Arctic Updates

[Ben D]

And Ben D, you have said again, and again, that we should not be worried about the warming in the next century, because it is all very uncertain, and sun rises and sun sets, and cosmic vibrations permeate the Mother Earth, and we shouldnt be worried, because Earth is always changing anyway.

If you really want to worry about warming in the 22nd century, or even this present one, be my guest, but my point is that I'm not convinced that the IPCC projections are accurate, and so it is not my fate to suffer the anxiety brought on by expectations of GW that some experience.

And just because I'm not with you on GW, I'm not against you in the context of the bigger picture of the glorious future of humanity,.. and beyond.

[brainpanhandler]

"There's no excuse for saying 'we've got to keep pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere," he told Reuters by telephone, adding that the cooling was projected to start in 10,000 to 100,000 years.

Well there is breathing for a start!

Nice comeback, but Penguin didn't write that. Thomas Crowley, from one of the articles you cite, wrote that.

Understood bph, but he emphasized the statement in 'bold' to presumably make a point.

I could have also pointed out that there is no identification as to who is saying "We've got to keep pumping blah blah etc.",....maybe some strawman somewhere?

In the context of the interview it seems that the "he" referred to in the quote is Crowley. No? Who else could the author be referring to?

Really not sure where you are coming from bph, in my read of the quote, it does not appear to be Thomas Crowley who is claiming that we've got to keep pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, rather he seems to be implying that someone else is saying that, and that he is disagreement with them... so there must be a third party he is referring to, or perhaps just a strawman, yes?

Yes. You are correct. Crowley erected a strawman. I really don't know anyone who is saying, "We've got to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere", nor do I imagine he does. However, if someone were to say, "We can't just stop burning fossil fuels", that woud be the functional equivalent of saying, "We've got to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere" and that I have heard people say and in fact I would say it myself, we can't just stop burning fossil fuels.

But as I said wrt risk assessment, I emphatically reject the notion that "we have a lot of time to argue about the appropriate level of greenhouse gases.". Even if I thought there was a high probability that that were true I would still reject that idea.The consequences if it is not true that we have a lot of time to argue about the appropriate level of greenhouse gases could be the extinction of our species. Given consequences like that I say we err on the side of caution and proceed as quickly as possible toward a day when we can say, "hey, we could just stop burning fossil fuels altogether". If that's pushing the panic button then I say push the fuckin' panic button, even if there is the possibility that all our efforts would be in vain and we are already too far gone.

[wintler2]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... 5797.story

Appeals court rules against Arctic drilling plan

In a 2-1 decision, the court orders a more thorough environmental review of the proposed offshore oil drilling project's effect on fish and endangered bowhead whales.
By Kim Murphy
November 21, 2008
Reporting from Seattle -- The Bush administration's authorization of a major new offshore oil drilling program in the Arctic Ocean was dealt a serious setback Thursday when a federal appeals court ruled the plan did not adequately consider the effect on bowhead whales and the native villagers who make their living from the frigid coastal waters.

Ruling on the first of several major new projects for tapping oil and gas deposits from the Arctic floor, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the federal government should have prepared a more exhaustive environmental review before concluding that harm to whales, caribou and other Arctic wildlife either would be insignificant or could be mitigated. ..



Readers in Ottawa might want to drop in on..

Arctic climate - The Lowdown on the Meltdown - Tuesday, November 25, 2008 - Drawing Room, Fairmont, Château Laurier, Ottawa
OTTAWA, Nov. 20 /CNW Telbec/ - Media representatives are invited to
attend all or part of a symposium on Arctic climate, taking place on Tuesday,
November 25.
The north is of huge economic and strategic importance-and
disproportionately affected by weather and by climate. Since 2000, the
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS) has invested
$30 million in Arctic and cold-climate research. The symposium will look at
what we have learned, current issues and emerging questions.
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/arch ... c2791.html

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Arctic Ice Melt Of Over Two Trillion Tons Has Occurred Since 2003

WASHINGTON — More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.

More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.

NASA scientists planned to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Luthcke said Greenland figures for the summer of 2008 aren't complete yet, but this year's ice loss, while still significant, won't be as severe as 2007.

The news was better for Alaska. After a precipitous drop in 2005, land ice increased slightly in 2008 because of large winter snowfalls, Luthcke said. Since 2003, when the NASA satellite started taking measurements, Alaska has lost 400 billion tons of land ice.

In assessing climate change, scientists generally look at several years to determine the overall trend.

Melting of land ice, unlike sea ice, increases sea levels very slightly. In the 1990s, Greenland didn't add to world sea level rise; now that island is adding about half a millimeter of sea level rise a year, NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally said in a telephone interview from the conference.

Between Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska, melting land ice has raised global sea levels about one-fifth of an inch in the past five years, Luthcke said. Sea levels also rise from water expanding as it warms.

Other research, being presented this week at the geophysical meeting point to more melting concerns from global warming, especially with sea ice.

"It's not getting better; it's continuing to show strong signs of warming and amplification," Zwally said. "There's no reversal taking place."

Scientists studying sea ice will announce that parts of the Arctic north of Alaska were 9 to 10 degrees warmer this past fall, a strong early indication of what researchers call the Arctic amplification effect. That's when the Arctic warms faster than predicted, and warming there is accelerating faster than elsewhere on the globe.

As sea ice melts, the Arctic waters absorb more heat in the summer, having lost the reflective powers of vast packs of white ice. That absorbed heat is released into the air in the fall. That has led to autumn temperatures in the last several years that are six to 10 degrees warmer than they were in the 1980s, said research scientist Julienne Stroeve at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

That's a strong and early impact of global warming, she said.

"The pace of change is starting to outstrip our ability to keep up with it, in terms of our understanding of it," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., a co-author of the Arctic amplification study.

Two other studies coming out at the conference assess how Arctic thawing is releasing methane _ the second most potent greenhouse gas. One study shows that the loss of sea ice warms the water, which warms the permafrost on nearby land in Alaska, thus producing methane, Stroeve says.

A second study suggests even larger amounts of frozen methane are trapped in lakebeds and sea bottoms around Siberia and they are starting to bubble to the surface in some spots in alarming amounts, said Igor Semiletov, a professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. In late summer, Semiletov found methane bubbling up from parts of the East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea at levels that were 10 times higher than they were in the mid-1990s, he said based on a study this summer.

The amounts of methane in the region could dramatically increase global warming if they get released, he said.

That, Semiletov said, "should alarm people."

Link

[wintler2]

Has the Arctic melt passed the point of no return?
Steve Connor, Science Editor

Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen. ..

Temperature readings for this October were significantly higher than normal across the entire Arctic region – between 3C and 5C above average – but some areas were dramatically higher. In the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska, for instance, near-surface air temperatures were more than 7C higher than normal for this time of year. The scientists believe the only reasonable explanation for such high autumn readings is that the ocean heat accumulated during the summer because of the loss of sea ice is being released back into the atmosphere from the sea before winter sea ice has chance to reform. ..
The Independant

[wintler2]

[the_last_name_left]

I don't know why the precautionary principle is so hard to grasp...........

[Jeff]

Two stories:

Methane Bubbling Up From Undersea Permafrost?

Mason Inman in San Francisco, California
for National Geographic News
December 19, 2008

The East Siberian Sea is bubbling with methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, being released from underwater reserves, according to a recent expedition by a Russian team.

This could be a sign that global warming is thawing underwater permafrost, which is releasing methane that has been locked away for many thousands of years.

If these methane emissions from the Arctic speed up, it could cause "really serious climate consequences," said study leader Igor Semiletov of the Pacific Oceanological Institute in Vladivostok, Russia.

Semiletov and colleagues have traveled along the Siberian coast—this year they covered 13,000 miles (22,000 kilometers)—while monitoring methane concentrations in the air and observing the seas.

"According to our data, more than 50 percent of the Arctic Siberian shelf is serving as a source of methane to the atmosphere," Semiletov said.

This vast shelf is about 750,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers)—about the same size as Greenland or Mexico—and about 80 percent of it is covered with permafrost, Semiletov said.

He presented the findings from his group at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week.

more at link


Arctic melt 20 years ahead of climate models

19 December 2008 by Devin Powell

Though scientists tend to agree that summer ice at the North Pole will eventually disappear, they haven't settled on a date. And one group now claims to have evidence that Santa may have to start swimming much sooner than we thought.

US researchers claim to have found evidence that accelerated melting has crossed a "tipping point" from which there is no going back.

The amount of summer ice at the North Pole has steadily declined since 1979, according to satellite images. Computer models predict that this trend will continue, leaving the Arctic completely ice-free as early as 2030.

In 2007, though, the ice surprised everyone by contracting far more rapidly than the models predicted. A particularly warm summer left only 4.28 million square kilometres by September - a record 23% below the previous minimum.

ccelerated ice loss

At the time, researchers including Mark Serreze of National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado claimed that the Arctic had reached a "tipping point" - a dramatic and irreversible slide towards ice-free conditions.

As the summer melting season finished up this year, they waited with bated breath to see how much, if any, ice would survive.

4.67 million square kilometres remained at the end of September. A positive interpretation says that the Arctic defied the apocalyptic prophecies by recovering slightly, thanks to a pattern of colder and windier weather.

But Serreze is sticking to the idea that we have reached a point of no return.

"If you look over the past five years, you see an acceleration of ice loss," says Serreze. Though 2008 did not beat the record set by 2007, it is still the second-lowest amount on record, below the record lows of 2002 and 2005.

He and his colleagues, speaking at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week, presented new evidence for a mechanism driving this acceleration.
Dramatic changes

During the summer, as ice melts, it is replaced by dark ocean waters that absorb heat. When the cooler winter weather arrives, the oceans release this warmth, creating a pocket of higher temperatures above the Arctic that slows down the regrowth of sea ice during the winter.

By measuring the air temperature directly over the Arctic after the end of the summer melt, Serreze found a large amount of released heat. Temperatures in areas losing ice were as much as 5 °C higher over the last four years as compared to the historic average.

The computer models predict this "Arctic acceleration," says Serreze but 20 years into the future. "The models are giving us the big picture of what is going on, but it's all happening much faster than expected," he says.

This change may already be irreversible, as the extra heat creates a runaway thinning of ice that will soon be unable to survive in the summer Sun. If it disappears entirely during the summers, the ramifications would be global.

"The Arctic is the heat sink of the Northern hemisphere; the circulation patterns of the oceans could change dramatically," says Serreze.

What's more, the effects from this rush of heat seem to already be bleeding out into neighbouring Alaska and Siberia.

more at link

[brainpanhandler]

U.S. Climate Change Science Program final report for 2008

see: Chapter 5: Potential for Abrupt Changes in Atmospheric Methane [1.3 Mb]

[brainpanhandler]

[brainpanhandler]

NASA Sea Ice 2008 video


NASA Data Show Arctic Saw Fastest August Sea Ice Retreat on Record

Following a record-breaking season of arctic sea ice decline in 2007, NASA scientists have kept a close watch on the 2008 melt season. Although the melt season did not break the record for ice loss, NASA data are showing that for a four-week period in August 2008, sea ice melted faster during that period than ever before.

Each year at the end of summer, sea ice in the Arctic melts to reach its annual minimum. Ice that remains, or "perennial ice," has survived from year to year and contains old, thick ice. The area of arctic sea ice, including perennial and seasonal ice, has taken a hit in past years as melt has accelerated. Researchers believe that if the rate of decline continues, all arctic sea ice could be gone within the century.

"I was not expecting that ice cover at the end of summer this year would be as bad as 2007 because winter ice cover was almost normal," said Joey Comiso of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We saw a lot of cooling in the Arctic that we believe was associated with La Niña. Sea ice in Canada had recovered and even expanded in the Bering Sea and Baffin Bay. Overall, sea ice recovered to almost average levels. That was a good sign that this year might not be as bad as last year."

The 2008 sea ice minimum was second to 2007 for the record-lowest extent of sea ice, according to a joint announcement Sept. 16 by NASA and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo. As of Sept. 12, 2008, the ice extent was 1.74 million square miles. That's 0.86 million square miles below the average minimum extent recorded from 1979 to 2000, according to NSIDC.

Contributing to the near-record sea ice minimum in 2008 was a month-long period in the summer that saw the fastest-ever rate of seasonal retreat during that period. From August 1 to August 31, NASA data show that arctic sea ice extent declined at a rate of 32,700 square miles per day, compared to a rate of about 24,400 square miles per day in August 2007. Since measurements began, the arctic sea ice extent has declined at an average rate of 19,700 miles per day at the point when the extent reaches its annual minimum.

Observations of changes to sea ice over time are possible due to a 30-year record of data from NASA and other agency satellites, including Nimbus-7, Aqua, Terra and the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat).

Researchers say that the recent seasonal acceleration could be in part due to conditioning going on in the Arctic. For example, research by Jennifer Kay of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and colleagues reported this April in Geophysical Research Letters that reduced cloud cover in 2007 allowed more sunlight to reach Earth, contributing to a measureable amount of sea ice melt at the surface. Reduced cloud cover also contributed to warmer ocean surface temperatures that led to melting of the ice from below.

"Based on what we've learned over the last 30 years, we know that the perennial ice cover is now in trouble," Comiso said. "You need more than just one winter of cooling for the ice to recover to the average extent observed since the measurements began. But the trend is going the other way. A warming Arctic causes the surface water to get warmer, which delays the onset of freeze up in the winter and leads to a shorter period of ice growth. Without the chance to thicken, sea ice becomes thinner and more vulnerable to continued melt."

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/featur ... e_min.html

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Warming in Antarctica Looks Certain

By KENNETH CHANG
Published: January 21, 2009


An illustration that depicts the warming that scientists have determined has occurred in West Antarctica during the last 50 years.
The dark red shows the area that has warmed the most.

Antarctica is warming.

That is the conclusion of scientists analyzing half a century of temperatures on the continent, and the findings may help resolve a climate enigma at the bottom of the planet. While some regions of Antarctica, particularly the peninsula the stretches toward South America, have warmed rapidly in recent decades, weather stations including the one at the South Pole have recorded a cooling trend. That ran counter to the forecasts of computer climate models, and global warming skeptics have pointed to Antarctica in questioning the reliability of the models.

In the new study, scientists took into account satellite measurements to interpolate temperatures in the vast areas between the sparse weather stations.

“We now see warming is taking place on all seven of the earth’s continents in accord with what models predict as a response to greenhouse gases,” said Eric J. Steig, a professor of space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle and the lead author of a paper appearing Thursday in the journal Nature.

“We’re highly confident our calculation is very good,” Dr. Steig said.

Because of the climate record is still short, more work needs to be done to determine how much of the warming results from natural climate swings and how much from the warming effects of carbon dioxide released by the burning of fossil fuels, Dr. Steig said. He and another author, Drew T. Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, presented the findings at a news conference on Wednesday.

From 1957 through 2006, temperatures across Antarctica rose an average of 0.18 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, comparable to the warming that has been measured globally. In West Antarctica, where the base of some large ice sheets lies below sea level, the warming was even more pronounced, at 0.3 degrees per Fahrenheit. In East Antarctica, where temperatures had been believed to be falling, the researchers found a slight warming over the 50-year period. With the uncertainties, East Antarctica may have indeed been cooling, but the rise in temperatures in the west more than offset any cooling. The average temperature for Antarctica is about minus 58 degrees.

“There is very convincing evidence in this work of warming over West Antarctica,” said Andrew Monaghan, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who was not involved with the research reported in Nature. As with earlier studies, the scientists found that temperatures had cooled in East Antarctica since the late 1970s, a phenomenon that many atmospheric scientists attribute to emissions of chloroflurocarbons, a family of chemicals used as coolants that destroyed high-altitude ozone. Those chemicals have since been phased out, the ozone hole is expected to heal, and the cooling trend may reverse.

The region of East Antarctica, which includes the South Pole, is at much higher elevation and extends farther north than West Antarctica. The Transantarctic Mountains separate the two. While the scientists said the ozone hole most likely had a significant influence on Antarctic temperatures, other factors, including sea ice and greenhouse gases, may play a larger role.

“Obviously the situation is complex, resulting from a combination of man-made factors and natural variability,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton, who was not involved in the research. “But the idea of a long-term cooling is pretty clearly debunked.”

Dr. Monaghan, who had not detected the rapid warming of West Antarctica in an earlier study, said the new study had “spurred me to take another look at ours — I’ve since gone back and included additional records.” That reanalysis, which used somewhat different techniques and assumptions, has not yet been published, but he presented his revised findings last month at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

“The results I get are very similar to his,” Dr. Monaghan said.

Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/scien ... .html?_r=1

[Joe Hillshoist]

Here come the shuggoths.

[brainpanhandler]

bump

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Global warming 'underestimated'

The severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed, a leading climate scientist has warned.

Professor Chris Field, an author of a 2007 landmark report on climate change, said future temperatures "will be beyond anything" predicted. Prof Field said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had underestimated the rate of change. He said warming is likely to cause more environmental damage than forecast.

Speaking at the American Science conference in Chicago, Prof Field said fresh data showed greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2007 increased far more rapidly than expected.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously in climate policy," he said. Prof Field said the 2007 report, which predicted temperature rises between 1.1C and 6.4C over the next century, seriously underestimated the scale of the problem. He said the increases in carbon dioxide have been caused, principally, by the burning of coal for electric power in India and China.

Wildfires

Prof Field said the impact on temperatures is as yet unknown, but warming is likely to accelerate at a much faster pace and cause more environmental damage than had been predicted. He says that a warming planet will dry out forests in tropical areas making them much more likely to suffer from wildfires. The rising temperatures could also speed up the melting of the permafrost, vastly increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, Prof Field warns. "Without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought," he said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7890988.stm