By Steve Goddard
In 2007, Dr. Hansen boldly declared
“…defying government gag orders. Hansen told Reuters, quote, “The reason so much (of the Arctic ice) went suddenly is that it is hitting a tipping point that we have been warning about for the past few years.”
and Mark Serreze placed the blame squarely on CO2.
“…the effects of greenhouse warming are now coming through loud and clear.”
So let’s see how the greenhouse gas induced tipping point is working out. By this date in 1990, there was already a large hole in the ice in the Laptev Sea (upper right, near Siberia.) Watch the video:
Generated from UIUC maps.
Solar radiation in the Arctic is very close to it’s peak by May 25, so there was a lot of solar energy being absorbed through the ice in the Arctic ocean by this date in 1990.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/EnergyBalance/images/annual_solar_insolation.png
Sea ice concentration is considerably higher now than it was on this date 20 years ago.
Generated from UIUC maps.
This means higher albedo (reflectance) and less absorption of solar energy. Note in the insolation graph above, that by the end of July the amount of sunshine in the Arctic begins to drop off very quickly.
You can see in the JAXA graph above that the 2007 divergence occurred in late July after Arctic insolation was already shutting down, essentially nullifying the Arctic albedo feedback argument. The Arctic minimum comes too late in the summer to have a significant impact on the radiation budget, due to the very low angle sun at that time. In fact, CERES has measured that during September 2008, the Arctic net radiation balance was strongly negative. The open water loses heat to the atmosphere (because it is not insulated by ice) meaning that declining ice cover is probably a negative feedback, not a positive one. NASA’s Earth Observatory explains:
This map (below) of net radiation (incoming sunlight minus reflected light and outgoing heat) shows global energy imbalances in September 2008, the month of an equinox. Areas around the equator absorbed about 200 watts per square meter more on average (orange and red) than they reflected or radiated. Areas near the poles reflected and/or radiated about 200 more watts per square meter (green and blue) than they absorbed. Mid-latitudes were roughly in balance. (NASA map by Robert Simmon, based on CERES data.)
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/EnergyBalance/images/ceres_net_radiation_200809.jpg
Looks like the Arctic is less tipped than it was 20 years ago. It is a shame that Dr. Hansen feels like he is gagged, when he has such important information needed to save the planet.
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It’s getting worse – from the BBC 12 May 2009 “Huge Bolivian glacier disappears”. This “Huge glacier” “had in 1940 an area of 0.22 km², reduced to 0.01 km² in 2007 and was completely gone by 2009” (Wikipedia, Chacaltaya) – huge indeed.
There’s a rural park near where I live that’s almost exactly the size (in 1940) of the “Huge Glacier” on Chacaltaya (which Wiki calls “a mountain range”- it’s a mountain, 5,421 m). The BBC says “Many Bolivians on the highland plains, and in two cities, depend on the melting of the glaciers for their water supply during the dry season”. They wouldn’t have got much water from THAT “Huge Glacier” then would they?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8046540.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chacaltaya
The eye elevation changed starting with their September 12, 2009 image. It affects lower latitudes, but has almost no effect inside the Arctic Basin, which is what we care about wrt summer ice.
FYI – The teeter-totter traffic sign at the top of the post is Anthony’s artwork.
25 May: UK Telegraph: Richard Alleyne: Turning all cars electric in Britain needs boost in power supply
Switching all cars in the country to electric would drain the National Grid of nearly a fifth of its capacity unless the equivalent of another six new nuclear power stations are built, claims a report.
The Royal Academy of Engineering said that to convert the countries fleet of 30 million vehicles would increase current demand by 16 per cent or an extra 10 gigawatts of power…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7764110/Turning-all-cars-electric-in-Britain-needs-boost-in-power-supply.html
Best DATA ?
When someone does analyses in 2 Dimensions when 3 are available — it means the theory DOES NOT WORK FOR ALL 3.
Look at the 60-year Cycle on the Volume Chart:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/IDAO/icevol_nao.gif
… Low around 1950, low again NOW.
It’s NOT thicker than 1990. Hansen used partial data to hoke up a Scare when it was ‘way thicker than 1950, and the Extent-users are using the SAME trick to say the reverse of what the data says, ie, that we are NOT close to the edge.
Tipping, or Not ?
DO the Math.
With 5800 cubic km left last year at minimum, “our ” Present El Nino is a 1.8.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml
A 1.1 El Nino (peak) in 2007: melted 4000 km3 more than in 2006, leaving 6000 km3 ACCORDING TO SEASAT. And PLEASE do not try again to “win” a debate by distracting people with talk of who invented PIOMAS. Word-Tricks are NOT Science. Satellites, Ships, Planes ALL saw the Ice thinning. NO ONE saw it thicken in 2007.
Loss: by year: 2007 Loss x 2010 El Nino/2007 El Nino
Loss by km3: 4000 km3 x 1.8/1.1 = 6545 km3 loss
From 5800 (Piomas) or 6000 km3 (Seasat)
= a Negative Number.
= Death, for 99% of Americans, as the currents stop.
— OK, I only give it 25% … Because it may be going straight for it now but … it is the Weather. Will Katla Blow ? Did Cosmic Ray spikes increase Clouds ? (December was WICKED)
http://cr0.izmiran.rssi.ru/oulu/main.htm (More Cloud=Less Sun = more Ice)
Again, the currents may change but are they changing FROM a pattern ENOUGH like 11,000 years ago to get the same result = 300 mph winds ?
…. Remember, even 1/4 the energy of 300 mph = “only” 150 mph sustained for 2 months = likely 225 mph gust = no Buildings survive outside the Tropics save the Pyramids.
No civilization, no food, no Rescue, no Hope. It’ll take 30 years for the Trees to grow back so we can build huts.
And to stop this costs 6 cents per American !
Why are we playing this Right Wing vs. Left when the NUMBERS say … what they say (above) ? The President must DO something and WE are the people who have to tell him THIS IS A RISK.
6 Billion Dead times 25% = 1.5 Billion AVERAGE dead.
Cannot you admit that there is a POSSIBILITY that this Extra-strong El Nino happenning EXACTLY at the Low-Ice point of the 60-year cycle
— COULD be a COLLOSSAL Killer ?
Or will we go down with the Louisiana Governor that cancelled the Katrina Alert & kicked both FEMA & Amtrack out of the State because “Hurricanes miss 75% of the time” & people’ll be inconvenieced Usually ?
I cannot even get ESA to use the advertised “flash” result feature of Cryosat 2, to verify thickness. 75% of the time, we live, so they figure: we deserve Scientific Priority of Publishing — so they are keeping all results SECRET until next September … that is: 2011 !
Mike
Except in rare circumstances that don’t apply here, all water already has more heat in it than ice does. Otherwise that water would freeze and it would already be ice.
The suggestion that the heat radiated by open water wouldn’t exist if the ice insulated that water, should be clarified to take this into account. Do you satisfactorily account for open water during Arctic night? If so, could you explain it?
Charles Wilson
Were holes in the ice “thicker” in 1980? LOL
This is from Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper, so you know it’s true:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3341039.ece
Some well known English researchers made a video of the holes during the 1960s.
The AVI files linked from Youtube show a somewhat different (softened) view of things at the pole though. The .PNG file attached http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/deetest/deetmp.81.png or http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=05&fd=24&fy=1980&sm=05&sd=24&sy=2010 show a fairly good comparative image of 1980 vs 2010. But the youtube video shows a more softened detail when compared to this file from the same site http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/animate.arctic.color.0.html I like the clarity of data presented here better ( from http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ )
Anu
In private industry, an employee discussing company business with the press without authorization would be fired immediately. In the military they would be court martialed.
Organisations require some discipline to be functional. If everyone in government was setting up press conferences to discuss their pet theories and their plans to save the planet, it would collapse.
John_in_Oz
If the air temperature is lower than the water temperature, heat will move out of the ocean. This starts occurring near the end of August.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Freezing seawater does the same thing. The process of freezing moves heat from the water into the atmosphere. Melting removes heat from the atmosphere.
RGates saith: “Now some people might be confused about what a “death” spiral is, and specifcally what it might look like as sea ice declines. It means it doesn’t go straight down, but has a few down years, and then a few up years…sort of 2 steps forward and then 1 step back, then 3 steps foward, and 2 steps back, then 1 step foward and 2 steps back…pretty simple.”
Nope. You keep saying that, but it’s false:
http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/graveyard_spiral/
graveyard spiral: n. originally, an inescapable winding descent of an airplane that leads to a crash; (hence), the rapid decline or devaluation of something, such as a career, a company, etc. Subjects: English, Aviation, Slang
Editorial Note: Synonyms are dead man’s spiral and the far more common death spiral.
Nothing at all there about going up-and-down.
Mike says:
May 25, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Kind of reverse logic: “The heat would not have been in the water to radiate out if the ice had been there.” Ice does not cause cold, it is caused by cold.
Ice over water insulates and keeps water warm. It’s one of the many wonderful features of water that makes life itself possible on this planet. Lose that cover, and it gets colder. The water in the Arctic ocean is constantly on the move, and warmer water will constantly be replacing the cooler water, for no other reason than simple convection, but probably more so because of constant currents.
So the theory is sound. Can you give us data on the amount of heat radiated by the uncovered Arctic ocean vs that reflected by the ice cover, perhaps?
R. Gates says:
May 25, 2010 at 4:43 pm
But furthermore, in looking at this trend chart:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg
I don’t see how someone, even the most elementary chart reader, could not easily see what the longer term trend has been in the sea ice since long before 1990, even going back to the 1960′s— it’s been down, slowly, but perceptively spiraling down.
You seem like someone who has invested more than a little time in trying to understand what’s going on in the Arctic, so perhaps you can help me with something I’ve never been able to locate a cogent answer for on my own. What exactly is the source of all that wonderfully precise data for the Arctic sea ice from 1900 to 1979?
The ice was so thick in 1959 that a submarine surfaced at the north pole in December.
R. Gates — Concentration is not extent. You and Steve are talking about different things.
I’ll be very, very interested to see how this year comes out, because I’ve got my own theories and this looks like the year to prove or disprove them re the importance of the central core’s concentration to eventual minimum extent.
The thing about extent is, there are large swaths of the spring max extent that are absolutely meaningless to eventual fall minimum extent. They melted thirty years ago, they melted 10 years ago, they’ll melt this year, they’ll melt 10 years from now. In judging minimum extent all that matters is those areas that one might reasonably expect have a chance to survive the minimum extent.
Dan Hawkins says:
May 25, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Charles and Smokey,
Thank you, gentlemen, for trying to keep us literate. IT’S a shame when a sentient being can’t handle ITS own language. The human race little realizes that IT’S likely to be ITS downfall one of these days. The tipping point draw’s nigh.
Dan, I was so filled with hope when I read the opening of your posting. Then…..along came “draw’s”. Please, just as “it’s” always means only “it is”, the third person singular of a verb is NEVER formed with an apostrophe. It takes me back to my days in Australia, where nearly every sign in a window seemed to form the plural with an apostrophe.
IanM
Donald (S.Australia) says:
May 25, 2010 at 4:34 pm
Perhaps Hansen is standing at the window of his Manhattan office pronouncing with all the understated solemnity of a self-important prophet that the perimeter road alongside the Hudson is to be submerged by the rising sea. Oh, that was thirty years ago? And that little tipping point was due some 10 years ago. Not a millimeter of difference. Another of Hansen’s wonderful, wonderful predictions. I predict…. he will be sharing a cell with Al.
—
The funny thing about this particular debacle is that the West Side Highway was supposed to end up submerged beneath the Hudson at that time anyway. However, it had nothing to do with sea level rise.
“Westway was the name of a proposed project to put New York City’s West Side Highway underground, first planned in 1972 and officially canceled in 1985. It would have involved extensive landfill in the Hudson River off Manhattan to accommodate a highway and real estate development.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westway_%28New_York%29
If the project had been carried out, Hansen’s prediction would have been correct, but for an entirely different reason.
@Dan Hawkins who wrote: “The tipping point draw’s nigh.”
Is that misspelling supposed to be sarcasm about ITS vs IT’S?
R Gates:
I would be real careful about how much you read into the “trend” charts. When I looked at those dates, my first question was, “where did that data come from before satellites” and the answer is “extrapolation in space and time from land observations”. This is what the source at Illinois says:
These data are a compilation of data from many sources integrated into a single gridded product by John Walsh and Bill Chapman, University of Illinois. The sources of data for each grid cell have changed over the years from infrequent land/sea observations, to observationally derived charts, to satellite data for the most recent decades. Temporal and spatial gaps within observed data are filled with a climatology or other statistically derived data.
Please note that large portions of the pre-1953, and almost all of the pre-1900 data is either climatology or interpolated data and the user is cautioned to use this data with care (see “Expert user guidance”, below).
I think you are pretty much left with post-1979 trends. Good luck with that. I don’t think you can derive any meaningful trend at all from a time period of that length.
stevengoddard says:
May 25, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Anu
In private industry, an employee discussing company business with the press without authorization would be fired immediately. In the military they would be court martialed.
Organisations require some discipline to be functional. If everyone in government was setting up press conferences to discuss their pet theories and their plans to save the planet, it would collapse.
Yes, that’s what the Bush Administration tried to argue.
They eventually fired the young political operative – turns out he had lied about his college degree before he joined the Bush campaign (the loyal work for which he became a political appointee). Close, but didn’t actually graduate – like Cheney at Yale.
Science is not the same as Business or Military – it it were, you couldn’t demand to see their data and get to make graphs and videos like you do.
OT: Anthony, we need a thread on the absurd reporting that the MSN is doing on the oil spill versus where the real information can be found. CNN is a running, drooling mess of misinformation. Tonight’s guffaw was Bill Nye, “the science guy,” trying to explain the technology behind a “top kill.” All he proved was that he is not an engineer and had not even done a good Google search on the subject. For example, he insisted it would take “400 tons of pressure” to counter that of the escaping oil. Come to think of it, not even a good scientist would make that statement.
My Google search turned up http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6505
Charles S. Opalek, PE says:
May 25, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Dr. Hansen is famous for his tipping point nonsense.
When it comes to temperatures, for the last 550 million years the Earth’s temperature has varied between 12C and 22C. (Scotese). About 22% of the time during that period temperatures topped-out at 22C; only about 6% of the time they bottomed-out at 12C. The atmosphere contains 750 Gigatons of carbon. If all the 4,000 GT of fossil fuel reserves were burned, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would increase from 390 ppm to 2,470 ppm. The resulting logarithmic temperature increase would be 1.4C, which would increase the temperature from the present 14.5C to 15.9C. So after burning all our fossil fuels, we would wind up 39% off the bottom of the historic temperature range.
So much for Dr. Hansen’s tipping points.
==============================
Nothing like the cut and dry analysis from an engineer. I wish climate scientists would take a few lessons from you guys.
But, if they did that, they would be out of a job…for upsetting the Hansen establishment.
Excellent post! Have saved for my own reference.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Anu
Imagine if every NASA scientist called press conferences to announce his/her plans for space travel. It would be unmanageable chaos.
Ever heard of the Hatch Act?
May not use their official authority or influence to interfere with an election
May not engage in political activity while on duty
May not engage in political activity in any government office