Polar Bear Nonsense

I am forever amazed at how uncritical opinion so often is shouted about through the press with little in the way of rebuttal. A perusal of the press coverage of the past while regarding sea ice would have you believe that the polar bear is about to be wiped out. At the same time, the enviro political crowd is pushing to have the bear declared endangered. Perhaps the enviro crowd intimidates the press.

I personally suspect that summer sea ice will completely clear out of the Arctic as early as 2012. I also suspect that this will stimulate a thriving Arctic biosphere as much more solar energy is absorbed into the sea. There may still be extensive floes in and around the islands.

In any event, the polar bears will hardly notice. In fact, I suspect that the odds favor them doing a lot better. Lest we forget, they effectively hibernate during the short summer. In James Bay, this summer lasts as much as five months which pushes the envelope for pregnant females, but not the males. This summer is a lot shorter almost immediately as you travel north. So our bears always have the option of hiking north a few hundred miles to more hospitable waters.

The bears will colonize anywhere that sustains a covering of winter sea ice since the related seals are their principal food source. If the great lakes had seals, we would be watching annual polar bear migrations to exploit the resource.

In the meantime, the increase in Arctic solar energy means a sharp rise in the food stocks available to the seals, whose population should also expand providing a larger range for the bears. I expect that the bear will continue to prosper, since he has no meaningful predators whatsoever.

The only question that I am left with is to ask how far into the Arctic Sea that the bears travel during the winter. All of it is prospective hunting ground for the bears so I suspect that they cover all of it, one way or the other. They are very much like the lions of Africa in that they truly dominate their environment.

In the meantime, folks only destroy their own credibility by espousing environmental propaganda that is so patently wrongheaded and diverts public energy away from an ocean of environmental problems that clearly needs champions like unrestricted factory harvesting of our fish stocks on the high seas.

The environmental movement would do themselves a great service if they consciously became the champions of global tenure of all biological stocks in order to create global law and management protocols. Simple ownership of viable stocks would end the global competition for the last fish. In fact, stakeholders then become stock maximizers.

To date, the movement has been beset by the old leftest dream of governmental management by a chosen elite operating in competition with other stakeholders. We know that never works and simply throws a new level of cost into the mix.

This will be a long process to properly establish. In some cases, it is necessary to let the stocks be destroyed as has happened to the Grand banks. It is easier to impose common sense to a group of losers, than to a group of addicted gamblers still living of the last great hand.

A grand banks commission could now operate successfully to work at restoring the fishery and be funded by a combination of tenure fees and royalties as is done in the oil patch. Foreign involvement ensures a form of compliance also.

This is only one important example.

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.

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.

Clear seas in the Arctic by 2015

NASA published this report a month ago on the Arctic sea ice conditions over the past two years.

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/quikscat-20071001.html

A couple of very suggestive observations are made and need to be noted. Of course, the fact that ice coverage has been reduced is obvious to everyone and the known 60% reduction in total ice volume between the two data collection dates of 1957 and 2000 has also been commented on extensively by myself. In fact, this has led to my own analysis and prediction of a likely date for total sea ice disappearance as early as 2015.

I am only able to say for sure that it should not be much sooner. The NASA report calls even that into question.

The last two years saw a significant shift in the arctic wind regime that has had the effect of speeding the clearing of the sea ice off most of the Arctic and inducing the release of substantial long term ice into the lower latitudes. The article reads as if this has never happened before or has never been observed before.

This presumably implies that a lot more atmospheric heat is now finding its way into the Arctic helping the process of melting along. This is new, then the next question is whether it will be stable. It certainly supports a global transition in the weather regime and explains the warmer winters that we have experienced in the temperate climes.

In any event, hugely larger open water areas allowed a lot more solar energy to be absorbed by the Arctic Ocean this summer, perhaps because this switch was turned on. The question is whether this is a new wind regime that helps bring northern temperate zones back to their pre little ice age highs.

It actually makes a lot of sense that this is exactly what will happen. The high temperatures experienced in Scandinavia over five hundred years ago could well be the result of a natural wind regime adding a couple of degrees of extra warmth in combination with a clearing out of sea ice from Arctic waters.

In other words, we have already reached the optimum temperatures previously established in the past and it is simply taking time for all the effects to be fully expressed.

The past two years have seen the Arctic start the clearing process in a fairly convincing manner. Even though I was even predicting the rapid decline long before the process was underway, I did not fully recognize the actual onset.

A permanent wind system that delivers heat into the Arctic is a natural and predictable outcome of an atmospheric warming cycle regardless of it's causes. How else might we get rid of surplus heat in the Northern Hemisphere?

A wind system sustained by an ice freed Arctic in the summer should be a powerful engine in spreading the new regime around the Arctic Basin.

The next interesting question will be if this trend is sustained as we go into the next season. I thought that last season's behavior was very much a part of the normal ebb and flow of the warming process itself.

I can now suggest that if this climate trend is shifting to a new Arctic regime, that the winds and related heat transfer will actually be as strong or stronger than this season and will continue to strengthen over the next several seasons until all the summer sea ice is gone and the system can stabilize.

In other words, clear sailing in the Arctic by 2015 is possibly more likely than ever.

Long Arctic Indian Summer

For the moment, I want my readers to totally put all you have been brought to believe about the human impact on global warming completely out of your mind and travel with me on a thought experiment. Let us imagine that humanity is missing. What does the data tell us then?

500 years ago, we had a climate down shift called the Little Ice Age that ended the long lasting Medieval Warm P9eriod that had held sway for over two hundred years. Since then, the climate of the Northern Hemisphere has very slowly warmed back to the previous climate regime. My analysis of the impact of a modest positive warming influence has shown us that this can explain all the current evidence, and that we are about to have a full return to a warmer Northern climate.

The planet Earth has two natural heat sinks at the poles that operate over a yearly cycle due to the tilt of the poles. We like to ignore the Antarctic, but it is the dominant cooling engine, simply because it has a small continent able to collect an ice cap and a huge uninterrupted circumpolar ocean current that shields it from warm water intrusions. This is one mean cooling machine.

The arctic is the complete reverse of this. We have a land ringed deep ocean for most of the ice cap forming 15 degree polar area. There is only one break in this ring and it is fed by a large bounded north equatorial ocean that must pump warm water into the Arctic. Had this been engineered deliberately, I fail to see how it could have been improved on. We may discover, once all the crustal positions are properly worked out, that this is a rarity in global history.

Remember that the ocean rose 300 feet around 12,000 years ago. Prior to that the continental shelf was shaped by ocean currents and land erosion for millions of years. This unusually stable process formed long broad and very shallow coastal plains. This could never have happened if the sea level was shifting radically back and forth.

The indications are though, that left to its own devices, that natural climate balance for the Arctic is a little warmer than what we are experiencing now. The medieval Warm Period lasted a comfortable 200 years if not a great deal longer. The Bronze Age optimum lasted for thousands of years. In between, it is fair to say that it was more often warm than cold.

In fairness, all our information is drawn from proxies that are very prone to local variation. This is particularly a factor with shifting human settlement and disturbance. The only trustworthy information comes from pollen data from the more northerly transition zones and even that will actually lag the changes by a couple of centuries. We are experiencing that today.

The fact remains that a four hundred year climate cycle may simply defy resolution. The only certainty is that the antiquity of human habitation is universal.

The question then, is not why is it not warmer, but what causes it to chill out in the first place. Left to itself, the Arctic climate will moderate with total sea ice destruction every year. A moderate Arctic will mean less extreme winters throughout the Northern Hemisphere and improved growing conditions everywhere.

The good news, is that once the North is at its natural stability point around the complete elimination of summer sea ice, it appears to stay warm for a long time. There is likely enough freezing going on to prevent any cumulative heat retention.

The bad news is that sooner or later, the party is over.

My best theory, is that a surplus of Antarctic cold water is forced into the Benguela Current, strengthening it substantially and for decades lowering the temperature of the Gulf stream sufficient to allow ice accumulation in the Arctic. We are talking of a very small switch in energy transport when compared to the total regime. We do not even know if the atmosphere is a significant factor at this point.

All we really have is plenty of misunderstood and conflicting data of which we need a lot more.

When we see the world from this perspective, the good news is that it is getting warmer. The bad news is that this will end. And what did humanity have to do with any of this?

Our greatest Scientific Blunder

For the past thirty years the accelerating pace of warming in the northern hemisphere has been associated with human activity. This has at least led to reconsideration of our very bad policy of burning hydrocarbons and not sequestering CO2. The brutal truth is that all the available geological hydrocarbons are going to be burned sooner or later. The only question remaining is how much later. We few have at least redesigned an historically proven agricultural protocol to correct this problem. That still leaves us with the global warming problem.

My consideration of the mathematics of sea ice melting has shown me that we are very likely dead wrong about the principal cause of global warming. And everybody has got it totally backwards.

Atmospheric variation is principally moderated by the massive heat sink represented by the oceans and their currents. It is not the other way around, spectacular as atmospheric effects are. We are confusing cause and effect.

Returning to the Northern sea ice we know with certainty that solar energy is delivered at the same constant rate each year. We know that a trivial amount of southern heat energy is also delivered by the atmosphere, more reflecting the seasonal solar regime than anything else.

The real surplus is arriving year after year by way of the gulf stream and is exactly why we do not have a real polar ice cap(apologies to Greenland) This heat pump has been very steady for the past 500 years as it has slowly but surely reversed the effects of the onset of the little ice age.

On average, over the centuries, a slight overage of heat is consistently been delivered to the Arctic. It was almost in balance. We have now entered the final phase of this great melting process. The present acceleration is merely a mathematical artifact of this steady persistent pressure. And yes, it will be mostly over by 2020.

We are returning to the full climate regime experienced throughout the Bronze Age and before the onslaught of the little ice age and intermittently in between.

Humanity is doing plenty to screw up our planet that needs to be corrected and I have been actively showing my readers how. Nothing humanity does pulls me up short. The little ice age does. There is nothing we can do to stop that freight train and I very much suspect that that is what is really brewing in the southern hemisphere. There the winter sea ice is apparently expanding. A major one time diversion of cold polar water into the south Atlantic would drop the temperature of the gulf stream very nicely, and we now know for sure that it would take 500 years to correct the problem. However it happens, it is not a tall order and the current systems are in place.

It could well be that the planet uses this corrective measure much more often and that it actually varies all over the place. The hard evidence points to a long cycle between climate disasters, but there is no reason to think that smaller events are not happening in between.

We now have a very important working hypothesis. Peak warming in the arctic is reversed by an increase in the Benguela current bringing cold water into the equatorial seas lowering the heat content of the Gulf Stream. This can actually do the dirty work and it scares me S*tless.

It is our bad luck that the maximization of modern civilization is coinciding with this event, but that was also inevitable even if we were living in the Bronze age. That was the apparent drill every other time this happened. this nature's way of playing whack a monkey.

The sun sets in the high Arctic

It is a beautiful late September and in the high arctic the sun is setting. The great freeze has begun and we can all put this subject back into hibernation until the spring. Unbelievably, we have all lived through the unthinkable. The legendary Northwest Passage was open for weeks this year for the first time. The North East passage almost opened for one short week also.

I am also told that South Atlantic sea ice reached a record breaking maximum. This suggests a disturbing hypothesis. That the deep sea circulation system is able to pulsate surplus heat or lack thereof between the poler regions through the Atlantic on a centuries long cycle. The five century long little ice age we are now exiting is only one example. It certainly explains the origins of the little ice age as I suggested in an earlier post.

If such a long cycle exists, and the little ice age is the best evidence, then our attempts to link global temperatures to CO2 content are even more spacious than I thought. Mother Earth has one hell of a correction device.

Have a good weekend.

Changing Arctic Ocean

In my last post, I showed that we have at most a decade before the last of the long term sea is gone and no longer a factor. What difference will it make?

The important change will be in the amount of summer heat absorption in the Arctic Ocean. Up to very recently, this factor was negligible since the Sea remained covered with minor late season clearances. This year, half the Arctic is clear. And the other half will mostly clear in the next decade. This will be additionally stabilized by the sharp increase in solar energy absorption in the top layer of water.

What I am saying, is that once the ice is gone, the annual reestablishment of sea ice cover will be more difficult. The water will be slightly warmer and will take longer to establish its annual thickness.

Remember that it took 32 calories to melt or freeze the ice in the first place. If all this unused energy goes into warming the arctic waters, then Our sea ice cover will behave a lot like the sea ice cover in Hudson Bay providing perhaps a four month long clear sailing environment.

It will still be too cold to generate much evaporation, so there should be little change for the land based ice sheets. This conforms to the data provided by the drill cores that go back over 15,000 years. In fact, the only break in that data continuity came 12500 years ago and is a principle marker for the Pleistocene nonconformity. It became dryer.

This also suggests open seas during the summer months of the Bronze Age and their near reemergence in the early fifteenth century. It also loudly begs the question of what mechanism cooled the northern Hemisphere, or more appropriately what cooled the surface waters of the gulf stream?

A previous post suggested that the mechanism was an injection of cold water from the Antarctic. We just have not figured it all out yet. I think though that we should be prepared for a nasty surprise there. The open question in my mind is whether we now have any evidence to support a four hundred year chilling cycle for the Atlantic? It may be more random than that, but it likely exists.

It has only taken 400 years to recover from the little ice age. Yet almost 2500 years had passed since the collapse of the Bronze Age optimum. Surely someone noticed? My point is that as far as we can determine, most of those 2500 years were chilly. We could actually be dead wrong here and the climate could have been generally warmer throughout and the real anomaly is the recent little ice age.

Time to look at those tree rings and pollen samples in transition areas to get a much refined climate proxy.

Otherwise, with the current regime, We know that the permafrost line will shift north somewhat, and the tree line will also move north. It is hard to see how this will effect humanity very much since few of us like to live in alpine like conditions. The short summers will remain the same and be just a little warmer. And there are many better places to grow potatoes.

Local coastal agricultural enclaves will be possible, just like those old Vikings in Greenland. Otherwise, a quick trip to Churchill will inform you of likely future conditions in the high Arctic.

Certainly, once the long term ice is gone, the shipping season will open right up although I am sure everyone will plan on a September crossing. The polar bears will be able to treat the whole Arctic the same way they treat Hudson Bay with a much longer hunting season. I would also expect an explosion in the Arctic biomass in general since there will be a season in which the ocean receives sufficient solar energy for all forms of plankton and the like.

The high arctic will still be a desert on land, but the ocean could easily become the globe's larder if managed well.

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.

Arctic Sea Ice Collapse

I see that the press is waking up to the speed of the collapse of arctic sea ice. Anyone who has read my earlier posts will not be very surprised. My surprise is the ongoing bafflement of the scientific community. Then again these are the guys who dodged physics as fast as they could.

It takes a long time for a mass of deep frozen ice to warm back up to the melt temperature. While this is happening, melting is modest. But once all the ice is potential melt (i.e. 32 degrees) then it gallops. On top of that the ice is steadily thinning so that the available mass is declining in a non linear manner.

For example, if the removal rate is 5% of the original mass M then we have the following effect:

year 1 .95M
year 2 .90M equals 5.26%
year 3 .85M equals 5.55%
year 4 .80M equals 5.88%
year 5 .75M equals 6.25%
year 6 .70M equals 6.66%
year 7 .65M equals 7.14%

You see were this is going. The point is that the surface area has dropped from 5m to 3m in the past thirty years and the actual mass has dropped by at least 60%. The truth is that this has mostly happened over the last half of that time period. This suggests that the removal rate has been around 3% of the original maximum ice cover and it is now in the last stages of removal and collapse.

I wrote three years ago that I would be brave and say that the sea ice would be flushed out by 2015 when everyone was saying 2100. I am beginning to think that I was too conservative. We need a cold spell up there.

Be happy.

Watching Sea Ice disappear

Last week we listened to press stories pointing out that the sea ice was already at its lowest level ever recorded. And the season had a few weeks yet to run.

I just looked at the next snapshot from august 22 and am even more startled. Appreciate that I have been looking at these maps now for several years and am fairly comfortable in interpreting them.

Over a one week period, the apparent boundaries retreated about 10 to 20 percent and we also have a large expansion of grey tones within the ice floe. This means that the amount of open water within the floe expanded hugely. This ice is still melting fast.

In fact, this is more noteworthy than the reduction of the boundaries which has been clipping along for the past several weeks. The thinning of the ice floe was masked up to now by the fact of its original thickness. For it to grey up so swiftly tells us that weeks of melting are having its effect and that much of the remaining ice is very close to disappearing. In other words, by the time you have extensive open water it is close to been over.

Go to: http://www.socc.ca/seaice/seaice_current_e.cfm for the current cover and then go back one week to compare.

If we were looking at a glacier, we would be describing this as galloping. I suspect that we are looking almost at the end of the melt for this season, but the movement just in one week is huge and one can readily see that another six weeks at this rate would wipe out the polar sea ice in its entirety. These are pictures that do not lie.

It has been stated that three principle melts will clean out the ice. We had number one in 1998 with no recovery in the intervening years. This year we are having number 2. After this year, I suspect that there will be almost no multiyear ice left of consequence, setting the stage for a number 3 melt to come along in the next decade.

It is noteworthy, that however the amount of ice is reduced, that the sea ice continues to span the Arctic cutting of shipping from using the over the pole route through Russian waters. In a way it is a natural fluke that this is so. Even it the arctic warmed up enough to ensure a clearing of the ice every year, it appears that a northern route will continue to be impractical or at least a daring gamble at best.

Current Polar Sea Ice Maps

One of my favorite sites is:

http://www.socc.ca/seaice/seaice_current_e.cfm

We get a map of current sea ice coverage and a second map showing current change against the twenty year average. Don’t miss the second map.

I personally think sea ice could be mostly gone within the next ten years. When I started watching this several years ago I thought I was been brave to predict as early as fifteen years. I had to wait for confirmation of the current speed of the melt. It is coming in spades.

I reasoned that you do not lose sixty percent of ice thickness over 40 years on a linear basis. Yet we only had two points of reference consisting of the 1958 international geophysical year when an ice thickness survey was conduced by submarine. This was repeated again at the turn of the century. The difference of sixty percent was unanticipated.

The majority was likely lost in the last third of those 40 years or over a period of about fifteen years. That meant that the remaining forty percent should largely disappear in the succeeding fifteen years. And at some point toward the end it should flush out very quickly like a spring breakup since most of the long term sea ice will have been eliminated.

In the mean time it is fun to watch. Note that grey areas in the strong white areas likely reflect standing water at the least and semi open water in the main. I think that the grey areas have been growing larger and more widespread each year also. We still have a month left in this season.

Won't everyone be surprised?

I am looking forward to a cruise through the sea ice to the North Pole and Northern Greenland and Ellesmere Island. Since it was this hot in 1421 writer Gavin Menzies’ speculation on Zhu Di’s Chinese expedition through this area may even have it right. I thought that prospect a complete stretch, even with the map evidence.

I also would like to note that the polar seas will be covered every winter with seasonal sea ice that will break up and almost disappear over a fairly long summer season. It will still be as inhospitable as ever.

And we seriously need a cold snap up there.

The end of the Ice Age forever

For the last two weeks, I have posted my chapter on the Pleistocene Nonconformity in order to fully present and properly develop my principal thesis that the million year ice age ended permanently 12,500 years ago, because the earth's crust slipped thirty degrees.

Our climate is still adjusting, but we can make some general conjectures.

1 The Antarctic sea ice perimeter, stabilized around the time the Bronze Age ended causing a slight drop in ocean temperatures.

2 The invigorated Gulf Stream, a direct result of the nonconformity will continue to dump heat into the Arctic. Will it be enough to eliminate the multiyear sea ice pack?

We can also state a couple of iron clad facts:

1 Solar output variation is subject to extremely minor variation, simply because the inputs are almost invariable, certainly by human time scales. There is no more hydrogen been added. And yes, we have just come off a variation high and it has gone back to rest. These are almost predictable.

2 Polar ice caps are polar ice caps. No other type can exist at sea level and their natural perimeter is within 15 degrees of the pole. All the apparent counter evidence we have immediately disappears with the Pleistocene Nonconformity.

You can now perhaps understand my global perspective on the issue of climate change a little better in my future posts.

Global Warming Reality Check

I noticed an item in the press about a scientist questioning the existence of the Global Warming Phenomena.. He was quite rightly challenging the models used and the shaky logic extrapolating so called trends into the future.

I also do not feel comfortable predicting the global climate over the next ten years let alone the next 100. I anticipate only that I will be surprised. I have already stated earlier that the link between CO2 and a a global heat wave is problematic and certainly should not be relied on.

We can rely on the fact that the CO2 in the environment is increasing.

What about Global Warming? There we have two compelling arguments. The increase in the growing season in the high Arctic is one compelling reason. It could not be clearer. The second is the sixty percent decrease in the thickness of permanent sea ice in the past sixty years. This actually is huge.

What few have understood is that the decline was not linear. We did not take any measurements over that duration. However, any theoretical scenario is going to require that the bulk of the ice was removed in the past twenty years. And that means, boys and girls, that the balance will be removed inside the next twenty years and probably a lot sooner if the tail end naturally flushes out like a spring breakup.

Of course, this does not make the Arctic ice free. It means that we will have winter sea ice that breaks up and disperses every year. And the Arctic will remain as a cooling engine for the climate. We may have a September shipping season over the pole!

The fact is that we have had a warmer Arctic for the past twenty years, very similar to the high in the early fifteenth century. I personally hope it is sustained, but I would be uncomfortable in making book on it. By the way, melting sea ice will have no effect on sea levels for those alarmists out there.