Back on July 18 Andrew Bolt said that we should “forget media scares about a melting North Pole”. As with almost everything he said in that article he was wrong. This graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows how things are progressing:
You may recall when we looked at this recently that 2005 was the previous record low before the astonishing decline in 2007 which inspired glaciologist Jay Zwally to suggest that the Arctic could be almost ice free by the end of summer 2012 and that “the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.”
2007 was an exceptional year weatherwise in the Arctic with unusual winds keeping the skies relatively clear and tending to blow the ice into the warm North Atlantic. Given that there was quite extensive ice coverage in the subsequent northern winter and 2008 is a coolish year one would expect a considerable recovery. This daily updated graph at Philip Sutton’s GreanLEAP Arctic watch site shows that the low will probably fall short of the 2007 low. Nevertheless it’s unequivocally bad news.
I said in the previous post 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”. One indicator of the direction of the trend is the age of the ice. This image from NASA via Wikipedia illustrates the problem:
In the mid- to late 1980s, over 20 percent of Arctic sea ice was at least six years old; in February 2008, just 6 percent of the ice was six years old or older.
This animation from Wikipedia shows the loss of old ice, the leaking of ice into the North Atlantic and the receding ice in the face of the inflow of warm water through the Bering Strait.
This image (not sure where I got it from) shows the extent and age of the ice at the 2007 summer minimum:
Just how serious the 2007 event was is shown in this image, again from Wikipedia:
It always bothers me that the usual 1979-2000 baseline itself contains considerable melting. The whole story of where the trend has come from and where it is now in relation to the projections of just a few years ago is best shown in this graph from a Dr Sorteberg via Carbon Equity:
I can well believe that this is what the Arctic summer minimum might look like in 2013 (from Philip Sutton at GreanLEAP):
Elsewhere Barry Brook has a neat post with lots of links; Open Mind also takes a look.
Deltoid and Open Mind continue their war on deniers.
Update: This story has been updated here.
Bolt says:
Great post, Brian – thanks for the update. Bolt and other deniers seem to make a habit of capitalising on regression to the mean – the fact that 2007 was an extreme year for ice loss means that 2008 can be treated as having more ice, just like all the years after 1998 are cooler.
Also, the links to Barry Brook and Open Mind appear to be missing.
Thanks, Tobias. The Brook and Open Mind links were there and working. I’ve expanded the link words to make them more obvious.
Cheers, Brian – I suspect my bleary eyes played a part in missing them.
Climate progress points out that the North Pole has become an island for the first time in 125,000 years.
Commenter Richard C links to yet another interesting graph.
Brian, more depressing news.
For interested LP readers, I’ve spent a lot of time analysing the recent BCA report into emissions trading – and found that they are almost certainly wrong in claiming that carbon leakage is a big issue for Australia. The article is at NewMatilda.com
Thanks Ben. Typical of the kinds of ‘lobbying innovation’ we’re seeing in response to any discussion of an ETS. Where’s the positive spin from business about innovative new techs that will slash our carbon emissions?
you shouldn’t worry too much about arctic ice melting because its floating in water.
you can just go up there and save the polar bears, but it will have a positive impact for us humans.
Cato – as long as the Greenland ice sheet stays put, and the Siberian Tundra doesn’t turn to soup, you’re probably right from a short term perspective. Cutting 4,000 nautical miles off the shipping routes from Germany to Japan will have some remarkable economic effects, as will, say, a six-week season of North Pole pleasure cruises circa 2015 (book now!).
But just because it was all (literally) beer and skittles for the Vikings during the middle ages, don’t assume that modern agricultural industries elsewhere in the world won’t suffer disruption from shifting rainfall patterns. And pray that the Gulf Stream keeps conveying nice warm Caribbean water eastward across the Atlantic, unless you relish the thought of “Old Europe” under a half-mile of ice.
Crikey reported today that Garnaut will propose a 0-15% 2020 reduction target, and apparantly that will be constistent with a 450ppm stabilisation target (????) . I wonder what implications that has for the Arctic ice…
In the long run, Peter W, it means there probably won’t be any ice anywhere.
Mercurious, there is also the prospect of oil and gas to be found under the Arctic Ocean, so we can pump even more CO2 into the air.
The latest version of the first graph in the post is here:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Hard to say if it will beat the previous record, but it does look like we’re in a different regime now.
Oops .. missed the link to that in the text. My bad.
aidan, a couple of days ago it looked as though it was bottoming out, but it’s heading south again. A couple of weeks should tell the story for this year.
A new regime is one way of putting it. I’d say we are at the beginning of the end-phase. You’ll notice that the criterion is “at least 15% sea ice” which is not much. It looks as though there may be a strip along the northern Canadian coast that might hang on for a while, but here too there are continual reports about ice shelves collapsing and chunks falling off. And the remaining floating ice is becoming so thin that some time soon it is likely to just break up and dissolve.
In an article a few days ago Gwynne Dyer said the arctic story really gets scientists by the throat but it’s too remote to stir the populace at large. But if Gustav had turned out to be Katrina 2 people would have taken notice.
So he’s saying, and I agree with him, that it’s going to take something pretty dramatic to galvanise the world into action.
Via Carbon Planet stories from Google Earth and Reuters on the disintegration of Arctic ice shelves.
The Telegraph has an image showing the north-west passage and the north-east passage open, making the North Pole an island. The Beluga Group in Germany is planning to send a ship through the north-east passage to Japan next year. The Canadians reckon anyone using the north-west passage should check in with them.
Clearly this is a (ghoulishly) fascinating problem, with heaps of contributing factors, just take a look at
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
with analysis of sea temperatures, rates of ice loss in different locations etc. What is clear is that ice volume is the big story — it has plunged dramatically. This has a sort of 2nd-order effect on the ice extent, with melting further into September than normal and also more rapid ice loss through the all the summer months.
The record low summer ice extent in 2007 was, mostly, the result of the ice extent falling off a cliff at the end of June that year (losing what looks like a million square kilometres in the space of a week or two). This year the (as yet not quite) record low is based on the rate of ice loss not abating through late August.
They’re saying this continuing high rate of loss is due to the thinness of the ice, and I guess the massive loss of ice extent in late June 2007 may well have been the result of the thinning ice too. Anomalously warm/windy conditions that early in the season presumably wouldn’t have resulted in such a rapid decline in ice extent when the ice was much thicker.
I think you’re right. End game. Just a matter of time really.
Thanks for that aidan. I didn’t read that link all the way through before I posted.
Here’s the BBC story on the great ice shelf collapse.
It seems the latest bout of ice shelf break-up dates from 2002.
Meanwhile I’ve just heard it’s raining in Greenland. That’s put my mind into a spin that makes it hard to attend to Garnaut etc, but I’ll try.
This is amusing – Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered
I wonder if every one of the 1000+ sites and blogs that took so much glee in linking to this article will also report the update.
(update to the article, not sea ice extent data)
Nick, yes, that post by Goddard is the one that Tim Lambert at Deltoid dissected. In an update he mentions that Bolt has linked to it more than once and started a post this way:
Sorry Brian! I missed the link up there.
Ah well, it’s good (I guess) that some googling on related issues turns up Goddard’s post pretty quickly.
No probs, Nick!