The Danger of Short-Term Thinking

There has been a flurry of online discussion last week when the US National Snow and Ice Data Center released a report showing that Arctic summer ice coverage has grown above both the 2007 historic low, and the 2008 summer ice coverage.

Look, said many, the Arctic ice cover is growing, ice cannot grow in warmth, global warming is a hoax.

Scientific data tells us that the average temperature of the planet as a whole is rising, and that it has been rising for many years, with a considerable spike in warming over the last few generations - but that does not mean that it is necessarily getting warmer everywhere on the planet. It means that some places will experience cooler average temperatures over the long term, others will experience higher average temperatures over the long term, and that some may experience periods of both.

Those who advocate that the global community should do nothing to mitigate the effects of climate change, and that this will all somehow sort itself out, quickly seized on the National Snow and Ice Data Center report. However they neglected the fact that summer minimum ice coverage is still lower than it was when verifiable satellite records first began showing that Arctic ice coverage was decreasing.

Those same people also fail to note that climate scientists have also said that this is not necessarily unexpected, and that as part of the overall global climate change process there will be periods of cooling.

The long term trend in the Arctic has been that the average temperature is rising. Scientific data confirms this, and the narratives of people who live in the Arctic, and who have experienced firsthand the effects of this warming, also confirm it.

Climate change is not a short term problem, and choosing to look at short term data, for short term purposes, will most certainly compound it.

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