Monday, March 16, 2009

Summer Sea Ice Gone in 2013

This is one report that we must listen to. He is saying this directly in the face of what has been a very cold winter that has certainly chilled my enthusiasm for an ice free 2012 or 2013. Recall that I said exactly the same thing as the 2007 accelerated melt unfolded. My argument was a response to the expected acceleration of the ice loss and the recognition that the decades long linear model then championed was wrong headed.

The real test will be this year’s melt. Again we will be watching closely and my expectations are very low. We will now see.

The losses he is recognizing is attributable to the last of the melt phase of 2007. The reversal that took place right after should have jump started fresh sea ice accumulation this winter in particular. We are getting our assess kicked and it should be apparent by a rise in the long term ice this summer. A few summers of that and we will be right back to where we started.

Of course, sunspot cycle 24 may well kick in with a vengeance in 2010 and the global response may be quick enough to put it all back on track.

Arctic Summer Ice Could Vanish By 2013: Expert

http://www.independent-bangladesh.com/environment-news/arctic-summer-ice-could-vanish-by-2013-expert.html


Sunday, 08 March 2009

The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on Thursday.

Warwick Vincent, director of the Center for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", which call for an ice free summer in 2013.
The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong -- each year we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected," he told Reuters.

The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and the sea ice cover shrank to a record low in 2007 before growing slightly in 2008.

In 2004 a major international panel forecast the cover could vanish by 2100. Last December, some experts said the summer ice could go in the next 10 or 20 years.

If the ice cover disappears, it could have major consequences. Shipping companies are already musing about short cuts through the Arctic, which also contains enormous reserves of oil and natural gas.

Vincent's scientific team has spent the last 10 summers on Ward Hunt Island, a remote spot some 2,500 miles northwest of Ottawa.

"I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The extent of open water is something that we haven't experienced in the 10 years that I've been working up there," he said after making a presentation in the Canadian Parliament.

"We're losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much closer to reality."

In 2008 the maximum summer temperature on Ward Hunt hit 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to the usual 5 degrees. Last summer alone the five ice shelves along Ellesmere Island in Canada's Far North, which are more than 4,000 years old, shrunk by 23 percent.

Vincent told Reuters last September that it was clear some of the damage would be permanent and that the warming in the Arctic was a sign of what the rest of the world could expect. He struck a similarly gloomy note in his presentation.

"Some of this is unstoppable. We're in a train of events at the moment where there are changes taking place that we are unable to reverse, the loss of these ice shelves, for example," he said.

"But what we can do is slow down this process and we have to slow down this process because we need to buy more time. We simply don't have the technologies as a civilization to deal with this level of instability that is ahead of us."

7 comments:

acadie1755 said...

How can the Ice Shelves be 4000 to 4500 years old when they had collapse 40 years ago?

http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic38-3-174.pdf

arclein said...

I am also skeptical regarding the age of the northern Ice shelves, but I do not think anyone is in a rush to figure it out.

however, 3000 years ago the long and much warmer Bronze Age maximum ended and I find it optimistic to think that ice shelves were maintained throughout that.

The modest warm up that we have experienced over the past couple of decades has nicely eliminated some big chunks.

Maybe it can grow a lot faster than we think.

pvsheridan said...

This alarmist NONSENSE has run its course and they are in desparation mode, especially as it relates to their "polar bear" fairy tales. Get a load of their track record here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aIe9swvOqwIY

"sensor drift" How 'bout integrity-drift?

They missed ice the size of California? 193,000 square miles!!

Does anyone actually believe anything these alarmist fund-raisers have to say? By definition they cannot be trusted, period. Can you image the media/political outcry if the lie was the other-way-round?

And, as you might expect, NSIDC avoids like-the-plague the FACT that Antartic ice is increasing dramatically, AND the fundraisers have no cogent explanation.

So, they now just hype the Arctic/north . . . but watch 2009 . . . the ice there will ALSO increase WHILE atmospheric CO2 continues to increase . . . because there is no positive correlation. But remember, no matter which way the true data goes, humans did it:

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/sea_ice.html

Get a load of this hysteria:

http://www.slate.com/id/2192730/

When the ice decreases it's bad AND humans did it. When the ice increases it's bad and . . . humans did it . . . again:

Does anyone actually believe anything these alarmist fund-raisers have to say? Reasonable people do not, and those truly concerned about the environment do not. Vincent and the Freedom's Phoenix blogger need to get-a-life!

pvsheridan said...

Ah, the goo "Comment moderation has been enabled. All comments must be approved by the blog author." is no more than censorship, correct?

arclein said...

everyone has seen usenet smashed into the ground by undiscliplined ranting and spam mail. I first participated on usenet in the very early nineties so got a ringside seat.

therefore i reserve the right to make sure we stay on topic in particular.

after all that, you are quite right to observe that the dialogue over global warming ended some time ago. We now have ranting and this is driving out any real participants.

Tomorrow i post on the successful application of chaos theory to climate modeling. this will certainly pull the scientific community out of the fringe aspects of this debate.

acadie1755 said...

Why it is call Summer Ice? Hummm.

arclein said...

A large amount of multiyear survives through the summer into the next winter. This has been eroded by a warming Arctic over the past twenty years at least.

The real shocker was to discover that the ice had lost 60% of thickness since the last time it was measured in 1957 to 2000 when next measured.

Any thoughtful calculation showed that collapse was much closer than ever thought and that any warming at all could blow it all out as soon as 2012. i was saying this before we got the very warm summer of 2007.

A combination of the right conditions two years in a row could still work. I am more inclined to think that we are going the other direction now, regardless of a return of the sunspots.