While this article is encouraging when looking at the title, they are still pushing that “ice-free summer” meme.
A late-winter expansion of Arctic sea ice is a good example of ice-forming dynamics that could keep the Arctic from hitting a “tipping point” in the near future.
Some scientists have predicted that rising temperatures could create a runaway feedback loop in the Arctic. Sunlight-reflecting ice sheets would give way to sunlight-absorbing water, driving up temperatures and melting even more ice. The Arctic climate would change so dramatically that winter ice couldn’t form again, producing planet-wide ripples in weather patterns.
But some research suggests that other, previously underappreciated forces may stabilize the melt before it’s complete. The Arctic will soon be ice-free in summer, and winter ice will decline, but it won’t suddenly become permanently ice-free.
“Everyone thought there would be a tipping point,” said Dirk Notz, a Max Planck Institute climate scientist. “But that’s too simple.”
…
Tipping-point evidence is stronger for western Antarctica than Greenland, said Notz. But even the absence of a tipping point wouldn’t necessarily be reassuring. “It doesn’t mean Greenland won’t melt away,” he said. “It just means it will happen gradually.”
Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/polar-ice-review/
Polar Sea Ice
Dwindling Arctic sea ice and crumbling Antarctic ice sheets are now a common sight. Whether they signal an impending tip, with rapid melts causing Earth’s seas to inundate heavily-populated coastal plains, is debated.
The process appears to accelerate itself: Warming ice melts, which exposes darker areas, causing local temperatures to rise further. But in the Arctic, another feedback may stabilize the ice, wrote Max Planck Institute meteorologist Dirk Notz in PNAS. Though most of the ice “will disappear during summer,” much of it will re-freeze in the winter. Arctic sea ice loss “is likely to be reversible if the climate were to become cooler again.”
But Notz is less optimistic about Antarctic sea ice, its undersides heated by eddying Southern Ocean currents. And the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have shrunk suddenly at least twice in the last several million years, a behavior that’s backed up by climate models. It’s “well possible that a tipping point exists for a possible collapse” for those sheets, wrote Notz. It could “render the loss of ice sheets and the accompanying sea-level rise unstoppable beyond a certain amount of warming.”
Climate ‘Tipping Points’ May Arrive Without Warning, Says Top Forecaster
From a UC Davis press release
Though, my favorite environmental tipping sign is this one :
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The tipping point has been reached and the Arctic ice cap is advancing. Plan on cold in your future. Warm clothes and food stores needed.
And yet what do we get? An increase in sea ice extet, thicker than expected in 2009, sea ice area near normal. What does this say about AGW and the Arctic? What does this say about AGW and Antarctica? Ziltch!!!
I have read so many explantions about these contradictions that I now fnally understant that AGW has evolved into a religion.
They will sit around pontificating on what will happen like so many pundits before a football game,then after the fact will come the explanations/excuses for why so many failed to predict the home team equalising in the final minutes etc.
Really, all this endless prophesizing says more about human nature then it does about the climate.
The disorientation of climate science is the act of confusing feedback mechanisms with the drivers that maintain the feedbacks.
The winds that moved the ice out of the Arctic can just as easily prevent the ice from getting out.
And what of the drivers that are responsible for a string of Ice Ages lasting 100,000 yrs?
Did the Ice Ages occur as a result of drivers, tipping points, both or none of the above?
Peter Wadhams of Cambridge is one who thinks it’s going to be hell on earth – this from October last year.
‘The new data, presented by the Catlin Arctic Survey and the international conservation group WWF, support the view that the Arctic will be ice free in the summer within about 20 years.
Most of the ice melt is expected to happen within the next ten years, Wadhams said in his statement.’
” The arctic will soon be ice-free during the summer ….” Now that’s quite the statement . How soon is soon ? Or does that depend on what your definition of soon is ?
“That is the question. Read More”
I’m not sure I can read more! My head is starting to hurt! Where’s my duct tape?
The message in the two stories is almost identical. I think they’ve dusted the old story off and rephrased it to cover their posteriors in light of the Arctic ice showing such signs of resilience. As for this Notz guy, I’m not sure what kind of “top forecaster” he is if he’s still crying about the sky falling in Antarctica, when even alamist Cryosphere Today has the current southern Hemisphere anomaly above normal, as it has been for most of the last 3 years, and the only discernable trend is UPWARD. I suspect they figure they can get away with the Chicken Little approach to the Southern ice only because it hasn’t received enough press for the general public to know how badly the alarmist forecasts down there are failing. When the MSM start paying attention to the very healthy Southern Ice Sheet, watch WIRED produce a reworked version of this same story, with the Southern ice comments toned down or excised altogether.
Meantime I’m crying in my coffee over the eco-nonsense my old Alma Mater has plunged itself into. Ironic this panic over “GHG”s–which throughout their story clearly means “CO2”, though the essential plant nutrient is never named–considering a vast body of scientific literature originating at UBC–a long-time pioneer of research in agriculture (particularly silviculture) that definitively establishes the benefit of higher CO2 levels to the ecosphere. Someone in admin has been drinking the coolade, I’m afraid.
So much for expecting donations from this alumnus.
Oh, they’ll re-orient quickly, anna v. And watch them continue to demonize carbon and the albedo of the Chinese. Dismaying as the prospect is, it’s going to take a hard freeze to kill these bugs.
==================
The sun is tipping back LOL
3pm and no sun spots!
where is the watts effect when you need it. lol
I thought it was Guam in danger of capsizing.
It’s nice to see this going more or less mainstream. The comments show many people get it.
If WUWT could get linked on Wired, BoingBoing, Digg, FARK, and any other social aggregate sites more often, Anthony could help turn the indoctrination tide.
Even the Met Office with it’s new computer is wrong in it’s forecast almost 100% of the time.
2008: The ice is in a “death spiral” and may disappear in the summers within a couple of decades, according to Mark Serreze, an Arctic climate expert at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
2009: Mark Serreze Named NSIDC Director, in charge of the web site you mentioned – he drew the blue line and decided what to show and what not to show (there is no analog of the Norwegian graph above shown)
This week, April 4, 2010 The Sunday Times
“Arctic ice recovers from the great melt”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7086746.ece
“In retrospect, the reactions to the 2007 melt were overstated. The lesson is that we must be more careful in not reading too much into one event,” Serreze said.
“On current trends it will still become ice-free in summer by around 2060.”
Did you think Mark Serreze had moderated his views? On our national ice web site directed by Mark Serreze, the “Frequently Asked Questions about Arctic sea ice”
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq.html
“Is Arctic sea ice really declining? Yes, the data show that Arctic sea ice really is in a state of ongoing decline.”
“Is Arctic sea ice starting to recover? Even though the extent of Arctic sea ice has not returned to the record low of 2007, the data show that it is not recovering.”
There’s the Arctic, and then then there’s Mark Serreze’s Arctic melting fast…
Joe Bastardi on Steven Colbert Show last tuesday debating a ‘climatologist’ from The Union of Concerned Scientists. They do talk about Arctic Ice.
10 minute video, debate is in last 4 minutes. Steven Colbert actually treats Joe Bastardi well. And Colbert is funny.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/269929/april-06-2010/science-catfight—joe-bastardi-vs–brenda-ekwurzel
I want my Ice-Free Arctic. After all, I teach science and as water freezes at zero degrees, I want to see just how it avoids freezing at the average temperature of -40 to -50 during the winter. This would be a major blow to my previous beliefs. Still, having – with reluctance – looked at Wikipaedia for their unique take on events, I find that it can all be blamed on ferns – yes, ferns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_the_Arctic
“This unusual climate was created in the Azolla event when fresh surface water in the Arctic Ocean caused a long term abundance of Azolla, a type of aquatic fern. Huge quantities of dead Azolla Ferns built up and formed sedimentary rock, much of which contains fossil fuels as a result of the carbon contained in the Azolla. This process caused global cooling as a result of a reduction in the greenhouse effect”.
Well, words do fail me here.
Wieslaw Maslowski says ice free by 2013, Mark Serreze by next year.
too bad they don’t need 97% consensus before issuing a press release of their latest disaster scenario.
Unfortunately, what would happen is tragically simple. No matter what happens, whether it’s warming, cooling, drought, floods, fire, famine, pestilance, the Earth being struck by an asteroid, the sun dimming, the sun going nova, a rogue planetoid yanking Earth out of orbit, the moon crashing down into the South Pacific, etc. etc. etc, the answer is simple:
Humanity will be the cause. Most likely fossil fuel use will be the cause. Almost certainly our current population level will be the cause. Sigh.
Good article, thanks for citing this.
Tipping points, such as those that could lead to sudden arctic ice disappearance, are less important than feedback loops, which exacerbate GHG caused global warming. Changes could occur in century time scales, not in the abrupt pattern that “tipping point” implies.
The problem is that these changes are going to be very difficult to reverse, since so much CO2 will be in the atmosphere. It may be a slow moving train, but the train’s arrival at 7c (as predicted by the MIT business as usual model) will depopulate this planet, and it won’t be pretty.
“Alarmists” like myself don’t welcome all of the bad news that has been coming in lately, including record global highs in March. We would rather be wrong. Unfortunately, the probability of that appears to be very, very small.
arch stanton (13:10:27) :
Which scientist(s) predicted the Arctic would “suddenly become permanently ice-free.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-no-ice-at-the-north-pole-855406.html
Wired generally does a yeoman’s job of science reporting. But their audience is hip, young, green kids with no working knowledge of reality beyond their bedrooms. Springing the real picture on them in one article would get the editor fired. This is progress for them.
In general, I like their science reporting. In the past they’ve done a better job than the NYT on topics that hold their interest.
About the only tipping point anyone’ll see due to a lack of ice will be that reached by climate scientists and journalists , after they’ve had too many neat drinks.
A note ofcaution to Mr. Notz and the other warmies: Don’t get your “notz” in an uproar over increasing arctic sea ice.
mike roddy;
The problem is that these changes are going to be very difficult to reverse, since so much CO2 will be in the atmosphere. It may be a slow moving train, but the train’s arrival at 7c (as predicted by the MIT business as usual model) will depopulate this planet, and it won’t be pretty.>>
Pre-industrial population of earth => 1 billion
Current population of earth => 8 billion
number of people who must DIE to go back to a pre-industrial economy
7 billion
Is that pretty enough for you?
I’ll take my chances that the 0.6 degrees temperature rise over the last CENTURY won’t turn into 7 degrees. Wonderfull nice March we had by the way, warmest in a long time, coincides with the biggest human population on the planet ever. Growing ice extent at both poles and a declining ocean heat content that signify a net energy loss of the planet on the order of 1000 times the increase in the atmosphere…. remember that wooly mammoth they found, frozen in a glacier, green plants still in its mouth? Now that worries me.