SciTech

Cold As Ice!

pO157.

Posted to SciTech on Sat Sep 01, 2007 at 03:20:09 PM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.

Global Climate Change is shrinking the Arctic ice at an unprecedented rate. This year its summer ice area was reduced to a record of under five million square kilometers.

Residents of the West Coast in Norway are no longer able to race their snow scooters, and the fjords are beginning to be ice free year round. The problem is not just confined to Norway. Last week, an ice sheet the size of Louisiana simply vanished -- thousands of square miles of ice suddenly lost. Projections indicate that the temperatures in the Arctic will increase 3.5 to 6 degrees Celsius by 2050, a major problem for local inhabitants and wildlife. In fact, recent activity has been called "The Perfect Melt ,"which is pretty impressive when you consider the immense size of it all.

It is not all bad news. Increased melting of the Arctic has allowed icebreakers and naval vessels into the waters to map the sea floor surface below. The Chukchi Cap may contain up to 25% of the world's oil and fuel resources but has so far been unavailable to exploitation due to the thick ice above it. If the rate of melting continues, by 2040 it will be completely uncovered during the summer as all of the Arctic will be unfrozen. Of course, this will be bad for its current residents.

Tags: edited by Port1080, written by pO157, global warming, Foreigner (all tags)

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6

What's Different This Year

Shy Elf.

Thu Sep 06, 2007 at 05:48:13 AM EST

5.00 (interesting)

Arctic sea ice extent is defined to be the area of ocean in the Northern Hemisphere with greater than 15% surface ice in a satellite photo cell.  Arctic sea ice area is the area of the ice in such cells.  The reason sea ice extent is often used instead of sea ice area is that it is less susceptible to instrument calibration errors and variations in the amount of water ponding on top of ice.

With this in mind, let's take a look at the average sea ice extent for the entire month of August since we started getting good data on this in 1979.  We see that this measure has been setting a new low every five years or so.  However, this year is still greatly different from usual, with what appears to my eye to be about a 3.5 sigma variation from a straight line decline.

Another telling graph is the departure from the average sea ice area for the day of the year, which also clearly shows that the recent decline is unprecedented, and has markedly accelerated.

One of the major reasons people watch sea ice concentrations closely is that it has been mentioned as a possible climate tipping point.  Ice reflects much more light than water, which is of course why it is white, and why the ocean is dark.  It also emits much more infrared radiation than water.  The result is that the less sea ice there is, the more heat the ocean absorbs from the sun, and the less it emits back to space.  This in turn makes the ocean warmer, which means it has less sea ice, which makes it warmer, and so on.  If the feedback is strong enough to go on until you are mostly out of ice, you have a climate tipping point, and the climate can change permanently very quickly.

So what do models say will happen from here on out?  There's a good blog article about that here.  It focuses on the CCSM3 model which has some ensemble outliers which nearly match this year's melt, which appears to rule out a match to most of the other models.  This model appears to not have a tipping point for arctic sea ice area, but not to be far from having one either.

The treeline in the arctic is heavily dependent on the summer temperature, and any increase in summer temperature will likely move the treeline north, resulting in even more light absorption, as less snow and more trees will be visible.  None of these models take this into account.

Further reading at National Snow and Ice Data Center and The Cryosphere Today.

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Re: What's Different This Year

zyxwvutsr.

Thu Sep 06, 2007 at 09:52:42 PM EST

4.00 (interesting)

The treeline in the arctic is heavily dependent on the summer temperature, and any increase in summer temperature will likely move the treeline north, resulting in even more light absorption, as less snow and more trees will be visible.  None of these models take this into account
I'd like to see some research results that suggest a north-moving tree line is even remotely possible in the short term, i.e., less than a century. Not only do trees grow very slowly, but there has to be adequate and suitable soil in which they may grow.

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Re: What's Different This Year

Shy Elf.

Fri Sep 07, 2007 at 01:56:24 PM EST

5.00 (brilliant)

See here sections 10-14, and here for an article on its significance.  As to trees needing adequate soil, from here I quote, "This contrasts with the general rule that bare mineral soil surface provide favourable seed beds for wind-mediated tree seeds, mainly because competition with dwarf shrubs or grass vegetation is absent or reduced."  In other words, trees are MORE likely to succeed where there is no soil.

The treeline can move, and has in some areas of the Arctic by having krummholz bushes grow into trees, without any new plants growing  For example, here are mountain hemlocks grown in different climates.

Finally, a complete response probably DOES take about 200 years, but this means that the vegetation is still responding to the Little Ice Age starting to end around 1850.

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great

DEMachina.

Sun Sep 02, 2007 at 08:43:08 PM EST

4.00 (astute)

It is not all bad news. Increased melting of the Arctic has allowed icebreakers and naval vessels into the waters to map the sea floor surface below. The Chukchi Cap may contain up to 25% of the world's oil and fuel resources but has so far been unavailable to exploitation due to the thick ice above it. If the rate of melting continues, by 2040 it will be completely uncovered during the summer as all of the Arctic will be unfrozen.

Just we we need: another excuse to drill for more oil.  Which will cause more greenhouse gases, and more ice to melt, uncovering more oil reserves, etc.  I don't really think you can say that it's not all bad news.

Q: What do you think of western civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

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Re: great

pO157.

Mon Sep 03, 2007 at 09:35:55 AM EST

none

I think some oil companies should add the passage above to their annual report to shareholders about the positive effects of carbon emissions. Sort of along the lines of "Burning oil and gas creates a positive feedback loop that leads to... More Oil!"

Spread it on!

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Contingency plan

port1080.

Mon Sep 03, 2007 at 10:31:44 PM EST

none

So, setting aside whether we can do anything about global warming at this point (maybe we can, maybe we can't, maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't), it seems pretty likely that we won't do anything until it's too late. Even if Kyoto is miraculously fully implemented, even its architects never claimed it to be more than a most politically feasible stop-gap that was designed to get the ball rolling towards more ambitious efforts. Now it looks like those ambitious efforts are probably a pipe dream. Even if North American & European nations get their collective acts together, China, Pakistan, India, and Southeast Asia are where manufacturing is moving and there is little or no political will in those countries to do anything to reduce pollution. So, climate change is coming. What are the realistic plans we should be making? Who will be the winners, who will be the losers? If I was a speculator looking for the really long term, I think I'd be buying up property in northern Canada right now....

Ce n'est pas une pipe. C'est une signature.

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Re: Contingency plan

pO157.

Tue Sep 04, 2007 at 08:45:51 AM EST

none

As everybody has pointed out the developing and 3rd world countries really have no incentive to stop using coal and cheap power. Unfortunately, they will likely be disproportionately affected by the changes so that sucks. Globally there is no will globally to cut down on pollution to meaningful levels, and even if we did it would take a bit to reverse all of the damage already caused.

So what do we do? Hold on, and enjoy the ride, I suppose. The thing that scares me personally is that a lot of the really crazy shit is not supposed to happen until I am old and feeble, and temperature extremes and old age does not go well together. The only good thing is that changes will not happen all of a sudden like that retarded "Day After Tomorrow" movie, so perhaps we have time to get used to it and adapt.

I would also consider seeing Europe while you still can before it becomes Cold As Ice!

Spread it on!

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Regional Climate Projections

Shy Elf.

Thu Sep 06, 2007 at 02:22:53 AM EST

none

     The credibility of our current regional climate models has dropped greatly recently, but here are a good short summary and a good long summary of their results.

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Re: Regional Climate Projections

pO157.

Thu Sep 06, 2007 at 08:37:48 PM EST

none

So are you saying just the regional models are faulty, but the overall interpretation of the data is fine, or the whole global climate change idea is whack? From Comment #6 I imagine you are saying you believe the overall interpretation of the global data, but the tools used to interpret it need some reworking. Or am I misreading your informative posts?

Spread it on!

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Re: Regional Climate Projections

Shy Elf.

Fri Sep 07, 2007 at 09:12:30 AM EST

5.00 (informative, brilliant)

Yes, anthropogenic global warming is sizable and real, and most of our climate models need to be seriously reworked.  

Greenhouse gasses create a heat flux at the surface, and this can only be balanced by storing the heat in the ocean, melting ice with the heat, or by raising the surface temperature until the extra heat is radiated into space.  Currently, ice melting is negligible (at least in comparison to the heat budget), and about half the greenhouse heat flux is stored in the ocean, which means that equilibrium greenhouse warming for today's levels of greenhouse gasses will be roughly twice what it is today, and that's before adding additional forcing from albedo feedback from melting arctic ice.

This conclusion is robust regardless of the model used, though different models have different cloud effects which give different numbers for the size of the warming.  The average global outgoing IR radiation must balance the increased heat flux, so the area integral of  the fourth power of temperature must increase by a certain amount, and this is usually simplified to talk about the global average temperature.  The problem is that heat storage in the ocean isn't constant with time, and neither is global heat transfer, so the actual effects for particular regions can be rather strange.  As an example, take the instrumental temperature record for Alaska which is clearly a step function temperature change in 1977.

Climate models don't just calculate from basic physical laws, but use phenomenological rules verified over time.  This of course can create problems if you go outside the range of parameters where those rules are valid.  As an example of this, hurricanes are too small to be represented in the current models, and as a result the mixing caused by them is replaced by a constant factor called background mixing, which clearly will lead to too little mixing when hurricane strengths increase.

Most of the current climate models have a serious problem with not enough internal climate variability over mulit-decadal time-scales.  They can't produce the constant drop of the salinity of the North Atlantic from the start of good measurements in the 1950s until 2004 (at least with the right size).  They can't produce the 80% drop in deep water production in the Antarctic in the past 50 years or so compared to what it must have been over the past few centuries  They can't produce the huge annual variations in the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation that we've been able to measure recently now that we have fixed buoys recently placed and constantly measuring it.  And, glaringly, most of them can't ever produce the >15% drop in sea ice extent this year from the previous record.

The coupled sea-ocean models are really just need a few tweaks, and one of them actually produced a chance of the sea ice extent drop, but they still suffer from a lack of a good long observation record for model validation.  The glacier models really are just a wild guess and most glaciologists aren't particularly confident that they aren't off by nearly an order of magnitude and believe that there's at least a very small chance that the global ocean rise over the next century could be 2-4 meters.  In addition to the coastal flooding, This would cause a huge shift in ocean circulations.

What people actually want isn't so much a climate forecast of the average temperature and rainfall at their location over many runs of a climate model with the correct forcing, but the significantly different numbers of what the average temperature and rainfall are likely to be for the next 1, 5, 10 and 30 years, given current conditions of a PDO positive phase since 1977 and very high arctic thermohaline circulation since 2004, etc., etc.

So, be confident that the Earth will be warmer.  As the years go by and we keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere faster and faster, the chances are that almost all locations will be warmer.  The temperate rain belt seems to shift towards the poles in just about every model.  Other than that, the models' climate projections are more likely than not, but I'm not going to feel very confident in them until the models get tweaked again.

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