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 :
These folks are so damn fond of keeping track of ice and all, it’s a darn shame that we’re cutting back on the space program. With the discovery that Pluto is actually one of potentially dozens, or even hundreds of dwarf planetary ice balls floaring around just shy of the Oort cloud, seems that groups of them could be assigned their very own little plantetoid to measure and study ice makeup to their heart’s content, and never have to lose a single wink of sleep worrying their fevered noggins that it was ever going to melt.
And from that distance, we really wouldn’t have to listen to their drivel.
Maybe someone can refresh my memory. I seem to recall reading, I believe it was sometime last year, where several of these geniuses finally ‘fessed up that if the fabled “collapse” of the West Antarctic ice sheet was to occur it would take place over the next 1 to 3 THOUSAND YEARS. I haven’t been able to relocate the reference, so it is possible i just dreamed it.
We shouldn’t complain about these partial steps toward sanity in the media. It’s a “work in progress” and reminded me of the farmer’s position on the heroic pig that awoke a farm family when a house fire broke out. The pig had even reentered the burning inferno and retrieved the farmer’s baby from its crib by the scruff of the neck. When the farmer was later asked why the pig had only three legs the farmer responded, “You can’t just eat a special pig like that all at once!”
Please all, take the time to read this post – Colin Porter (17:42:18)
Very importent that you waste no time with roddy the troll. This person is way wacked. Please ignore, and hopefully he will go back under his bridge!
I live in the tropics. I live in a dreaded warm area. Hey. It isn’t that bad.
No tipping point in my opinion. 1. The environmental dynamics of the Arctic bowl will keep it in oscillation between the seasons (IE lots of ice in Winter, not so much in Summer). 2.The dynamics of greenhouse gases and AGW are only a very tiny part of why the Arctic freezes in Winter and melts in Summer. 3. In addition, the affects of CO2 based warming will diminish as CO2 emissions diminish (as they will with time). 4. The forces of nature that bring about extremes will continue unabated.
I once worked for a company that made the cover of Wired magazine. They made up a bunch of stuff about what we did that wasn’t true. It wasn’t negative stuff, it was just fabricated.
So I’d take anything they say with a grain or two of salt.
Steve Oregon (18:45:46) :
They never had anything more than thier climate models.
That’s what has been eating them (and thier 3-legged pig).
mike roddy (16:03:02) :
Neither GISS nor Had Crut are showing any record monthly temperatures this year. So you can relax …..
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1978
OMG!!!!!!! The Arctic is gonna melt!!!!!!!! Notz…
Much uncertainty about what exactly is a tipping point so following the precautionary principle I feel Al Gore’s wife must be banned from visiting the Arctic. They say that behind every great man….. could explain a lot!
I know I’m simple minded but why didn’t it happen after the drastic sea ice loss of 2007?
There is a high Stratus cloudiness in the Arctic, 70-80 percent. The clouds will probably remain even if the ice is receding. Therefore, the arctic albedo will not change as much as if the Arctic was cloudfree, as shown on many arctic photos.
mike roddy,
““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.”
LOL!
Henry chance,
“Krugman the economist in his NYT diatribe today mentions a tipping point.”
The only tipping point Krugman should be crowing about is the impending national debt explosion.
It doesn’t take much to stampede a heard of buffalo or 6.5 billion “lemmings”. I wish these people would just be quiet about AGW and ‘tipping points’, there’s more to life than weather. Well, there used to be.
R. Gates (16:43:27) :
Pushed far enough, every system will change to a new mode– the more important question is, will AGW push the arctic far enough? The only honest thing to say is– we don’t know.
Amidst the towering mountains that affect climate, AGW is but a molehill. It can’t push anything. It’s interesting that you continue to believe that it can. Where is your evidence? Remember, correlation is not causation.
rbateman (22:01:52) :
Steve Oregon (18:45:46) :
They never had anything more than thier climate models.
That’s what has been eating them (and thier 3-legged pig)
Has anyone yet established the tipping point of a 3-legged pig?
When I was a child we called this kind of speculation a “Pipe Dream”. I have smoked good Dutch tobacco in my pipe ever since, but still no dreams. What am I missing here? I know, we can call it “speculative science”. Oh, that is an oxymoron, but so are tipping points in dynamic and chaotic systems.
Given the incredible climate history of this planet and the fact that the Earth now still does resemble a warm, wet and welcoming home for billions of species, how is it that any credible scientist can make a claim that a “run away feed back loop” is ever going to occur?
Mercury and Venus, even Mars, look like “run away feed back” possibilities. But Earth? In this so called “run away feed back loop”, once the water and the gases evaporate into outer space, exactly how would Earth gets its oceans and atmosphere back?
If such an event hasn’t happened at all in the past (since we still do have our oceans and atmosphere) then why should we believe that our minute influence would make it occur in our tiny blip that is human history?
“”” Climate ‘Tipping Points’ May Arrive Without Warning, Says Top Forecaster
From a UC Davis press release “””
Well that’s why they call it the “future”; it will happen, when it happens.
A warning is something you were told about what is now the past.
And you know that famous statement about making predictions; especially about the future; wazzat Yogi Berra who said that; maybe it was Satchel Paige.
Well let’s see now; ice is white; high albedo, and open water is black; low albedo.
And ice extent is 85 % black water and 15 % white ice.
So howcome most of that picture is whie rather than black. I see very little black mixed in there with the white areas. Even the mush in that tongue at the bottom is mostly white.
So how much of that ice do you think is actually horizontal, so that the arctic sun strongly reflects off it, because of grazing incidence.
Well we are looking pretty much straight down from the Zenith; so why is it so bright, if the low sun angle is supposed to give rise to high albedo specular treflectance. Wouldn’t surprise me, if that surface turned out to be at least Lambertian; and could even be nearly isotropic reflectance; well the ice parts. The open water is more likely to be specular, when there aren’t violent storms around.
“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. ”
Now the models are good out to millions of years? They predict nothing well, but their predictions are taken as fact.
So, they had a programmer program these melts using what variables? Hummers? Hummingbirds? Humans making the first fire? Humble penguins passing gas?
Try as they may, they still cannot get these programs to make a good cup of coffee. When they can do that without request when needed, then they can claim to predict whims. Only then can the pretend to predict climate.
Can someone please point me to a site that shows how many and where the REAL thermometers are that are RECORDING the Artic temperatures (that we continually hear are rising) I am sceptical that the Artic is warming but would like very much to have good data to understand how such claims are made. Thanks
As tipping points are being discussed, I think it would be illuminating for some of you to read this following article, on how one little thing can affect the global climate:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100110151325.htm
A quote from this article is most revealing:
“the fact that seemingly insignificant changes can lead to dramatic tipping points for climate patterns, especially in and around the Arctic.”
When it comes to any system, no matter how complex, there is always that one extra nudge that pushes the system into a new response pattern. The truth is, we don’t know what those nudges are in the arctic, or how far current nudges can go before a tipping point is reached. To say there are no tipping points or we are not close to a tipping point in the arctic is as ignorant as saying you know where a tipping point is…we don’t know, but as the above article demonstrates, but what we do know is that they are out there– somewhere.