Ice cap melt seen "very, very alarming"

By Gerard Wynn and Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - Record melting of Arctic sea ice this year sent a "very alarming" signal about warming at the North Pole, but it couldn't all definitely be blamed on manmade climate change, the U.N.'s top weatherman said on Tuesday.

The amount of Arctic ice which melted this summer beat a previous record, set two years ago, by an area more than four times the size of Britain, a 30-year satellite record shows.

"This year was quite exceptional ... the melting of the Arctic ice ... it's quite spectacular," Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organisation, told Reuters.

"Can it all be attributed to climate change? That's very difficult. It's very, very alarming," he said. His answer to how best to interpret the melt was -- "let's do more research."

"What it means is that we have to monitor that very, very carefully. It's a warning signal."

Melting of sea ice doesn't affect sea levels because it's entire volume is already in the water, but scientists fear if it melted that could trigger more warming and melting of ice sheets over Greenland, which could raise sea levels by 7 meters.

Asked if scientists should have better predicted the rate of sea ice melting now seen Jarraud said: "I don't know the answer. It's a difficult question. Some of the models predicted faster melting than others."

The prospects for avoiding dangerous climate change depended on the world putting in place measures to cut emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for heating the planet, he said.