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.
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Hello kadaka (KD Knoebel)
You say increased CO2 in the atmosphere does not cause warming.
Try this then – do you accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas ?
Hope so as that was proved when good old Queen Victoria was on the throne here in England.
Accepting that basic bit of science, and knowing what the forcing effect is, then its possible to calculate how much the planet will warm for a given CO2 concentration increase.
Thats the work that was done in the 1970s and it has been proved essentially correct albeit that of course there are lots of other forcing variations going on so we do not see a straight linear trend (the rise in CO2 has been essentially linear in the modern instrument record)
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
Or maybe you don’t accept that the increase in CO2 has been caused by humans ?
I fully accept that not all scientists accept the CO2 link to global warming. Dr. Spencer is entitled to his views and you are entitled to believe in them. But its not a view shared by the majority of climate scientists.
Most of us accept the fact that CO2 is referred to as a “greenhouse gas.” So-called greenhouse gasses are transparent to higher frequency incoming solar radiation and opaque to certain bandwidths of outgoing lower frequency radiation. Most of the bandwidths trapped by CO2 are also trapped by water vapor.
Since greenhouse gasses only trap certain bandwidths, their heat-trapping effectiveness follows production functions (AKA diminishing return functions). Each incremental addition of GHG traps less heat than the previous increments.
All other things being equal, an increase in atmospheric CO2 will warm the atmosphere; with the warming following a production function. However, “all other things” are never equal.
It’s not even remotely close to being “possible to calculate how much the planet will warm for a given CO2 concentration increase.”
If it was, Hansen et al, 1988 would have been able to accurately forecast the net warming from their very accurate forecast of CO2 concentration increase.
Hansen et al., 1988 CO2 Forecast
Hansen et al., 1988 Model Invalidation
And Kaufmann et al., 2011 wouldn’t be wondering where the missing 0. 2°C of model-forecast warming went to.
Mankind’s contribution to the carbon flux is minuscule and much of the CO2 rise is the natural response of the oceans, biosphere and atmosphere to the warm-up from the Little Ice Age. I merged the data from six peer-reviewed papers on stomata-derived CO2 to build this Holocene reconstruction…
Northern Sweden (Finsinger et al., 2009), Northern Spain (Garcia-Amorena, 2008), Southern Sweden (Jessen, 2005), Washington State USA (Kouwenberg, 2004), Netherlands (Wagner et al., 1999), Denmark (Wagner et al., 2002).
The plant stomata pretty well prove that Holocene CO2 levels have frequently been in the 300-350 ppmv range and occasionally above 400 ppmv over the last 10,000 years.
The incorrect estimation of a 3°C equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) to CO2 is almost entirely driven by the equally incorrect assumption that preindustrial Holocene CO2 levels were in the steady range of 270-280 ppmv, as indicated by the Antarctic ice cores.
The plant stomata data clearly show that preindustrial atmospheric CO2 levels were much higher and far more variable than indicated by Antarctic ice cores.
Northern Hemisphere Temperature Anomaly and Atmospheric CO2
As the Earth’s climate continues to not cooperate with their models, the so-called consensus will eventually recognize and acknowledge their fundamental error. Hopefully we won’t have allowed decarbonization zealotry to bankrupt us beforehand.
Hopefully we won’t have allowed decarbonization zealotry to bankrupt us beforehand. Amen to that its scary how rabid some alarmist are. I have never believed GHG to be more than a blanket that traps heat and remains a relitive constant no matter that CO2 is going up. Oh BTW this is an interesting paper about CO2 levels in the recent past :http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1806245/posts
From James Abbott on July 24, 2012 at 4:06 pm:
Where? I know it’s a favored tactic against skeptics to pigeonhole them into a blanket “Claims increased atmospheric CO₂ concentrations do not cause warming”, but the reality is more complex than that.
Sure.
And that’s where you run into problems. That requires a more complete understanding of the climate system than we currently possess. “Climate” is an incredibly complex interconnected system, with many feedbacks and the distinctions between “cause” and “effect” blurred. You cannot point to a single number, atmospheric CO₂ concentration, and state X increase will cause Y temperature increase. To do so shows ignorance.
That’s a fallacious conclusion as it has not “been proved essentially correct”. The planet has warmed naturally since the depths of the Little Ice Age. The late 20th century warming went along with a positive phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
There has also been peer-reviewed published work ascribing around half of the warming to black carbon (soot), even CFC’s can account for most of the warming.
Add in the work of Henrik Svensmark and how cosmic rays affect cloud cover, which dovetails nicely with Dr. Spencer’s 1-2% cloud variation.
And you find CO₂ is not needed to explain this geological eyeblink spate of increased global temperatures. Given the plethora of alternative explanations, it is not possible to ascribe with certainty even a portion of the warming to the atmospheric CO₂ concentration increases.
Plus it is well known CO₂ has a logarithmic effect. There is increasing evidence the effect is saturated. Thus further increases will yield minimal increases in global temperatures, if any.
There you go again. Blanket statements like that don’t sound very smart. How much of the increase has been caused by outgassing of CO₂ from naturally warming ocean water? How much from permafrost thaw which accompanied the natural warming, noting of course the conversion of the also-released methane from the decaying organic matter to carbon dioxide? Stick some usable numbers with just those two other sources of CO₂ increases, and you get closer to figuring out how much of the total increase is human caused. One thing’s for certain, it’s not all human caused.
Did you miss the logarithmic effect? CO₂ can cause global warming, but its major effect is at lower concentrations. From here on upwards, it can’t do much if anything.
And since when did ‘a majority of scientists’ mean all that much? The majority thought something else before accepting plate tectonics. Same thing before Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Same thing before Einstein. True science is never “settled”, it awaits the coming of new theories that will better explain the evidence, while continually testing the old ones by looking for the quirk, the oddity, the exception, that shows an accepted theory is not totally correct.
And bud, the way those 1970-80’s “CO2=OMG CAGW!” theories have been panning out, I don’t see how you can possibly be accepting them, whole and without debate, and pretend to be anything like scientific.
The lower reaches of Greenland already experience high levels of summer melt, hence the difference in scales between the two graphs. Tying in the measurements of surface melt helps solidify the picture of high altitude melting this summer.
Allan MacRae says: July 21, 2012 at 11:13 pm
Here is what we predicted a decade ago, in 2002:
Our eight-point Summary* includes a number of predictions that have all materialized in those countries in Western Europe that have adopted the full measure of global warming mania.
Full article at
http://www.apegga.org/Members/Publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
____________________________
The four most beautiful words in our common language: “I told you so.”
– Gore Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012
🙂