I’ve been given a report on glaciers and sea ice in the Arctic that I want to share with readers. There’s some compelling evidence of glacier melting and open water in the Arctic sea in this report that I haven’t seen before.
There are also worrisome reports of significant temperature increases, with anomalies of several degrees. Also in the report is the mention of ice free open sea of almost 2 million square kilometers, which is termed as “unprecendented in the history of the Arctic”.
It is shocking to read. I urge readers to have a look at some of the excerpts I’ve posted.
First a map. Spitsbergen is part of Svalbard, which is part of Norway.
From the page 471 above, except for the date, this language seems familiar:
Well, we all know what a warm year 1934 was.
Here’s a mention of some strong temperature anomalies, as much as 10 degrees.
Here we see some significant reduction in Arctic sea ice across broad areas:
Wind seems to be a factor in flushing out the Arctic basin.
Signs that the “warming is not terminating”. Oh, that has to be bad.
Here’s the book:
All of these reports about sea ice and melt seems familiar, except the date, which is 1943.
There’s also a fascinating discussion about linkages between sunspots and precipitation on pages starting on page 460.
You can view the entire book here at archive.org
Oh and here’s that mention of “unprecendented in the history of the Arctic” open water from page 470:
The more things change, the more they stay the same. It seems from history that the Arctic ice is always going up or down. We can’t assume that our recent 2007 record sea ice minimum is something unique in the history of the Arctic ice.
And of course we’ve heard historical reports of a melting Arctic before, such as this one:
November 2nd, 1922. Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.
Big hat tip to Richard North of the E.U. Referendum, who alerted me to this book.
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R. Gates says:
May 3, 2010 at 7:36 am: Response: Really? C’mon, really?
More receding glaciers:
http://www.archive.org/stream/comptesrendusofo00buchiala#page/n343/mode/2up
http://www.archive.org/stream/comptesrendusofo00buchiala#page/n343/mode/2up
A paper by Mahoney et al. (2008) discuss the ice retreat between the 1930s and the 1950s. The decline was in the Russian Arctic and afterwards the ice recovered between the 1950s to the mid-1980s. The most recent retreat since the 1980s is Arctic wide and occurs in all seasons, whereas the 1930s retreat was confined to the overall Russian Arctic during the summer months.
Recent ice loss has been attributed in a number of papers to natural variability in the large-scale atmospheric circulation, rising air temperatures from GHGs and the ice-ocean feedback (see Overland et al., 2008). Between 1980 and 1999, the trends in surface warming and the retreat of sea ice from the Arctic were largely attributed to the state of the large-scale atmospheric circulation marked by the positive phase of the Arctic Oscillation and the Pacific North American-like (PNA). Since 2000 the large-scale atmospheric circulation pattern shifted to meridional blowing towards the central Arctic. Overland and Wang (2005) point to a similar pattern in the late 1930s that coincided with anomalous winter surface warming of +4C at Spitzbergen.
The current continued retreat of the Arctic ice cover testifies to the presence of alternative mechanisms. Some studies have argued for the dipole pattern (high pressures over the Canadian Arctic and low over Siberia), and a central Arctic pattern marked by low pressure over the Arctic basin. Both patterns continue to be present since the late 1980s and have contributed to the observed sea ice reduction in the western and central Arctic.
If anyone wishes to make a backup copy of Zubov’s book, simply download the .pdf to your hard-drive and save it to http://www.scribd.com
Scribd is a great site for personal archiving, and results are searchable if you provide accurate tags. There are other archive sites popping up as well.
mountainprotector said: This is great! If we can say it is attributed to “wind” then we should stop the insanity of building “wind” farms, right? (just kidding)
You could put wind turbines around the Arctic basin. The increased surface drag would slow the winds and lessen the flushing effect.
Enneagram says:
May 3, 2010 at 8:01 am
Yes, but it is appearing that they are not ignorant and superstitious completely. Add sly and crafty to that, and I’ll buy it.
According to the post-glacial rebound graph ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound ) the ice mass has been melting for quite some time now. There was an ice age… since it ended things have been melting. Anything different would be a return to ice age conditions. And this is a much scarier situation that a mild warming from an already warming condition.
If people think retreating glaciers are catastrophic, then their little pinheads will just pop a the problems caused by advancing glaciers.
Just think of New York City 20,000 years ago under 5,000++ feet of ice.
Now that’s a problem.
Glaciers, like climate are in a perpetual state of change, either advancing or retreating.
I much prefer the retreating state.
This is not warming! May mean temperatures, records, averages Budapest 1780-2009 (hungarian)
http://www.varaljamet.eoldal.hu/oldal/climate_budapest_majus
Baa Humbug says:
May 3, 2010 at 12:46 am
‘So predictable isn’t it? As Meier said, “it was only regional yada yada yada” No matter how many times we slap these alarmists in the face with evidence, peer reviewed or observational, they keep raising their ugly heads un deterred. What do we call those blow-up knock-em down thingies? Knockem down dolls i think.’
What about “Tar Babies?” Warmists will accept no observational evidence that might not be consistent with their “views.” I say “views” because they have no theories, no hypotheses, and they have done no interesting research and no experiments. To quote Gertrude Stein, “There is no there there.” The science of Warmism is exactly what you would get if you saw carbon trading coming down the pike and you hired a bunch of undistinguished scientists to claim that their science, which is nonexistent, PROVES that man-made CO2 is the main culprit in a planetary ecology that is rapidly approaching a tipping point.
The heart shaped lake is nice.
Is Watts the English translation for Zubov?
REPLY: I dunno, is “kernels” the English equivalent of “nuts”?
On recurring theme which is always interesting to me is how perceptually inept we human beings are.
Take quantum theory, for instance. (Bear with me – I’m going somewhere with this). Intuitive visualisation of the universe as described within quantum theory is largely beyond our capacity. Events and laws which the mathematics describe seem to us to be paradoxical in many ways; things have momentum but no defined position, or vice versa, for example.
Similarly, relativity is not easily visualised. Consider the “rubber sheet” description of space-time warping. Now try to visualise it in 3D. Not easy, nor is the fundamental idea very intuitive. Following on, a universe in which we can only gain information from the volume of it within our relativistic “light-cone” seems at odds with everyday experience and we can never be certain of what may be going on in the unobserved region.
I recal with a wry smile the writing of the late Douglas Adams who captured some of these limits to what we can perceive or even understand;
“Light… travels so fast that many civilisations take eons to realise it’s even travelling at all…”
Both of the above examples deal with, on the one hand, very short distances and timeframes and on the other vear large distances. The above article, and many more contemporary ones, seem to suffer from the same intuitive visualisation as I’ve outlined above only the failing is remarkable in its starkness. The author’s inability to apply reason beyond the immediate and to consider what his or her observations mean on timescales of generations or even many generations is striking. One has to wonder if this is a (possibly sub-conscious) ploy used to inflate the importance of the message and therefore render the articles with unwarranted meaning and importance. Of course, we all know that the data in these works are important in an of themselves. They are the records on which we can advance our knowledge and our science.
It is fundamental to the study of systems, in which we are subjectively involved, to make the assumption they we exist in a period and/or a location which is not unique. The repeated failure of some in climate science to observe this assumption leads to an inevitable conclusion that short trends are the harbinger of apocalypse when, in actual fact, we cannot know how extraordinary those trends really are.
We would be wiser to widen our perspective, widen our perception and derive our intuition from much-longer-term historical data ranges rather than jumping at every new anomaly which we were not expecting. This is especially true in a science based on a proxy historical record and one which has been under close study for only 40 or so years.
The Pope is to intervene to restart glacier advance in Switzerland.
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/index/Can_the_pope_save_Europes_largest_glacier.html?cid=32914
a dood says:
May 3, 2010 at 7:46 am
> Digging the typography! Two spaces after a period. LOL
I do that. Why do you find it laughable? I even do it in text at the end of sentences that I know browsers are going to collapse to a single space.
A lot of proportional fonts have a fairly small space character, and I find an extra space helps sets sentences apart. Also, it helps associate abbreviations in the middle of a sentence as part of a sentence instead of the ending.
Perhaps you can explain your spelling of “dude.”
Glaciers are made of ice, and ice is made of water. No one mentioned air humidity. What about it?
Glaciers – About 60% of Svalbard is glacier-covered, with many outlet glaciers terminating in the sea. In central Spitsbergen, most glaciers are comparatively small due to the dry climate
http://notendur.hi.is/oi/svalbard_geology.htm
Ok! I admit it! I bought it hook line and sinker. Top posting, Mr Watts.
So….if the hideous prophet wishes come true, and there is Global Warming, the increased air humidity would increase glaciers, not the other way.
OT
How typical
One day there’s this rare commentary.
Yesterday’s Sunday Oregonian had this well written skeptic’s commentary by Dr. Gordon Fulks.
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/05/utter_honesty_needed_from_clim.html
Followed the next day an asinine lead editorial.
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/05/neath_the_great_blue_lies_an_o.html
timheyes
maybe you will this:
http://www.motionmountain.net/
Is the big heart-shaped pond shown in your photo clear evidence that Spitzbergen loves the loss of its frigid glacier embrace?
Ric Weme, Andrew WH and Dude: Standard word processing format was and still is in many companies for two spaces after a period – some systems are set to do this automatically. I have been retired for a few years but up to 7 years ago, our engineering reports always had double spaces after the periods. For example, you can set Microsoft Office to always put two spaces after a period and do document checks for double spaces in the grammar section. Other programs have similar options.
Well, off to fix fences before the next spring snow storm.
Wayne Delbeke in (sometimes) sunny Alberta.
I propose to re-present it as a new press release with recent dates, and then issue to The Guardian and Independent newspapers(in UK). They are usually pretty good at basing stories on alarmist press releases without double checking credibility (because it must be right of course).
Both of these papers have gone very quiet on global warming stories recently, so I’m sure they would really appreciate a ‘fresh’ study.