Since we last looked at the Arctic ice coverage the equinox has been passed, the sun has set and the sea is icing up again quite nicely considering the ice loss fell just short of the 2007 record.
Nevertheless, a record was probably broken and a serious one at that. The volume of the ice in 2008 was very likely lower than in 2007. I’ve used the terms “probably” and “likely” because as far as I can see they didn’t actually do a survey as they did in 2007 when they found much of the ice only a metre thick.
The problem can be seen in the markedly increased presence of one-year ice and areas where the coverage is less than 50%:
On the upside the young ice still reflects the heat of the sun. I would point out, however, that the criterion for coverage is ice >15%, so if you compare the white areas, signifying 15-50% the total reflectivity in 2007 and 2008 was probably similar.
On the downside it makes a longer term revival of the ice coverage well-nigh impossible. As Jay Zwally says:
“The reason volume is so important is new ice can’t get thick enough in the winter to survive next summer’s melting,” he says. “It takes seven to eight years for sea ice to reach its equilibrium thickness of around four to five meters.”
This may auger well for shipping, but not so well for release of methane clathrates.
And now a new study finds that blame can be attributed directly to humans for the warming of the polar caps.
Yes, the Antarctic is warming too.
Yet another study has found a rising frequency and intensity of arctic storms over the last half century. This is attributed to increasingly warmer waters and results in the acceleration of the rate of arctic sea ice drift out into the warmer North Atlantic waters.
It also involved deeper mixing of ocean levels. Sirpa Hakkinen, one of the scientists involved, seemed to be a bit excited about the potential of this to increase carbon storage in the ocean. Personally I can’t see any joy over increasing acidity of the ocean, nor over the presumed likelihood that deeper mixing might promote the release of methane.
And it indicates the presence of a positive feedback loop. Warmer waters lead to increased storminess, which leads to loss of sea ice to the North Atlantic which leads to warmer waters. What we need is cooler water coming in the Bering Strait end, which means a cooler Pacific, which means a cooler everything.
This is the decade the Bushes and a corrupt high court in the US cost us collectively. Apparently Deh Fuhrer’s last White House acts are the signing off on a raft of anti environment bills before he takes his leave as he dumps his mess in the hands of an inexperienced Obama, at a time when Brian’s stats show things now probably beyond the point of no return.
Paul, not just with climate, unfortunately.
The term “bellweather” was used in one of those reports. Arctic warming has also been called the “canary in the mine”.
I think that white cap on top of the world is an indicator of how things are going. What it’s telling me is not that we just need a limit to warming, which is where virtually all the world’s politicians are heading, at best, but actual cooling.
So we can’t hit the breaks either?
Wait a minute, this is nineteen seventy two. The mushrooms will wear of shortly and a good nights sleep should see this all right…
Thanks Brian, is there any idea of when the Wilkes Ice Shelf is going to finish up?
dylwah, I don’t know what’s next with the Wilkes Ice Shelf, so I googled and near the top of the list was a Jennifer Marohasy post the general drift of which was that it was all new ice and anyway there are heaps of active volcanoes warming things up down there.
This is somehow supposed to be a comfort. The bottom line is that there is a net loss of ice down there each year and if the thing tips decisively it doesn’t have the topographic inhibitions which might slow Greenland’s melting down.
Also following this link you get a map showing volcanic activity mostly in the West Antarctica area, where much of the bedrock is below sea level and the ice piled up is worth about 5 metres sea level rise worldwide.
I guess that’s alright then, we can all relax!
Brian –
I’ve been following your climate change posts here on LP over many months with great interest and mounting alarm. Please don’t take this comment as disrespectful, but the term ‘bellwether’ arises from the practice of shepherds to put a bell around the neck of a castrated male sheep (’wether’) so the sound would alert them to where the flock could be found in conditions of darkness, inclement weather, steep topography or thick undergrowth. Wethers are, like steers and indeed MSM op-ed writers, unadventurous and content to remain with the herd at all times. Their infertility is another point of similarity with MSM op-ed writers, come to think of it.
There ain’t no such word as ‘bellweather’.
End of pedantic comment.
Brian, why would you waste time and effort doing something as futile as reading Marohasy?
That’s like reading Janet Albrechtsen, devoid of the intellectual component.
Hal9000, no offense. I knew all that stuff you mentioned, well some of it, about 50 years ago. Just another ’senior moment’!
Paul Walter: never under-estimate Jennifer Marohasy’s influence. She has a considerable following amongst middle-aged male public service managers. Hormonal masquerading as intellectual, I think.
TFA and Paul W you are both right. What was I thinking? Another senior moment perhaps? What surprised me was how high Marohasy was up on the list when I googled. I do sometimes read her posts to see the sport as Luke, Ender and a few others go toe to toe with the denialists. And sometimes there are interesting links.
I should have looked to see what I had bookmarked, where there was this story from early July of the connection with Charcot Island hanging by a thread. There is some comment here and now I’ve found an animation.
Surely the bridge cannot last the summer. Has anyone heard anything more recent?
The bottom line, however, is whether the continent is losing ice in net terms, and whether West Antarctica becomes seriously destabilised.
Thanks for linx. a) At last a real newspaper?
b) Remain in awe of how dry it’s been in Adelaide this winter.
A long term trend?
Michael Duffy at it again in the SMH
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/michael-duffy/truly-inconvenient-truths-being-ignored/2008/11/07/1225561134617.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
What was really galling was the way it was featured on the front of the web site this morning.
Paul, the standard answer, I think, would be it’s too early to say, but it’s a worry when what you are getting fits in with the long term script of the rain-bearing winter circulation systems shifting polewards.
We’ve had a distinct pattern here of the autumns becoming very dry, starting as early as February, and then depending on what seem to be exceptional events for most of our winter rain.
T Rex, you’ve made my day. A couple of weeks ago I heard Duffy interview Lindzen so you can download the audio if you’ve got nothing better to do. Or follow the link to Lindzen’s paper where you can download a 36-page pdf and see:
Yet Hansen complains of missing out on funding because he won’t tell his political masters what they want to hear.
Lindzen is rejecting the use of models as unscientific. My impression is that if you did your science his way you’d never be able to make decisions on mitigating GW before it was too late.
Marohasy picked this one up, of course. (No, I’m not going to link to her.) Part of what they are in a lather about was that Rajendra Pachauri was supposed to have put forward some horrendously erroneous and misleading information.
There was a link provided in a comment to Pachauri’s 2008 Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture. If you go to about 16 mins into the video you come to the part in question.
He says that that global surface temperatures increased by 0.74C in the 20th century. If you draw a trend line through the 20th century graph and then draw another one through the last 50 years of the century you’ll notice that the trend is increasing at roughly double the rate in the second case, he says.
This is the simple unadorned truth.
But unless you assert as Duffy and co require that the graph has been flat for the last 10 years you are guilty of a heinous crime.
Duffy should settle down and first explain to us why these graphs track each other so closely over hundreds of thousands of years and then have a look at Hansen’s explanation of the last 65 million years or so.
It’s been exceptionally cold in Alaska during the winter of 2007-8 and the summer of 2008. Anchorage had the third coldest summer on record, about 3C below the norm.
This was naturally picked up by denialists and served up on my Google feed. Of course it has no significance unless repeated ad infinitum and matched by similarly cold temperatures elsewhere. When this sort of thing happens I usually find that it has been exceptionally warm somewhere else, curiously enough often further north.
Sure enough, in the autumn a little further north, the temperature was 5C warmer than usual in the Arctic. If you follow the link to the Arctic Report Card for 2008 you find some other negatives including records set in both the duration and extent of summer surface melt in Greenland. It seems that the ice sheet lost at least 100 cubic km (24 cubic miles) of ice. Not good.