McDad
I can't brain today; I has the dumb.
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Mead lake made headlines when the water dropped to historic lows. They found boats, cars, and maybe a body or two in the exposed mud. A year later because of historic snowfall and melt, the lake was completely recovered (or close to it). No headlines.This is part of the problem. It's telling a slanted story.
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Arctic Sea Ice Near Historic Low; Antarctic Ice Continues Decline - NASA
Arctic sea ice retreated to near-historic lows in the Northern Hemisphere this summer, likely melting to its minimum extent for the year on Sept.11, 2024,www.nasa.gov
The historic low via satellite was 1.3 million in 2012. At the end of 2024 we were at 1.6. Do you ever hear about that increase? Or do they always just phrase the study to only show change as decreases?
Antarctica is similar. 2024 was a decline over the highs from '21 to '23, but still considerably higher than the low in 2012.
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Antarctic ice has grown again – but this does not buck overall melt trend
Study shows ice sheet gained mass from 2021 to 2023, due to extreme snowfall that was also an effect of climate crisiswww.theguardian.com
The issue with all of this is we presume that whenever we started measuring these things it was "normal", and thus any change is going away from that "normal". Which may not be the case. Maybe we started recording data at a local "high" and we are just returning to average.
As far as the land loss that is a relative thing. Overall we are still gaining. Some islands are losing, but more are gaining. Again we like to pretend that when we started paying attention is exactly how it was before humans messed anything up. That simply isn't the case. The world was changing long before we figured out fire.
It is extreme hubris to presume that we are the drivers of the change we are seeing today. We certainly have an impact, but it's not the difference in environmental apocalypse vs "normal". "Normal" was always a point in time, not some set truth that humans ruined.
The cognitive bias alive in climate sensationalism is some of the worst around.