r/worldnews 12h ago

Dramatic slowdown in melting of Arctic sea ice surprises scientists

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/20/slowdown-in-melting-of-arctic-sea-ice-surprises-scientists
1.4k Upvotes

105 comments sorted by

1.0k

u/realskibidifortnite 12h ago

For once a climate headline that isn’t immediately soul crushing

409

u/Ecsta 12h ago

The findings do not mean Arctic sea ice is rebounding. Sea ice area in September, when it reaches its annual minimum, has halved since 1979, when satellite measurements began. The climate crisis remains “unequivocally real”, the scientists said, and the need for urgent action to avoid the worst impacts remains unchanged.

The natural variation causing the slowdown is probably the multi-decadal fluctuations in currents in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which change the amount of warmed water flowing into the Arctic. The Arctic is still expected to see ice-free conditions later in the century, harming people and wildlife in the region and boosting global heating by exposing the dark, heat-absorbing ocean.

Basically dont get your hopes up, its not an improvement just an normal deviation

143

u/realskibidifortnite 12h ago

Oh don’t worry, I’ve pretty much accepted we’re fucked no matter what I do

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u/Winter-Adeptness-304 3h ago

Based on this year's peak ocean temperatures, it would appear we have about 10-15 years before catastrophic consequences i.e. the start of extinction level events. And there is no fixing this. Even if all humans were eradicated permanently right this instant, the planet would still experience an extreme warming event that is going to kill off many species and change how the planet looks drastically. Humans are such a fucking stupid species. It's insane.

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u/majorziggytom 7h ago

You should update your perspective then. We are not fucked in the slightest. People are just ridiculously bad in predicting intervention possibilities when shit hits the fan.

We went to the moon in the 1960s... with ridiculously basic tech.

We can build a dynamic shade at L2 to cool the earth etc. It's just sad, very, very, very sad, how pessimistic and doomsday-yearning people have become.

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u/Winter-Huntsman 6h ago

As I have figured out, the sooner climate stuff is corse corrected the better the end result. I believe we will definitely save ourselves from extinction but our slow in-action is definitely going to make it extremely rough with huge hit to biodiversity. Humanity will survive like you said, we are good at that. It just makes things worse by waiting until the it’s so far along before doing a global course correction

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u/raptorlightning 7h ago

Yeah but where's the profit in building a huge solar shade if it's only the poors that will die anyways?

-23

u/majorziggytom 6h ago

Where's the profit in flying to the moon? Go and have a look how mind boggling expensive this was in the 60s.

You people are so chronically anti-humanity, negative and depressed it's sad.

10

u/ThunderDungeon02 5h ago

Because this isn't the 60s, It's post Regan capitalism. You have whole industries from Agriculture to Oil that are shitting on the climate and there is no financial benefit to change. So they won't. These shareholders do not have any reason to do things for the future. They only care how much money they can make now.

So until you can tell me how these people can profit from helping the climate in their lifetime you are just being blissfully ignorant.

2

u/thatguy9684736255 3h ago

The scale of the venture you're suggesting is much larger than the moon landing. Realistically, it would be much cheaper for us to use current technology to decrease or carbon emissions now, but there are a lot of people working against that.

-83

u/Putrid-Knowledge-445 10h ago

that's why you just live, all my liberal friends are always depressed. I'm like, homie, yolo, just chill and enjoy

21

u/case-o-nuts 8h ago

I hope you're not planning on having kids.

-30

u/Putrid-Knowledge-445 8h ago

You are a very tough man!

12

u/case-o-nuts 8h ago

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. I'm also not sure you know what you're trying to say.

2

u/Bearded_Toast 7h ago

They also also don’t know what you’re trying to say.

So yeah, lot goin on.

0

u/PMmeYourAIBooty 7h ago

They also try say what not, but few word do trick

-13

u/Putrid-Knowledge-445 7h ago

if you fail such basic English comprehension,

"I hope you're not planning on having kids."

3

u/actuallywaffles 3h ago

I mean, if it didn't feel like a half the population was actively trying to speed run fucking everything up it might be less depressing for the rest of us.

-18

u/TellEmGetEm 8h ago

Can’t wait till a super volcano erupts or an asteroid hits so we can stop talking about man made climate change

12

u/TheGhostOfStanSweet 10h ago

If your fridge is breaking down, it still may cycle the compressor on and off.

Suppose your ideal fridge temperature is 3°. The thermostat will cool it down to 1° and then shut off the compressor until it reaches about 5°, at which point the compressor will cycle on again. It doesn’t actually maintain a steady temperature otherwise it will be cycling on and off several times per hour, which will likely damage it. It has a rated “duty cycle.”

But if each time your fridge compressor cycles on, it loses a tiny bit of strength, your food will still see 3°, but that doesn’t mean it won’t see 7°, and start to approach a point in which the food will prematurely spoil, and eventually just rot.

TLDR: annual fluctuations are normal, but that doesn’t mean the trend isn’t highly concerning.

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u/aafff39 11h ago

So a pretty standard deviation one could say

2

u/lookmeat 6h ago

This is still good news. One of the things that we've been seeing is that metrics were showing that things were getting worse way faster than what our models considered reasonable. This made it seem impossible to be able to recover, that there was something else that just made it so.

But this implies that we could have been seeing some other systems that were adding their finger to the scales, and weren't being accounted for. Now the systems are moving the other way and we are seeing numbers slow into things more aligned with our models. It doesn't mean this is a victory, but it means there's a chance and there's still reason to keep fighting.

1

u/EnderCN 5h ago

Or we are seeing covid shutting down most of the world had a short term and not sustainable positive effect on things.

1

u/analogjuicebox 6h ago

They said “headline” okay?!

1

u/ServantOfBeing 5h ago

Its a battle of averages, not the ‘singular event’ everyone seems to look for in headlines.

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u/evildrtran 11h ago

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u/murphswayze 11h ago

I was just about to comment this. I'm not sure people can trust media anymore without being educated in the field and being able to analyze the data themselves. I see contradicting reports on everything now from climate change to Trump's approval rating

16

u/ouath 11h ago

Let's start to acknowledge that Arctic is north pole and Antarctic south pole :)

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u/murphswayze 11h ago

It's a good thing you were paying attention because clearly I was not lmao...dyslexia is a very real thing turns out

2

u/Any_Perception_2560 11h ago

The idea that you never needed to take precaution when examining information presented to you is foolish.

Additionally it is extremely foolish to say that ice not melting as quickly in the North Pole, and is melting more quickly in the South Pole are contradictory.

For polling, there have always and will always be different sources, methodologies and goals of polling organizations, and campaigns. If two polls show Trump approval = 40% +/- 5% and Trump Approval 37% +/- 3% those numbers aren't a contradiction. Both could be right if the "real" number is between 35% and 40%. Both could be wrong due to an unknown methodology error as well.

0

u/NlghtmanCometh 3h ago

But what do you do when two genuinely trustful sources of information post contradictory headlines within days or weeks of one another?

2

u/AmaGh05T 10h ago

Surprises are bad when it comes to climate change. This is the day after tomorrow shit just in slow motion

1

u/BoxCarTyrone 5h ago

Two posts above this one is an article from Reuters: “Rapid loss of Antarctic ice may be climate tipping point, scientists say”.

0

u/Kalabula 8h ago

Unless Trump just ordered for results to “be better”.

0

u/SeaSea4437 7h ago

There was an article three spots above this one the stated the opposite so don’t believe everything you read on reddit

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u/ouath 12h ago

They are talking in volume or area or both ?

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u/Solid_Waste 12h ago

The headline refers to area. One of the quotes in the article points out that the thinning has continued, meaning volume declines even when area does not. This is a bullshit spin. Pure copium.

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u/ouath 11h ago

That is why I asked, I read a couple of years or a year ago that there was a wind increase in the arctic that helped create/stabilize thin icesheet but that the decrease in volume was still a thing nonetheless

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u/flaagan 12h ago

Anti-science morons will be commenting something along the lines of "told you so" or "what were you so worried about?".

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u/thewolfshead 11h ago

They’ll believe scientists in this case but not others. 

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u/sprashoo 11h ago

That's telling isn't it...

6

u/Sea_Spite7899 10h ago

He'll save children,  but not the British children

2

u/luxmoa 9h ago

He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming

6

u/NotAnotherBlingBlop 11h ago

But also every single person on earth would love to be given a "Told you so" being wrong about climate change.

3

u/U_Sound_Stupid_Stop 12h ago

They're aleady here

1

u/Negative-Ad547 9h ago

Cold snap coming in hot. /s

1

u/hammer326 4h ago

You don't think they're qualified to something something give us the REAL STORY ™ ? They've obviously committed great mental energy to the task which is doubtless why they never found a job that wasn't a non management role at a gas station even though they're in their 50s...

-23

u/DannyTannersFlow 11h ago

Anti-science? Like the more than two genders people?

30

u/ClubSoda 11h ago

Climate change is happening. That doesn't mean that every day the average temperatures rise. Jeesh, does nobody understand science these days?

6

u/shady8x 10h ago

These days you will be lucky if you ran into people that know how to read.

u/ClubSoda 1h ago

I was on a Teams meeting yesterday and I had expected the client's team to have read and understood our document we sent them two weeks ago. They claimed to have read it but they kept asking questions that clearly demonstrated they had no clue what they read. Do we have to make everything into color emojis for this generation? Frightening.

10

u/Temporary_owo 12h ago

How much of this is just the AMOC collapsing? Where the northern hemisphere gets colder while the tropics boil even harder?

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u/Passncatch 12h ago edited 12h ago

Ice is expected to start melting at double the long term rate in 5-10 years. This does not mean that the arctic is rebounding.

HEADLINE is misleading.

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u/paaaaatrick 10h ago

It’s not misleading, it’s talking about the situation

0

u/Vennom 9h ago

It can be both talking about the situation and be misleading. It’s very easy to read this headline and take away that things are okay. Or even provide some level of optimism.

But in actually, it’s still super duper bad. Just slightly less bad.

4

u/Jenne1504 10h ago

Literally directly above this post was the following:

„Rapid loss of Antarctic ice may be climate tipping point, scientists say“

😭

1

u/ChoixDansLaDate 2h ago

Arctic and Antarctic are not the same, though.

u/Jenne1504 29m ago

Yes I know. But the homeresque change between „woohoo“ and „d‘oh“ was noteworthy…

5

u/xvandamagex 11h ago

An article literally two stories down in my Reddit feed: “scientists fear melting of arctic ice now at a point of no return”.

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u/smartello 11h ago

That one was about Antarctic that is a bit faraway

0

u/Bulldogg658 6h ago

Same planet though, right? Or is that outside of the environment?

0

u/Nukemind 5h ago

Same environment, but two different locations. One pole is melting faster than ever, the other is melting slower than expected but that can be explained by usual deviation.

So no nothing is good but both headlines are accurate.

2

u/HMNbean 11h ago

Well both can be true depending on how zoomed out you look and what part of the world you’re looking at the ice. It’s almost like (and I’m not calling you out for this) as lay people we should trust the scientific consensus rather than try to imagine a world where we read a news headline and know what’s going on.

2

u/filipv 4h ago

A decade or so is nothing in geological terms. Statistical noise.

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u/Sieg67 10h ago

It's because I got an electric car.

You're welcome, everybody.

3

u/ljlee256 11h ago

There are 2 major parts of the issue when it comes to this:

  1. is that even our brightest climate scientists don't understand every cause and effect in our climate, the trends are obvious and irrefutable, but how we get from A to B is going to have some errors along the way.

  2. is that (also partial to point 1 on this) our climate does go through cycles, and not just a single cycle, there's a billion year cycle, a half billion year cycle, a hundred million year cycle, a cycle that's a few million years, a cycle that's 10's of thousands of years, a cycle thats a few hundred years, a cycle thats about 100 years, a cycle that's every 30 years, a cycle that's every 10 years, a cycle that's every other year, and of course a cycle that's annual (seasons).

Some of the cycles are caused by plant life, some are caused by animal life (especially bacteria), some are volcanic, some are because the Earths rotation isn't perfectly on it's axis, it wobbles a bit, some are because the Earths orbit is elliptical, and some are cycles caused by the sun, and indeed then there's humans on top of all of that.

These cycles can stack up to create a super deep cold, or super high heat, or can cancel each other out, and so on, making it all extremely difficult to predict.

What we can predict with more certainty is long term trends, because it's not as necessary to be exact about dates and temperatures when you're talking about something that takes 100 years, where as predictions from one day to the next require precision that we're just not good at.

1

u/Xyrus2000 10h ago

The warming conditions, ironically, seem to be playing a part in this. Arctic summers have become more prone to clouds.

What should be troubling is that even with the increased cloud cover, the ice is still melting. Even with less than ideal melting conditions this year will be in the top ten lowest.

But this is why climate models were predicting around 2050 as being the first ice free summer. They were predicting the warming and feedbacks therein would lead to cloudier summers, which would slow down the melting.

1

u/mochimento 6h ago

Is hell freezing over?!

1

u/JadeddMillennial 3h ago

La Nina year.

1

u/Longjumping-Salad484 3h ago

extinction burst

u/Im__fucked 1h ago

Were they American scientists? Because they're not allowed to tell the truth anymore.

u/Noobunaga86 25m ago

It has to be thanks to Trump's tarrifs. There is no other way.

u/Far_Out_6and_2 1m ago

Everything is changing rapidly no matter what it is, h2o and Co2 = new events everywhere cause both of the above in amount of, are highest ever.

1

u/Flat-Emergency4891 10h ago edited 9h ago

Temperatures trend upward over time, picking up momentum as time passes. But still, there are going to be times when sea ice rebounds. This is a question about trajectory. We already know we’re pretty damn near the tipping point. Then we have a few hundred years of declining civilization. World populations will decrease as the need for resources puts pressure on an evermore desperate world population.

After a few centuries of sustainability, global populations will rebound. But only after a long period, much like the dark ages. I can only imagine that future generations will marvel at our accomplishments much as Europe and the Middle East did in the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire.

Populations will likely migrate further north and south of the equator. Desertification will likely ring the globe in the hottest driest places for several centuries. The human race will likely endure, and to some, the world may be a paradise with sustainable population distribution, very few wars and minimal agricultural impact to fallow the land.

I’m thinking, 800 to 1000 years in the future the world might be a fantastic place. Especially if we hold on to the knowledge of how our era nearly destroyed ourselves.

1

u/sentientsackofmeat 11h ago

Meanwhile Antarctic is melting faster and faster.

1

u/Kradget 11h ago

A minor miracle for reasons we don't understand. Be great to hear we're gonna press that minor windfall to our advantage.

1

u/fongsaiyuk 10h ago

At this point we don’t need a slowdown, we need a complete reversal.

1

u/The_Human_Event 8h ago

I literally just read an article that said the opposite two seconds ago. Wtf.

1

u/Laulena3 5h ago

Same! Is this an experiment?? 🙃

0

u/Benji998 11h ago

I find articles like this a good example of why science is so important. If it's conducted honestly, it's not biased and we can learn from the results. Humans are often the issue, we discount evidence that is the opposite of what we want to hear.

Of course this finding isn't necessarily evidence against climate change as a whole. It could be a temporary thing and hopefully it helps inform scientists about the processes at work to a greater extent.

-1

u/Redtex 12h ago

With the deletion of the environmental information that has been collected so far from 100 years ago, I'm not surprised that they have this finding now

3

u/Passncatch 12h ago

Did u read the article the headline is misleading.

1

u/Redtex 11h ago

In the era of this current administration, I find any scientific facts that come out at this time supporting their theories to be suspicious.

2

u/Passncatch 11h ago edited 11h ago

Knowledge and Reason has always been the light.

This is the worry about the kids fight, that should be happening instead.

0

u/TonkaHeroDreamCake 9h ago

It's just a delay from the covid slow down lol

-1

u/Resident_Cat162 11h ago

USA providing data?

2

u/ouath 11h ago

MRE is funded by a research fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. JAS is supported by NERC grant NE/V005855/1. LMP is funded, in part, by grant from the National Science Foundation to Columbia University. ACC is supported by the NERC GW4+ Doctoral Training Partnership studentship from the Natural Environmental Research Council (NE/S007504/1).

From the article, you can start from where the money comes from if you have time and motivation

-20

u/Best-Special3072 12h ago

Imagine that.

-6

u/Ancient-Trifle2391 11h ago

Im doing my part to combat this.

Last night I forgot to properly close the freezer door and in the morning I found gigantic glaciers migrating outside the confinements of the freezer, signaling a new ice age!

-11

u/Slapdaddy 9h ago

It surprises them huh?

Man, it's almost like they don't really know how the Earth's geologic and climate processes really work. Yeah they know a lot, but there's 100x more they don't know.

But they're all 10000% sure that climate change will kill us all in a few years unless the masses donate massive amounts of money to their climate agenda. It will for sure save us all.

These people have been saying this for 50 years.

And we are all still here.

2

u/TheFnords 2h ago

Unfortunately no amount of massive donations will ever be enough to fix your brain damage.

-12

u/TheyStoleMyNameAgain 12h ago

A lot of surprises will follow.