From the University of Calgary Utoday:
Melting Arctic ice cap at record low – By Heath McCoy
Think of a poor hamster on a spinning wheel, caught up by momentum and unable to stop until it’s overwhelmed, sent tumbling, crashing out of control inside.
That’s the analogy John Yackel, head of the department of geography, makes when he considers the annual summer ice melt in the Arctic, which he’s been closely monitoring for the past 15 years – documenting the ice cover as it’s steadily shrunk in the wake of Arctic and global warming.
Thoughts of imminent crashes seem particularly ominous this year as last week marked the unofficial peak, or the end of the summer ice melt, with ice levels more dramatically diminished than at any time since satellite monitoring began 33 years ago.
The previous record low for Arctic sea ice extent, set on Sept. 18, 2007 with a 4.17-million sq.-km. ice cap, was already shattered by the end of August this year when it had melted to below 4-million sq. km.
“This is the smallest minimum ice extent we’ve ever had, and not just in the satellite record, but probably in the last million years,” says Yackel, a sea ice geophysicist and climatologist.
From the patterns he has observed, this year’s extreme melt could be the beginning of a frightening trend.
Yackel and the university-based Cryosphere Climate Research Group use satellite technology to research the physical properties of Arctic ice. As recently as the 1980s, most of the ice in the Arctic Ocean was “multi-year ice,” – thick ice that would remain throughout the summer. At that time, the split between multi-year ice and seasonal ice – ice that would melt away in the summer – was about 80 per cent multi-year and 20 per cent seasonal.
“In the last 20 years we’ve almost gotten to the point where we’ve reversed that ratio,” Yackel says, predicting the ice extent that covers the Arctic Ocean “is likely to be gone in the summers within the next 20 to 25 years, if not sooner.”
The depleting ice cover would have serious ramifications for the planet. Arctic ice acts as a reflector of sunlight, helping regulate the Earth’s temperature, cooling the climate.
“When there’s no longer that sea ice below the air mass and it’s just open ocean, that’s when more moisture off the ocean’s surface gets into the atmosphere and the water vapor in the atmosphere makes for more violent storms,” says Yackel.
“We can also expect to see an increase in storm frequency and storm intensity for most of the world’s populated places as the Arctic and Earth continues to warm.”
DirkH says:
September 26, 2012 at 11:13 am
“Oh, simple. above 37 deg C at 100 % rel. humidity the human body is no more able to cool itself. At 42 deg C humans die.”
…which make me think of
S. Matthew Liao, NYU professor, ETHICIST, (wants to genetically engineer people to become shorter, torture them to induce vegetarian lifestyle, and give them drugs to make them easier to handle)
at
http://ethics-etc.com/category/environmental-ethics/
Somebody should suggest to him that we could also genetically engineer humans to withstand higher temperatures. He’ll like that.
tkfoler says: This graph is ALSO a good place to look in this context:
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi_range_ice-ext.png
That data is exactly the graph what woke me up to the scam of only looking at the minima. We see that the annual swing in ice extent has increased notably since 2007. I also noticed that the maxima were increasing about a much as the minima were decreasing but the longer term trend is difficult to isolate from the short term “weather” noise on the graph . So I went to do what any good scientist would do: get the data and have a closer look.
Once you filter out the annual variation this is what you get.
http://i50.tinypic.com/24enw2c.png
It is clear that there has been a regime change since 2007. The dramatic fall from 1995-2007 has been broken.
It is only the “trick” of focusing on the minimum that gives the false impression that “it’s worse than we thought”.
” it’s steadily shrunk in the wake of Arctic and global warming.”
Umm, global warming?
So this is evidence of global, as in the planet is warming?
So if the globe is warming why is the Antarctic not melting? It is on the same planet. What ever your answer the idea of the globe warming is not happening with the SH being so cold. It’s a NH effect only.
Maybe all that CO2 piles up at the North Pole.
Jimbo says:
September 26, 2012 at 8:21 am
The ‘dikranmarsupial’ is not often seen in these parts. It must well out of its normal range; very likely due to global warming.
Hey, y’all quit complaining. My son is a student at the U of C so when I pay his tuition I am in part funding this lunatic.
Thomas U. says on September 26, 2012 at 12:30 am :
“— ——— —, —– —. “We can also expect this doomesday cult to linger on until the funding countries are finally bancrupt. There is a high probability that this event, bancrupcy, will occur before the “great global warming catastrophy” happens.” —-“
================
Yes, a very nice day to all of you. Autumn has begun in the northern hemisphere’s economy and I am wondering what the bankers are doing nowadays which is different from what they have always done, – except that is, apart from handling lots more money from things like “carbon trading” deals, windmill building, Carbon Sequestrating research financing and other “very important earth saving deals”. My bet is that the “Western World’s economic deficit” is in close resemblance to the “Western World’s Global warming expenditure”
Only a guess mind but why should only “Climatologists” have monopoly on guesswork.
tjfolkerts says: I am not the one who chose to look at winter maxima. If you want to object to those, then talk to P. Solar.
I did not suggest we look at winter maxima rather than any other part of the year. What I am pointing out is that we should be looking at all available data, not pretending the annual minimum defines ice extent.
Chris says:
September 26, 2012 at 10:39 am
With regards to the insulating properties of ice, um, no, ice is not a good insulator.
Snow covered ice is an excellent insulator. Around an order of magnitude better than ice.
http://www.mendeley.com/research/thermal-conductivity-seasonal-snow-1/#page-1
Chris says:
September 26, 2012 at 10:39 am
Where do you get the idea that because ice feels cold it is not a good insulator? It feels cold because it’s cold and has a high thermal mass, if it was not a good insulator it would feel as warm as the underlying water. Incidentally, the reason dry cardboard doesn’t feel as cold as ice is because its thermal mass is minute in comparison. (A bit like air really which is one reason why the whole AGW thing is a scam.) Strangely, the water under the ice is warmer and not exposed to allow either radiative or conductive energy loss. Do you want to revise that now?
Are you an arts major?
DaveE.
ferdberple says:
September 26, 2012 at 8:03 am
Think of all the whales and seals that will be saved by an ice free arctic. Otherwise, if the sea is covered with ice, they have to survive by breathing through holes in the ice. If these holes freeze over, they die from suffocation. Of course their cascaras sink to the bottom under the ice, so out of sight out of mind, folks only worry about the polar bears. Why isn’t Al out their campaigning to help the whales?
Because he dosen’t know what a cascara is.
Earlier I sent a couple of questions to Prof. Yackel and I got a prompt response
Here’s my email:
Dear Professor,
I read your comments reported in the Utoday article.
“In the last 20 years we’ve almost gotten to the point where we’ve reversed that ratio,” Yackel says, predicting the ice extent that covers the Arctic Ocean “is likely to be gone in the summers within the next 20 to 25 years, if not sooner.”
You would seem to base this opinion on study of the ice coverage minima. While this is interesting , it may be deceptive if taken to be representative of Arctic climate.
There has been a notable change in the behaviour of ice coverage since 2007 as can be seen in the anomaly graph provided by Cryosphere Today:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
Note that the maxima are near to the 30y average, the key feature of this period is the notably increased swing of the annual cycle. This is very likely a consequence of the prevalence of thin ice that you comment on. In such a context, considering only the minima will give a very misleading impression of the state of ice cover, no more representative than only considering the maxima and concluding ice coverage was back to “normal”.
I would draw your attention to the other 364 days of each year. Considering the daily ice extent and applying a 6m or 12m gaussian filter we see a better indication of what is happening:
data sourse:
http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0051.html
filtered daily ice extent:
http://i50.tinypic.com/24enw2c.png
It would appear that there has been a regime change since 2007. The alarming plunge, far from continuing “worse than we thought” , stopped in 2007.
The article states ” he considers the annual summer ice melt in the Arctic, which he’s been closely monitoring for the past 15 years – documenting the ice cover as it’s steadily shrunk in the wake of Arctic and global warming.”
Do you think your prediction that ice extent “is likely to be gone in the summers within the next 20 to 25 years, if not sooner” is consistent with the change in behaviour since 2007?
That would seem more consistent with the pre-2007 drop which you are suggesting will continue unabated. That would seem contrary to the evidence of the last 5 years.
Have you ever looked at the whole years data as presented here?
Here’s the reply from Prof. Yackel
>>
Thanks for your comments.
Yup, scientists really don’t expect any changes to be seen in the winter maxima … since the positive sea ice albedo feedback doesn’t operate in the winter when there is no daylight. This feedback is now accentuated in the summers because of the ratio flip of old to new ice we’ve observed in the last 20 years. So, ice will further melt at an accelerated rate in the summertimes. The ice that can grow back in the winter … is thin stuff that can easily be melted in the subsequent summers. We are not growing anywhere near as much old ice as we did 5, 10 or 20 years. To summarize, its about the feedback processes in the summer … that most people really don’t fully understand.
Cheers … John
>>
ie total evasion of the questions I asked him. I then pressed him to reply to my questions and got the following:
>>
Please come see me in my office hours … I love to explain it to you as I cannot express the context of the situation quickly in words or in a few sentenses.
Many thanks,
John
>>
LOL.
” Have you ever looked at the whole years data as presented here?”
Yes or no would do. I don’t need to come round for coffee.
“Do you think your prediction that ice extent “is likely to be gone in the summers within the next 20 to 25 years, if not sooner” is consistent with the change in behaviour since 2007?”
Likewise, it’s a yes or no question. The good professor is happy to go on record as an expert on the subject making such untenable statements but is unable back it up or answer a yes or no to a clear question.
If “scientists really don’t expect any changes to be seen in the winter maxima” well then they should try looking at ALL the data. Science is based on observation NOT expectation.
Tom in Florida says on September 26, 2012 at 4:34 am:
“Just a thought from a layman. Maximum arctic ice melt is at the end of summer. So
why wouldn’t maximum arctic ice melt be at the end of the interglacial?”
============
Oy, oy don’t you start frightening us hamster lovers. – The poor little things will have to run a lot faster just to keep warm if you are right.
If global warming causes more snow then global cooling must cause the ice cap to melt.
P. Solar says:
September 26, 2012 at 12:19 pm
I see the good Dr brings in the old albedo canard. As I replied earlier to Chris, albedo is measured at the normal, ie 90° incidence, not the much lower angle of insolation at the poles.
DaveE.
Should we conclude from this that the models provide an upper bound to future ice extent or that they just don’t work?
MJW,
It is crystal clear that models just don’t work:
http://www.duke.edu/~ns2002/scafetta-forecast.png
Question from Climatology 101 Final Exam, Physics section:
13. What is the force holding a hamster to the side of the hamster wheel?A. Centrifugal
B. Centripetal
C. Both A and B
From the grading instructions for the teaching assistant:
Chris B, any social scientist must blame preschool brainwashing. Its all Tiny Tims fault, after all most of these climatologist/ activists are of the age to have seen Tim in his glory. Oh the horrors of an unhinged subconscious mind. Sarc aside its one possible explanation for this bedwetting and doom over weather from supposedly educated people. Thanks for posting the vid, LOL.
David A. Evans says:
September 26, 2012 at 12:35 pm
>>
P. Solar says:
September 26, 2012 at 12:19 pm
I see the good Dr brings in the old albedo canard. As I replied earlier to Chris, albedo is measured at the normal, ie 90° incidence, not the much lower angle of insolation at the poles.
DaveE.
>>
Doctor? Professor no less.
He also starts waffling about positive feedback but clearly all this physics stuff if outside his field of understanding, it’s just a ploy to avoid answering the direct questions I asked him about what is supposed to be his area of expertise.
BTW here is the graph I intended to post (the one where I managed spell Arctic correctly 😉 ).
http://i48.tinypic.com/dzj70k.png
P. Solar:
September 26, 2012 at 1:11 am
September 26, 2012 at 12:19 pm
Regime change since 2007 ? Really?
http://i46.tinypic.com/dpixar.png
Oh wait, where have we seen a solution to these “frightening” trend.
U of Calgary Professor TED talk from 2007:
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_change.html
Garethman says:
September 26, 2012 at 2:10 am
IN the UK we have just had the heaviest 24 hours of rainfall for 30 years. This is in addition to a wet cold summer and cold winters, the 4th year in a row. It may be all coincidental, but it’s looking suspicious that the ice has dramatically declined in the same period.
Tonight I see this excitable headline “Mighty rains head South: Jet stream that brought Britain’s worst storm in 30 years does an about-turn and will strike TONIGHT” The pictures tell a better story than the article.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2208812/Uk-Weather-Massive-clear-begins-deluge-powerful-warped-roads.html
I have posted this before – but it is still worth reading – as even the continual rain is normal when the climate changes from warm to cold. It happened just the same way at the end of the Medieval Warm Period as the climate moved into the Little Ice Age. From the book “The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization” By Brian M. Fagan –
“Seven weeks after Easter in A.D. 1315, sheets of rain spread across a sodden Europe, turning freshly plowed fields into lakes and quagmires. The deluge continued through June and July, and then August and September. Hay lay flat in the fields; wheat and barley rotted unharvested. The anonymous author of the Chronicle of Malmesbury wondered if divine vengeance had come upon the land: “Therefore is the anger of the Lord kindled against his people, and he hath stretched out his hand against them, and hath smitten them.” Most close-knit farming communities endured the shortages of 1315 and hoped for a better harvest the following year. But heavy spring rains in 1316 prevented proper sowing. Intense gales battered the English Channel and North Sea; flocks and herds withered, crops failed, prices rose, and people again contemplated the wrath of God. By the time the barrage of rains subsided in 1321, over a million-and-a-half people, villagers and city folk alike, had perished from hunger and famine-related epidemics. Giles de Muisit, abbot of Saint-Martin de Tournai in modern-day Belgium, wrote, “Men and women from among the powerful, the middling, and the lowly, old and young, rich and poor, perished daily in such numbers that the air was fetid with the stench.” People everywhere despaired. Guilds and religious orders moved through the streets, the people naked, carrying the bodies of saints and other sacred relics. After generations of good, they believed that divine retribution had come to punish a Europe divided by war and petty strife.
The great rains of 1315 marked the beginning of what climatologists call the Little Ice Age, a period of six centuries of constant climatic shifts that may or may not be still in progress.”
Note that even the start date of the rain was similar although now instead of the ‘Wrath of God” we have the Gaia upset with our carbon footprints – the driving religious fervor is just the same.
It would really be an idea to lay in a few months supply of some dried foods lentils, alfalfa sprouts, rice, barley, etc. It looks like things may be about to take a turn for the worse.
tjfolkerts says:
September 26, 2012 at 11:17 am
Still refusing to understand, despite admissions that completely undermine your own position. Weird.
vacek says: Regime change since 2007 ? Really?
http://i46.tinypic.com/dpixar.png
what’s you point precisely? You cherry pick a couple of years in your annotations but if you don’t say what you mean it’s hard to agree or disagree.
I did not say there was more ice this year than last year or than there was in 1979.
What I was pointing out was a marked change in behaviour. The long, continuous slide from 1995-2007 ended abruptly in 2007. Since then there has been a cyclic event similar to those seen in 80s and 90s except that end of the hump is higher than the beginning unlike the earlier years which were already seeing a marked underlying decline.
This is an entirely different impression to that which is gained by obsessing on the annual minimum and ignoring the rest of the year.
UAH lower tropo temperatures also went into cooling at about that time. 2004 for SH, 2006 for NH
http://i50.tinypic.com/2s12an6.png
That seems a fairly good indication that this is not a localised Arctic event but global.
If you have any further comment , please try to be specific.
Billy Liar says:
Snow covered ice is an excellent insulator. Around an order of magnitude better than ice.
I’d also add that the Eskimo make igloo due to the insulation. You can get them up to above freezing inside (though they drip 😉
Also, a standard survival technique is the “snow cave” for the same reasons.
Clearly “Warmers” will never survive being lost in the frozen north…. or frozen south…
OH, and don’t forget that “Ice does NOT convect; water does.”
That matters. Rather a lot. For reasons unknown (the only ones I can figure should result in arrest and prosecution…) the Climate “Scientists” never do account for convection worth a tinkers, er, expletive…
So we end up with ‘radiative models’ that ignore gigatons of evaporation, convection, condensation, and precipitation. In the arctic, the albedo acting on the largely nonexistent sunshine is held key, while again gigatons of convecting water is ignored (along with similarly gigantic flows of air as strong winds).
Drivers (no, not “forcing”, there is no “force” identified) ought to be ranked with highest mass and highest specific heat as most important, near mass-less and nearly non-existent photons are also nearly irrelevant at the pole… Don’t believe me? Take off your cloths and stand in the arctic “sun” in September. Then jump in the open water for 5 minutes. Then get back in the sun for 5 minutes. Does the “sun” have as much effect as the water dunk? If you think it does, repeat the process. 5 minutes in, 5 out, for a day… Have a medevac unit standing by…
There’s an oscillation in the data, between N and S pole; we just happen to be in a “Warmer north, colder south” at the moment. In a half dozen years, I expect this will change around. It looks like about a 30 year cycle and we’ve been in this one for a while.
FWIW, I’ve looked at thousands of charts of similar stochastic resonant type data. One pronounced characteristic in the financial charts is the “double top” or “double bottom” with “failure to advance”. Exactly what that sea ice chart looks like. Especially at price bottoms (for complex reasons not important here) the volatility goes way up. You get a ‘spike down’, a small recovery, then what looks like it will be Yet Another Spike Down (as there may have been several, each deeper and more violent). But it doesn’t make it. It just more or less matches the prior one. Failure To Advance to the downside. That is the first and IMHO most important signal of a reversal.
So what I see in that chart is simple. We had a thicker atmospheric height higher UV level driven regime with modest swings of Arctic Ice. In about 1998 we had the sun go sleepy. As there’s an 18 year or so delay of central Pacific water temp changes getting to Alaska, the Arctic water temp will lag. (Don’t know the time delay for Atlantic water). Arctic continued to have warm water, but also got a dose of more violent winds ( I’ve noticed more ‘gusty’ wind and found it in wind data, since the UV drop) breaking up the ice. (Ice breakers all over the Arctic don’t help either). It gets blown out into warm water.
That trend continued for many years, but now we have “failure to advance” to the downside. It’s over, IMHO. We’ve gone into a cold regime. Heat is leaving (mostly it leaves at the poles and the open water will just accelerate that) and we can see that heat transport directly reflected in the larger rainfall near the tropics. High evaporation, convection, condensation (with radiation at altitude, where CO2 increases IR loss) and precipitation. Just like any other heat engine or heat pipe. Even the Arctic will be making those waters colder as they radiate and picking up the pace of the “sink and circulate” in the oceans.
LAST thing to happen IMHO will be more ice at the North Pole. It’s got to dump a lot of heat from the 30 year hot phase of the 60 year cycle first. And that N.Pole / S.Pole oscillator has to run it’s cycle too.
We’re back in the 1950s (about when the last North Pole Melting and Tiny Tim song things were going on) and in about the ’60s we started in on the “New Ice Age” scare. So give it about a decade to be back to the ice age scare as the “Climate Chaos” story of choice. For now, they will stay with “chaos” as too many of us remember the “warming” paranoia rant…
OH, and mark your calendar for 2050. That will be the next opportunity to run with the “Global Warming” scare story…
Cycles, so useful to folks using linear trend lines to make Chicken Little Rants…
If you look at the ‘net flux’ movie here:
http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/GlobalMaps/view.php?d1=CERES_NETFLUX_M
you can see that there is always heat loss from the poles. Briefly at the warmest moment of the year at the north pole, the heat loss drops to about a net balance, but not a gain (it’s hard to tell in the pictures if it has a gain for a brief moment, but some areas away from the pole do have gain late in the season. At some point the gain where the sun is overhead must pass through near zero to zero to negative at the pole, so watching that line move back and forth is educational).
The whole notion of the “Poles Warming” is just broken. At most they can “lose heat more slowly” and “freeze less”. They are always heat radiators. Just as the Equatorial zone is always where the heat gain is most (modulo a seasonal wobble to each side).
So anyone who talks about ‘heat gain’ at the pole is already showing signs of serious defect of thinking… It never ‘gains heat’ and it never ‘warms’. It loses heat, and at various rates. The only question is how much the equatorial and temperate heat gain is lost on the way to the pole…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/what-does-precipitation-say-about-heat-flow/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/outgoing-vs-land-vs-water-vapor/