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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No one knows how regional or not regional certain conditions were during any given time. My suspicion is that, for example, the MWP might have been more widespread than some experts admit, but not aas widespread as some AGW skeptics try to paint it. It terms of regional periods of melting in the arctic– who can say? Smokey keeps talking about the N. Pole being ice free at some point in the past, to which I answer– who cares? Tell me what the rest of the arctic was like at that time, and then I might care, especially if you have data covering the 10 years before and after that time. Greenland and parts of NE Canada saw record high temps this winter because of the negative AO index, but we know that record warmth was not spread out over the whole N. Hemisphere (i.e. the snow we had in Florida). Drawing any conclusions about global climate change from old, localized, anectdotal evidence is pointless at best, and deceptive at worst.
I will be most interested in seeing how Steve Goddard spins this weeks sharper downturn in arctic sea ice. In truth, it means very little that arctic sea ice is now below 2009 for the same date, other than being a statistical point of interest, much like the March-April “bump up”. Of more interest will be where we end up in September…
It would be much more interesting to see a comparison between what they were measuring, and current conditions.
When ice is thick, water under it is insulated from the atmosphere, so the Arctic Ocean is essentially continental (from an atmospheric perspective).
The most damage can be done if the timing of blasts is right. The following plot features -SOI (-Southern Oscillation Index) for AUGUST:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/-SOI_August.png
Red represents interannual -SOI (so + indicates El Nino dominance).
Black is the cumulative effect.
There are a number of these internet archives now, often at universities. It’s great to be able to see old rae books, even if you can’t afford to buy them.
tonyb
If you are interested in Ipiutak, have you ever seen the the article by Froelich Rainey in the September 1942 National Geographic? It has very fine pictures of the skulls with jet-studded ivory eyes and aerial views of the town site with the mile long “avenues” with house ruins. Froelich seemed to think the population had been bigger than modern Fairbanks (which in 1942 was 3,455). I was amazed when I read this article, never having heard of this archeological site before. Do you know if this site has ever been debunked as not authentic?
Perhaps Mr. Dood is a twitterer, and therefore accustomed to the need to shorten messages for the small screen of a cell phone or blackberry. I will resist the temptation to abbreviate this noun for the same reasons.
Bill Parsons says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
May 3, 2010 at 11:53 am
Delete this (my) comment, will you? It was unnecessary and stupid.
Theo Goodwin: May 3, 2010 at 9:41 am
Baa Humbug :May 3, 2010 at 12:46 am
Re the knock-em-down toy. In the early 70’s They were called ‘Weebles’ and marketed with the slogan “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeble
Hmm. ‘Climate weebles’ has quite a ring to it.
John F. Hultquist says:
May 3, 2010 at 8:22 am
Well spotted thanks. The AO would seem to be the major factor in longer term variations of Arctic ice. Its 90yr period maps the warmer and colder episodes over the last few centuries well. It also makes sense that the Arctic is probably a good place to investigate longer cycles as the region will exagerate any so called global temperature changes. I get the feeling that the proposed 60yr cycle that is so popular, is a misinterpration of temperature history, due to distractions from years that are so evidently exceptions in the AO record, And that the 90yr cycle is not only more repeatable than the 60yr cycle historically, but will be more successfull for forecasting.
http://jisao.washington.edu/ao/
Hah!
And please take a summer cruise to Spitsbergen to see what it looks like today:
http://tinyurl.com/2wcnamr
Do remember that ice condition still determines the itinerary.
Tres enjoyable!
“”” AlanG says:
May 3, 2010 at 1:01 am
……………….
I’m a real fan of solar energy as it produces some energy even if it’s raining, unlike those environmentally barbaric wind turbines which produce nothing for days on end when high pressure moves in. The problem was the subsidies which raised demand too fast and created a bubble in the price of polysilicon pushing it to nearly $500 per kilogram. Spot market pricing is expected to decline to as low as $100 per kilogram in 2010. When solar gets cheap the demand will explode. We need to get some real capitalism in here and kick out the subsidy queens and rent seekers. “””
So what makes you think that solar will get real cheap. I can remember when oil was $2 per barrel and oil shale was going to make a killing if oil ever went to $6 per barrel. Well oil did that; and oil shale was all set to make a killing if oil ever went to $11.
Well the same thing has been happening to PV solar. If silicon just gets cheaper, solar will make a killing.
Well the price of poly silicon is irrelevent when it comes to the cost of producing PV electricity.
PV solar is both area and efficiency constrained. You could give the polysilicon away; and it won’t impact the cost of PV electricity.
It takes a whole lot of energy; a whole lot, to get from polysilicon to a 22% + Efficiency Solar electric output; which is what the news media trumpet Sunpower as being able to achieve.
Well first off; I doubt very much that 22% is the total system efficiency; from say Air Mass 1.5 solar energy at ground level; through a glass cover that can protect the cells from a 100 year storm, and convert to DC, which then needs to be converted to Grid ready synchronised AC power. If Sunpower is indeed claiming that; then my hat is off to them. I rather suspect they are talking about lab level simulated sun on bare silicon cells.
Don’t forget the huge costs of cleanup after all the environmental pollution generated by the Silicon industry, in the growth of single crystal silicon; and the conversion to practical PV systems.
And the bandgap of silicon is such that the peak energy portion of the solar spectrum is not efficiently converted by silicon.
Don’t even mention multigap; multimaterial solar cells which have achieved about 40% conversion efficiency; but that is at air mass zero extra-terrestrial sun; where NASA can afford to put such devices, because of the high launch costs of payload.
The test is easy; put a fence around your favorite solar energy plant; and then try to use its output energy; plus all the raw materials in the universe in their natural state, to replicate your amazing energy plant.
Good luck on that with Silicon PV solar.
So, in 1933 the permafrost boundary was at Semzha. It would be interesting to know where it is now.
Soviet Science, especially when Stalin was running things was always a little dodgy. However, with the Arctic convoys running, they didn’t piss around during 1942-1945.
Matthew Paris was a monk historian in the 13th Century. He depicts dozens of storms and extreme weather events, usually accompanied by the phrase “never have such events been seen.” Of course, in those times, the implicit assumption is that they were the hand of God.
Glad to see someone else considering the same possibilities:
Ulric Lyons May 3, 2010 12:25pm
See the following:
1) http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/SAOT_Lunar_aa_SOI.png
[for details: http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/VolcanoStratosphereSLAM.htm ]
2) http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/SAOT,DVI,VEI,MSI_SOI,L90,SOI+L90.png
[for details: http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/VolcanoStratosphereSLAM.htm ]
3) Figures 7 & 8 (& Section 3 more generally):
Sidorenkov, N.S. (2005). Physics of the Earth’s rotation instabilities. Astronomical and Astrophysical Transactions 24(5), 425-439.
http://images.astronet.ru/pubd/2008/09/28/0001230882/425-439.pdf
4) Figure 1:
Sidorenkov, N.S. (2003). Changes in the Antarctic ice sheet mass and the instability of the Earth’s rotation over the last 110 years. International Association of Geodesy Symposia 127, 339-346.
“The purpose of this paper is to call attention to a close correlation of the decade variations in the Earth rotation with the mass changes in the Antarctic ice sheets.”
“The redistribution of water masses on the Earth entails changes in the components of the Earth’s inertia tensor and causes the motion of poles and changes of the Earth’s rotation speed.”
“Apart from all other reasons, the parameters of the geoid depend on the distribution of water over the planetary surface.”
5) Figures 2 & 3:
Sidorenkov, N.S. (2005). The decade fluctuations of the Earth rotation velocity and of the secular polar motion. In: Journees 2004 – systemes de reference spatio-temporels. Fundamental astronomy: new concepts and models for high accuracy observations, Paris, 20-22 September 2004, edited by N. Capitaine, Paris: Observatoire de Paris, ISBN 2-901057-51-9, 2005, p.153-154.
http://syrte.obspm.fr/journees2004/PDF/Sidorenkov.pdf
“The initial cause of the decade oscillations of the atmospheric and oceanic circulations are, probably, the gravitational interaction between the Earth’s non-spherical and eccentrical envelopes and the Moon, Sun, and planets (J.V.Barkin, 2002).”
6) Figures 9, 10, & 11:
Carvalho, L.M.V.; Tsonis, A.A.; Jones, C.; Rocha, H.R.; & Polito, P.S. (2007). Anti-persistence in the global temperature anomaly field. Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics 14, 723-733.
http://www.uwm.edu/~aatsonis/npg-14-723-2007.pdf
http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/gem/papers/npg-14-723-2007.pdf
7) Notes on Southern Ocean / Antarctica: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/22/spencer-something%E2%80%99s-fishy-with-global-ocean-temperature-measurements/#comment-177986
Bear in mind:
a) north-south terrestrial asymmetry.
b) uniqueness of Atlantic connection to Arctic (keeping in mind that since it’s smaller than Pacific it’s more responsive)
c) Antarctic Bottom Water (ABW), Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), Antartic Circumpolar Wave (ACW), & related phenomena.
d) There’s a LOT more water stored as ice in Antarctica (than in Greenland/NH).
e) Arctic acts continental for much of year (since ocean frozen over), whereas SH oscillations are maritime (& thus damped).
When studying the influence of polar patterns on global integrations, it is not the equator that divides “NH” from “SH”. It’s more like somewhere between 45S & 60S (varying with longitude) for temperature. This is most intuitively understood in terms of continental vs. maritime dynamics (wild oscillations vs. damped oscillations). When studying precipitation, try a dividing line around 45N (loosely suggesting Arctic vs. non-Arctic drainage).
Contrast:
North Polar Region:
Ocean pond with limited outside-ocean-connections, receiving freshwater runoff from surrounding ring of land and insulated from the atmosphere by a cap of ice for much of the year.
South Polar Region:
Island holding TONS of ice, surrounded by SPINNING HUB of salt water that is WELL-CONNECTED to ALL other oceans.
Some of us need to be thinking about how spatial phase-variations integrate over interannual-to-decadal timescales.
Due to maritime/continental south/north and small-Atlantic vs. big-Pacific (very loosely speaking) spatial contrasts, global integrations mask important signals: http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/CumuSumCombo.png [for details: http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/60yearCycles.htm or http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/VolcanoStratosphereSLAM.htm ]
Steve Oregon says 10:22 am
You are living in a most beautiful place. I first visited there briefly in 1956. Later, I learned to ski at Timberline, Mt Hood. What a state–Too bad most voters there are people I call idiots for voting the way they do. No wonder the news there is so biased.
Dang! There goes the neighborhood.
I have been reading “The Last Explorer” by Simon Nasht. It is the story of Sir Hubert Wilkins the great forgotten polar explorer who was the first man to fly over the North Pole and the first to explore Antarctica by air. I quote:
“…they sailed south in search of potential landing strips on the Antarctic coast, but were continually frustrated by storms. Wilkins was amazed to record that the floating ice field had receded by almost 1000 kilometers from the previous year. Looking back on these conditions later, he told journalist Lowell Thomas, with some prescience, that he believed this ice warming to have had a long-range effect on climatic conditions throughout the world. The ice melt that southern summer year was followed by an extensive drought in the United States. Decades before the world became aware of ozone holes and global warming, Wilkins was recognizing the links between Antarctic conditions and climate change.”
The year of the expedition was 1929. Comments please.
Anthony-
The book was published in 1943 but Table 121 that you show has an entry for Average Temperatures of Surface Water in the English Channel from 1920 to 1947. How can that be?
REPLY: perhaps it is a second edition. It appears this book was published via an informal translation, and was used withing scientific and oceanographic circles, but maybe did not make it to popular press. My citation from the front of the book is the only date I saw. -A
I have said in earlier posts that the nouveau climate scientists like Dr. Hansen (an astronomer) and others jumped into what they, at the time, thought was untilled soil.
Based on Hansen’s observations that Venus is engulfed in GHG and is 800C or so he recklessly extrapolated that extreme situation to our planet and Climatology was essentially born (again) without much thought that paleoclimatologists have been studying earth’s climate from the distant past.
Being a new science, proponents wouldn’t think that a good literature search would be worthwhile. And here, sitting in the US Navy library is a book on Arctic Ice that describes and era of warming that is relatively recent and even more extreme. Since the publication of this book we have even had an alarmist scare about the impending ice age of the early 1970s.
Since knowledgeable people on the subject entered the debate, revealing such things as the MWP and the LIA, etc., the nouveau practitioners have spent all their time digging up what they could to bury these earlier studies and observations and doing “repair” research that required manipulations and emendments and amendments to sustain their early fledgling offerings. The lengths they went to and the enlisting of a gulible public all fell apart in the Climategate revelations. Now with the tide turning, only a few are sticking stubornly to their guns.
The others are engaged in revisions ever so gradually – reflating the MWP and the Roman WP and deflating the LIA slowly back to their rightful places. The 1930s have been rebounding to become the warmest decade of the last century again and more glaciers seem to be bouncing back along with arctic ice.
Paul Vaughan says:
May 3, 2010 at 4:15 pm
“Some of us need to be thinking about how spatial phase-variations integrate over interannual-to-decadal timescales.”
Hi Paul, as you know, I am rather more focussed on seasonal/monthly/weekly detail, and forecasting it.
Cycles can be useful for climatic outlooks, but the seasonal exceptions are actually more important. This determines whether we have a cold winter or not, or if India gets a drought for example.
Style guides I’m familiar with recommend using a single space after a period. For instance, here’s a quote from The NY Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage, p. 699:
When are we going to start charging, these H I C K s of CIVILIZATION: GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES
T H U G G I N G N A T I O N S
with their
S C A R E MONGERING
government-trough FED
TERROR DISSEMINATION
without a MODICUM of PROOF?
{I’m just passing through one of the upper slow-talking farmlands of the United States and even out HERE if someone yelled FIRE, and kept pointing, around a corner,
THAT’S ILLEGAL of there’s no FIRE.
A.L.A.R.M.I.S.M. has been a C R I M E since the age of GREECE & ROME .
Government funded EMPLOYEE & GRANT RECIPIENT,
F. R. A. U. D.
Terror & alamism as G.O.V.E.R.N.M.E.N.T-S.A.N.C.T.I.O.N.E.D.
P.O.L.I.C.Y. S.H.I.F.T.I.N.G.
Re: Ulric Lyons May 4, 2010 12:14pm
My primary interest is in the integrals of the things that attract your attention. I say “some of us” acknowledging that “others of us” will place focus elsewhere within the puzzle that is certainly sizable enough to warrant variation in individual focus.
I appreciated your notes on the role of seasonality. The adjustments I’ve started making to my algorithms have already paid dividends (in terms of insight – money is another matter!)
Perhaps I should clarify that my perspective is that of an ecologist. Example: A tree might survive a summer drought or a winter cold snap in one year, but if pounded with the same scenario for a decade, the hierarchies of competitive-edge are restructured. There are a wide variety of factors constraining dominance. For any given species, there may generally be only one or a few factors that are critical in maintaining competitive-edge. That species’ opponents may be constrained in part by a different few critical factors. All of this varies over time & space. For example, a species may be restricted by different factors in different parts of its range.
All of the complexity of life on top of climate & everything else (soils, genetics, pollen & seed dispersal, migration, etc.) Landscape ecologists have had to invent deeply (& technically) philosophical frameworks for conceptualizing the extraordinarily complex multi-scale patterns found in nature. In my experience, the conceptual frameworks are not at all intuitive to new students. They struggle to get a handle on the technicalities of the different frameworks. As for the mainstream, they haven’t even heard of this stuff. But like I say: multidisciplinary, so we all have our unique combination of pieces of the overall most-fascinating puzzle. Cheers – & thanks for the notes Ulric.