Sea Ice News #31

I commented on this a bit a while back too! Odd how the NSIDC graph has caught up since some folk started talking about it, or rather, odd how the ice has caught up! Spooky!
I’d still like to know why the Southern Hemisphere anomaly is so out of synch with the sea ice extent. Or is that just another mathematical quirk?

Here’s one from the peanut gallery. The downtrend in Arctic sea ice extent is caused by soot from China’s coal burning. Specifically, the soot falls on the ice and increases its albedo, making it melt a little faster. That’s why the downtrend in sea ice coincides with the uptrend in Chinese coal usage. The Antarctic is unaffected because the soot never makes it further south than about where the ICTZ is.

And hungry for tree huggers, I have to add.
[d]

Joe Romm is courting multiple strokes in his overblown, libelous attack on Bastardi and WUWT over this mistake. Cancun must not be living up to his expectations.

Anonymous commenter guy says: December 5, 2010 at 6:59 pm
“…….the downtrend in sea ice coincides with the uptrend in Chinese coal usage.”
That has not come expressly to my mind so far (my bad….), but I’m now sure you’re spot on. Thanks.

I’m probably committing the same error of eyeballing, but the NSIDC Antarctic Sea Ice Extent graph appears to show that the current extent is around 1 million sq km above the long-term average. So why is the “Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly” only +0.268 (in the same units)?
Is it because the anomaly chart (from Cryosphere Today) uses a baseline of 1979-2008 while the NSIDC average is 1979-2000?

Over the last century and a half there has been many ideas to prevent ice melt and to help ice melt:
In 1912 Carroll Livingston Riker, an engineer, inventor, and industrialist, proposed a scheme to change the climate of polar regions by tinkering with the ocean currents of the Atlantic. This was to be accomplished by preventing the cold Labrador Current from colliding with the Gulf Stream.
In 1957 Soviet academician Borisov, alluding to the centuries-old quest of the Russian people to overcome the Northland cold, proposed building a dam across the Bering Strait to melt the Arctic sea ice. In numerous articles and then again in his book Can Man Change the Climate? (1973), Borisov detailed his vision of a dam 50 miles long and almost 200 feet high with shipping locks and pumping stations. To liquidate Arctic sea ice, Borisov wanted to pump cold seawater out of the Arctic Ocean, across the dam, and into the Bering Sea and the North Pacific. This displacement would allow the inflow of warmer water from the North Atlantic, eliminate fresh water in the surface layer in several years, and thus prevent the formation of ice in the Arctic Basin, creating warmer climate conditions. His goal was to remove a 200-foot layer of cold surface water, which would be replaced by warmer, saltier water that would not freeze.
Other ocean-engineering schemes included installing giant turbines in the Strait of Florida to generate electricity and adding a thin film of alcohol to the northern branch of the Gulf Stream to decrease surface water evaporation and warm the water by several degrees, although the cod might become rather tipsy.
Russian scientists warned of possible climate disruption from such mega-projects.
No kidding! Even the phase climate disruption is not new
http://m.gizmodo.com/5680669/thawing-the-arctic-+-soviet-russias-cold-war-war-on-cold

Oh…thanks the article….

Melt the Arctic! Year round open transit would be great. The PBs will survive just like they always have.

From LazyTeenager on December 5, 2010 at 7:51 pm:

I am going to guess that you read an article somewhere and decided to claim that all of the melting is due to black carbon, just to make consideration of CO2 go away.

Good job, peanut. That is not what he said, and you expressly quoted what it was:

Anonymous commenter guy says:
December 5, 2010 at 6:59 pm
Here’s one from the peanut gallery. The downtrend in Arctic sea ice extent is caused by soot from China’s coal burning.

What was said is a good possible scenario. Heck, even Wikipedia provides supporting evidence. From the Black carbon entry:

(…) In addition, black carbon forcing is two to three times as effective in raising temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere and the Arctic than equivalent forcing values of CO2.[35]

Also:

According to Dr. Charles Zender of the University of California, Irvine, black carbon is a significant contributor to Arctic ice-melt, and reducing such emissions may be “the most efficient way to mitigate Arctic warming that we know of”.[45] The “climate forcing due to snow/ice albedo change is of the order of 1.0 W/m2 at middle- and high-latitude land areas in the Northern Hemisphere and over the Arctic Ocean.”[46] The “soot effect on snow albedo may be responsible for a quarter of observed global warming.”[47] “Soot deposition increases surface melt on ice masses, and the meltwater spurs multiple radiative and dynamical feedback processes that accelerate ice disintegration,” according to NASA scientists Dr. James Hansen and Dr. Larissa Nazarenko.[48] As a result of this feedback process, “BC on snow warms the planet about three times more than an equal forcing of CO2.”[49] When black carbon concentrations in the Arctic increase during the winter and spring due to Arctic Haze, surface temperatures increase by 0.5 °C.[50] Black carbon emissions also significantly contribute to Arctic ice-melt, which is critical because “nothing in climate is more aptly described as a ‘tipping point’ than the 0 °C boundary that separates frozen from liquid water—the bright, reflective snow and ice from the dark, heat-absorbing ocean.”[51]

Got that? On the worldwide front, with the forcing from CO2… Well, the esteemed Dr. Phil Jones of UEA-CRU agreed in February 2010 that there had been no statistically-significant global warming from 1995 to the present. So the CO2 ain’t doing much. Meanwhile black carbon (soot) is implicated in dramatically increasing Arctic sea ice melt.
And China is building many new coal plants and burning lots of coal.

China and India together account for 25-35% of global black carbon emissions[66] Black carbon emissions from China doubled from 2000 to 2006.[67]

Now, when you examine the Arctic “tipping point,” while considering global temperature trends, you should be able to figure out that it is highly possible that soot is responsible for the downward trend in Arctic sea ice extent. Indeed, it is at least more likely than not. And China is generating a lot of soot, and will generate lots more.
It becomes an argument as to whether it was specifically China’s soot emissions, and specifically from their coal burning, that lead to the downward trend, and the sea ice would be growing or holding in extent without them. After about five years or more of complex computer modeling, dueling papers, maybe some real field research, and a few billion or so dollars, Climate Science™ may have a definitive answer. Until they do that and it disproves Anonymous commenter guy’s statement, it seems very plausible.
You know, the esteemed Dr. James Hansen of NASA-GISS has done impressive work highlighting the disastrous warming contributions of soot. Read that Wikipedia entry, work through the references, study his research. Maybe you’ll understand why the esteemed Hansen so loudly protests against those “death trains” hauling coal!
😉

Anthony,
Thanks for the NANSEN link, that’s a new dataset/source of monthly values for me to look into. 🙂
As to your Bremen link, AFAIK that link does not post a daily/monthly time series, but than again I may have missed it, but I’ve looked throughout that link several times before. Maybe you or someone else can be more specific as to the location of their time series tabulation?
Finally, you have a small typo in your post, UUIC should be UIUC.
As to NSIDC, I’ve consistantly agreed with you about NSIDC publishing digital/tabulated daily values.
I’ve been digitizing their daily sea ice extent graphs for the past 3 month, and am just waiting for them to publish their December monthly update (hopefully on Monday), to see what their November monthly mean sea ice extent numerical value is, my September monthly agreed with there’s (-0.03E6 km^2), but my October monthly was way off for some reason (-0.75E6 km^2), if November’s mean monthly extent is reported by NSIDC as way above my digitized mean, than I’ll be emailing NSIDC, with tabulated numbers and a PDF graph, to try to understand where I’m misunderstanding what’s plotted versus what’s reported by NSIDC, they say “Sea ice extent averaged over was …” and that’s what I’m calculating AFAIK.