Mid July Sea Ice

As of the 15 July the sea ice looks generally weaker and we have weeks of melting left. There is no sign of any strong winds which would hugely shift much of this material.

On the other hand the prevalence of sixty percent coverage throughout is saying a lot.

http://www.socc.ca/cms/en/socc/seaIce/currentSeaIce.aspx


We have possibly another eight weeks of net melting to contend with and this looks like a lot of open areas are coming.

The western part of Lancaster Sound is still plugged, but this should go now. If all is similar to last year we should have an open North West Passage. That would be a remarkable three years straight. The message to shippers is that unless winter drops another half degree, this channel is open and likely open every year with a moderate risk of closing. In other words it is subject to bad weather.

We will not be sailing the north coast of Greenland yet but I think that opening up along the north coast of the Arctic islands is becoming possible with the right wind conditions.

In fact, this is showing us that we are on the last stage of the breakup of the Arctic sea ice pack. Nothing looks stable and there is now scant multiyear ice. A strong wind can reshape it all at will as surprisingly as 2007.

We are very much on schedule for essentially clear seas in 2012. Ice loss this year will be heavy and we can no longer expect any change over the next two. The sea ice will establish a new equilibrium between new winter ice and the summer melt out. Multi year ice will become insignificant and we will simply get a carry over from the past year that naturally rotates into warmer waters every year.

Early July Sea Ice

The july 1st sea ice map is out. See yesterday’s post for links. The Western Arctic is now showing broad deteriation as compared to two weeks ago. A blast of warming winds would hugely reduce this area as in 2007. In the meantime, I suspect the Russian Eastern Arctic is well along also.

We seem to have intact ice north of Greenland but that may be also as ephemeral as the ice of the Western Arctic of two weeks ago.

It is still a toss up to see if we have a third consecutive opening of the NorthWest Passage.

Rising Seas

As we have long since acknowledged, this past decade has been a warm decade in the run of things. The prior two decades showed a warming trend while this present decade saw that trend fully developed and a flattening out at its high. The past two years has seen precipitous decline suggesting that the warm decade may be over. This could be a response to the accelerated warming of 2007 or the commencement of a decadal downtrend and my bet is presently on the latter.

In the meantime, according to these reported numbers, we have added one inch or so to ocean over that period. That is too big to be a mistake so it gives us a magnitude for global response to a rise in temperature. According to this it has mostly come from the Greenland sheet which fits observations. It seems a bit rich, but is obviously not.

And yes, if this were to continue at this present temperature range it is plausible to anticipate an inch of rise per decade until the Greenland sheet is eliminated. Of course, Mother Nature is already signaling the opposite.

It seems though that two cold winters notwithstanding that the sea ice retreat is as quick as the past two years, suggesting that it takes a bit more than a simple drop in average temperatures. We also understand a bit better, reports of access during the Viking era. Once the bulk of the sea ice is reduced, the lower level remains quite stable in the face of colder weather.

That suggests that a simple repeat of 2007 every decade or so will progressively reduce the ice pack. It also suggests that historic conditions were a direct and unusual result of the little ice age itself and are not to be considered the natural default. So unless the little ice age comes back we can expect Greenland to get back in the dairy business and the Northwest Passage will continue to open every summer.

I suggest that we are living through the restoration of normal climatic conditions that will be similar to the medieval optimum and this will last until perhaps something goes bang in Alaska.

As an aside, the language of this item is intemperate at best and the numbers and claimed facts are been exaggerated right across the board. However 3.1 mm per year over a decade is a believable number since it is easy to construct accurate enough tidal gauges and the like in enough places to be so assured.

Oceans Rising Faster Than UN Forecast, Scientists Say (Update2)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=afmw1nT6inhA

By Alex Morales

June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Polar ice caps are melting faster and oceans are rising more than the United Nations projected just two years ago, 10 universities said in a report suggesting that climate change has been underestimated.

Global sea levels will climb a meter (39 inches) by 2100, 69 percent more than the most dire forecast made in 2007 by the UN’s climate panel, according to the study released today in Brussels. The forecast was based on new findings, including that Greenland’s ice sheet is losing 179 billion tons of ice a year.

“We have to act immediately and we have to act strongly,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told reporters in the Belgian capital. “Time is clearly running out.”

In six months, negotiators from 192 nations will meet in Copenhagen to broker a new treaty to fight global warming by limiting the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and clearing forests.
“A lukewarm agreement” in the Danish capital “is not only inexcusable, it would be reckless,” Schellnhuber said.

Fossil-fuel combustion in the world’s power plants, vehicles and heaters alone released 31.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, 1.8 percent more than in 2007, according to calculations from BP Plc data.

‘Rapid and Drastic’

The scientists today portrayed a more ominous scenario than outlined in 2007 by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which likewise blamed humans for global warming. “Rapid and drastic” cuts in the output of heat-trapping gases are needed to avert “serious climate impacts,” the report said.

The report called for coordinated, “rapid and sustained” global efforts to contain rising temperatures. Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, also in Brussels, told reporters that nations have to reverse the rising trend in emissions of heat-trapping gases.

“We need targets,” Rasmussen said. “All of us are moving toward the same ambitious goals.”

Scientists from institutions including Yale University, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge compiled the 39-page report from research carried out since 2005, the cutoff date for consideration by the IPCC for its forecasts published in November 2007.

Sea Levels

Ocean levels have been rising by 3.1 millimeters a year since 2000, a rate that’s predicted to grow, according to the study. The projections of sea levels rising by a meter this century compare with the 18 to 59 centimeters (7 to 23 inches) forecast by the IPCC.

“There are indications that rates of sea-level rise are higher than projected, and impacts like Arctic melting are more rapid,” Martin Parry, who supervised part of the UN panel’s 2007 study, said in a telephone interview. He wasn’t involved in writing the new report.

Oceans are warming 50 percent faster than the IPCC predicted and Arctic sea ice is disappearing more rapidly in summer -- exposing darker ocean that absorbs more heat, the study said.

The academics produced the study, “Climate Change --Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions,” by compiling research submitted to a conference in Copenhagen in March. They also drew from an October 2006 report into the economics of climate change by Nicholas Stern, then the U.K. government’s chief economist.

Doing-Nothing Cost

Stern’s study, which wasn’t included in the IPCC report, said that the cost of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change can be limited to 1 percent of economic output while doing nothing could lead to damage costing as much as 20 percent of the world’s gross domestic product.

“Greater near-term emissions lock us into greater climate change requiring greater costs from climate impacts and more investment in adaptation,” Stern wrote in today’s study. “Furthermore, they lead to a faster rate of climate change with greater challenges for adaptation.”

By 2050, when the global population will be an estimated 9 billion people, per-capita gas emissions will need to have fallen to about 2 tons a year, compared with levels as high as 20 tons a person currently in the U.S., the report proposed.

The University of Copenhagen coordinated the effort by the 10-school International Alliance of Research Universities. Other members include the University of California at Berkeley, Peking University, the Australian National University, ETH Zurich, the National University of Singapore and the University of Tokyo.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at:

amorales2@bloomberg.net.

ECO Sailors Rescued by Oil Tanker

Everyone loves irony and this tale has irony in spades. Why they chose to go to sea across the North Atlantic in April escapes me. The seas and winds are guaranteed to be awful. Most likely they faced a strenuous expedition to the peak of the ice cap pushing their schedule, and we can hope there is a well beaten path there, or this must be recorded as one of the more ill conceived adventures put together lately.

In the event, been rescued from folly by an oil tanker nicely reminds everyone that the oil industry is huge for a very good reason. The modern world uses a lot of energy and will continue to expand that use. Someone recently said that every American has the energy equivalent of over fifty human slaves working tirelessly for him.

There is no better description of the difference between modern and pre modern. It is a transition that the rest of the globe is also making.

We certainly have to replace oil, but it will not be by accepting less energy. It will be by producing huge amounts of new energy, and most of that will be grid energy now that the advent of the electric car is truly eminent.

And that is it isn’t it. 85,000,000 barrels of oil per day will be replaced and ultimately over the next three generations five times its energy equivalent will be built out in the form of mostly fusion and fission reactors. It is a great time to be in the power engineering business.

In the meantime, folks will go to sea in small boats with slim appreciation of the risks. And Mother Nature will remind them who the boss is at sea and with the ecology.

Eco-sailors rescued by oil tanker

An expedition team which set sail from Plymouth on a 5,000-mile carbon emission-free trip to Greenland have been rescued by an oil tanker.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/8034027.stm

Raoul Surcouf, Richard Spink and skipper Ben Stoddart sent a mayday because they feared for their safety amid winds of 68mph (109km/h).

All three are reportedly exhausted but safe on board the Overseas Yellowstone.

Mr Surcouf, 40, from Jersey, Mr Spink, 31, and Mr Stoddart, 43, from Bristol, are due to arrive in the USA on 8 May.

'Heartfelt thanks'

The team, which left Mount Batten Marina in Plymouth on 19 April in a boat named the Fleur, aimed to rely on sail, solar and man power on a 580-mile (933km/h) journey to and from the highest point of the Greenland ice cap.

The expedition was followed by up to 40 schools across the UK to promote climate change awareness.
But atrocious weather dogged their journey after 27 April, culminating with the rescue on 1 May after the boat was temporarily capsized three times by the wind.

In one incident Mr Stoddart hit his head and the wind generator and solar panels were ripped from the yacht.

Water was also getting into the boat from waves breaking over it and the crew took refuge in the forward cabin.

The crew were 400 miles (644km) off the west coast of Ireland when they sent a mayday to Falmouth coastguards who co-ordinated the rescue with Irish coastguards.

The transfer from the Fleur to Overseas Yellowstone was achieved in 42mph (67km/h) winds.

Mr Spink and Mr Surcouf were able to jump across to a rope ladder. But Mr Stoddart fell into the sea, was thrown a line by the crew and hauled aboard.

Team spokeswoman Jess Tombs said: "They are all overwhelmingly relieved to be safe.

"They would like to give heartfelt thanks to the coastguards for their professionalism as well as to the outstanding captain and crew of the Overseas Yellowstone."

Narwhal Migration

This is a neat item from England and gives us more insight into the life cycle of the Narwhal. This is one of those iconic creatures of the far north like the polar bear that by and large has been fairly unaffected by human encroachment. More likely they have been helped by human hunting of their competition.

What is interesting is their ability to migrate through the ice in the face of the obvious and apparent dangers. They pull it off year after year.

The Arctic is a harsh environment but is a lot less fragile than some let on.

In fact, the waters are teeming with sea life on a scale with the crest of the oceans. The barrenness of the land is that of the desert that it is. I do not have to go to the Arctic to locate such deserts.

Until the globe warms up to the top end of the Holocene temperature range and stabilizes there with only modest variation, the arctic will hang on to its summer ice pack. This does not need to be and will change once we reforest the Sahara back to conditions prevalent during the Bronze Age.
Narwhals filmed for first time on migration

Narwhals, known as ice unicorns for their long tusks, have been filmed for the first time as they make their treacherous migrating along the cracks in the Arctic sea ice.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/4547325/Narwhals-filmed-for-first-time-on-migration.html

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 9:13PM GMT 07 Feb 2009

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01291/narwhales_1291644c.jpg

The treacherous journeys made by narwhals have been witnessed for the first time Photo: PAUL NICKLEN/BBC

These unusual whales are rarely glimpsed in the fleeting moments they break through the ice that covers their underwater world.

But spectacular aerial footage captured by the BBC shows how the gruops of narwhal, with tusks up to eight feet long, crowd their way through narrow gaps between the ice sheets as they attempt a dangerous spring migration in the search for food.

It comes as new research is also revealing how these rare and strange-looking mammals are under threat from changing conditions in the Arctic.

Scientists studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic have concluded that narwhals are even more vulnerable than polar bears, which rely upon the ice to hunt. They claim that without the ice to shelter them, narwhals will become more vulnerable to predators and competition from other whales.

"Narwhal need predictable conditions so they can time their migration right and get to their food sources at the right time," added Dr Kristen Laidre, a polar biologist who is carrying out the research on narwhal at University of Washington. "They are really very specialised animals that have adapted to live amid the ice, so if the ecology of the Arctic changes then it can impact on the whole food chain.

"The areas they are found are extremely remote, so they are difficult to study. We still don't know how they manage to find open water within the ice. Each year the ice breaks up in different ways, but they time their migration at the right moment."

The narwhals, which feature in the first programme of the BBC's latest natural history series Nature's Great Events, were filmed during their annual migration north from the west coast of Greenland to their summer feeding grounds in the fjords and bays beyond Lancaster Sound.

They form the vanguard of animals to migrate north as rising spring temperatures and winds start to break up the vast stretches of sea ice that form in the Arctic Circle during the freezing winter months.

The film captures the thousands of narwhals as they make the annual trip along thin channels in the ice in the ice in groups of 20 or 30, all swimming in perfect unison as they surface for air.

Occasionally channels close up and the narwhals have to swim to find openings in the ice further along their route or they will drown. The animals can also become trapped if the ice sheets close up above them and the narwhals have to break through thin sections of the ice in order to breathe.

To get the footage film crews had to travel 30 miles out on the sea ice while it was starting to break up.

Justin Anderson, producer of the programme that follows the springtime melting of the Arctic ice sheets, said it took three weeks before they found the elusive whales.

He said: "The location is very remote and the ice was breaking up all the time around the film crew.

"When you see them, it is hard to believe they are real – they seem almost mystical as if they have come straight from some kind of fantasy world."

Narwhal tusks are thought to be the inspiration for the legend of unicorns and they can fetch thousands of pounds. Queen Elizabeth I is said to have paid a fortune for a narwhal tusk which she used as a sceptre.

Only male narwhals have tusks and they were originally thought to be used in "fencing" as males competed for mates. Recent research, however, has suggested the tusks could also act as some sort of super-sensory organ that allows them to detect changes in water temperature and salinity.

Nature's Great Events follows six periods of dramatic seasonal change in different parts of the world, including the salmon run in north America, flooding on the Kalahari and shoals of sardines up to 15 miles long migrating off the coast of South Africa.

In one heart-rending scene, a pride of hungry lions in Africa's Kalahari attack and kill a baby elephant in broad daylight. Such behaviour is considered to be extremely rare and it is the first time such an attack has been filmed.

Although lions are known to attack elephants, they usually do it under cover of darkness when the elephants are unable to see. It is thought that some prides are adapting to increasingly difficult conditions in their habitats to hunt bigger and more difficult prey.

Chris Carbone, a carnivore ecologist at the Zoological Society of London, said: "Lions do occasionally hunt really big prey that weigh up to one tonne, but that is pretty unsusual. They usually stick to zebra and wilderbeast that can weigh up to 200kg. With a social species like elephant, the adults will try to protect the young so it is a big risk. But lions are very adaptable and there are lions that specialise in hunting giraffe."

Nature's Great Events will begin on Wednesday 11 February on BBC One at 9pm.

Narwhal Facts

Weight: up to 3,500lbs

Length: up to 15.5 feet

Ivory tusk: Actually a left front tooth that grows to 8ft

Population: up to 80,000

Dive more than 3,000 feet

Feed on arctic cod and squid

Related to other toothed whales such as orca and sperm whales

Ice Age Climate Interpretation

The Vostok Ice Core (last friday's post) opens the door to additional hypothesis that we will now entertain. I have already dealt extensively on this blog with the idea that the Holocene was initiated by a thirty degree shift in the Earth’s crust along a line from the North Pole to the Center of Hudson’s Bay. We go further and surmise that the evidence also supports a directed asteroid impact as the trigger. The evidence for both is extensive and strongly conforming. I still do not expect you to accept these ideas as with the exception of Einstein and a few others over the past sixty years, I am perhaps the only real champion.

You will discover that if you start mapping the known extent of ice flows, that all the conflicts disappear that bedeviled the original acceptance of ice ages in the first place. We no longer need to pretend that ice flows will survive at sea level in temperate environments when we cannot make it happen in the far north today. It is amazing how serious reservations are often forgotten in science because their champions die out. I personally have found that a fruitful source of new ideas.

Since we can comfortably separate out the Holocene as a special case, we can now look at the balance of the data as a very different regime. The Antarctic remained a polar continent surrounded by a continuous circumpolar current and wind system that separated its climate niche largely from the rest of the Earth. This too can be comfortably isolated from our considerations. At best, a small part of it had a climate like Norway’s as Atlantic warm waters partially penetrated the current providing excellent fishing grounds.

The Northern Hemisphere was a very different tale. The polar cap was intact for a million years as a direct result of the emergence of the Panama Isthmus that blocked the interchange of waters between the Atlantic and the Pacific and thus dumping heat into the Arctic. I would go even further. Prior to this closure the heat flow was possibly large enough to keep the North ice free and possibly strong enough to reduce the Southern Ice Cap. Applying our climate modeling programs would be very interesting and the geological changes are well enough known to get a pretty good first estimate that can then be confirmed by direct investigation of sediments.

During the ice Age, the Atlantic heat flows were insufficient to much affect either cap even when the climate warmed up as happened several times as shown by the Vostok record. The ice retreated, but briefly. Sea levels rose, but only a few feet. Present day Greenland is a good example.

Even had the climate warmed and sustained itself as has in fact happened during the Holocene, the retreat would still have had minor impact as is the case today in Antarctica. What conceivable difference would a ten degree drop in global temperatures make to Antarctica? The same was true for the Northern Ice Cap.

This all means that with two polar ice caps, that the global temperature is ten degrees colder. From this we know that the presence of two polar ice caps will lower the sea level by three hundred feet. Also outside the vastly expanded coastal plains, we will have a far less stable climate regime that will rumble back and forth with as it impacts with shifting glaciation and ocean changes brought on by the rise and fall of sea ice supply.
The chart shows that there was never a stability zone even at the lower ranges. It likely hit its lows because ice flooded the oceans for a few years until it melted away and the ocean had a chance to recover.

Today, the only threat is the Antarctic and the currents and winds are set up to contain the events. Imagine the Ross Ice Shelf breaking up and flooding into the Atlantic over a few years. Such ice shelves existed and certainly flooded into the Atlantic during the ice age. Thus we have a convincing causation for the long climate shifts shown by the Vostok chart. Huge amounts of cold ice could get shifted all the way into equatorial regions chilling the surface waters and needing years to recover.

In fact looking at the chart it is easy to believe that I am looking at the trace of ice removal and this includes everything except as explanation for the sudden rapid warming that took place at least four times before the Holocene. In fact, I find it easy to create a narrative of explainable differences between the four apparent cycles. I will not bore you with it, but another question is immediately apparent. I need someone to figure out how to measure the area under the chart from low to low. If the result is very similar, it would be an excellent indicator that the periodicity of the peak event is excellent and may in fact be cosmological.

I recall grinding the raw ice core data from Greenland back in 1996 to confirm a Greenland climate shift 12900 years ago. We need to do something like that here. Actually summing the temperatures between the two points should be sufficient.

So what about the brief hot spots? There we have two possible explanations, one that I have already discussed at length. We may be on an orbit that brings us close to Sirius and its star group. The weakness with such an idea is that is demands a very precise periodicity in the orbit. The apparent periodicity is very close to been good enough to give credence to the idea which is why it has champions.

An investigation of comparable ice cores could refine the periodicity to a convincing level of precision. At least we know it should be done.

Then there is the excellent possibility that the sun simply gets hotter. There the periodicity is much rougher and we are likely still overdue. Such periodicity has been observed in the short term but not on the time scales we are looking for. Or it could also have been that the crust was deliberately shifted when the sun became warmer. Except that I simply do not think that the sun is warmer at all.

The bottom line is that we have a very consistent ice age climate chart with a periodic hot spot that is external to the ice age narrative and that is quickly subdued by the ice age. One way or the other, the hot spot is cosmological and it will not kill us, but may inconvenience us. The solar causation allows us to accept the dating regime as is and to wonder how soon. The orbital causation puts us thousands of years away but going in the right direction inward while strongly indicating that the time axis needs to be stretched for far time and shrunken for near time.

Us Geological Survey on Global Warming

This report was pieced together over the past two years and we can assume a strong bias toward the global warming orthodoxy. Even with that, this report is muted if this article is a sample of the best interpretation of the reports contents.

The statement is made that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing 48 cubic miles per year. How that is calculated with the slightest confidence escapes me. That it is no longer likely to be true does not.

More importantly, they are advising that greater volatility is to be anticipated. They likely could have got that from the geological record, because we have had pretty serious shift in climate over the millennia and cooling in particular has shown it to be sudden which is not true of warming.

Over the last eighteen months we have lost a global 0.7 degrees. Imagine this going on for another three years. That would be a total 2.8 degrees. That is a lot and it is abrupt. Yet three volcanoes going of in the tropics could do it nicely or perhaps one Volcano in Kamchatka could do it nicely for the Northern Hemisphere.

In fact, the Little Ice Age needs one nasty volcano. Our real problem is that there are so many to choose from out of Alaska.

Anyway, this report surely started with the global warming premise, so judge it accordingly.

"Faster Climate Change Feared"

... New Report Points to Accelerated Melting, Longer Drought

(Source: Washington Post, 12/25/08)

The United States faces the possibility of much more rapid climate change by the end of the century than previous studies have suggested, according to a new report led by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The survey -- which was commissioned by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and issued this month -- expands on the 2007 findings of the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change. Looking at factors such as rapid sea ice loss in the Arctic and prolonged drought in the Southwest, the new assessment suggests that earlier projections may have underestimated the climatic shifts that could take place by 2100.

However, the assessment also suggests that some other feared effects of global warming are not likely to occur by the end of the century, such as an abrupt release of methane from the seabed and permafrost or a shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation system that brings warm water north and colder water south. But the report projects an amount of potential sea level rise during that period that may be greater than what other researchers have anticipated, as well as a shift to a more arid climate pattern in the Southwest by mid-century.

Thirty-two scientists from federal and non-federal institutions contributed to the report, which took nearly two years to complete. The Climate Change Science Program, which was established in 1990, coordinates the climate research of 13 different federal agencies.

Tom Armstrong, senior adviser for global change programs at USGS, said the report "shows how quickly the information is advancing" on potential climate shifts. The prospect of abrupt climate change, he said, "is one of those things that keeps people up at night, because it's a low-probability but high-risk scenario. It's unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, but if it were to occur, it would be life-changing."

In one of the report's most worrisome findings, the agency estimates that in light of recent ice sheet melting, global sea level rise could be as much as four feet by 2100. The IPCC had projected a sea level rise of no more than 1.5 feet by that time, but satellite data over the past two years show the world's major ice sheets are melting much more rapidly than previously thought. The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are now losing an average of 48 cubic miles of ice a year, equivalent to twice the amount of ice that exists in the Alps.

Konrad Steffen, who directs the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder and was lead author on the report's chapter on ice sheets, said the models the IPCC used did not factor in some of the dynamics that scientists now understand about ice sheet melting. Among other things, Steffen and his collaborators have identified a process of "lubrication," in which warmer ocean water gets in underneath coastal ice sheets and accelerates melting.

"This has to be put into models," said Steffen, who organized a conference last summer in St. Petersburg, Russia, as part of an effort to develop more sophisticated ice sheet models. "What we predicted is sea level rise will be higher, but I have to be honest, we cannot model it for 2100 yet."

Still, Armstrong said the report "does take a step forward from where the IPCC was," especially in terms of ice sheet melting.

Scientists also looked at the prospect of prolonged drought over the next 100 years. They said it is impossible to determine yet whether human activity is responsible for the drought the Southwestern United States has experienced over the past decade, but every indication suggests the region will become consistently drier in the next several decades. Richard Seager, a senior research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that nearly all of the 24 computer models the group surveyed project the same climatic conditions for the North American Southwest, which includes Mexico.

"If the models are correct, it will transition in the coming years and decades to a more arid climate, and that transition is already underway," Seager said, adding that such conditions would probably include prolonged droughts lasting more than a decade.

The current models cover broad swaths of landscape, and Seager said scientists need to work on developing versions that can make projections on a much smaller scale. "That's what the water managers out there really need," he said. Current models "don't give them the hard numbers they need."

Armstrong said the need for "downscaled models" is one of the challenges facing the federal government, along with better coordination among agencies on the issue of climate change. When it comes to abrupt climate shifts, he said, "We need to be prepared to deal with it in terms of policymaking, keeping in mind it's a low-probability, high-risk scenario. That said, there are really no policies in place to deal with abrupt climate change."

Richard Moss, who directed the Climate Change Science Program's coordination office between 2000 and 2006 and now serves as vice president and managing director for climate change at the World Wildlife Fund-U.S., welcomed the new report but called it "way overdue."

"There is finally a greater flow of climate science from the administration," Moss said, noting that the report was originally scheduled to come out in the summer of 2007. "It really is showing the potential for abrupt climate change is real."

The report is reassuring, however, on the prospects for some potentially drastic effects -- such as a huge release of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas, that is now locked deep in the seabed and underneath the Arctic permafrost. That is unlikely to occur in the near future, the scientists said.

"It's unlikely that we're going to see an abrupt change in methane over the next hundred years, but we should worry about it over a longer time frame," said Ed Brook, the lead author of the methane chapter and a geosciences professor at Oregon State University. "All of these places where methane is stored are vulnerable to leaking."

By the end the century, Brook said, the amount of methane escaping from natural sources such as the Arctic tundra and waterlogged soils in warmer regions "could possibly double," but that would still be less than the current level of human-generated methane emissions. Over the course of the next thousand years, he added, methane hydrates stored deep in the seabed could be released: "Once you start melting there, you can't really take it back."

In the near term, Brook said, more precise monitoring of methane levels worldwide would give researchers a better sense of the risk of a bigger atmospheric release. "We don't know exactly how much methane is coming out all over the world," he said. "That's why monitoring is important."

While predictions remain uncertain, Steffen said cutting emissions linked to global warming represents one of the best strategies for averting catastrophic changes.

"We have to act very fast, by understanding better and by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, because it's a large-scale experiment that can get out of hand," Steffen said. "So we don't want that to happen."

Ice Age Denoument

As my long time readers are aware, I have taken a particular interest in the climatic history of the Holocene generally in order to establish historic drivers to the observed climatic variation. The millennia long Bronze Age climatic optimum has been of particular interest. During this period, it was observed that the Sahara was created by the destruction of a well vegetated ecosystem. This also coincides with a similar decline throughout the Middle East.

I pointed out that this was a heat capture system that explains the warmth of the Northern Hemisphere during this time and its loss explains the less optimal climate since.

It is also noted that the principal rise in sea levels from melt waters ended about seven thousand years ago, having lasted a total of perhaps seven thousand years. Other sources had suggested a much shorter melting time frame, so perhaps we should be a bit wary as yet in accepting the source that I am appending here. Those curves are way too smooth.

What I have not paid attention to yet is the last several thousands of years simply because it appears to be a minor variation as compared to the previous collapse. The fact is that there was plenty of land based ice up to perhaps four thousand years ago and this was reflected in the still substantial as compared to today, increase in sea level. It was about twice the current level of sea level increase.

This suggests that a lot of the original ice sheet lingered on the ground near sea level into the late Bronze Age. This surely kept the Arctic cold and possibly a large part of the present boreal forest at bay. In other words, present historical conditions in the high arctic are actually very new and only properly established in the past three thousand years or so.

This also suggests that the Bronze Age had an extra cooling engine in the arctic to offset the warmth coming out of the south. All this is much closer in time in terms of effect than I had anticipated and negates facile comparisons to those climatic conditions. It appears way more robust than anticipated.

It would be useful to do carbon 14 dating on bog trapped wood throughout the boreal forest to get an idea of just how long the forests have been present. I see no evidence that anyone has launched such a program anywhere, let alone in the more northerly regions. It would give us a time line on were and for how long surface ice lingered representing necessary input for the generation of climate models.

A derivative of this result is that during the climatic optimum of the Bronze Age, the Greenland ice sheet would have been far less vulnerable to change and that the sea ice would have remained largely intact. The medieval optimum was possibly the first real look at an ice free summer Arctic and that lasted for many decades. We can never prove it of course.









http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Holocene_Sea_Level_png

Image:Holocene Sea Level.png
From Global Warming

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Sea level rise since the last glacial episode


Sea level rise from direct measurements during the last 120 years

This figure shows changes in sea level during the Holocene, the time following the end of the most recent glacial period, based on data from Fleming et al. 1998, Fleming 2000, & Milne et al. 2005. These papers collected data from various reports and adjusted them for subsequent vertical geologic motions, primarily those associated with post-glacial continental and hydroisostatic rebound. The first refers to deformations caused by the weight of continental ice sheets pressing down on the land, the latter refers to uplift in coastal areas resulting from the increased weight of water associated with rising sea levels. It should be noted that because of the latter effect and associated uplift, many islands, especially in the Pacific, exhibited higher local sea levels in the mid Holocene than they do today. Uncertainty about the magnitude of these corrections is the dominant uncertainty in many measurements of Holocene scale sea level change.

The black curve is based on minimizing the sum of squares error weighted distance between this curve and the plotted data. It was constructed by adjusting a number of specified tie points, typically placed every 1 kyr and forced to go to 0 at the modern day. A small number of extreme outliers were dropped. It should be noted that some authors propose the existence of significant short-term fluctuations in sea level such that the sea level curve might oscillate up and down about this ~1 kyr mean state. Others dispute this and argue that sea level change has been a smooth and gradual process for essentially the entire length of the Holocene. Regardless of such putative fluctuations, evidence such as presented by Morhange et al. (2001) suggests that in the last 10 kyr sea level has never been higher than it is at present.

Copyright This figure was prepared by Robert A. Rohde from published data.


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References

[abstract] [DOI] Fleming, Kevin, Paul Johnston, Dan Zwartz, Yusuke Yokoyama, Kurt Lambeck and John Chappell (1998). "Refining the eustatic sea-level curve since the Last Glacial Maximum using far- and intermediate-field sites". Earth and Planetary Science Letters 163 (1-4): 327-342.
Fleming, Kevin Michael (2000). Glacial Rebound and Sea-level Change Constraints on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Australian National University. PhD Thesis.

[abstract] [DOI] Milne, Glenn A., Antony J. Long and Sophie E. Bassett (2005). "Modelling Holocene relative sea-level observations from the Caribbean and South America". Quaternary Science Reviews 24 (10-11): 1183-1202.

[abstract] [DOI] Morhange, C., J. Laborel, and A. Hesnard (2001). "Changes of relative sea level during the past 5000 years in the ancient harbor of Marseilles, Southern France". Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 166: 319-329.

CNRS enters more data on 2007 Arctic sea ice

This item just out is providing us with a good update on the hard data that is emerging around the rapid ice retreat of last summer. Those who have followed my postings know that I was a very early proponent of an accelerating ice collapse in the Arctic, simply because if we only assume a simple constant small heat imbalance year after year the results on the ground are not actually linear at all and must end with a collapse crisis.

Last year we got a really good look at what a collapse crisis will look like. The remaining question right now is if this last summer was brought on be a combination of several bits of bad luck getting us ahead of the curve or if the unusual collateral effects are merely results.

The reason that I ask this question is that last year the Arctic seemed to get more than its share of lower latitude’s warm air, sped along by a strong shifting of boreal winds. It now seems to be returning the favor by giving us lots of cold polar air this winter. Is this a new climate cycle? In other words, something has happened this past year that was both completely unexpected and not clearly understood.

It almost looks like an emergent heat pumping action that will draw surplus heat into the Arctic at a much stronger rate than in the past. All this suggests that the sea ice will continue to retreat at an even faster rate than in the past. In any event, current results are now strongly supporting a full disappearance of summer sea ice by 2012.

They are also quite right to point out that the summer of 2008 will be critical on every level. It will confirm specific new trends or even give us a sharp reversal. My own analysis really supports the thesis that we have now entered the final collapse phase of the perennial sea ice which is actually been accelerated by the specific onset of Arctic spring like conditions.

In fact my worst case scenario now would be to have a few very cold Arctic winters in which the ice loss is merely zero. However, at some point sooner or later, we will have a warm summer or two and the balance of the sea ice will be eliminated. And honestly, if this cold winter does not reward us with a significant reversal of last year’s decision, then it is really over as far as the long term perennial sea ice is concerned.

Once the summer sea ice properly clears every summer, the Greenland ice cap can now be expected to largely retreat slightly from the shoreline over the following century eventually stabilizing with quite a bit of mass loss. This will have a marginal effect on sea levels.

Arctic ice-cap loss twice the size of France: research

PARIS (AFP) — The Arctic ice cap has shrunk by an area twice the size of France's land mass over the last two years, the Paris-based National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said Wednesday.

"The year 2008 promises to be a critical year on every level," said Jean-Claude Gascard, the body's research director and coordinator of European scientific mission Damocles, which is monitoring the effects of climate change across the Arctic.

September 2007 measurements show ice covering 4.13 million square kilometres (1.6 million square miles), down from 5.3 million square kilometres in 2005.

"Melting could result in the loss of another million in one (2008) summer," he added at a press conference.

"Summer 2007 was marked by a major retreat in the ice-cap, one we were not anticipating," Gascard said. "The rate of decline is also two or three times faster than (observed) beforehand."

International models used to predict retreating ice have some "catching-up" to do, he said.

Over the last 20 years, 40 percent of the ice-cap has melted with the average thickness halved from three to 1.5 metres.

Year-round ice coverage has reduced, with summer melting also lasting longer, the centre reported.

The Damocles' exploration vessel Tara has been able to cross the 5,000-kilometre Arctic Ocean in just over 16 months -- less than half the time taken by a late 19th century Norwegian explorer.

Gascard said the ship had been able to travel at "twice the pace expected by organisers, and three times the speed models suggested".

Disruption to the thermal layers of atmosphere stacked over Earth's far north was cited as the principal cause by Swedish researchers earlier this month, in a study published in the journal Nature.

The Tara team recorded a temperature of 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) at altitudes between 500 and 1,000 metres.

"The reduction in the intensity of cold (temperatures) during winter over these last 20 years corresponds to an accumulation (rise) of 1,000 degrees Celsius," Gascard said.

The team highlighted the role of ocean currents, namely in the northern Pacific, behind warming of waters.

Gascard's research colleague, Gerard Ancellet, also spoke of recently-formed Arctic mist, pollution clouds which "trap" Earth's naturally-emitted infrared rays thereby raising temperatures.

"Internal" Arctic pollution is the source, Ancellet said, highlighting Russian and northern Scandinavian gas and oil exploitation.

Carbon dioxide emissions among the major north American, European and south-east Asian economies was not the only other factor, he added.

Shipping traffic with additional nitrogen oxide emissions is a growing complication, given he estimated that 25 percent of the increase in future maritime transport "will be confined to the Arctic zone".

In summer 2007, the Northwest Passage, historically an ice-jammed potential shortcut between Europe and Asia, was "fully navigable" for the first time since monitoring began in 1978, according to the European Space Agency.

It lasted five weeks, according to Canada's environment ministry, with 100 vessels getting through.

How come we never heard this? I assume that this was all small boats, but it would be nice to see a freighter make it through. Once the long term ice is really gone, the Arctic shipping season should be at least two months. Right now it is still a nasty speculation especially as how strongly this was effected by unusual winds in 2007.

Warming Arctic Surface Water

This article highlights an unexpected consequence of the clearing of sea ice from a huge expanse of surface water. The surface temperature climbs way more than expected because the wind has blown any pack ice far away. This was not so obvious in previous years simply because the open areas developed later and were much smaller.

This indicates that summer surface temperatures in the Arctic Ocean will climb to the same levels once full ice removal is possible and a decent summer season is established. This also suggests that a fair amount of moisture will find its way into the Arctic atmosphere increasing precipitation on the Greenland icecap. So while the edges of the cap will experience greater melting, the cap itself will be adding ice faster.

I used to have a copy of the raw ice core data from back in the nineties when they were not charging for it. I had it because I wanted to get a handle of the precise timing of the Pleistocene Nonconformity and even to confirm it was for real(it was). It now strikes me that that same data may be sensitive enough to pick up those time periods in which the Arctic was ice free in the summer. I hate hard drives.

Note also that a direct result of this is winter ice thicknesses dropping from an average of 80 centimeters to an average an average 25 centimeters thinner or about 55 centimeters. This is a huge effect and it alone means that the sea ice could clear even sooner next season allowing an even earlier attack on the perennial ice. We are clearly well past any tipping point because this is a cumulative effect that will happily clear out all the sea ice over the next several years.

For this process to properly reverse now, something radical has to change and permit a large chilling effect. And since that type of response takes a long time to set up, I suspect that we are in for a few centuries of warmer Arctic climate.

Without Ice Cap, Arctic Waters Warm To As Much As 5C Above Average

Written by The Naib

Record-breaking amounts of ice-free water have deprived the Arctic of more of its natural “sunscreen” than ever in recent summers. The effect is so pronounced that sea surface temperatures rose to 5 C above average in one place this year, a high never before observed, says the oceanographer who has compiled the first-ever look at average sea surface temperatures for the region.

Such superwarming of surface waters can affect how thick ice grows back in the winter, as well as its ability to withstand melting the next summer, according to Michael Steele, an oceanographer with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Indeed, since September, the end of summer in the Arctic, winter freeze-up in some areas is two months later than usual.

The extra ocean warming also might be contributing to some changes on land, such as previously unseen plant growth in the coastal Arctic tundra, if heat coming off the ocean during freeze-up is making its way over land, says Steele. (who incidentally is speaking Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco)

He is lead author of “Arctic Ocean surface warming trends over the past 100 years,” accepted for publication in AGU’s Geophysical Research Letters. Co-authors are physicist Wendy Ermold and research scientist Jinlun Zhang, both of the UW Applied Physics Laboratory. The work is funded by the National Science Foundation.

“Warming is particularly pronounced since 1995, and especially since 2000,” the authors write. The spot where waters were 5 C above average was in the region just north of the Chukchi Sea. The historical average temperature there is -1 C (the salt in ocean water keeps it liquid at temperatures that would cause fresh water to freeze). This year water in that area warmed to 4 C, for a 5-degree change from the average.

That general area, the part of the ocean north of Alaska and Eastern Siberia that includes the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea, experienced the greatest summer warming. Temperatures for that region were generally 3.5 C warmer than historical averages and 1.5 C warmer than the historical maximum.

Such widespread warming in those areas and elsewhere in the Arctic is probably the result of having increasing amounts of open water in the summer that readily absorb the sun’s rays, Steele says. Hard, white ice, on the other hand, can work as a kind of sunscreen for the waters below, reflecting rather than absorbing sunlight. The warming also may be partly caused by increasing amounts of warmer water coming from the Pacific Ocean, something scientists have noted in recent years.

The Arctic was primed for more open water since the early 1990s as the sea-ice cover has thinned, due to a warming atmosphere and more frequent strong winds sweeping ice out of the Arctic Ocean via Fram Strait into the Atlantic Ocean where the ice melts. The wind effect was particularly strong in the summer of 2007.

Now the situation could be self-perpetuating, Steele says. For example, he calculates that having more heat in surface waters in recent years means 23 to 30 inches less ice will grow in the winter than formed in 1965. Since sea ice typically grows about 80 inches in a winter, that is a significant fraction of ice that’s going missing, he says.

Then too, higher sea surface temperatures can delay the start of freeze-up because the extra heat must be discharged from the upper ocean before ice can form.

“The effect on net winter growth would probably be negligible for a delay of several weeks, but could be substantial for delays of several months,” the authors write. We are getting very close to the tipping point, or maybe we have already moved past it. Either way these continued warnings from the nations best scientists mean that we need to take much more drastic action, and soon. Without an immediate reduction in green house gas emission we are dooming ourselves to a world with a fever. If only our government could pull it’s head out of it’s ass long enough to realize this we might be alright. I suggest you call up your congress person and bitch at them till they hang up on you, do this every week or until we have change. If they keep voting the way you don’t like, vote for someone else who will vote the way you want.

Little Ice Age ending, Boreal Wind returns

Now that I am not the only voice saying that the perennial sea ice will disappear between five and seven years from now, I don't mind adding a couple more comments.

My first comment is to remind everyone that this effect that we are witnessing is easily explained by a constant surplus influx of warmth into the Arctic. In other words, the excess is likely the same for the past thirty years. It is just that its effect, now that perhaps 80 to 90 percent of the original perennial sea ice is gone, is now more visible and dramatic. We are now in the late collapse stage of this Arctic warming cycle.

My second comment is that this excess warmth will have a large effect on the northern climes once this perennial ice is removed. It will be reflected in a restoration of conditions of the Bronze Age and the warm Medieval period. This means a two degree jump in average temperatures for Scandinavia and the restoration of viticulture in Southern England. To say nothing of good pasture land in Greenland.

I also expect that the already changing boreal winds as reported recently by NASA will strongly reemerge and be restored to their medieval fame in legend and literature. Such winds will hit full stride in mid summer and be as predictable as the trade winds. They will obviously first clear out the winter ice before blowing strongly into Northern Europe.

My last comment is that no additional warmth from anywhere is needed at all. The century by century recovery from the Little Ice Age is progressing at much the same rate as always. And the advent of the first signs of the boreal winds these past two years can be properly used to demarcate the true end of the Little Ice Age. We are now transitioning into the a normal northern climate regime as experienced for centuries at a time in the past.

I am therefore proclaiming that the transition period 2006 - 2015 is now ending the Little Ice Age. I suppose we can call the next several hundred years the 'Ice Free Age"

Nasa wakes up and predicts 2012 as ice free

It is good to see someone else waking up to the fact that the Perennial Sea Ice will be gone by 2015 and as early as 2012. I have copied this report in CNN in its entirety since it is current and rather complete. They are also becoming more excited about it all than I am and I am inclined to let them do the cheer leading.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/12/11/arctic.melt.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

Dwindling sea ice is affecting wildlife.

Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

"The Arctic is screaming," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colorado.

Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

So scientists in recent days have been asking themselves these questions: Was the record melt seen all over the Arctic in 2007 a blip amid relentless and steady warming? Or has everything sped up to a new climate cycle that goes beyond the worst case scenarios presented by computer models?

"The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming," said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. "Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines."

It is the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that produces carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, responsible for man-made global warming. For the past several days, government diplomats have been debating in Bali, Indonesia, the outlines of a new climate treaty calling for tougher limits on these gases.

What happens in the Arctic has implications for the rest of the world. Faster melting there means eventual sea level rise and more immediate changes in winter weather because of less sea ice.

In the United States, a weakened Arctic blast moving south to collide with moist air from the Gulf of Mexico can mean less rain and snow in some areas, including the drought-stricken Southeast, said Michael MacCracken, a former federal climate scientist who now heads the nonprofit Climate Institute. Some regions, like Colorado, would likely get extra rain or snow.

More than 18 scientists told The AP that they were surprised by the level of ice melt this year.

"I don't pay much attention to one year ... but this year the change is so big, particularly in the Arctic sea ice, that you've got to stop and say, 'What is going on here?' You can't look away from what's happening here," said Waleed Abdalati, NASA's chief of cyrospheric sciences. "This is going to be a watershed year."

2007 shattered records for Arctic melt in the following ways:

552 billion tons of ice melted this summer from the Greenland ice sheet, according to preliminary satellite data to be released by NASA Wednesday. That's 15 percent more than the annual average summer melt, beating 2005's record.

A record amount of surface ice was lost over Greenland this year, 12 percent more than the previous worst year, 2005, according to data the University of Colorado released Monday. That's nearly quadruple the amount that melted just 15 years ago. It's an amount of water that could cover Washington, D.C., a half-mile deep, researchers calculated.

The surface area of summer sea ice floating in the Arctic Ocean this summer was nearly 23 percent below the previous record. The dwindling sea ice already has affected wildlife, with 6,000 walruses coming ashore in northwest Alaska in October for the first time in recorded history. Another first: the Northwest Passage was open to navigation.

Still to be released is NASA data showing the remaining Arctic sea ice to be unusually thin, another record. That makes it more likely to melt in future summers. Combining the shrinking area covered by sea ice with the new thinness of the remaining ice, scientists calculate that the overall volume of ice is half of 2004's total.

Alaska's frozen permafrost is warming, not quite thawing yet. But temperature measurements 66 feet deep in the frozen soil rose nearly four-tenths of a degree from 2006 to 2007, according to measurements from the University of Alaska. While that may not sound like much, "it's very significant," said University of Alaska professor Vladimir Romanovsky.

Greenland, in particular, is a significant bellwether. Most of its surface is covered by ice. If it completely melted -- something key scientists think would likely take centuries, not decades -- it could add more than 22 feet to the world's sea level.

However, for nearly the past 30 years, the data pattern of its ice sheet melt has zigzagged. A bad year, like 2005, would be followed by a couple of lesser years.

According to that pattern, 2007 shouldn't have been a major melt year, but it was, said Konrad Steffen, of the University of Colorado, which gathered the latest data.

"I'm quite concerned," he said. "Now I look at 2008. Will it be even warmer than the past year?"

Other new data, from a NASA satellite, measures ice volume. NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke, reviewing it and other Greenland numbers, concluded: "We are quite likely entering a new regime."

Melting of sea ice and Greenland's ice sheets also alarms scientists because they become part of a troubling spiral.

White sea ice reflects about 80 percent of the sun's heat off Earth, NASA's Zwally said. When there is no sea ice, about 90 percent of the heat goes into the ocean which then warms everything else up. Warmer oceans then lead to more melting.

"That feedback is the key to why the models predict that the Arctic warming is going to be faster," Zwally said. "It's getting even worse than the models predicted."

NASA scientist James Hansen, the lone-wolf researcher often called the godfather of global warming, on Thursday will tell scientists and others at a meeting of researchers in San Francisco that in some ways Earth has hit one of his so-called tipping points, based on Greenland melt data.

"We have passed that and some other tipping points in the way that I will define them," Hansen said in an e-mail. "We have not passed a point of no return. We can still roll things back in time -- but it is going to require a quick turn in direction."

Last year, Cecilia Bitz at the University of Washington and Marika Holland at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado startled their colleagues when they predicted an Arctic free of sea ice in just a few decades. Both say they are surprised by the dramatic melt of 2007.

Bitz, unlike others at NASA, believes that "next year we'll be back to normal, but we'll be seeing big anomalies again, occurring more frequently in the future." And that normal, she said, is still a "relentless decline" in ice.

My argument is that this has been true for at least thirty years and we are only now experiencing the final collapse. See my earlier posts.

Linking corn culture and pine beetles

As readers know, I have never been comfortable about the proposed link between global warming and excessive CO2 emissions. Both are measurable facts and their existence is indisputable. But as a thinker who loves rigor, I find it unnecessary to link them to explain the present climatic environment. I also sense a very real danger that the linkage will lead to a global policy misstep when global industrial economy needs very specific issues to be aggressively addressed. Of course, if we can get the right thing done for the wrong reasons, who am I to complain. I am more worried about the wrong thing for the wrong reason.

In our earlier posts, we have extensively developed the thesis that the adoption of terra preta corn culture globally will not only sequester all the excess carbon but also manufacture high quality soil in a previously unanticipated span of time. We can expect a ton of carbon per acre per year of uptake which is at least ten to a hundred times the rate of any alternative. Farmers have never had this option, and it is actually a revolution.

Even if we do nothing else particularly clever, that alone will bail our sorry asses out without anyone else lifting a finger. After all, manufacturing high quality soil will have an immediate and direct effect on farm income.

And yes girls, the climate is now apparently at its warmest since just before the Little Ice Age and since the Bronze age. That is the problem. We know for sure that this is not an unique anomalous event and does not have to be linked to anything.

In my province, the advent of a warmer climate has triggered a mass die off of the interior pine forest as the mountain pine beetle population takes off. It will all run out in about ten years and fall back to normal as new trees fill the niche. In the meantime, we are harvesting as much as possible. And if we are really clever, we will burn off what we cannot harvest to stimulate good new growth without a lot of fire wood lying around.

More importantly it is even much warmer in the high latitudes. I saw last night a report on a chap who has been measuring the temperature regime on the Greenland icecap. In a period of perhaps thirty years , he has found an increase of around five degrees Celsius. I do not want to comment on what that will actually mean and what is happening on the entirety of the icecap. It is far too easy to be on the edge were things are going quite fast, while inland at higher elevations very little is changing.

The true question to ask is, what is happening at the location of the ice cores. Likely nothing, since these areas were chosen for their accumulation ability.

Certainly we can expect the southern edges of the icecap to retreat exposing more land. I think though that that will be essentially it. It also will take hundreds of years to properly stabilize if our current temperature regime is maintained.

And I still keep wondering what triggers a major injection of cold water into the South Atlantic.

Cold Water on Global Warming

After alluding to the role of Antarctica yesterday, I think it is appropriate to add this article from 2001.

The climate of the northern hemisphere has experienced several major swings in climatic conditions over the past 10,000 years. The bronze age in particular appears to have been hotter that it is now as was the period before 1500 and the little ice age. The current hot spell seems to be doing no more than restoring those conditions. I also point out that these warm spells were very stable, while the sudden onset of a cold climate was abrupt. I posit that the only way it is possible to have such a shift is if the surface waters of the ocean itself was abruptly chilled by perhaps a degree.

And then the question is how? We have been blithely blaming the sun. I suspect that may well be rubbish. On the other hand we have a mechanism large enough in the southern hemisphere capable of doing this. And particularly doing this to the closed off Atlantic.

What would it take? There we do not know. Perhaps a build up of sea ice, or perhaps a decline in sea ice? That is the one thing capable of a long cycle of variation with periodic discharges into the Pacific and South Atlantic.

A discharge of cold water into the Atlantic would certainly impact on the whole of the Atlantic very quickly. It is also totally believable and I hope, unlikely to happen for a few centuries. At least enough time to get the permafrost out of the soil in Greenland and to reestablish the dairy industry there.

Here is the article:


http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20010917seaice.html

September 18, 2001 - (date of web publication)

El Niño, La Niña Rearrange South Pole Sea Ice

Scientists have been mystified by observations that when sea ice on one side of the South Pole recedes, it advances farther out on the other side. New findings from NASA's Office of Polar Programs suggests for the first time that this is the result of El Niños and La Niñas driving changes in the subtropical jet stream, which then alter the path of storms that move sea ice around the South Pole.

	Image 1

The results have important implications for understanding global climate change better because sea ice contributes to the Earth's energy balance. The presence of sea ice, which is generated around each pole when the water gets cold enough to freeze, reflects solar energy back out to space, cooling the planet. When there is less sea ice, the ocean absorbs the sun's heat and that amplifies climate warming.

By looking at the relationship between temperature changes in the ocean, atmospheric winds, storms, and sea ice, the new study pinpoints causes for retreating and advancing ice in the Atlantic and Pacific ocean basins on either side of the South Pole, called the "Antarctic dipole."

	Image 2

"El Niños and La Niñas appear to be the originating agents for helping generate the sea ice dipole observed in the ocean basins around the Antarctic," said David Rind, lead author of the study and a senior climate researcher at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The study appears in the September 17 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research.

During El Niño years, when the waters of the Eastern Pacific heat up, warm air rises. As the air rises it starts to move toward the South Pole, but the earth's rotation turns the winds eastward. The Earth's rotation is just strong enough to cause this rising air to strengthen the subtropical jet stream, a band of atmospheric wind near the equator that also blows eastward.

When the subtropical jet stream gets stronger over the Pacific basin, it diverts storms away from the Pacific side of the South Pole. Since there are fewer storms near the Pacific-Antarctic region during El Niño years, there are less winds to blow sea ice farther out into the ocean, and ice stays close to shore.

At the same time, the air in the tropical Atlantic basin sinks instead of rising. That sinking air weakens the subtropical jet stream over the Atlantic, guiding storms towards the South Pole. The storms, which intensify as they meet the cooler Antarctic air, then blow sea ice away from the pole farther into the Atlantic.

During La Niña years, when the Eastern and central Pacific waters cool, there is an opposite effect, where sea ice subsides on the Atlantic side, and advances on the Pacific side.

The study is important because the amount of sea ice that extends out into the ocean plays a key role in amplifying or decreasing the warming effects of the sun on our climate. Also, the study explains causes of the Antarctic sea ice dipole for the first time, and provides researchers with a greater understanding of the effects of El Niño and La Niña on sea ice.

Scientists may use these findings in global climate models to gauge past, present and future climate changes.

"Understanding how changes in the temperature in the different ocean basins will affect sea ice is an important part of the puzzle in understanding climate sensitivity," Rind said.