Barents Sea Tipping Point

[Brian]

Yet another apparent climate-change tipping point in the rear view mirror -- this time in the Arctic region and the Barents Sea.

Barents Sea seems to have crossed a climate tipping point

"The challenge with tipping points is that they're often easiest to identify in retrospect. We have some indications that our climate has experienced them in the past, but reconstructing how quickly a system tipped over or the forces that drove the change can be difficult. Now, a team of Norwegian scientists is suggesting it has watched the climate reach a tipping point: the loss of Arctic sea ice has flipped the Barents Sea from acting as a buffer between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans to something closer to an arm of the Atlantic."

One more scary sign that we can, at best, only hope to mitigate the worst effects at this point... and, at worst, we can't predict how these myriad regional changes will interact, potentially amplifying the overall effects. Yikes.

[Robert]

On the one hand it seems to be happening over night, on the other hand 500 years ago there was a natural barrier, at some points 3,000 miles wide that ran almost from Pole to Pole. It was filled with every kind of natural function for keeping the planet running clean. Probably acted like a filter, producing clean healthy air and a rejuvenating the coastal waters on both sides of it, with all the curves and inlets, maybe 20,000 miles of shore lines. That was South, Central, and North America. As quickly as it was resettled all the natural functions were dismantled over time. It is now a dysfunctional reservoir where the patch worked jungles and forests can churn out more greenhouses gasses than they process back into the ground. The free ranging breeding places are mostly gone, putting big dents in the functionalism of the natural world. For all the animals we remove, or disperse, their jobs at keeping everything balanced are not done by others. Certainly not by us. When some one can see a tipping point its like getting in on a stock tip that everyone else has already cashed in on and will now take a lifetime to get your money back.

[Clare]

With the opening up of the Arctic Ocean above Greenland to the orcas, the predatory whales are now top predator in every ocean. Packs have been tagged and followed, and one was followed heading in to a fiord and killing every narwhal in a nursery colony. So more than one balance has been broken.