From the AGU Journal Highlights, some news that NSIDC’s “death spiral” has zombie like characteristics, and that the ice may quickly return from the dead, even if the Arctic turned ice free during summer. Nature is more resilient it seems, than some people give it credit for.
No tipping point for Arctic Ocean ice, study says
Declines in the summer sea ice extent have led to concerns within the scientific community that the Arctic Ocean may be nearing a tipping point, beyond which the sea ice cap could not recover. In such a scenario, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap outgoing radiation, and as the Sun beats down 24 hours a day during the Arctic summer, temperatures rise and melt what remains of the polar sea ice cap. The Arctic Ocean, now less reflective, would absorb more of the Sun’s warmth, a feedback loop that would keep the ocean ice free.
However, new research by Tietsche et al. suggests that even if the Arctic Ocean sees an ice-free summer, it would not lead to catastrophic runaway ice melt.
The researchers, using a general circulation model of the global ocean and the atmosphere, find that Arctic sea ice recovers within 2 years of an imposed ice-free summer to the conditions dictated by general climate conditions during that time. Furthermore, they find that this quick recovery occurs whether the ice-free summer is triggered in 2000 or in 2060, when global temperatures are predicted to be 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer.
During the long polar winter the lack of an insulating ice sheet allows heat absorbed by the ocean during the summer to be released into the lower atmosphere. The authors find that increased atmospheric temperatures lead to more energy loss from the top of the atmosphere as well as a decrease in heat transport into the Arctic from lower latitudes. So the absence of summer sea ice, while leading to an increase in summer surface temperatures through the ice-albedo feedback loop, is also responsible for increased winter cooling. The result is a swift recovery of the Arctic summer sea ice cover from the imposed ice-free state.
Title:
“Recovery mechanisms of Arctic summer sea ice”
Authors:
- S. Tietsche, D. Notz, J. H. Jungclaus, and J. Marotzke
- Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
Source:
Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) paper 10.1029/2010GL045698, 2011
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 38, L02707, 4 PP., 2011
doi:10.1029/2010GL045698
Recovery mechanisms of Arctic summer sea ice
S. Tietsche, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
D. Notz, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
J. H. Jungclaus, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
J. Marotzke, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
We examine the recovery of Arctic sea ice from prescribed ice-free summer conditions in simulations of 21st century climate in an atmosphere–ocean general circulation model. We find that ice extent recovers typically within two years. The excess oceanic heat that had built up during the ice-free summer is rapidly returned to the atmosphere during the following autumn and winter, and then leaves the Arctic partly through increased longwave emission at the top of the atmosphere and partly through reduced atmospheric heat advection from lower latitudes. Oceanic heat transport does not contribute significantly to the loss of the excess heat. Our results suggest that anomalous loss of Arctic sea ice during a single summer is reversible, as the ice–albedo feedback is alleviated by large-scale recovery mechanisms. Hence, hysteretic threshold behavior (or a “tipping point”) is unlikely to occur during the decline of Arctic summer sea-ice cover in the 21st century.
=====================================================
This lends credence to this related story previously on WUWT:
The full paper is here (PDF) backup location here Tietsche_GRL_2011
Homeostatis – the tendency of a system taken from its natural state to return back to its natural state. Carbon and oxygen are lagging indicators from when the sun overheats the surface and those levels increase. As the sun decreases so do the levels of those trace elements. The sun decreases in output and ice increases. Isn’t it amazing?
Climate research can do very peculiar observations and conclusions, however in my lifetime we don’t see icefree arctic. In ten years from this day, they warn us from new ice age, because multiyear ice in arctic grows rapidly. Climatescience is mostly pseudoscience. HAH!
MarkW says:
February 9, 2011 at 11:56 am
I vaguely remember a study from a few years back that found that as sea ice decreased, evaporation from the polar seas resulted in an increase in low level clouds, which in turn bounced a lot of sunlight back into space.
1st rule of AGW:
Only use the data that fits the theory, mate. Ignore the rest.
Schrodinger’s Cat says:
February 9, 2011 at 11:12 am
I wonder if they started this to find the tipping point due to positive feedback and found enhanced negative feedback instead. Damn, there goes next year’s funding.
This really underlines the fact that nature has lots of defensive tricks. The only downside is that the conclusion came from one of these admired and trusted GCMs….
###
No no no, you got it all wrong! The growing ice PROVES CAGW! You just have to compensate for the negative feedbacks interfering with the warming signal.
It appears this “climate model” – and certainly the CAGW propagandists “must agree” with a model’s impartial and always-accurate results! – tears down the (false) tipping theory so often claimed about the Arctic ice.
1) The model did not assume any cause for the initial cause of the Arctic ice melt: The programmers merely began with an ice-free Arctic, then let the simulation run.
2) The simulation (model, if you will) was run under today’s conditions at today’s temperatures. Then it was re-run starting at a +2 degree initial condition and run again. With the same results -> The Arctic froze up again, just as in the first model run. (I will argue that an assumed +2 degree temperature by mid-century in unlikely/unrealistic under ANY circumstance, but that is irrelevant to the model runs.
That said, but ….
However, why do they bring up a 24-hour solar exposure? That occurs ONLY during the very few mid-summer northern hemisphere weeks centered at 22 June. Since nobody in any CAGW group is claiming/forecasting that the mid-winter ice will disappear (today’s winter temperatures are -25 to -35 average), and since the maximum ice coverage is Feb-Mar-April-May, discussing a June 22 ice-free Arctic is absurd.
Arctic minimum ice conditions occur 3 months later, just days before the fall equinox of 22 Sept. Thus, when the Arctic has minimum ice, the Arctic is exposed to (at most) 12 hours of sun. And that sun is (at msot) between 20 degrees and 5 degrees above the horizon. (About 1/4 of the Arctic Ocean starts north of Greenland’s north coast at about 82 degrees, a little over half is at 70-72 degrees north (from about longitude 120 W all the around to about 135 East) and the rest is open ocean between Greenland and the Murmansk Peninsula. (Roughly speaking.)
Since the land area of Canada, Alaska, and North Russia/Siberia always thaws every summer, albedo changes can only depend on the freezing or not freezing of the thin band of water between the dark (thawed) land and the “white” sea ice of the Arctic north of that land-sea border. Supposedly.
But at an angle of incidence of less than 22 degrees, just how much incoming sunlight is actually absorbed by the ocean – if any is absorbed at all? The atmosphere between 70 north and 90 north absorbs even more heat from the sun: You can see that every night when a setting sun is “easy” to look directly into every evening at dusk, while intolerable between 9:00 am and 3:00 pm the same day with the same clouds and the same dust, but with a atmosphere layer smaller by the tangent of the sun’s angle.
Great.
A group of scientists expend 2 or 3 years of valuable expertise and resources, which conclude by stating the bleeding obvious just to debunk another stupid warmist myth.
Little wonder that progress in better understanding the Earth’s climate system has slowed to a snails’ pace……….
Every summer since the sixteenth century (we don’t have reliable data further back) all ice in the Baltic has melted and the water has warmed up to bathing temperatures in the shallows. Every winter the water cools and the ice comes back. Judging from the fact that the Harbor Seal that depends on ice for pupping has survived since the Early Holocene there hasn’t been any long ice-free periods for at least several thousand years.
And lest somebody claim that it would be different in a deeper and saltier sea, it works just the same in the Okhotsk sea, which is both deep and salty. And so does the sea-ice in Antarctica which also largely melts and reforms every year in even deeper and saltier waters.
The idea that sea-ice wouldn’t come back once it has melted is completely unrealistic, and could only be due to the fact that most “climate scientists” seem to be remarkably ignorant about actual conditions at high latitudes.
“Zombie ice”
I like it. May I run with it?
I think the outline of a new Arctic ice-water circulation model is emerging slowly from where it was buried in 2007.
In 2007, the CO2 plague (thought to be carried by humans) melted away much of the Arctic in a “death spiral” that was expected to last until all ice was dead sometime between 2013 to 2030.
However, unexpected good news came from Catlin Arctic survey in 2009, when the scientific expedition led by a team of dogs-and-sleds explorers (no dog was harmed during the expedition) encountered “rotten ice”. This was bitter-sweet news for the expedition which went on to be surround by a host of rotten ice, and had to be rescued by air-lift. The question then was whether the rotten ice was the remnant of the perfectly good ‘live ice’ or the making of something truly rotten.
Well, with these findings scientists’ fears have been realised. It has now emerged that much of the recovery from 2007 is due to rotten ice growing and turning into “zombie ice”, which is an entirely different kind of ice than the one it replaced.
The ice that melted as a result of the CO2 plague was alive and it helped cool the planet. What effect ‘zombie ice’ will have on climate and biosphere is still unknown. It is suspected that ‘rotten ice’ may go through a process of purification in Arctic waters until it becomes alive again, but such a mechanism is poorly understood and is yet to be established. More research will be needed.
The Arctic ice-water circulation model:
Live Ice=> Death Spiral=> Rotten Ice=> Zombie Ice=> Purification?=> Live Ice
Do I need to add /sarc off to this?
Claude Harvey says February 9, 2011 at 11:37 am
But if you stuff it in a half-baked media bun and pour cheap red political ketchup all over it, there’s no mystery about folk finally chucking up after swallowing the tale. Frozen dough gets ’em every time.
lack of an insulating ice sheet allows heat absorbed by the ocean during the summer to be released …
Who would have thought that lack of insulation would increase blackbody radiation?
It seems the proponents of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming will spare no effort to catalog sources of heat, but are casual in identifying the sinks. One can draw a conclusion about agenda driven research verses pure scientific research.
Thanks for highlighting this story, Anthony.
If anyone s interested, here was our take on it over a World Climate Rerport:
Arctic Ice “Tipping Point” Rejected.
Seems an Arctic ice tipping point is a favorite story of John Holdren.
-Chip
The evaporation and resulting fog/clouds really throw a spanner into the works. Evaporation removes a lot of heat from the ocean. The fog/clouds reflect heat back to space but they also act as insulation. I haven’t seen a trustworthy paper that describes this yet. I would dearly love to see someone actually try to measure the heat flux.
I remember looking out over the frozen arctic ocean and seeing a fog bank rising straight up thousands of feet into the sky. I had never seen anything like it. The met tech explained that it was caused by a patch of open water.
There are one or two scientists whose judgment I trust when it comes to things arctic. The rest only spend relatively brief periods if they go there at all. It is really easy to concoct plausible sounding theories from the comfort of a desk down south but if you’ve never spent whole years up north, you won’t have a working BS filter based on lived reality. My favorite example is the number of people who seem to think that the arctic sea ice melts from the top down. That’s simply not true. By the time you see puddles, the ice is 1/10 as thick (or less) as it was when the sun came up. If you haven’t spent time up north actually measuring ice thickness by boring holes, you won’t know that and your theories will be bunk.
My other favorite example of scientific cluelessness: Talk to an Eskimo (I’m being deliberately non-PC, they prefer to be called Inuit) about polar bears. You won’t get the same story you get from the scientists. I’m betting the indigenous are right and the scientists are wrong. </rant> (but I could go on)
It should be noted that the absence of a “tipping point” , in which a loss of sea in a single summer, would cause permanent disappearance of the ice, independent of climate trends, does not imply that ice free summers in the Arctic will not happen. According to the Science Daily news story on the article, where the authors were interviewed:
The researchers underline that their results do not question the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice or its relation to anthropogenic climate change. “If we don’t slow down global warming extensively, we will lose the summer sea-ice cover in the Arctic within a few decades,” says Tietsche. “Our research shows that the speed of sea-ice loss is closely coupled to the speed of global warming. We think that it’s important to know that we can still do something about slowing down or possibly even stopping the loss of the sea-ice cover.”
The authors are saying that if the earth gets cooler, the summer arctic sea ice will reappear. They are not saying it won’t disappear if the climate gets warmer.
Climate boffins never seem to think these things through. There is practically no sun during the arctic winter and because of the high angle of incidence not much in the summer either. As well, water reflects sunlight quite well at high angles of incidence. So the bottom line is albedo doesn’t mean a whole lot above the arctic circle.
What DOES matter a lot is that ice is a decent insulator and prevents the liquid ocean underneath from cooling by radiation and convection. So the positive feedback that the climate boffins imagine is actually a negative feedback. That should sound familiar. They imagine that surface heating caused by increased CO2 has a positive feedback effect through the creation of more water vapor while that too is actually a negative feedback due to increased evaporation, convection of the energy upwards in latent heat of vaporization, and release at altitude when a cloud forms which the raises albedo in lower latitudes where albedo really matters a lot.
These runaway warming narratives get tiring and make one wonder how these people ever passed any kind of physical science course in their sorry lives.
Basically they found out that open water freezes in dark and -30°C.
real talk translation of this story: Hey, you know that stupid, made up thing that’s never going to happen? Just in case it somehow does happen don’t worry about it because that entire idea of a “tipping point” is just another stupid, made up thing that’s never going to happen.
While being quite ignorant of the details, this is something I have been saying ever since someone here (much more knowledgeable than myself) pointed out the possibility.
What I find ridiculous is that the idea makes so much sense, and yet the warmists have completely ignored the possibility as it does not ‘feed their monster’.
Spare a thought for the aide that has to pass on this information to the hitherto misinformed Prince Charles. This will only serve to reinforce his misgivings over the likely outcome of his five year prognosis.
A lesson in the venality of grant chasing scientists, politicians and sycophantic courtiers and advisors. At his age the lesson should however have been unnecessary.
Anthony,
In the whole history of this planet, has it ever overheated to what these guys are exaggerating too?
I do have to give credit to a very active imagination through the whole climate science community. Unfortunately, they also effect government policies.
An ice-free arctic will absorb so much more sunlight in the winter. Oh…there is no sunlight in the winter. Well, maybe the lost energy will keep the Arctic ice-free all the time.
Doesn’t an ice free Arctic summer….
…mean the weather is improving
I was going to comment that lack of arctic ice has exactly the opposite effect – a negative feedback.
1. open water reflectance increases as the angle of incidence decreases – the arctic sun is low in the sky to begin with and what little sunlight is left in the winter is reflected just as well off water as off of ice
2. there is very little sun above the arctic circle to reflect in the first place, even in the summer, and in the winter it diminishes to near zero insolation so between this and high reflectance at low angle of incidence albedo really doesn’t mean much near and above the arctic circle
3. ice is a good insulator and when it covers a body of water it prevents that body of water from giving up heat by radiation and reflection. In the arctic winter if there’s no ice that water will be cooling down like a mofo and there won’t be no ice for very long.
In short, arctic ice melt has a negative feedback with it that limits further ice melt. That’s a contributing factor for why the earth has gone through many ice ages but has never experienced a runaway greenhouse in all its billions of years of history.
This narrative about positive feedbacks from the climate boffins is a familiar refrain. A higher level of CO2 in and of itselt does nothing but add a small amount of very beneficial warming – extending growing seasons, making plants grow faster, and use less water while they’re doing it. Everyone knows this so so the climate boffins invented a positive feedback where more CO2 makes it a little warmer and the little more warmth puts more water vapor into the atmosphere which makes it warmer still and starts a runaway greenhouse. This simply doesn’t happen in the real world, has never happened, and never will happen so long as the earth remains a water world. Increased warmth results in increased evaporation which convection carries upward along with a huge amount of latent heat of vaporization. Adiabatic lapse rate causes the water vapor to condense a thousand or more feet above the ground where it releases all that heat upon condensation. The heat is thus swiftly removed from the surface and carried upward where it has an easier path out to the cold of space. Adding negative feedback upon negative feedback when the heat is released by condensation a cloud is formed and if it’s during the daytime (clouds tend to form in the afternoon which is why afternoon/evening thunderstorms are the strongest and most frequent) the cloud is highly reflective and blocks the strong afternoon sunlight from ever reaching the surface.
Higher atmospheric CO2 is actually a great benefit so when it comes to fossil fuels – burn baby burn!
Models are useless to confirm or refute an hypothesis as they do not have predictive power and do not take into account how the climate mechanisms change when the Earth has a surplus or lack of energy.
Worryingly the Earth seems to dispose of surplus energy easily via heat transport from equator to poles, but is not good at conserving energy at times of scarcity. It seems in this case it can only maintain temperatures suitable for life by sacrificing territory to extra polar ice, particularly in the NH. That’s why ice-ages are common events and warm climate optimums are relatively rare.
Here’s hoping the sun decides to wake up soon!
corrections added:
I was going to comment that lack of arctic ice has exactly the opposite effect – a negative feedback. But others already did so the points are repetitious but they deserve repeating.
1. open water reflectance increases as the angle of incidence decreases – the arctic sun is low in the sky to begin with and what little sunlight is left in the winter is reflected just as well off water as off of ice
2. there is very little sun above the arctic circle to reflect in the first place, even in the summer, and in the winter it diminishes to near zero insolation so between this and high reflectance at low angle of incidence albedo really doesn’t mean much near and above the arctic circle
3. ice is a good insulator and when it covers a body of water it prevents that body of water from giving up heat by radiation, evaporation, and convection. In the arctic winter if there’s no ice that water will be cooling down like a mofo and there won’t be no ice for very long.
In short, arctic ice melt has a negative feedback with it that limits further ice melt. That’s a contributing factor for why the earth has gone through many ice ages but has never experienced a runaway greenhouse in all its billions of years of history.
This narrative about positive feedbacks associated with arctic ice melt is a familiar refrain from the climate boffins. A higher level of CO2 in and of itselt does nothing but add a small amount of very beneficial surface warming – extending growing seasons, making plants grow faster, and use less water while they’re doing it. Everyone knows this so the climate boffins invented a positive feedback where more CO2 makes it a little warmer and the little more warmth puts more water vapor into the atmosphere which makes it warmer still and starts a runaway greenhouse. This simply doesn’t happen in the real world, has never happened, and never will happen so long as the earth remains a water world. Increased warmth results in increased evaporation which convection carries upward along with a huge amount of what’s called latent heat of vaporization. Latent means it won’t register on a thermometer. Adiabatic lapse rate causes the water vapor to condense a thousand or more feet above the ground where it releases all that latent heat upon condensation. The heat is thus swiftly removed from the surface and carried upward where it has an easier path out to the cold of space from the higher altitude. Adding negative feedback upon negative feedback when the heat is released by condensation a cloud is formed and if it’s during the daytime (clouds tend to form in the afternoon which is why afternoon/evening thunderstorms are the strongest and most frequent) the cloud is highly reflective and blocks the strong afternoon sunlight from ever reaching the surface.
Higher atmospheric CO2 is actually a great benefit so when it comes to fossil fuels – burn baby burn!
Claude Harvey says:
February 9, 2011 at 11:37 am
“….The obvious mystery is why, in view of documented climatic history, anyone would believe a quarter-inch, man-made, CO2 tail (by volume) could wag a one-hundred-yard-long atmospheric dog?”
Best anti AGW comment and analogy of the day.