Late August Sea Ice

Winds have abruptly cleared a lot of the western ice away and sharply reduced the areal extent of the sea ice. I do not know now it stacks up against the past two years but the lateness of the winds has surely allowed for more areal extent than normally expected.

We also get a sense that the thickness is continuing to decline strongly. Therefore if no reversal is experienced or even a substantial slowing of the thickness loss, we are on the way to sea ice dramatics in a couple of years.

A combination of essentially one season ice throughout and a return of 2007 wind conditions would possibly even clear the ice pack out of the Arctic.

This year those same lack of winds kept the Northwest Passage blocked off and have also kept the Northeast Passage closed. Both needed just a bit of luck to be open though. The swift recent clearing of the Bering sea shows that.

One thing that I would like to point out is that the ice is pulling way back from the Russian coast pretty consistently, so while a clear passage is not conveniently available, it is possible for smaller prepared vessels to approach the edge of the ice almost everywhere and to be in position to force their way through the area blocking the Northeast Passage with a slight break in the winds.

Again the map is at:

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

And the graphic chart pretty well tells us that the three year ice is now effectively gone. From now on our sea ice will consist of one and two year ice rotating through the Arctic Gyre. This should grind down to a region of consistent two year ice with a generally smaller region of coverage that will be stable.

We may not get total removal of the ice in any given year but we will also not have any three year ice.

It may also turn out that minimum ice cover looks largely like this. Strong winds may concentrate the ice in a smaller area but do little to the annual coverage produced by the winter freeze.

Wolves Running Wild in China

This item is a worthy reminder that all carnivores must be tightly managed. Humanity happens to be a natural prey to all such animals and our historical aggressiveness kept them in fear of us. Unless they caught us alone and vulnerable.

The press loves to push tales of their reappearance in historics regions long since hunted out. This is quite silly. The grizzly had a natural range that reached the banks of the Mississippi. It is now restricted mostly to the Great Bear Rainforest which has its almost inhabitability to recommend it. It is a very safe place to keep them.

My recent reading of Humbolt’s Cosmos informed me that in the rainforest, your constant nightly visitor was the jaguar, kept at bay by the blazing fire kept. And the lions of Africa are denied by a fondness for thorn thickets.

This tale out of China shows just how a pack will identify a source and keep at it until it is wiped out. They stay with the game.

On top of it, wolves are notoriously difficult to hunt. That is why ranchers have resorted to poison.

Of course we now have the Yellowstone pack. I wonder how much public support will remain if a cunning wolf grabs a young child and takes off.

The truth is that the wolf pack of our recent past was a fearsome force during times of famine in the wild. It was quite common for hungry wolves to be driven down into the valleys where dozens would waylay travelers on horseback. We may have insolated ourselves from all that, but the relaxation of our guard demonstrated here is unwise.

China's herders plea for help as wolf packs rampage

by Staff WritersSiziwangqi, China (AFP) May 25, 2009

http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/Chinas_herders_plea_for_help_as_wolf_packs_rampage_999.html

Scanning the vast northern China steppe surrounding him, Delger leans on a wooden staff that is his herd's only protection against a lethal enemy that is out there, somewhere.

"They come at night, but you never hear them. When you do hear something, it is the sheep crying out, and by then it's too late," he said.

Delger, 44, has lost six of his 40 sheep in the past two years to stealthy attacks by the wolf packs that roam northern China's Inner Mongolia region.

The wolves were hunted to near extinction in China as Communist leader Mao Zedong encouraged the eradication of an animal viewed as a threat to his utopian efforts to increase agricultural and livestock production.

But mounting attacks by the wolves -- now protected -- have sparked calls by herders and some local governments for resumed hunting of the predator.

"There is not enough protection for us herders now. The wolves cannot be hunted. What about us?" complained Delger, who like many members of China's ethnic Mongolian minority goes by one name.
The attacks have become so frequent that desperate authorities in the Alxa district of Inner Mongolia constructed a 100-kilometre (62-mile) fence last June near the border with the republic of Mongolia.
Alxa herders had lost more than 600 sheep and 300 camels over the preceding two years, state media said. Similar tolls have been reported across Inner Mongolia.

In December, a wolf was spotted along the Great Wall just 50 kilometres from Beijing, the first sighting there in a generation, according to Chinese media.

What remains unclear is the reason for the wolves' boldness.

Government reports and state-controlled media have said all the indicators show wolf populations are on the upswing thanks to environment-protection measures.

But wolf expert Gao Zhongxin said the opposite is likely true.

Wolves are attacking livestock because environmental degradation

, expanding desertification, and human encroachment have reduced their natural prey, said Gao, who has studied the issue for China's Northeast Forestry Institute.

"The number of wolves has probably stabilised but desertification and degeneration of the grassland is increasingly serious and a new threat to the wolves," he told AFP.

The issue is an emotional one in China's ethnic Mongolian border areas due to the powerful symbolism of wolves in traditional Mongol society.

Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan modeled his fierce and highly mobile cavalry on the wolf packs, eventually amassing the largest land empire ever.

Mongol nomads have for centuries battled the wolves to protect their flocks, even while revering them as guardians of the grasslands.

"The wolves are central to Mongol culture, but there are fewer of them now. Young Mongols today do not hear the old wolf stories anymore. That is dying out," author Lu Jiamin told AFP.

Lu, an ethnic Han Chinese who lived with Mongol herders during China's Cultural Revolution, detailed the animals' spiritual connection to the wolves in his acclaimed book "Wolf Totem," written under a pseudonym.

He agrees the stepped-up wolf attacks indicate the animals are under pressure, which he calls a bad sign for China's six million ethnic Mongols, many of whom claim their culture is rapidly dying out under Chinese rule.

So far, proposals to relax the hunting ban have gained no traction, although Gao says illegal hunting is under way in some areas.

For now, Delger keeps his sheep closer to home than before and does not let them roam at night.

He was already under pressure from a recent plunge in mutton prices and says promised government compensation for lost sheep has not come through.

"They used to prey on wild animals," he said of the wolves.

"But now they are preying on us."

Andrew Freedman and Sea Ice

Those tracking this summer’s sea ice melt can see that it is the retreat on the eastern edge is well ahead of past seasons, while the western edge is showing little change as yet. This is hardly surprising considering the massive retreat of last year.

This past winter created a thicker than expected first year ice, but the melting taking place appears to also have been faster this April. In short, I see nothing stopping the removal of most of last years sea ice this summer. Then if the winds rise, we will catch another sharp reduction in the remaining sea ice this August. The scientists are quite right to quote short odds on this event.

I observe also that there will be a number of cruise ships standing by to run the Northwest Passage. That will still need a cooperative wind at the best, but we certainly could have done it last year. I wonder if there will be any brave merchant ships making the attempt? I suspect it will not be permitted yet.

We continue to get froth over the polar bears, primarily driven by the need of environmentalists for a salable cause. The bears can essentially hibernate a full five months as they must do in southern Hudson’s Bay. At this moment, even that is still covered with ice, although I am pretty sure it is pretty rotten now. Anywhere further north they are still feeding and will be largely retreating to land now as the ice continues to fail. Their hibernation period is more like three months. Also the observation that the bears are getting slightly smaller is a strong indicator of overpopulation problems, since the population has sharply expanded over the past forty years.

We need to actually declare the Blue fin Tuna as endangered since it is in decline thanks to aggressive over fishing. Oh well!

Andrew Freedman: Arctic Sea Ice May Set Record Low

The Interior Department's decision last week to list the polar bear as a "threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) may soon be seen as either a prescient move, or possibly even as too little too late, if scientists' ominous predictions for this summer's Arctic sea ice melt and for future seasons prove correct. A number of predictions have been issued in the past several months, all indicating that 2008 has at least a decent chance of beating out 2007 for the title of the greatest summer sea ice loss on record.

In fact, some experts have concluded that the North Pole itself may be covered by water, rather than ice, during the peak of the annual melt season at the end of the summer, and that the Northwest Passage could be ice-free for a time as well.

The recent predictions offer an unsettling picture of the astonishing rate of environmental changes that have been taking place in the far north. Sea ice loss also puts the pace of climate change policymaking into perspective, since there is a stark disparity between the rapidly melting Arctic and the slow pace of Washington policymakers.

An examination of new information about Arctic sea ice dynamics illustrates this point. According to recent analyses of Arctic sea ice, the ice that is entering the 2008 summer melt season is thinner and younger than the ice that melted like butter on a frying pan last summer. With sea ice, the opposite of the Hollywood ideal of young and thin is desirable, since new and thin ice melts more rapidly than thicker, older ice.

Late last month, University of Colorado at Boulder researchers found that only two percent of Arctic sea ice was older than normal (defined in that study as the period between 1982 to 2007), while 63 percent was younger than average. Consistent with this assessment, National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) researchers reported in April that first-year ice covered a whopping 72 percent of the Arctic Basin, including the area around the North Pole. The NSIDC noted that Arctic sea ice had recovered in terms of geographic extent from last summer's record melt, but that last summer's decline was so large that there was precious little older ice left over to build up during the winter.

Recent atmospheric conditions have also contributed to the Arctic sea ice's young and thin problem, including a positive phase of the Arctic Oscillation in which pressure patterns steer storms farther north, bringing stronger surface westerly winds in the North Atlantic and warmer and wetter than normal conditions to the Arctic and northern Europe. Such winds helped to flush older ice out of the region this winter, leaving a large expanse of younger and thinner ice to enter the 2008 melt season. Last summer, unusually sunny weather during portions of the summer season contributed to the record melt.

Although it remains to be seen whether atmospheric and ocean conditions will combine to create another record sea ice melt this year, most predictions indicate that there is a high likelihood that this year's melt season will at least result in well below average Arctic sea ice extent (average here refers to the 1979-2000 period).

"Even if more first-year ice survives than normal, the September minimum extent this year will likely be extremely low," the NSIDC stated on April 7.

The University of Colorado's sea ice forecast indicated that there is a three-in-five chance that the 2007 record low for Arctic sea ice extent will be exceeded this year due to the combination of warming temperatures and the preponderance of younger, thinner ice. And the NSIDC has declared that it is "quite possible" that the North Pole will be ice free during this melt season.

According to a study published in February in Geophysical Research Letters, computer model predictions show a 50 percent chance that the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage will be "nearly ice free" in September of 2008. The study indicated that sea ice loss this year is likely to progress more slowly than last year, and reach a low but not necessarily record-breaking minimum.

The NSIDC's May 5 sea ice news and analysis stated that only 30 percent of first-year ice typically survives the summer melt season, compared to a 75 percent survival rate for older ice. NSIDC scientists compared survival rates from past years with the 2008 April sea ice coverage and determined that in order to avoid breaking last year's record, more than 50 percent of this year's first-year ice would need to make it through the melt season. To put this into further perspective, only 13 percent of first-year ice survived last year's record melt.

Last year, sea ice melted to a record low that far exceeded 2005's record melt. In September of 2007 (September marks the end of the summer melt season), the sea ice cover was 23 percent below the 2005 level and 39 percent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000.

The melt was so rapid last year that, according to Sheldon Drobot of the University of Colorado, during a two-week period the area of sea ice lost was equivalent to losing the area of Kansas every day.
Scientists blame human emissions of greenhouse gases for much of the Arctic sea ice decline, but natural factors are also at work in the region, such as variations in ocean currents and atmospheric cycles including the Arctic Oscillation. The interactions between natural cycles and human influences is a key research area during the current International Polar Year.

Whether or not sea ice cover hits a new record low this year, however, it's likely that the overall decline in sea ice will have negative repercussions on polar bears and other ice-dependent species. This is, of course, the reason for the Interior Department's begrudging polar bear listing last week. The Interior Department's press release stated as much when it said, "loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat. This loss of habitat puts polar bears at risk of becoming endangered in the foreseeable future, the standard established by the ESA for designating a threatened species."

However, assuming a strong relationship exists between sea ice loss and species decline, after looking at the latest predictions and the recent Arctic sea ice data, I wonder how soon it will be before polar bears are pushed into the endangered category. Hopefully policymakers will catch up to the scientists, who are themselves struggling to stay abreast of the rapidly changing environment. According to NSIDC, one sea ice expert, Ron Lindsay of the University of Washington, has cautioned that "sea ice conditions are now changing so rapidly that predictions based on relationships developed from the past 50 years of data may no longer apply." In other words, we're now in uncharted territory.

Winter Storms

The press has certainly taken the subject of the weather to new highs. We cannot avoid excessive coverage today of every winter storm. To date we have had a very conventional winter in every way that you care to look at it. I would describe it as average and without real extremes as yet. Getting a lot of snow is more an indication of mildness.

The interesting question is whether or not the temperature will be low enough in the BC pine forests to stop the pine beetle infestation in its tracks. I certainly hope so since that will nicely end a nasty threat to the pine forests. We can call the pine beetle the canary in the mine for climate warming.

The much more interesting question is if this is having any effect in the Arctic itself. My expectation is that we are heading for a neutral year, although winds may hide this. It took unusual winds last year to clear the seas to the extent achieved. If those winds were to fail in the coming season we could have a larger sea ice minima even though the net ice is either neutral or even declining still.

My own sense is that it is still warmer than we think and that the ordinary weather patterns are hiding this. Remember that sixty percent of that perennial Arctic sea ice disappeared with nobody noticing. Also this past year saw a lot of heat dumped into the Arctic Ocean which must slow the winter sea ice growth. That extra heat did not disappear.

I also continue to see some alarmist commentary on the dangers that the polar bear faces with these past warmer summers. This is utter rubbish and the conservationists and the press both know better. The few polar bears who insist on living at the southern extreme of their range in Hudson bay are at risk. In the meantime, expanding ranges north of them with better conditions for prey animals is actually promoting an expansion of the bear population and will be even more so if the Arctic clears every summer.

Remember that polar bears hibernate during the summer and in winter hunt on sea ice thin enough for seals to create air holes. If all the too thick ice disappears then the seals must have a larger range as does the polar bear. All the historic evidence that I have seen suggests that the bear population is at a maximum. I look forward to been corrected.

I guess white seal pups are not photogenic enough, while them polar bears really have great moves. I am reminded of a cub reporter sent out by his editor to do a story on the damage caused by all the parks board heavy equipment removing logs from the beach. Somehow I do not think that story survived the next tide.

In the meantime, we are having a great winter sports season, which everyone should take full advantage of. It does not get much better than this. I see Buffalo had a sellout crowd for a new year's outdoor hockey game. I think that this is a fantastic new year's day event that deserves to become a tradition for a lot of Northern NHL cities. It may take a few bits of technology to make it reliable but it is worth it as a great once a year event that promotes larger audiences for the game. The NHL needs to make this work. New year 's day deserves something better than the polar bear swim.

Polar Bears and Fish

The press was full this weekend of a story about some biologists proclaiming that sixty percent of the polar bears will disappear as a result of the eminent loss of year round Arctic sea ice cover. They even stick in dates, carefully chosen to coincide with their unlikely presence on earth.

The idea that the ice could be just as gone in the next five years, simply does not occur to them. My own instincts tell me we only need a couple of more summers like this one to finish the job. The only remaining question is how much sea ice will normally remain at the end of season in the form of diminishing drift floes. After all it takes time to demolish a winter's sea ice covering the whole Arctic.

What I do know is that my reckless in your face prediction as this issue emerged several years ago was hesitant. And I am still been hesitant when I say that it is possible to remove all the sea ice in the next five years. It is unlikely but it is possible and I would be jolted if it happens.

However, the polar bears will be affected to the extent that they will see changes in their hunting grounds and a possible expansion of their primary prey population who will now be able to penetrate deeper into the arctic and in greater numbers. Remember, the polar bear is active during the Arctic winter when the sea ice is growing and inactive during the summer. It effectively hibernates. This strategy has allowed it to operate in southern Hudson Bay were they now have a five month lean period. This will never be true further north.

And yes, I know that these southern bears are under stress and are responding by having a slower reproduction rate. Rather logical don't you think. This may also occur further north but not nearly as much.

Right now we are looking at the maximal warming effect in a place like Hudson Bay unless we have a radical revision of continental weather patterns which is not really in the cards.

At the very best, they may be forced out of the Bay which is highly unlikely. So far they haven't budged. There is just too much food in the way of seals out there for them to eat all winter while us humans are holed up in our heated dwellings.

This also throws up another question which is much more interesting. Increased sunlight absorption (perhaps a hundred fold) in the Arctic seas is a fact as a result of the annual clearing of the winter sea ice. This means a major stimulus to the bottom of the food chain. And that means rather naturally a huge increase in fish stocks and those dependent on them.

In practice, over the last several years, a vast reach of the Arctic (a full half) has opened for summer fishing. It has been open waters for weeks now. The principal stakeholders are Alaska (1/3) and Eastern Siberia (2/3). This is a heaven sent opportunity for the two stakeholders to develop a sane management strategy of the fishery resource itself. They need to act like owners and work together to maximize the sustainable resource. This has never been done before in high seas fisheries and a successful model can then be implemented world wide. It is desperately needed.

A managed sea will also see the full re establishment of the whale population originally decimated in the late nineteenth century.

As far as I can see, the only danger the Polar Bear faces is sharp population expansion as their prey population expands. Perhaps I should predict a sixty percent increase in bear populations by 2050. I would have to be 102 to see that one and I am pretty sure that I would not care if I were there to celebrate the anniversary.

And by the way, take a look at the sea ice map and the related variation map. This is about as good as it gets. It will soon start to freeze up.