Ice cap disappearing 30 years ahead of schedule

[goebfwai]

Entering positive feedback mechanism territory

I've been following climate change research and reports for several years now.

There is no doubt in my mind that the global climate is now entering positive feedback mechanism territory. If you haven't already done so, my recommendation would be for people to start finalising plans now for themselves and their families and take action accordingly, so that they are best equipped to adapt to any of the possible changes, that more rapid climatic upheavals could bring about. For different people, that will involve different steps. For example, in older houses people might be thinking they might want to install larger roof gutters and drain-pipes to cope with the more torrential downpours we are already seeing in the UK. Other people will be faced with the need to think of even more drastic changes.

Like anything, if you leave your plans to the last minute or wait until everyone else gets round to doing so (the herd instinct), things may be starting to move and change too fast and too quickly by that time for you to have much room or opportunity to do so.

Denial, preferring not to think about it, sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich or watching X Factor instead, aren't very good survival or contingency planning strategies!

It's a case of hoping for the best but planning for the worst, which is always a sensible thing to do.

http://uk.youtube.com/user/11thhouraction

 

[david dissadent]

October report from NSIDC

November 10, 2008
An expected paradox: Autumn warmth and ice growth

Sign up for the Arctic Sea Ice News RSS feed for automatic notification of analysis updates. Updates are also available via Twitter.

As is normal for this time of year, ice extent increased rapidly through most of October. However, this year, the increase was particularly fast, which contributed to above-average air temperatures near the surface. A look back at the entire melt season from March through October reveals that the Arctic sea ice is showing some unusual changes in growth and melt cycles.

The 2008 growth rate was especially strong in early October but subsequently slowed down slightly.

Over much of the Arctic, especially over the Arctic Ocean, air temperatures were unusually high. Near-surface air temperatures in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska were more than 7 degrees Celsius (13 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal and the warming extended well into higher levels of the atmosphere. These warm conditions are consistent with rapid ice growth.

The freezing temperature of saline water is slightly lower than it is for fresh water, about –2 degrees Celsius (28 degrees Fahrenheit). While surface air temperatures in the Beaufort Sea region are well below freezing by late September, before sea ice can start to grow, the ocean must lose the heat it gained during the summer. One way the ocean does this is by transferring its heat to the atmosphere. This heat transfer is largely responsible for the anomalously high (but still below freezing) air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean seen in Figure 3. Only after the ocean loses its heat and cools to the freezing point, can ice begin to form. The process of ice formation also releases heat to the atmosphere. Part of the anomalous temperature pattern seen in Figure 3 is an expression of this process, which is generally called the latent heat of fusion.

At its fastest point on October 15, the 2008 ice growth exceeded the 2007 growth rate on the same date by 92,000 square kilometers (36,000 square miles) per day.

However, if we look at the total extent of ice lost between the March maximum and the September minimum, 2008 set a new record for total ice loss over an entire melt season

Arctic sea ice and climate are behaving in ways not seen before in the satellite record—both in the rate and extent of ice loss during the spring and summer, and in the record ice growth rates and increased Arctic air heating during the fall and winter.

What now appears to be hapening is that some of the the huge amount of additional energy being accumulated by the large dark exposed areas of water over the summer, is being bled back into the atmosphere during the autumn. This will likely be helping raise global temperature averages a small amount. Another impact is the likely creeping north of the snow line as the air is slightly warmer, leading to more heat being absorbed by the ground and leaving more moisture in the air later in the season. Water offcourse is the biggest greenhouse gas of them all. These are the potential feed back effects of all this new heat in the air. But as this shows the system is so dynamic and unpredictable that this is merely speculation. More heat can lead to more percipitation and perhaps more snow in winter.

My best guess is that the maximum ice for the arctic this year will be significantly down on last year. The refreeze will slow into December and January, especialy without a very strong la Nina to drive it. What the exact 3 dimesional picture is of changes in heat distribution in the arctic is beyond me, whether new heat is penetrating deep into the ocean or if it is only sitting near the top and being immidiately bled back into the atmophere. Another plausability is that the thin ice crust over the ocean will retain more of the heat and the melt back next year may be rather fast. Especialy if it does start from a lower base than this year.

These are only estimated guesses as the forces at work now seem to be strong enough to drive themselves and overwhelm the CO2 warming signal locally.

Ice coverage for cryosphere today.

The NSIDC graph

The satelite image

The Hadley centers image of the worlds temperature anolomies. Notice the warming in the far northern Eurasia.

 

[david dissadent]

Ive come across this rather splendid graphic.

The animated figure shows the temperature difference between the two 5-year periods 1999-2003 and 2004-2008. Such results do not show the long-term trends, but it's a fact that there have been high temperatures in the Arctic during the recent years.

From this excellent and informative article at Real Climate.
Its a bit technical heavy but discusses the differences in the different temperature measurement systems. The gist of it is basicaly the HadCRUT 3 (the hadley climate centers most high profile temperature set) and CRUTEM 3v are not taking full acount of the increases in arctic temperature due to how they calculate areas with little or no direct surface temperature data available. This explains why there is a bit of a discrepancy between Hadly (the UKs met office) and GISTEMP the most used NASA global temperature measure.

 

[goebfwai]

Latest news from Hansen from CNN & Scientific American:

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/11/21/climate.danger.zone/index.html

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=global-warming-beyond-the-co2&sc=SE-Earth3_20080924

 

[david dissadent]

Antartic ice sheet breaks up in mid winter.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25638651/

Wilkins ice sheet nearing major break up.

The ice bridge connects the Wilkins Ice Shelf to two islands, Charcot and Latady. As seen in the Envisat image above acquired on 26 November 2008, new rifts (denoted by colourful lines and dates of the events) have formed to the east of Latady Island and appear to be moving in a northerly direction.

Dr Angelika Humbert from the Institute of Geophysics, Münster University, and Dr Matthias Braun from the Center for Remote Sensing, University of Bonn, spotted the newly formed rifts during their daily monitoring activities of the ice sheet via Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) acquisitions.

new scientist on the same story


Apparently Wilkins does not corck in glaciers like Larsen B did but still the potential break up of a ice shelf the size of Jamaca is surely a bit of news.

 

[david dissadent]

Last year the South Pole was slightly above average. This year the numbers from cryosphere today seem bang on the average, but someone sent me this, its a comparison of this years vs last years ice concentration. Although the areas are not that much different the 'density' of ice is alot thinner this year.

I dont have a similar comparison for previous years (genuinly great pity) so no real conclusions can be drawn but it certainly appears that the southern hemisphere melt season is set to be alot stronger than last years.

Just to be absolutely clear, although the southern hemisphere's floating ice is vulnerable to melt back in summer, the almighty continent sized monster that is the East Arctic Ice Sheet aint going anywhere in a hurry, it is so huge and cold it litteraly creates its own climate. The dynamics at work in the south are very different to the north and I dont really understand them fully.

The satelite measurements are placing this year in the South bang on average atm.

Thought Id just stick this up here incase the southern ice cap does anything dramatic to act as a baseline.

 

[Jonti]

The future rests on the soil beneath our feet

Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO. Nonetheless, the stakes—and the opportunities—could hardly be higher, says Rattan Lal, a prominent soil scientist at Ohio State University. Researchers and ordinary farmers around the world are finding that even devastated soils can be restored. The payoff, Lal says, is the chance not only to fight hunger but also to attack problems like water scarcity and even global warming. Indeed, some researchers believe that global warming can be slowed significantly by using vast stores of carbon to reengineer the world's bad soils. "Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root," Lal says. "In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil."
...
Reij has come to believe that farmers themselves have beaten back the desert in vast areas. "It is one of Africa's greatest ecological success stories," he says, "a model for the rest of the world." But almost nobody outside has paid attention; if soil is MEGO, soil in Africa is MEGO squared.
...
A black revolution might even help combat global warming. Agriculture accounts for more than one-eighth of humankind's production of greenhouse gases. Heavily plowed soil releases carbon dioxide as it exposes once buried organic matter. Sombroek argued that creating terra preta around the world would use so much carbon-rich charcoal that it could more than offset the release of soil carbon into the atmosphere. According to William I. Woods, a geographer and soil scientist at the University of Kansas, charcoal-rich terra preta has 10 or 20 times more carbon than typical tropical soils, and the carbon can be buried much deeper down. Rough calculations show that "the amount of carbon we can put into the soil is staggering," Woods says. Last year Cornell University soil scientist Johannes Lehmann estimated in Nature that simply converting residues from commercial forestry, fallow farm fields, and annual crops to charcoal could compensate for about a third of U.S. fossil-fuel emissions. Indeed, Lehmann and two colleagues have argued that humankind's use of fossil fuels worldwide could be wholly offset by storing carbon in terra preta nova.

Our Good Earth

 

[Bernie Gunther]

See my comments on the other thread.

Won't work unless you can fix capitalism.

 

[free spirit]

any chance we can not derail this thread, it would be nice to keep this one as a record and discussion about arctic and antarctic ice melt.

Jonti, why not start a new thread, or at least post that on the other thread that's already discussing this issue.

 

[isitme]

i'm prett pissed off. like we are setting all these targets and cutting down on our pollution and shit, and the ice caps aren't doing their bit, they are melting faster than ever ffs

 

[free spirit]

i'm prett pissed off. like we are setting all these targets and cutting down on our pollution and shit, and the ice caps aren't doing their bit, they are melting faster than ever ffs

some might say it was an indication our targets have way off what they needed to be.

me, I'll just say meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep coz it's friday night

 

[Jonti]

any chance we can not derail this thread, it would be nice to keep this one as a record and discussion about arctic and antarctic ice melt.

Jonti, why not start a new thread, or at least post that on the other thread that's already discussing this issue.

wtf?!

3/4 exactly on the theme of the arctic and antarctic ice melt. The fourth on a possible remedy.

And that fourth gets a reprimand, ffs!!

 

[david dissadent]

Gruniad link.

A story about the loss of old ice from the arctic with animation.

 

[goebfwai]

David Frost interview with James Lovelock on 'Frost Over the World':

http://vodpod.com/watch/1515364-frost-over-the-world-james-lovelock

 

[Dr Jon]

Evidence of ice loss from both poles this week has sparked fresh fears that global warming is progressing faster than scientists had predicted.

Arctic ice has thinned dramatically, as well as shrinking in area, according to US research. Thin seasonal ice, which melts and refreezes each year, now makes up about 70 per cent of the Arctic winter ice, up from about 40 to 50 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s, leaving far less of the older, thicker ice that is harder to melt.

...

“What we’re seeing is very dramatic,” said Andrew Fleming, remote sensing manager at the British Antarctic Survey. “It’s very worrying.”

link

 

[david dissadent]

If anyone is still following this story, there has been something of a development.

The 09 melt season got off to a rather slow start

This was a temperature anolomy map from April published by NSIDC. As you can see cold air masses persisted over the arctic for the early part of the spring\ summer leading to this.....

This was a taken at about 18/4/9. The melt season continued on this very slow tragetory until it almost hit the 1980-2000 average and tracked it.

This was greated with the usual howls of 'hoax' from the contrarian blogosphere. However over the past couple of weeks there has been something of a change in trend.......

This is from 03/06/09.
Seems this summers melt might not be a quiet and uneventfull as we all first hoped. Breaths are being drawn in again. We shall just have to wait and see what the rest of this year brings.

There may also have been developments with atmospheric methane concentrations but its all prelimenary and most likely over worried individuals than a genuine new trend.

 

[david dissadent]

Sea Ice At Lowest Level In 800 Years Near Greenland

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090701102900.htm

New research, which reconstructs the extent of ice in the sea between Greenland and Svalbard from the 13th century to the present indicates that there has never been so little sea ice as there is now. The research results from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, are published in the scientific journal, Climate Dynamics.

The nothern hemesphere mid summer is when the earth is the furthest from the sun at the moment that and other orbital factors mean that the insolation at 60N during June and July is the lowest for over 2000 years, we should have much colder summers and an ice pack keeping much further south increasing the albedo of the earth..... cooling it.


The 20th centuary is supposed to have been the coldest for a long time. Something is up.

 

[Pickman's model]

This week the arctic ice sheet has reached its lowest ever recorded ice coverage. Since it broke that record it has lost another whopping 11% in total ice surface area. Now at this time of the year it does retreat fast, this is high summer but 11% in a week is staggering. It has about a month of seasonal melting left so having already broken the record it looks well set to smash it.

it's reassuring to know that in this age of pisspoor service, when everything else is running late, some things can still arrive early

 

[david dissadent]

An interesting blog I have just been pointed too, very interesting too anyone following one of the climate story of the decade.

http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/

Its by Jason Box, a Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, and an IPCC scientist.

 

[david dissadent]

Will the arctic ice cap unanchor from land this year?

These two images were taken two days apart. What appears to be happening is that the normally stable old ice north of greenland is begining to disintegrate and what appear to be cracks are forming north of Canada. Although the ice cap is not a contiguous mass, where it is dense it usualy is pretty close to one.

This is a very very interesting and worrying development. I dont really know the consaquencies but dont they will be all that much in themself, the ice sheet is unlikely to go carreering round the arctic ocean like a loose cannon, but it could mean that much of the old 6 year + ice that is left is becoming free enough to be flushed out into the Atlantic. This will (again) acelorate the melting.

I think this may be a pretty momentous moment if it does happen, it may have happened during the medievel warm period or something but I think it is unlikely, I think they may be the first time this interglacial this happened. Perhaps not but it would appear to be a pretty big change in the earth if and when it does.

FWIW I am not saying that the cap will detach, but the chances of it seem greater than even a few days ago.

 

[david dissadent]

Hmmmm......

Still second warmest August and September on instrament records with the sun experiancing what the denialosphere is calling a 'grand minimum' and only a weak el nino in effect.

Augusts global surface temp anolomy as per HadCRUT3

Septembers should be out soon.

 

[david dissadent]

Arctic Ocean Awakens

All that wave action is expected to bring deep water nutrients closer to the surface, where with sunlight they'll feed summer phytoplankton blooms — forming a vast new foundation for the Arctic marine food web.

Among the more worrisome questions raised by a more turbulent Arctic Ocean is whether or not it could speed up the melting of Arctic sea ice.

"That's a big open question," Rainville said. "It's possible because the Arctic is a very peculiar ocean."

Unlike any other ocean basin, the Arctic has a lot of very fresh, very cold water on top from melted ice, what's called the cold halocline layer. But about 100 meters below is very salty, slightly warmer water. If internal waves become powerful enough to mix these waters, then yes, the warmer surface could accelerate the melting of sea ice.

"Storms in the central Arctic with reduced ice cover can easily lead to vertical mixing levels that can erode or even remove the cold halocline layer," said Ilker Fer of the University of Bergen, Norway's Geophysical Institute. "The ice is then easily exposed to the relatively warm Atlantic water, possibly leading to a positive feedback."

The thinning ice has long been supposed to make the ice more vaulnranble to wave action, the more kinetic the sea the slower it will melt come autumn, but the mixing is an interesting potential dynamic, but this will be offset by the warming surface ocean being less dense in many places. The arctic ocean has been cut off from the general oceanic cirulation for about 3 million years, the change will be scientificaly very intersting.

Incidently I noticed that Hudson Bay was ice free until early December, it was around the 12th before sea ice began forming. As much as we are experiancing cold here they are experiancing warmth up there

Jeff Masters blogs on the arctic dipole

Arctic Dipole blamed for colder winters in East Asia
It turns out that the new Arctic circulation patterns help to intensify the Siberian High, a large semi-permanent region of surface high pressure prevalent in winter over Siberia. According to Honda et al. (2009), this results in increased flow of cold air out of the Arctic in early winter over eastern Russia, Japan, Korea, and eastern China, causing colder temperatures. By late winter, the pattern shifts, resulting in colder than average temperatures from East Asia to Europe.

on December 11, 2009

Hmmm I always read his blogs during Atlantic Hurricane season and off season he often has some interesting observations. Man he nailed that on (superfically anyway).

Arctic sea ice loss appears to have created a new atmospheric circulation pattern that brings more warm air in the Arctic, creating a positive feedback loop that causes even more sea ice loss. This feedback loop increases the likelihood that an ice-free Arctic in the summer will indeed come by 2030, as many Arctic experts are predicting. It's worth noting that such an atmospheric circulation shift was not predicted by the climate models. Indeed, the loss of Arctic sea ice over the past three years exceeds what any of our models were predicting (Figure 4). While we can rightly criticize these models for their inaccuracy, we should realize that they are just as capable of making errors not in our favor as they are of making errors in our favor.

Thats not very comforting! People talk about increasingly chaotic (in a scientific sense) weather and shifts in climate regimes. Its only been 2 years since the 2007 melt season so we are still only speculating here but way may be headed into a new regime in the Arctic\ North Atlantic region.

 

[HarryinOz]

Please someone be angy at this. Should this not be on the front page, we are watching huge enviromental changes in DAYS.

I am. I'm fucken well pissed off at the politicians, corporations, the media and all the people who Deny anything is happening... or to worry about.

I especially get pissed off at the average normal person/people on here who actively try to convince everyone else that it's either not happening or that it's just a normal weather cycle, pour billions of tons of chemicals into the atmosphere and you think no damage at all will happen? It doesn't float out to space or just disappear it fucken well just keeps building up to higher and higher levels.

btw, the Australian liberal party (in opposition atm) has several members including it's leader who flat out deny global warming is happening.

pissed off? pissed off ain't the words for how I feel.

 

[Dr Jon]

I don't know if anyone has spotted this:

Major Antarctic glacier is 'past its tipping point'

A major Antarctic glacier has passed its tipping point, according to a new modelling study. After losing increasing amounts of ice over the past decades, it is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimetres.

 

[david dissadent]

Satellite data may not be showing the full picture.

Science Daily

However, in situ observations made in September 2009 by Barber et al. show that much of the ice was in fact "rotten" ice -- ice that is thinner, heavily decayed, and structurally weak due to a uniform temperature throughout.

The authors suggest that satellite measurements were confused because both types of ice exhibit similar temperature and salinity profiles near their surfaces and a similar amount of open water between flows. The authors note that while an increase in summer minimum ice extent in the past 2 years could give the impression that Arctic ice is recovering, these new results show that multiyear ice in fact is still declining.

Meanwhile the Kara Sea has been losing in the middle of January!
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.7.html

I assume this is due to wind rather than anything else, but I could not find a similar incident in the Crysophere today pages for a January over the past 30 years.

The NSIDC metric has us back under 07 for this time of year, but if the artic dipole has shifted we should not (in theory) get as big a melt.

In theory mind.

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png

 

[WouldBe]

The authors note that while an increase in summer minimum ice extent in the past 2 years could give the impression that Arctic ice is recovering, these new results show that multiyear ice in fact is still declining.

Could this be the way the earth compensates for a global warming?

By turning ice into slushies that cover a larger surface area the slushie could reflect more sunlight, stopping heat being absorbed by the earth and allowing the earth to cool.


Isn't this more evidence that the climate models are a load of toss?

 

[david dissadent]

Could this be the way the earth compensates for a global warming?

By turning ice into slushies that cover a larger surface area the slushie could reflect more sunlight, stopping heat being absorbed by the earth and allowing the earth to cool.


Isn't this more evidence that the climate models are a load of toss?

WTF? You are not even pretending to make sense.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

Could this be the way the earth compensates for a global warming?

By turning ice into slushies that cover a larger surface area the slushie could reflect more sunlight, stopping heat being absorbed by the earth and allowing the earth to cool.


Isn't this more evidence that the climate models are a load of toss?

It could, or global temperature changes and ice buildup/reduction could be down to the evil semi-aquatic sub ice dwelling unicorns waving their magic horns to create either cooling ice tea or dangerous espresso.

But that's just stupid on so many levels.

 

[free spirit]

WTF? You are not even pretending to make sense.

lol

 

[WouldBe]

WTF? You are not even pretending to make sense.

So what is the minimum thickness ice needs to be to be reflective then?