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The Arctic and the Antarctic play the role of, kind of like an air conditioner for the Earth system

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So they’re cold, they have a lot of ice

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They reflect a lot of the solar energy, so they stay colder than they otherwise would

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They’re more sensitive to climate change

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and therefore they’re the regions that we see the biggest effects of climate change so far and the biggest effects of warming

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They’re kind of a canary in a coalmine of global warming

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This year’s Arctic sea ice minimum is

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in about the top ten of the lowest that we’ve seen in the last three and a half decades

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As the global temperature has increased

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the temperatures in the Arctic

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especially in the past decade

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have increased by about two to three times the global average

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And so what’s happening is as temperatures increase, ice melts

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This year in the Antarctic we’ve seen a pretty spectacular maximum extent

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The Antarctic sea ice has expanded beyond anything

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we’ve seen before and set a new record

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The increase that we’re seeing in the Antarctic extent is a little bit of a mystery

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We’re seeing overall temperatures warming around the globe

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So you would expect to see ice loss

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Some people have looked at the Antarctic increasing trend and used that to suggest that global warming isn’t happening

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or that the increase in the Antarctic gives offset in the decrease in the Arctic

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and that’s simply not true.

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If you look at simply the magnitudes in the changes we’re seeing in the winter time

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the Arctic is decreasing about twice as fast as what the Antarctic is increasing

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It’s important to look at the relationship between the Arctic and Antarctic

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because studying those gives us an indication of what changes

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we’re going to see around the rest of the globe in the future

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