Got this in the mail just as I posted my open thread announcemnt. I’m too busy this weekend to say much else except to post this tweet from Bill McKibben and some past blog excerpts and invite discussion.
The reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet has…literally dropped off the bottom of the chart. This means MELT. http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=514
That graph says one thing to me – black carbon soot, especially since lower levels of Greenland, near the oceans and glacial terminae don’t exhibit the same effect:
CO2 doesn’t change ice albedo, but smoke from the industrialization of Asia does, and I think it is a factor. See why below.
It is possibly the same reason for the sea ice decline and the melt pools we’ve been seeing on the surface. Note that this year the melt accelerated quickly once the sun was regularly over the horizon in May…so that an energy dissipation in the ice when soot absorbs solar radiation.
Recall this experiment with soot on snow done by meteorologist Michael Smith of WeatherData where soot made a huge difference.
I also covered the issue in:
Greenland Ground Zero for Global Soot Warming
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, this moulin in Greenland a real eye opener:
He writes:
In the winter a huge among of snow are accumulated on the Ice (2-3 meters, sometimes more) and we are not talking about 1 or 2 square-miles, it’s about 100.000′s of square miles (up to 1 million) on the Westside of the Ice cap and a similar picture on the Eastside… when the melting season starts in april-sep… the meltwater has to go somewhere, and for sure it goes downhill in huge meltwater rivers.
The black stuff on the bottom of the lakes is carbon dust and pollution in general… but not from one year, but several decades (the topographical conditions don’t change from year to year). On a flight over the Ice Cap a sky clear day, you can see hundreds of huge lakes with the black spot on the bottom.
– Anthony
The website of Jason E. Box, Ph.D. meltfactor.org has more graphs and says:
Latest Greenland ice sheet reflectivity
These albedo visualizations are discussed here and here.
About the Data
Surface albedo retrievals from the NASA Terra platform MODIS sensor MOD10A1 product beginning 5 March 2000 are available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) (Hall et al., 2011). The daily MOD10A1 product is chosen instead of the MODIS MOD43 or MCD43 8-day products to increase temporal resolution. Release version 005 data are compiled over Greenland spanning March 2000 to October 2011. Surface albedo is calculated using the first seven visible and near-infrared MODIS bands (Klein and Stroeve, 2002; Klein and Barnett, 2003). The MOD10A1 product contains snow extent, snow albedo, fractional snow cover, and quality assessment data at 500m resolution, gridded in a sinusoidal map projection. The data are interpolated to a 5 km Equal Area Scalable Earth (EASE) grid using the NSIDC regrid utility April and after September, there are few valid data, especially in Northern Greenland because of the extremely low solar incidence angles. The accuracy of retrieving albedo from satellite or ground-based instruments declines as the solar zenith angle (SZA) increases, especially beyond 75 degrees, resulting in many instances of albedo values that exceed the expected maximum clear sky snow albedo of 0.84 measured byKonzelmann and Ohmura (1995). Here, we limit problematic data by focusing on the June–August period when SZA is minimal.
John Doe says in part, July 22, 2012 at 8:46 am:
> There’s a problem in this story. Soot from fossil fuel combustion floats.
> Power boaters all know this as the engine exhaust is underwater and you
> can see the film of soot on the surface.
John Doe appears to be talking about oily soot produced by a motorboat
internal combustion engines. Not all soot is oily, such as soot from boilers
for steam engines – a common way to generate electricity. Pure carbon is
denser than water.
From James Abbott on July 23, 2012 at 3:58 am:
You mean from back when climate scientists were predicting the coming “ice age”?
You forgot to mention the “anthropogenic” part of the emissions. That greenhouse gases warm the planet is accepted, in the sense it’s not a “warming” but a retention of incoming solar energy leading to higher temperatures than without them. Of which water vapor is still the most important GHG. Because you said “warming” instead of “warmer” it is implied there is an increasing of temperatures due to increasing levels of GHG’s. But there has been a host of natural reasons for temperature variation identified besides GHG levels. To look at the recent geological eyeblink of increasing temperatures and directly ascribe all of that to GHG increases is… unscientific.
Since humans have been repeatedly shown to be “along for the ride” on this planet rather than any sort of direct driver of changes to the global climate, with our influence limited to relatively small regional areas and the “proof” of human influence on global climate arising from the summing of those small changes into global products, it has yet to be shown humans can do virtually anything to alter current global trends.
As noted in the above post, the worrisome albedo drop is in the 2000-2500m elevation range. An explanation can be found here:
http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/article/2011/greenland-ice-sheet-getting-darker-2
The albedo drop-off is due to the snow and ice becoming less shiny.
Also, from here:
http://bprc.osu.edu/wiki/Greenland_Albedo
You wrote:
As far as Greenland is concerned, nah. At higher elevations, the snow is less shiny thus more energy is absorbed. At lower elevations, the ice is dirty thus more energy is absorbed. As the winds blow across Greenland, the extra energy at the lower elevations warms the air that subsequently makes the higher elevations less shiny.
So unless you can figure out how to permanently cover Greenland with a layer of non-melting white shiny snow, as painting Greenland with a reflective coating would be ruled out on ecological grounds, there’s really nothing we can do about it. The feedback mechanisms are in place and operating, beyond human control, the Greenland ice sheet will inevitably go away. In about 1000 years by estimates I’ve seen, barring the end of the interglacial or cataclysmic events like extraterrestrial object impacts or massive volcanism leading to sudden global cooling, etc.
Steven Mosher says:
July 22, 2012 at 2:38 pm
… Summit is at 10,500 ft. The loss of albedo there is not as dramatic as the loss
at lower altitudes.
http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=514
That page (which has been altered significantly very recently) shows that at the non-melting altitudes ie above the ablation zone, the fall-off in albedo is the greatest. The opposite of what you said to Bill Illis (you owe him an apology).
Little consideration seems to be given in these discussions to the optical effects displayed by ice crystals. Ice crystals are masters of taking in radiation, internally reflecting it multiple times and sending it back out in a different direction from whence it came. See the following site for some examples:
http://atoptics.co.uk/
Bearing in mind that in the summer in Greenland there is frequent freezing fog which causes crystals to grow on the surface. Perhaps you could tell us how the development of hoar frost affects the albedo of snow. I don’t buy this (from your earlier post):
…in areas where snow remains, temperature-driven snow metamorphism reduces reflectivity by rounding the sharp ice crystal edges that scatter visible light …
I believe hoar frost puts the sharp edges back again in ill-understood ways.
Aaargh! Formatting fail!
Why isn’t Jason Box highlighting the fact that in the ablation zone in Greenland (0-500m altitude) this year the albedo is rather high, only beaten, it would appear, in 2000 and 2006.
If the melting is due to industrial black carbon depositing on the ice surface and concentrating in meltwater lakes, are we wise to allow the plans to exploit oil reserves in the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic?
With no gas transport infrastructure it will have to be burned off. Would anyone care to estimate the effect of adding further black carbon deposition in the high Canadian Arctic and in Greenland?
Well there’s albedo and then there’s albedo. At these quoted high altitudes; we are not talking about sea ice; but something that started as snow, which is a polycrystalline sparse matrix of small particles; a nearly perfect anechoic trap for electromagnetic radiation in the solar spectrum range.
Initially after fresh snowfall, you can get these high reflectances from the sun’s input, but plenty goes into the material to get rapped by TIR and scattering processes, and this results in melting. No matter how cold the surface is, enough energy is absorbed to melt snow crystals , and once that happens, than a whole lot of solar energy transmits into the surface, and is TIR trapped. As a result those 80% plus reflectances are quickly gone in just a few hours after a fresh snowfall under the sun.
So you don’t have to postulate any black gremlins to absorb solar energy, although I admit that happens. Even absent such materials, water itself that results from surface melting (doesn’t have to be vast pools of water, just micro surfaces). Snow that is three or four days old, is not such a good reflector.
I’d still rather bet on tropical oceanic clouds for my albedo, than rely on getting good energy reflected from the frozen north.
Look at the moulin photograph. Follow the left hand shoreline. About halfway up the picture is a band of black material a little below the surface. That is definately not a shadow or a deeper area.
Natural gas flaring doesn’t yield black carbon.
Hello kadaka (KD Knoebel)
In reply to my comment that climate scientists have been predicting human induced global warming since at least as far back as the 1970s, you said
“You mean from back when climate scientists were predicting the coming “ice age”?
You forgot to mention the “anthropogenic” part of the emissions. That greenhouse gases warm the planet is accepted, in the sense it’s not a “warming” but a retention of incoming solar energy leading to higher temperatures than without them. Of which water vapor is still the most important GHG. Because you said “warming” instead of “warmer” it is implied there is an increasing of temperatures due to increasing levels of GHG’s. But there has been a host of natural reasons for temperature variation identified besides GHG levels. To look at the recent geological eyeblink of increasing temperatures and directly ascribe all of that to GHG increases is… unscientific.”
Can I suggest you pay too much attention to media reports.
Several serious science papers in the 1970s were noting that a substantial increase in CO2 concentrations could raise the global mean temperature by several degrees C. I was lucky enough to be taught at university (1979 – 1982) by an atmospheric physicist who was both a good teacher and who was working on these issues. He also went into a lot of detail about other human induced changes in the atmosphere that had consequences such as CFCs and HCFCs. It is notable that sceptics rarely seem to challenge that piece of science – yet the serious stratospheric ozone depletion was a direct consequence of the way humans can change the atmosphere – even in the case of those gases, at tiny concentrations.
What gives the early CO2 papers weight in my view is that they pre-dated the main phase of modern warming – which started in the early 1980s.
And please – you don’t need to repeat that there are “a host of natural reasons for temperature variation”. We know that.
Many climate sceptics don’t seem able to get that the atmosphere is a very complex system with multiple forcing mechanisms, feedbacks, etc – which climate scientists are well aware of. So ocean currents, volcanoes, solar variations, cosmic rays, etc etc all can and do influence surface temperatures. The issue is by how much and over what timescales.
So if the 0.5C rise in global mean temperature since the 1970s (NASA GISS) is not CO2 led, what is the forcing mechanism(s) ? Its easy to say its not CO2, but to say that also requires a science based alternative – not just wishful thinking.
The point about rising CO2 levels (and other human induced changes in greenhouse gases) is that it is a new element in the equation and over a (geologically) very small timescale. CO2 levels are much higher now than at any time in modern human history (last few hundred thousand years) and the change has taken place since the industrial revolution. It can also be calculated whether or not the amount of carbon we have burnt fits with observed increases in concentrations in the atmosphere allowing for feedbacks. It does (Houghton).
So I don’t understand why sceptics flail around trying to find reasons to decouple the rising levels of CO2 from rising global tempertures.
I have read some sceptic attacks that those who think the science is correct are acting “on faith” ie a religious stance.
The reality is that science predicted what is happening and long before the media and the sceptic community got their teeth into this issue. There has been no serious undermining of the science. Thats not to say there will not be – good science is its own harshest critic.
But right now, human induced global warming looks likely to the main cause of observed changes to temperature, sea level, glaciers, sea ice – and the Greenland ice cap.
David Middleton says:
July 23, 2012 at 2:11 pm
“Natural gas flaring doesn’t yield black carbon.”
That turns out not to be the case. There is considerable literature on the subject.
For example:-
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22482289
The feedback mechanisms are in place and operating, beyond human control, the Greenland ice sheet will inevitably go away. In about 1000 years by estimates I’ve seen,
That we see icebergs with dark horizontal bands overlain with much lighter ice, as in the image I posted above, means periods in the past when albedo decreased were followed by substantial ice accumulation. Proving that continued melting is by no means inevitable.
Entropic man points out the same phenomena in the moulin image above.
phlogiston says:
“Has anyone slung a bucket into one of these melt lakes to sample what stuff is at the bottom which looks black? Is it industrial soot, wildfire soot, local rock dust from glaciers or just an optical effect?”
Thank you phlogiston. !!!!
All this speculation about what this black stuff is.. why doesn’t someone go up there, get some of it, (if it isn’t just an optical effect) and darn well find out !!!
Chemical analysis.. you know…. science !!!!!
“So if the 0.5C rise in global mean temperature since the 1970s (NASA GISS) is not CO2 led”
and how much of that is real ? and not just GISS “adjustments”
Yes.. the 0.5C rise may very well be man made, but in the manner you are suggesting 😉
mods.. add to bottom of previous comment if possible , please.
@Entropic man,
I should have said that natural gas flaring is an insignificant source of black carbon… So insignificant as to be indistinguishable from zero.
“Soot” including black carbon and other particulate matter (PM)… “measured soot emission factors were less than 0.84 kg soot/10(3) m3 fuel.”
That’s less than 0.00002 kg PM per 1,000 cubic feet (MCF). A 10,000 barrel per day oil well with a gas:oil ratio of 1,500 would produce 15,000 MCF per day. If that gas had to be flared, the total soot output would be 0.3 kg per day. That is an insignificant soot yield.
Total US gas flaring amounts to about 251,000,000 MCF/yr. That’s about 5,000 kg of soot per year.
Total US PM10 and PM2.5 emissions amount to about 2,000,000 tons per year… 1,814,369,480 kg per year. That’s 1.8 billion.
My bet is this is all another climate science false alarm – night fears – chicken albedo.
From James Abbott on July 23, 2012 at 2:35 pm:
So? There are also early papers that predicted the current coolness, as in the lack of significant warming for at least a decade, with cooling to come:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/20/premonitions-of-the-fall-in-temperature/
There was also the 1974 CIA report warning of global cooling:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/25/the-cia-documents-the-global-cooling-research-of-the-1970s/
The reality is, “serious science papers” in this case is a numbers game. The possibilities were increase, decrease, or no noticeable change. Undoubtedly there are papers for all positions. You can point to some papers that showed warming that coincided with a positive phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, said phases portending global warming. Hooray for you.
And by the standard you set, expect cooling in the years to come.
At this point, frankly, you sound like a blithering idiot. The research is ongoing into discovering the different climate mechanisms, new work still being published. The effects of clouds, for example, are still contentious, as even admitted by the IPCC. Dr. Roy Spencer has a nice write-up about the issue: A Primer on Our Claim that Clouds Cause Temperature Change.
Dr. Spencer had previously posited that a mere 1-2% reduction in cloud cover, related to the PDO, could account for that warming. Indeed, a sizable reduction was found over China, in opposition to expectations: Spencer’s posited 1-2% cloud cover variation found.
“Significant decline in cloud cover with trend of −1.6%per decade during 1954–2005 was derived.”
So when you toss out about these elements of this incredibly complex and interconnected system that “…climate scientists are well aware of…” them, first you strain credulity that they are aware of all of them. And stating it like they are aware of how they all work and interact, sounds like ignorance as they clearly do not.
Plus you toss in the argumentum ad ignorantiam, argument from ignorance, of ‘what else could it be but CO₂?’, implying the warming is anthropogenic, from the atmospheric CO₂ concentration increases. But the default is the warming is within natural variation. The onus is on proving this is not the case. The warming has not been shown to be outside of natural variation. You demand a science-based alternative explanation for the warming. Good news, Dr. Spencer has provided one.
Thus you certainly sound a lot less knowledgeable than you prefer to appear.
There you go again.
David Middleton says:
July 23, 2012 at 8:05 pm
@Entropic man,
“I should have said that natural gas flaring is an insignificant source of black carbon… So insignificant as to be indistinguishable from zero.”
That depends on the effect. Your figures add up to 109.5kg/year per flare.
What we need now are figures for the rate of carbon accumulation per unit area for the Greenland ice cap and the effect of that accumulation on the albedo.
Once we know these, we can say whether the amuont of carbon from flaring is insignificant or not.
@Entropic man,
Average annual snow accumulation in southern Greenland = ~300 kg/m2
Average BC concentration in Greenland snow = ~1ng/g.
Average annual Greenland BC deposition = ~300,000 ng/m2 (0.0003 g/m2, 0.0000003 kg/m2).
Surface area of Greenland ice sheet = 1,710,000 km2 (1,710,000,000,000 m2).
0.0000003 kgBC/m2 * 1,710,000,000,000 m2 = 510,000 kgBC per year.
My hypothetical well would increase the annual BC deposition by 0.02%. All of the annual gas flaring in the US would increase the BC deposition by 0.95%. Since there currently is no production from Greenland (onshore or offshore), no one knows yet what the production rates and gas yields will be.
To put this into albedo perspective. If we use 0.90 for snow and 0.04 for BC, the current BC deposition reduces the albedo from 0.90 to 0.899999999140. If all of the gas flaring in the US was replicated in and around Greenland, the BC yield would further reduce the albedo to 0.899999999132.
As I previously noted, natural gas flaring doesn’t yield black carbon.
David Middleton
“510,000 kgBC per year.”
I was looking for good data on deposition rates. Reference, please
This is just out
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/jul/HQ_12-249_Greenland_Ice_Sheet_Melt.html
“Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. “With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data.”
McConnell, et al. , 2007 will get you a modern deposition rate in range of 1-7 ng/g per year.
McConnell, et al., 2001 will get you an estimate of annual snowfall rate.
David Middleton
“510,000 kgBC per year.”
I was looking for good data on deposition rates. Reference, please
McConnell, et al. , 2007 will get you a modern deposition rate in range of 1-7 ng/g per year.
McConnell, et al., 2001 will get you an estimate of annual snowfall rate.
Thank you. It helps me understand it better.
Regarding the sudden albedo change, it would seem to have been a transient high temperature weather event.
@ur momisugly Steven Mosher I believe this modern warming period to be almost all natural in origin and GHG never had any major effect on ^ increasing the warmth except for a blanket effect that remains a relative constant. 1,500 years ago we had a warming and 1,500 years before that another and they were completely natural in origin. So this is natural too and mankind has had little to do with it.
Answer me Steven Mosher if you dare !
Regarding the high temperature event I too believe it to be an anomaly and not a signal of further climate change. I agree with Anthony in that it is soot and that to be a temporary event as there probably was a spike in coal/forrest fires earlier.