woah holy shit a bio?
Even those don’t mean it’s straight for rock bottom.
A tipping point means a point of no return. It will never improve beyond that point. Extent of ice won’t show you that. Otherwise when the extent is at its lowest in March, it would never come back.
Yep. I didn’t mean to imply something wasn’t happening, but that something isn’t what OP pointed at, and that something is evidence of climate change.
People need to learn that its a slow decline. It’s disastrous, but it looks like worsening wildfires each year. More tornados in Iowa and Minnesota. Lower crop yields. Beaches getting smaller by inches, ocean front property values declining and insurance rates increasing. More intense variations in weather and more difficultly forecasting.
No. This is a sharper momentary dip. Sort of expected with climate change.
If you look at the summer months for 2025, (January and February for the southern hemisphere) you can see ice sheet area declined far more rapidly rapidly than 2026 did.
Rates of change, particularly ones that are of more recent data, can be very misleading. Now if the same rate of change continued through the end of August, then it would definitely be anomalous.
Climate change does not make immediate impacts like this. Climate change makes the trend of the WHOLE line lower, and more volatile. Notice that 2025 and 2026 lines are at the lower end of the graph.
One (ugly) way to understand this chart better would be the area under the curve for a given year. As 2026 isnt over yet, you cant do this reliably beyond the most recent data point.
The “big” thing then would be if the result for each year was successively lower.
Ill be darned. I knew they had calculated that the strike initiation energy was pretty damn close to cosmic ray energies. What I didnt know is that they never proved it experimentally.
Back in college we were playing around with it in astrophysics. A couple of things we toyed with were a relativistic charged particle (well a bunch of them really) penetrating deeper into the atmosphere - particle cross section is a probablistic interaction, not a certainty.
If a high enough energy particle (or group of particles) enters the static field in a cloud, the particle will occasionally travel a distance before being absorbed. Most of the time, this would result in cloud to cloud lighting (which is much more frequent), because of simply creating a lower path of resistance and the spike electrelectric field.
That would mean that cloud to ground strikes would require even higher energies to traverse the much longer distance. Problem with relativistic particles is that they only get so fast. So you’d really need a heavier particle. Much heavier charged particle. Traveling at relativistic speeds. It turns out that proton ions fit well into it. But you would have to have a particle accelerator to really send a beam of these ions to the atmosphere to do it. And solar flares don’t get them fast enough.
BUT it turns out there are plenty of sources of such beams in space. Black holes and neutron stars namely. Throw in the gamma radiation background interacting with the atmosphere? And you are cooking with enough energy sources to reliably produce lightning.
Ahhhhhh, that’s a much more intriguing question. You do have a limit to how many data points you can fit on a chart. Monthly average allows you to go back much further but with less insight.
I would assume you would get a much rounder example if you sampled weekly.
There’s nothing unexpected here so far. You’re causing yourself unnecessary anxiety 🙃.
With trend data or data over time, if you look at a small period of time, the only knowledge you get is limited to that period of time.
If we look at that small period of time where it behaves differently, we can say an event, independent of other events, caused the change. If we look at historical data, we can likely see that similar events caused similar changes. If we then take the data of the event itself, say the average temperature of the El Niño, and compare it to historical El Niños, we will likely see it is a worse El Niño, and maybe see that they have been worsening over time as well. That becomes evidence of climate change too.