to NASA, the global sea level has risen almost seven inches in the last 100 years. However, in the last decades, the sea level rose at double the rate of the previous decade.
- NASA also says our ice masses are shrinking. From 2002 to 2006, Greenland lost anywhere from 36 to 60 cubic miles of ice each year.
- Our oceans are also becoming more acidic – the result of more carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere. In fact, the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the top layers of the oceans increases by about 2 billion tons each year.
And now for the map. It’s sad (a time lapse of 27 years of shrinking Arctic ice) but it’s pretty, and it comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.