There’s trouble at the top of the world. Images like the above shocked climate scientists all around the world late last year. Arctic ice has been declining at an alarming rate. The minimum surface cover in September had been in a 7% per decade trend decline since satellite imaging began in 1979. But suddenly in 2007 it took a dive of 20% or so compared with the previous record low in 2005.
At RealClimate there was some discussion about what would happen in the future. Most, I think, believed there would be some improvement in 2008 but that the trend decline would continue. According to IPCC projections the Arctic sea ice was meant to last until 2080. Just a year earlier two top scientists had projected that the sea ice could disappear completely by 2040. Now glaciologist Jay Zwally in reviewing the 2007 data said that the Arctic could be almost ice free by the end of summer 2012.
He went on to say that in climate change “the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.”
Given that the ice mass has reduced by some 80% since the 1960s and is declining rapidly, while the thickness has reduced from about 3.5 metres to one metre, the complete demise within a few years would not surprise.
On the Science Show recently Tim Flannery said:
And this year, the start of this summer has been just terrifying. The sea ice is melting away at about 6,000 square kilometres greater rate per week than last year. And if this summer follows the trajectory of the last few summers, we stand to lose about half the remaining sea ice by the end of this northern summer. And that is putting us on a trajectory to an ice-free Arctic within five years or so.
This graph shows the decline in 2005 and 2007.
This image shows the extent of the decline.
The image at the top of the post (original here) graphs the decline, but also shows the clear water at the Bering Strait end. The long term problem is the warmer water entering through the Bering Strait. In 2007 the atmospheric circulation tended to blow ice out into the North Atlantic where it melted. The same circulation pattern also resulted in less cloud.
A further problem is what James Hansen describes as the ‘albedo flip’. Dry ice reflects about 80% of the sun’s radiation, whereas open water reflects only about 10%. It has been calculated that the albedo flip for Antarctica alone, should the ice completely disappear, is worth 0.3C of warming for the whole planet.
In contemplating how the canary might be brought back to life it seems clear to me that cooler water needs to come through the Bering Strait. This would presumably be transported there principally by the thermohaline current.
At the point where the current emerges from the deep in the North Pacific the water would be fairly cold. The task, then, is to warm the whole planet, which is why it’s fair to describe the Arctic ice sheet as the canary in the mine.
The longer trend decline in the Arctic ice is very stark, as shown in this image from a Dr Sorteberg via Carbon Equity shows:
It’s clear that the trouble started back in the 1950s. That’s when the canary got sick. It’s quite instructive to look at historic atmospheric CO2 levels, remembering that it takes a couple of decades for the climatic effects to materialise.
From this little exercise it’s clear, I think, that a target CO2 level of less than 300ppm is indicated.
One of the implications of a demise of the Arctic ice is that it would hasten the warming of Greenland. The pattern is one of increasing meltwater, faster ice flows in glaciers, thinning of the ice-sheet, more frequent “ice-quakes” indicating movement in the ice-sheet and increased net ice loss of ice volume as shown by satellite telemetry. I’ll take that up in another post, because it is becoming evident that we are at the threshold of real trouble with the ice sheets.
I didn’t make the comment about reducing CO2 levels to less than 300ppm lightly. Hansen and others remind us that 125,000 years ago when CO2 levels were less than 300ppm, the temperature was 1-2C higher than now and the sea was 4-6 metres higher.
While the nations of the world were having a bun fight in Bali last December James Hansen was giving a briefing at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union saying that we need to get CO2e ppm down to the 300-350 range in the first instance and see where we go from there.
Again I’ll expand on what Hansen is saying and why in another post.
Meanwhile it is clear that the trouble at the top of the world is a sign of trouble everywhere.
Update: As suggested by Lutz I’ve added here the graph linked by him showing the full range of ice coverage for the period. For the record, it’s my view that there is nothing untrue in the graph at the top of the post. The presentation of graphs is part of communication. I’ve given a critique of this graph in this comment.
Update 2: Sounds as though it has been bugging me, which isn’t the case, but on further reflection I think the graph at the top of the post is definitely not “somewhat sensationalistic”. What happened to the ice was sensational, as demonstrated by the reaction of scientists. What the graph showed was the normal scientific criterion used to monitor the decline of the ice coverage.
Anyway the next post in the series on what the IPCC did is now up.
Update 3: By spending time writing in the past little while I missed this little item. Some scientists have run their models to see what would happen to the surrounding land areas when there is a significant loss of sea ice.
The team found that during episodes of rapid sea-ice loss, the rate of Arctic land warming is 3.5 times greater than the average 21st century warming rates predicted in global climate models. While this warming is largest over the ocean, the simulations suggest that it can penetrate as far as 900 miles inland. The simulations also indicate that the warming acceleration during such events is especially pronounced in autumn. The decade during which a rapid sea-ice loss event occurs could see autumn temperatures warm by as much as 9 degrees F (5 degrees C) along the Arctic coasts of Russia, Alaska, and Canada.
Lawrence and his colleagues then used the model to study the influence of accelerated warming on permafrost and found that in areas where permafrost is already at risk, such as central Alaska, a period of abrupt sea-ice loss could lead to rapid soil thaw. This situation, when summer thaw extends more deeply than the next winter’s freeze, can lead to a talik, which is a layer of permanently unfrozen soil sandwiched between the seasonally frozen layer above and the perennially frozen layer below. A talik allows heat to build more quickly in the soil, hastening the long-term thaw of permafrost.
They say that “Arctic soils are believed to hold 30 percent or more of all the carbon stored in soils worldwide.”
OK, it’s only working the models, so let’s hope they made a big mistake!
Update 4: See Arctic update for the latest.
Great post Brian.
Thanks, mick.
Yes excellent post, Brian.
At the risk of sounding flippant, I’ll get in first with a link to dystopian wingnuttery: Northward Ho! http://northwardho.blogspot.com/
dk.au, thanks.
That polar cities guy was on one of the RealClimate threads a while ago. Everyone was being nice and gentle towards him. It was touching in a way.
So if, every scientist can see it, you can see it, most Australians can see it, I can see it, God can see it (he saw it first),….why can’t our politicians see it??
Excellent post Brian.
It is a worry but I believe that stopping climate change is too late we really need to be thinking to how best to adapt to the changing climate and more importantly reducing the rapid rate of extinctions.
Perhaps you might also have the courtesy of showing the complete graph about polar ice from http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.jpg
It is somewhat sensationalistic to show only the smallest portion of the overall picture. Sea ice fluctuates between 3 - 5 and 13 - 14 MM skm EVERY SEASON!
Brian, great update on the looming crisis, which is now looking like a global emergency that will far exceed the effects of Hurrican Katrina, Newcastle storm, the 2006 Asian Tsunami and the Chinese Earthquake.
It now appears the 2 degrees temperature rise is locked in based on existing CO2 emissions, which means the loss of the North Polar ice cap by 2015, or perhaps even earlier. This far exceeds the worst case predictions by IPCC and other scientists.
This also means the Greenland ice shelf is at high risk - if it goes then sea levels rise 4m.
We need to slash emissions now to avoid a 3 degrees rise, which would mean the death of the Great Barrier Reef and no more snow for Australia.
And the best our governments can do is argue about reducing petrol prices by 5c per litre and throw money at risky solutions (such as CCS) that will definately NOT be ready in time (if they will work, a big if) to address dangerous climate change.
I attended a forum on Saturday in Melbourne held by the PTUA about climate change and public transport. David Spratt spoke about the north polar ice cap situation and dangerous climate change, which was in line with the information that Brian has provided in this post.
Spratt’s presenation is availabe [here](PDF).
P Fox, I’m planning a series of 4 or 5 posts. I think you’ll see by the end of the series that aggressive mitigation is the only realistic option open to us.
Lutz, that’s a fair point and tonight I might play around trying to upload that graph as an addendum to the post. I spent a quarter of century in government, where I found that presentation, particularly visual presentation, was everything, by varying the relative length of the axes, chopping off the bottom so that the trend appears to be approaching zero etc. A few points.
Firstly, surface area is one thing. Given that the ice floats and the warmer water is chewing away from below, mass and thickness are possibly more significant. Recall this from the post:
At some point, perhaps at half a metre of thickness, wave motion will crack the ice, making it more susceptible to being blown out into the warmer North Atlantic.
Secondly, the decline has been going on since at least the 1960s it seems. Two of the images above use 1979-2000 as the reference state against which the decline is measured. 1979-2000 is not the original (healthy) state of the canary, but incorporates some of the decline.
Third, I’ve done a fair bit of charting of shares. Usually you run a variety of moving averages (simple or weighted) or you draw trend lines along both bottom and top extremities, usually both. The coverage in the winter is not so important, because the albedo effect is not in play, so the upper side has little significance.
At the bottom of the graph, the September summer minimum, your linked graph shows a decline from about 5.3 to 4. That’s about 25% on the initial value. Then you get a similar percentage decline from 2005 to 2007. That’s scary. Especially in relation to what’s left. See also Flannery’s comment about what’s happening in 2008. I had another source for that from a recent meting of scientists in Canberra, but Tim does it so eloquently.
So with a continued supply of warmer water through the Bering straight, and an increased albedo effect to warm the increased areas of exposed ocean in the summer, and the sheet losing mass and thickness rapidly (there were quite dramatic changes in this century on both, but I’d have to look them up - more dramatic than the loss of area) the prospects don’t look good.
In 2007 the atmospheric circulation patterns were anomalous, changing wind direction and reducing cloud cover. These changes probably have an element of AGW in them, but the short-term future pattern is unknown.
But from what I gathered of the discussion at RealClimate, a return to normalcy of the weather patterns wouldn’t reverse the longer term trend. For that we need global cooling.
Excellent post, Brian. If only Sir John Franklin had waited 143 years.
This post is worth reading both on its own and in conjunction with my previous post on The Stupid Cult of Cooling…
Petrec, thanks for the link. In future posts I’ll be using some of the images he’s got there.
There is one that I’d argue with, on slide 17. He shouldn’t have drawn a straight line through the points. It gives the wrong impression in the middle bit. I’ll explain when we come to it.
Also in your comment (good comment) Greenland as such is worth 7 metres of sea level rise, but it would never go in whole or significant part without some of both West and East Antarctica contributing (together) in equal or greater measure.
What Lutz said.
Please don’t resort to the techniques beloved of pharmaceutical companies - the drop in the sea ice minimum is sensational enough and doesn’t need this visually deceiving treatment.
rf, but if you read my comment at 11 you’d have to agree that Lutz’s linked graph masks some very significant problems. I don’t make these graphs, I just use what’s available.
Paul, thanks for the link.
I have in mind a wrap up post at the end, which could be sent off to policy makers - Peter, Penny, Marn, Ross Garnaut etc - to pick up BilB’s point.
Meanwhile if anyone in commenter-land wants to draw what’s posted on this blog to the attention of policy makers, I can’t imagine it would do any harm.
We are so, so screwed. Our children will spit on the graves of those industry-funded denialists and gutless politicians who got us to this point.
And there will be no excuses like ‘but we didn’t know!’ because there has been twenty years or more to do something about it.
Never mind ‘our children’, some of us here are young enough to have known about the problem for quite a while, tried to increase awareness about it and make a personal contribution to reducing the problem and are still going to have to live through the majority of our lives (should we live to life expectancy as currently is) in a climate created by wilful greed and stupidity.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Not only will the loss of albedo increase the warming of Greenland and the likelihood of Greenland melting, it will also increase the warming of permafrost leading to large quantities of methane being released, enhancing global warming.
According to Lawrence, D. M., A. G. Slater, R. A. Tomas, M. M. Holland, and C. Deser (2008), Accelerated Arctic land warming and permafrost degradation during rapid sea ice loss, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L11506, doi:10.1029/2008GL033985:
Thanks very much for posting this, it’s very useful. Looking forward to more posts in the series.
Brian, I think your wrap-up will be wasted on Marn unless you either send it to him as an audio-visual file, or ask one of the others to read it to him.
BilB @ 5, don’t forget the oil companies can also very plainly see it…they’re making a killing in the Artic Circle as previously un-drillable regions open up…potential war zone in 5-10 years.
Good stuff Brian.
Excellent point Nick. Cheney seems very excited about future prospects for Wyoming due to global warming…so I imagine Bush & the oil men are thinking same about the ability to gain access to previously unpenetrable &/or hostile areas. North-West passage and all that:
http://www.backpacker.com/blogs/199
Not surprising the Canadian PM is establishing further military & security links w/ Inuit.
impenetrable…doh!
I got a bit excited seeing a link at Crikey to something about disappearing ice caps, and ended up here!
Nick, this post was originally part of a larger one on sea level rise, which is where I’m headed, so I didn’t look at the other implications of Arctic melting. You are right, plenty of people, nations and corporations are salivating over the opportunity to extract hydrocarbons from the area. Remember the Russians planting their flag on the sea floor at the north pole?
Peter, apart from methane Tim Flannery reckons the warming of the Arctic might change what he calls “zonation” more rapidly:
My husband, a devoted greenie, was gently explaining to me that the bin was filling up much quicker, and needed to be taken out more often as i wasn’t separating the recycling properly, and not flattening out packages and containers before throwing them in.
I told him i was doing this on purpose to increase land fill, so we have something to stand on when sea levels rise.
He just shook his head and walked away.
True story.
sc it’s obviously a case of the difference between men’s and women’s logic.
BTW my son, the one who lives here, has a bike computer, which he calibrated against Mt Coot-tha. It’s probably a bit rough but it tells him what the elevation is. Our place is 80m above sea level, which might give us a nice beach-side place in a thousand years or so. But 90% plus of Brisbane would be under water if his computer’s right.
Cool. Its a speculators dream then- can you invest in real estate futures?
You should have seen the look on his face when i suggested the greatest untapped resource on the planet is dead people. You could eat ‘em, make fertilizer, burn ‘em for fuel…i mean if you are going to recycle, lets go the whole hog
(my apologies to any dead people reading this post).
Here, look, i can tie this back to the topic at hand.
Soylent Green is people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_GreenMake fertilizer out of them. Why not! It would be good to be doing something useful when you’re dead!
Excellent Brian. Have you looked at the effect of the northern boreal forests and the relationship between rising temperatures and the encroachment of free water vapour into the polar regions? I suspect that avery large and unsuspected positive feedback is on the agenda.
Respect.
Huggy
To be honest, Huggybunny, I haven’t. If by the “encroachment of free water vapour into the polar regions” you mean that it’s raining further north these days, I’ve heard of two negative effects. Flannery said that there were increasing incidences of female polar bears being killed in the ice dens they make to give birth to and nurture their young by unexpected rain caving in the roof.
Of broader implication I recall Hansen in 2003 pointing out that rain moving further north is one way that heat is transported from warmer oceans to northern lands. Increased rain at higher latitudes is an effect already observed.
Hansen also emphasises the growth of forests on tundras further north as a long term feedback, along with the loss of albedo through the loss of ice. He hasn’t explained it in detail that I’ve seen, but I think the idea is that the darker forests absorb more solar radiation than the open tundras and that this effect is greater than any draw-down of carbon from the extra growth. He regards it as very significant longer term.
Sounds as though it has been bugging me, which isn’t the case, but on further reflection I think the graph at the top of the post is definitely not “somewhat sensationalistic”. What happened to the ice was sensational, as demonstrated by the reaction of scientists. What the graph showed was the normal scientific criterion used to monitor the decline of the ice coverage.
Anyway the next post in the series on what the IPCC did is now up.
By spending time writing in the past little while I missed this little item. Some scientists have run their models to see what would happen to the surrounding land areas when there is a significant loss of sea ice.
They say that “Arctic soils are believed to hold 30 percent or more of all the carbon stored in soils worldwide.”
OK, it’s only working the models, so let’s hope they made a big mistake!