After all of the news about a minimum record ice extent last month, this is interesting. As we know when water loses its ice cover, it allows a lot of heat to radiate into space as LWIR. many predictied that as a result of the extra open ocean surface, we see a very fast refreeze in the Arctic. It appears they were right. In fact, this is the fastest monthly scale refreeze rate in the NSIDC satellite record going back to 1979.
Here’s JAXA data plotted to show what has happened:
From the blog sunshine hours, here’s an analysis using NSIDC data:
=============================================================
Today is day 291 in the Arctic. The minimum in 2012 was on day 260 – 31 days ago.
If you calculate the percentage of ice gained (the refreeze) 31 days after minimum, then 2012 is the fastest refreeze ever!
Arctic Sea Ice Extent has increased by 43.8% since the minimum was reached.
Extents are in millions of sq km.
(And note I am using NSIDC data here and their algorithm is making the refreeze appear slow compared to NORSEX)
| Year | Minimum_Extent | Extent Day | Extent_Change | Extent_Change_Pct |
| 1979 | 6.89236 | 295 | 2.55691 | 27.1 |
| 1980 | 7.52476 | 280 | 0.95144 | 11.2 |
| 1981 | 6.88784 | 284 | 1.71672 | 20 |
| 1982 | 7.15423 | 287 | 2.41499 | 25.2 |
| 1983 | 7.19145 | 282 | 1.70096 | 19.1 |
| 1984 | 6.39916 | 291 | 2.08442 | 24.6 |
| 1985 | 6.4799 | 281 | 1.50769 | 18.9 |
| 1986 | 7.12351 | 280 | 1.8491 | 20.6 |
| 1987 | 6.89159 | 276 | 1.37713 | 16.7 |
| 1988 | 7.04905 | 286 | 1.76783 | 20.1 |
| 1989 | 6.88931 | 296 | 2.70935 | 28.2 |
| 1990 | 6.0191 | 295 | 3.46791 | 36.6 |
| 1991 | 6.26027 | 290 | 2.69726 | 30.1 |
| 1992 | 7.16324 | 282 | 1.67903 | 19 |
| 1993 | 6.15699 | 280 | 1.85199 | 23.1 |
| 1994 | 6.92645 | 279 | 1.1014 | 13.7 |
| 1995 | 5.98945 | 283 | 0.5189 | 8 |
| 1996 | 7.15283 | 285 | 1.77882 | 19.9 |
| 1997 | 6.61353 | 277 | 0.65032 | 9 |
| 1998 | 6.29922 | 291 | 2.35169 | 27.2 |
| 1999 | 5.68009 | 286 | 2.68723 | 32.1 |
| 2000 | 5.9442 | 286 | 2.32372 | 28.1 |
| 2001 | 6.56774 | 293 | 1.95252 | 22.9 |
| 2002 | 5.62456 | 287 | 2.41992 | 30.1 |
| 2003 | 5.97198 | 291 | 2.10126 | 26 |
| 2004 | 5.77608 | 294 | 2.37329 | 29.1 |
| 2005 | 5.31832 | 296 | 3.09221 | 36.8 |
| 2006 | 5.74877 | 288 | 1.72446 | 23.1 |
| 2007 | 4.1607 | 288 | 1.39556 | 25.1 |
| 2008 | 4.55469 | 293 | 3.33615 | 42.3 |
| 2009 | 5.05488 | 286 | 1.45951 | 22.4 |
| 2010 | 4.59918 | 293 | 2.88065 | 38.5 |
| 2011 | 4.30207 | 282 | 1.35023 | 23.9 |
| 2012 | 3.36855 | 291 | 2.62409 | 43.8 |
Source: sunshine hours
===========================================================
Here’s the NORSEX plot and NSIDC plot compared:
See all the data on the WUWT Sea Ice Reference Page
In other news. I’ve been in touch with Bill Chapman at UUIC/Crysophere Today to point out this bug:
It turns out to be an accidental issue, and he says:
“I was using the script to generate a plot for a publication that wanted a U.S.-centric view and it looks like I forgot to put things back to the way they were originally.
I’ll have it fixed by tomorrows update.”
Stuff happens, no worries.
“J Martin says:
October 20, 2012 at 7:38 am
If the Arctic is entering a period of oscillation from record low extent in summer to (record) high extent in winter, could this presage a phase change, perhaps to a glaciation ?”
Why is that, because you can just say so?
The arctic sea ice doesn’t have a good place to expand and there is no data showing the maximum extent will be larger. The maximum extent doesn’t matter anyway, because it all melts away. The antarctic has two large gyres which usually protect a minimum of sea ice, but the arctic just has northern Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelagos (CAA). The CAA has been falling apart and it really collapsed in 2012. All those straits are leaking sea ice and they are leaking the multi-year sea ice necessary for the arctic sea ice to survive. The only way we could buy that arctic sea ice some time would be to plug up the CAA and Nares with ice bridges and prevent the escape of multi-year sea ice. That obviously isn’t going to happen this refreeze season and I don’t anticipate the governments being proactive enough to do anything about it in the near future.
Amplification isn’t something easy to quantify and it’s hard for people without a scientific background to understand. Our planet has feedbacks that were slowly making it colder, until a force overwhelmed the cooling trend and gained control of those feedbacks. The force doesn’t have to be strong, because the radiative force of cooling from Milankovitch Cycles is very weak. Any warming force strong enough to match it and then some gains control of the same feedbacks that were assisting it.
Nature requires a mechanism to work and there is no mechanism to reverse the present trend. Can you see these June snow cover anomalies and picture the magnitude?
http://scitechdaily.com/images/snow-cover-anomalies.jpg
Greenland doesn’t have quite 2 million square kilometers of ice sheet. If we continue to lose that much snow cover in June, Greenland is going to regularly melt like it did in 2012.
Our present warming is like a sigmoid function that starts slowly and accelerates. That past 30 or so years where we saw all those rapid changes is the last stages of the slow beginning of that function. The time series starts back around a 13 degree C global temperature Earth and ends with a 22 degree C Earth. The ice free arctic is just a road sign letting you know the speed limit has changed.
The only thing nature has to stop that function is man geoengineering his way out of it, while it is still within his power to do so.
Richard M
I don’t accept cherry picked data and I’ve told you over and over the antarctic ice mass has nothing to do with global warming. When a scientist looks at data, they look at all the data. When a scientist sees someone posting charts that deceive or flat out lie about dates, then they know the person isn’t interested in science. Science is the sum of knowledge about a subject and it doesn’t exclude data. If I wake up from a coma and are told we have a strong La Nina, I know the SST has declined and so has sea level. I don’t need to look at the data to make that conclusion or the opposite conclusion for an El Nino. Unless someone is willing to look at the whole history to discern long term trends, they are being deceptive to cherry pick certain starting points and presenting long term trends that way.
“The latest paper released in July 2012 analyzes ICESat data and computes an increase in overall ice mass. This paper is from NASA and was covered on WUWT last month IIRC.”
You claim you have recent IceSat data and IceSat collected data for 7 years, before it shutdown in February 2010. The consistent trend reported for Antarctica shows mass increase in EAIS and decrease in WAIS. The latest report is a mass reduction for the whole. Ice sheet data also includes fly overs.
It’s too cold in Antarctica to snow, so the more it warms, the more likely it will be to gain precipitation and mass, as long as the glaciers don’t remove the mass. I’ve told you Antartica has two ice sheets and the WAIS is the one that will melt. If Antarctica helps us a little on sea level rise, then so what? The world will starve to death before it will drown.
Is there anyone on this site who has taken college courses about the Earth, like a Physical Geography course that explains all the Earth’s features? Where is the logic in opposing greenhouse gas legislation and claiming that back radiation doesn’t exist, or that the scale has been tipped to cause warming instead of cooling? Since when is rejecting nearly 200 year old established science called science? When you see Greenland melting again in the coming years, don’t worry about drowning your coastal cities in the future, worry about the world of hurt you are going to have to deal with in the now! These aren’t going to be the Happy Days.
Sooo, if the heat is in the Arctic ocean, why the huge refreeze? Funny sort of heat, maybe it’s that sort of heat that produces the snow and cold that we were never going to see again?
From HenryP on October 20, 2012 at 9:49 am:
You can stop right there. While things like Svensmark’s galactic cosmic ray theory (hypothesis?) have a certain allure, I’m not going that far. By Dr. Spencer the late 20th century global warming can be explained by cloud cover variations without invoking CO₂, whose GHE is saturated anyway, the required amounts of cloud cover variations have been found, and that’s where I’m stopping, which is far enough.
Mechanisms for the cloud cover variations can wait for later, and I doubt it’ll be any specific one. Likely there’ll be several possibilities, with interconnections… And it can be written off as within “natural variability” once we look at timescales longer than the professional career of a grant-seeking climate scientist.
“Bill Taylor says:
October 20, 2012 at 9:01 am
gary lance posted this “Without back radiation from greenhouse gases, this Earth would be frozen solid.”
think about that please, you are saying the direct sunlight does NOT warm the earth at all it is “back radiation” that does the warming……..CLUE = without the earth warming first from the sun there would be NO radiation to be reflected back, which doesnt happen anyway.
there is NOTHING in co2 that would make it reverse the flow of IR from the surface towards space.”
First of all I said solar radiation absorbed by the surface of the Earth and you changed it. Here is the image:
http://www.optocleaner.com/images/Solar-Radiation-Budget-650.jpg
It’s the same concept of Earth’s energy budget that predates global warming concerns. Now, because you want to fight against a carbon tax, you reject science that is older than when most people had their ancestors immigrate to America. Your agenda doesn’t change reality.
Don’t you know all the scientists who study the planets know that without greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, this would be a frozen planet? Nitrogen and oxygen can’t make this Earth warm enough to keep CO2 a gas, because the gases are transparent to the longwave radiation leaving the Earth’s surface. There are places in Antarctica where it is cold enough to form dry ice, based on instrumental records. It works the same on Earth as it does on another planet. There is no scientific debate about the greenhouse effect. Your model of the Earth is like Mars which has such a slight atmosphere, it’s almost like not having one.
The surface of the Earth absorbs 168 watts per square meter from incoming solar radiation and it absorbs 324 watts per square meter from back radiation. An energy balance requires the amount entering the whole Earth to be the same as the amount leaving it and the same applies to the surface. Warming or cooling comes from changing the amounts and that’s why adding greenhouse gases change back radiation. The change only has to be enough to counteract the long term cooling change of our present position in Milankovitch Cycles and anything more will cause warming that is amplified by feedback.
That isn’t a model, it’s data.
Gary Lance and other co2 converts,
will nothing ever change your mind ? How much cold will it take ? If we get something close to a Maunder minimum, is that enough ? or will you still say it was caused by co2 and call it another sign of global warming ?
The effects of co2 are logarithmic, co2 has done it’s best or worst and can provide no further significant warming.
If Livingston and Penn turn out to be correct, sunspots will be history round about 2020, the last time that happened we had a frozen Thames in London. Finland lost between one third and one half of it’s population, over a million people died in France, harvests failed throughout the Northern hemisphere.
The Arctic ice has been melted from below, not from above where temperatures have remained below zero C for most of the year. Ocean currents can take years, sometimes hundreds of years to meander. Side effects of an ice free Arctic in the summer will be beneficial not some disaster as you imagine. Increased snow in the Northern hemisphere will happen, but that will not have been caused by the Arctic, since the Arctic will be frozen as usual during the winter.
Runaway warming cannot happen, runaway cooling is just a matter of time, and quite likely we will start to see that within the next 5 to 10 years.
Are you aware that the sun is behaving in a way never previously witnessed by science ?
co2 is merely a symptom, the Sun is the cause.
“richardscourtney says:
October 20, 2012 at 9:09 am
Gary Lance:
For the first time in this thread at October 20, 2012 at 8:41 am you write something that is true; i.e.
There is no good news in this years refreeze, be it extent, drift or salinity.
Indeed, so. The refreeze suggests we will NOT be getting the ice-free Arctic ocean which would have been such a blessing.
As you say, not getting an ice-free Arctic ocean is not good news. It is very bad news.
Richard”
The problem with that is you obviously never checked the data on salinity, drift, SST, weather and all the other common data on a daily basis to have an informed opinion. I did and I was doing it long before the minimum.
What you are being told is the patterns aren’t good for making good sea ice that will last a melt. The salinity is too high and all you have to do is check the archives back a couple years to see it. The drift was mixing up multi-year sea ice and I already was watching for a quick refreeze to keep it mixed up. You can check archives of that too. A quick refreeze locks the multi-year sea ice in place while it’s scattered, so it isn’t a good sign for things to come. Much of that multi-year sea ice drifted away from the CAA and if it’s caught in the Beaufort Gyre, there is a good chance of it going to open water and melting next year. If it makes it through the gyre, it still has the Fram and Nares Straits to deal with.
I also pointed out a quick refreeze can trap heat and if multi-year ice is mixed in, that heat can melt the depths of that thicker multi-year sea ice. It’s better for the heat to vent to the atmosphere, because it won’t be around next year.
If you want to know what happens to sea ice, you have to look at all the factors and not just the surface extent. Sea ice that is just putting on a surface show will be wiped out next year.
“richardscourtney says:
October 20, 2012 at 9:22 am
Gary Lance:
In your ludicrous rant addressed to me at October 20, 2012 at 9:02 am you say to me
If you think 2012 was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet.
I don’t “think 2012 was bad” (although it would have been better without the financial crisis).
2012 has been good so far. More people and less starvation than ever before. The usual minor wars around the world, but no global conflict. The usual minor natural disasters, but no major ones such as a Hurricane Katrina, a ‘Boxing Day’ Tsunami, or a Pompeii-type volcanic eruption. No pandemics. etc.
Why do you “think 2012 was bad”? If you can answer that then perhaps your answer will explain the cause of your delusions about AGW.
Richard”
It sounds to me like your whole world is only you.
Where were you when the exceptional drought hit in 2012 or when the financial crisis hit, five year ago? You don’t remember the Mississippi running dry or all those forest fires, this year, crop failures, people selling off all their livestock, because they couldn’t find feed? Maybe you will remember it when you have to pay for it in the grocery store and we all will.
I remember this old woman in Arkansas who took years building her herd of cattle and I think those cattle were more than money to her, when she had to sell them all off, because she didn’t have grass and couldn’t buy hay.
I don’t know how many farmers I saw showing off their pathetic corn.
Now, imagine a spin of the wheel of misforturne makes next year a drought for them, again! A good piece of our bread basket still has exceptional drought, so it isn’t over. Two years in a row will put a lot of farms under, like the Dust Bowl days. The country isn’t going to starve from it, but it will pay for it and those on the front line will pay the most, which could be all they own.
I don’t have delusions that I didn’t warn people about climate change and there is a link between exceptional weather and climate change. You’ve been told exceptional weather is going to be the new norm, but you didn’t listen. These facts have been documented, so the record of these predictions exist.
Kadaka KD Knoebel says
Mechanisms for the cloud cover variations can wait for later, and I doubt it’ll be any specific one.
Henry says
I showed you the mechanism. Looks to me you doubt it.
Priceless:
to find I am the only one who made the connection.
From Gary Lance on October 20, 2012 at 7:21 am:
That is the mewling of a science simpleton. You can’t explain why it could be true, but a measuring device gives you that reading, so that’s your explanation why it is true. I wouldn’t trust you to take voltage measurements, you’d be certain a 120V AC line has 170V spikes.
As I said, 10 Joules from the Sun are absorbed, 10 Joules are emitted from what did the absorbing, you’re saying there’ll be (nearly) 20 Joules of back radiation. What do those amounts of energy have to do with their wavelength?
Meanwhile people who actually know science look at the energy emitted by the planet. Energy out equals energy in, once equilibrium has been established. No one who actually knows science would claim the back radiation is really twice the amount absorbed, when the amount absorbed is the amount emitted into space.
But if you had looked at even the first Ira Glickstein article I linked to, you would have known why it appears to be true.
If you would have bothered to look at the logarithmic response link, you would have noticed that, yes, without GHG’s the Earth would be about 30°C colder, even 30K colder. But the overwhelmingly predominant GHG is water vapor. All the CO₂ in the atmosphere only provides about 3°C of warming.
I’m sorry, but your vociferous ranting is quite tiring. You are going on and on about the catastrophic consequences of global warming, and how you are expecting those consequences very soon, some within a few years.
But you are terrified to admit the next stop of your thought train, that it is already too late to do anything about it. By the thermal inertia of the world’s oceans, if more atmospheric warming will cause cataclysms within mere years, then that heat must already be absorbed into the oceans, and will be released, those cataclysms will happen. It is inevitable.
The rate of atmospheric CO₂ increase will not be noticeably reduced for decades at least. There is no worldwide carbon limiting treaty currently in the works. If one is passed, there will be decades of carbon credit trading with little effective reductions, if any. The excess CO₂ in the atmosphere alone will require many decades to be absorbed. And the warming oceans will release more CO₂, and the melting permafrost will release potent methane which will become more atmospheric CO₂. ETC.
If you think we must act NOW to avoid catastrophe, we have only a few years left, then you must admit it is already too late.
From you on October 20, 2012 at 11:42 am:
And there you have just said the surface of the Earth absorbs 492 watts per m² total. And only one third of that is coming from the Sun, which is THE source of energy for Earth’s climate. You might as well be saying you put gas in your car’s tank at a rate of 30 miles per gallon which yields 90mpg.
You must be having lots of fun accusing us of being anti-science, which you make easy on yourself by ignoring the real science we’re trying to present. If you bothered to pay attention, you might even notice we’re accepting science that you are SCREAMING that we are denying.
As it stands, if we wanted to point at a moron who can’t even be bothered to get the science right before proclaiming HE KNOWS IT ALL and EVERYONE ELSE HERE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT HE KNOWS…
Heh heh. You put on a real funny show for a Saturday, I’ll grant you that.
“J Martin says:
October 20, 2012 at 9:41 am
Gary Lance. What is your point ?
Are you saying that we should stop being such naughty people putting co2 into the atmosphere ?
The fact is that nothing you or anyone else says is going to stop that, so I suggest you take whatever measures you think you need to take to adapt to the future you think is going to happen and move nearer the North pole.
Myself, I think that temperatures are going to go down relentlessly and I will be moving nearer the equator.”
We should have been working to fix this problem over 30 years ago and there were solutions, like Thorium MSRs.
Temperatures don’t go down based on someone’s will without action. If you want to reverse the warming trend, you have to push the Earth towards cooling and remove that carbon from the atmosphere or the Earth will switch back to warming on it’s own. It will take years of effort to remove that CO2. If we let that arctic go ice free and wait, we may not be able to get the sea ice back during the summer.
We could stop the cooling trend with stratospheric sulfate aerosols, but we run the risk of the Earth double downing us with a large volcanic reaction and those consequences. Another major problem is we would have to keep using aerosols until the CO2 is removed.
We could plug up the exits for sea ice at the Nares Strait and the CAA. We could pump ocean water to the surface in the refreeze to make thicker sea ice. We could even destroy some first year ice forming during the refreeze with ice breakers to allow the heat to escape the ocean. It would take a massive effort to save that arctic sea ice.
We could remove carbon with biochar and use it in fields to increase crop production.
We are heading down the road to cause mass extinction and it isn’t just going to be species we wipe out. Maybe people should check the details of past mass extinctions and stop trying to imitate it!
“beesaman says:
October 20, 2012 at 11:27 am
Sooo, if the heat is in the Arctic ocean, why the huge refreeze? Funny sort of heat, maybe it’s that sort of heat that produces the snow and cold that we were never going to see again?”
Do you have a clue what you are saying?
How thick is first year arctic sea ice and how far below the feet of someone standing in the arctic do you have to go to find a warmer temperature, when sea ice is forming?
Sea ice forms when a column of water is sufficiently cooled to allow ice to form faster than the heat below melts it. Once the sea ice forms it insulates the ocean. If it snows on the sea ice during the formation process, the snow can insulate the sea ice from the colder air and make thin sea ice. If it snows too much and it weighs down the sea ice, ocean water can flood the snow and make thicker sea ice. That doesn’t usually happen in the arctic, but it’s been know to happen often enough in the antarctic.
If you want ideal conditions to make sea ice, try a temperature of below -10 degrees C and wind to remove heat.
Sea ice will lose it’s salt as it ages, but not as quickly as some here have said. Young sea ice is much more flexible than aged sea ice, because of the salt, but older sea ice is more durable. Older sea ice is also thicker, unless it’s been put in conditons to melt it.
Gary Lance:
I am answering your two posts to me at
(a) October 20, 2012 at 12:07 pm
and
(b) October 20, 2012 at 12:42 pm.
In (a) you say you cannot think of any problems from an ice-free Arctic ocean and you do not dispute the benefits it would provide but – for some reason – you think it would be a bad thing.
It is a strange world which your mind inhabits where ‘good’ is ‘bad’. I am glad I inhabit the real world and not the fears of your imaginings.
Indeed, in (b) you say to me
I cannot imagine how you could have gained that idea, but – on the basis of your writings in this thread – I suppose it is possible to find anything in the surreal world your mind inhabits.
You assert that the banking crisis was induced by global warming.
No. I will just say, no.
And you claim the normality of weather events with nothing exceptional in 2012 makes 2012 a ‘bad’ year.
Oh dear! You really do have some strange ideas. Nothing is perfect at any time. And there are people who struggle at any time. But you don’t provide any evidence to support your assertion that 2012 has been worse than usual: in fact, so far 2012 has been a good year.
I suggest you ‘take a dram’, sit in an armchair and relax. All your unfounded fears about what AGW “will” do must be causing you distress. Everybody has real problems they need to address and worrying about the silly AGW-scare can only be distracting you from yours.
Richard
Gary Lance,
Again you completely ignore the fact that the sun provides ALL our heat and is in the process of taking it away again, instead you seem to think that co2 magically generates heat. Sunspots are declining and in the past that has always led to cold periods, sometimes severe cold. Some sort of cold period is already inevitable over the coming 20+ years.
I know the mass media have brainwashed themselves, the politicians and a lot of unfortunate people that co2 will deliver runaway warming, but the effects of co2 are logarithmic and so co2 has done most of the warming it can do, what’s left is about half a degree C to come.
The World is not going to see runaway warming and didn’t even when co2 was at several thousand parts per million.
The suns magnetism is declining and sunspots could be gone by 2020, today we are at a solar high, except that that solar high is only half the height of recent highs. Despite the solar high and co2, temperatures have remained flat, so as the solar high soon declines to an extended low the inevitable result will be long term cooling.
The state of the Arctic is an irrelevant side show to the real issue, namely how will mankind fare if we get another Dalton, Maunder or worse.
Your passionately held views are derived from a very narrow viewpoint and consequently are the complete opposite of reality.
You are currently completely off your head. You have many hundreds of hours of reading ahead of you. Please move house to the North Pole and soon.
Gary Lance, you said
“Temperatures don’t go down based on someone’s will without action. If you want to reverse the warming trend, you have to push the Earth towards cooling and remove that carbon from the atmosphere or the Earth will switch back to warming on it’s own.”
Full of inconsistencies and nonsense. “Earth will switch back to warming on it’s own.”, really ? so what then is stopping it from warming now ?
The answer is the sun,
co2 has failed to drive temperatures upwards whilst the sun has climbed to its current level and co2 has failed to drive temperatures upwards whilst the sun has remained at a steady level and so it follows that co2 will be powerless to stop temperatures from declining as solar activity declines to the next minimum.
Gary
I think you need a broader historic perspective when talking about droughts. Droughts, floods, great heat and severe cold are a fact of history.
Can I respectfully suggest you broaden your climate horizons and read a book such as ‘Climate History and the modern world; by Hubert Lamb-first director of CRU.
If you are especially concerned with Drought read Emmanuel le roy laduie’s book ‘times of feast times of famine’ Chapter 2 deals in great detail with grapes and wheat and the climate that has affected them over the last 1000 years. Looking at the past it is clear that we live in benign-not harsh-times
tonyb
“J Martin says:
October 20, 2012 at 11:45 am
Gary Lance and other co2 converts,
will nothing ever change your mind ? How much cold will it take ? If we get something close to a Maunder minimum, is that enough ? or will you still say it was caused by co2 and call it another sign of global warming ?
The effects of co2 are logarithmic, co2 has done it’s best or worst and can provide no further significant warming.
If Livingston and Penn turn out to be correct, sunspots will be history round about 2020, the last time that happened we had a frozen Thames in London. Finland lost between one third and one half of it’s population, over a million people died in France, harvests failed throughout the Northern hemisphere.
The Arctic ice has been melted from below, not from above where temperatures have remained below zero C for most of the year. Ocean currents can take years, sometimes hundreds of years to meander. Side effects of an ice free Arctic in the summer will be beneficial not some disaster as you imagine. Increased snow in the Northern hemisphere will happen, but that will not have been caused by the Arctic, since the Arctic will be frozen as usual during the winter.
Runaway warming cannot happen, runaway cooling is just a matter of time, and quite likely we will start to see that within the next 5 to 10 years.
Are you aware that the sun is behaving in a way never previously witnessed by science ?
co2 is merely a symptom, the Sun is the cause.”
You have a load of fantasy in that post.
It doesn’t make a difference if our present additions of CO2 cause that much warming, because there is already enough to get the benefit of positive feedback. The logarithmic math works in reverse, too, and it’s easier to put CO2 into the atmosphere than remove it, which has to be done to get back to square one.
Do you need data about the differences in solar output based on sunspots? Here is your solar activity differences:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/Helioseismology/large/vir011_prev.jpg
That’s 1365.5 to 1366.5 watts per square meter, which needs to be divided by a quarter to calculate incoming solar radiation. That’s a quarter of a watt per square meter for your Maunder minimum and CO2 is causing 2 watts per square meter of warming. Greenhouse emissions have that covered 8 times over with aerosols and more than 12 times over without.
I happen to know something about history and the LIA was predated with large albedo changes in Europe with cutting down forests. A field in the winter is much colder than a forested area, plus the albedo of snow cover in forests is different than a snow covered field. I’m sure the cold had positive feedback to cut down more forests to stay warm.
That story about crops failing involves the year without a summer, which had a volcanic cause. To say otherwise is misrepresenting known facts.
The side effects of an ice free arctic are not going to be beneficial. You aren’t going to be able to maintain an ice free arctic and not flood every coastal city on Earth. There is no benefit in placing Washington DC passed it’s half life. We are already disrupting weather patterns and causing exceptional events.
” Are you aware that the sun is behaving in a way never previously witnessed by science ?”
I’m aware of the differences in solar radiation and we know the sun isn’t the cause of our warming.
Who said it was run away warming, but you? I said it’s warming between global average temperatures of 13 to 22 degrees C. That sounds great until you find out what a 22 degrees C world looks like. The aligators in the arctic will like it, but people won’t.
There is no natural negative feedback to prevent global warming, outside of a massive super volcanic eruption causing a nuclear winter.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
October 20, 2012 at 1:18 pm
What part of absorbed by the surface can’t you figure out? It’s that place where we take the temperature measurements for the Earth.
It amazes me how someone can think they are talking about science and not believe in the greenhouse effect. It’s like not believing in gravity.
“richardscourtney says:
October 20, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Gary Lance:
I am answering your two posts to me at
(a) October 20, 2012 at 12:07 pm
and
(b) October 20, 2012 at 12:42 pm.
In (a) you say you cannot think of any problems from an ice-free Arctic ocean and you do not dispute the benefits it would provide but – for some reason – you think it would be a bad thing.”
No wonder you are confused, I quoted you and you read your own remarks without noticing the quotation marks.
Pass a course in Climatology and then explain how good an ice free arctic is! It will be the most pivotal event related to the Earth that man has ever witnessed. The areas that will benefit from that change are not well populated and the areas who will be losers are well populated.
richardscourtney says:
October 20, 2012 at 2:00 pm
You brought up a financial crisis in 2012 and said 2012 wasn’t a bad year. Did you forget what you said? I told you the financial crisis was five years ago and we still have large areas of our bread basket having exceptional drought. 2012 was a bad year for many reasons and it should be a wake up call to people who don’t believe in global warming. You may be able to get by with that every 150 year story for the Greenland melt, but how many times will you be able to play that card? This is the beginning and not the end.
From Gary Lance on October 20, 2012 at 1:21 pm:
Come on! Thorium molten salt reactors never got beyond an experimental version that dumped the heat to the air. But we could have built out the nuclear power plants until ALL of our electricity was from nukes. Sure, back then we’d have needed some “peaker” plants as nuke was baseload only. But now we have newer designs, like the latest CANDU variants, that can do load following. If we had started then, we could be all-nuclear now.
But the Greenies nixed the idea, told everyone nuclear was TEH EVIL and wanted it dead. So now it is THEY who are getting what they deserve.
I realize your religion forbids you from acknowledging this, but the warm periods of this interglacial have been getting less warm. The current period of “unprecedented” warmth is less warm than the Medieval Climate Optimum, which wasn’t as warm as the Roman Climate Optimum that preceded it, etc. And this interglacial is relatively long in the tooth. Any deliberate attempts to tip the planet into cooling are risking the reward for hubris.
Again you don’t appreciate the timescales involved. It will take many decades to stabilize the atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, and then many decades to enact a reduction faster than what Nature alone can provide.
Which would be a problem because…?
You’re recommending Acid Rain? Are you barking foaming mad?
Perhaps A Century of Acid Rain? Besides risking sliding the planet into glaciation?
And you still haven’t addressed how to remove the CO₂.
You have truly grandiose ideas about what human engineering can accomplish. We can just make ships that can slowly get through a few meters of sea ice. How will we stop hundreds of thousands of tonnes of it from going where it wants?
Don’t forget whatever is done must be reversible. Blasting all of Canada’s mountains to small chunks to build levees is frowned upon.
So what should we do? Hang steel cables three meters thick across the gaps to restrain the ice? Where do we anchor them? Or are you going to anchor the ice itself, with real anchors and cables, affixing them to the floor of the Arctic Ocean?
Keep massive pumping equipment working at freezing temperatures in the Arctic? When the goal is to have so much ice that it’ll be impossible to bring in replacement parts? Where would you get the energy?
You also have no clue as to the sheer size of the operation you suggest. Consider pumping enough water from the Gulf of Mexico to flood Texas.
And likely get more than a few icebreakers frozen in place for the winter.
Why not combine some ideas? Have pumping stations that spray the ocean water into the air as a mist, then the evaporative cooling will cool the air and promote faster ice growth.
And would cost massive fortunes over many years to do so. Thus no country is willing to pay for it. Without the sea ice there is cheaper quicker transportation, and accessible oil and gas resources. It’s far more beneficial to the governments of the world to be rid of it.
Which is a good idea to reduce fertilizer usage and irrigation requirements. Conceivably it could be profitable for farmers to do it, by the forces of ordinary capitalism rather than the enforced mandates of governments.
And what do we really learn from the past? The old gives way to the new. Species that cannot adapt enough are replaced with those that can.
The mandate of evolution is clear. If we humans cannot adapt to global warming and its consequences, to not just survive but to prosper, we do not deserve to exist.
Gary Lance:
At October 20, 2012 at 3:15 pm you say to me
Oh Wise One who knows so much more climatology than me,
Please educate me on how “an ice free arctic … will be the most pivotal event related to the Earth that man has ever witnessed”.
This will be more “pivotal” than the exit from Africa, than the end of the last glaciation, than the invention of agriculture, and than the industrial revolution? How?
And, O Wise One, you tell me, “The areas that will benefit from that change are not well populated and the areas who will be losers are well populated.” Why is such a coincidence likely? And why will people not move if it happens?
O Wise One, I need to know more. I beg you to provide me with the knowledge I seek.
Richard
From Gary Lance on October 20, 2012 at 2:54 pm:
It amazes me how You can be as dumb as a tree stump. I link to articles describing the greenhouse effect, I try to converse with you on the greenhouse effect. And you’re trying to say I don’t believe in the greenhouse effect?
Beyond the pedantic quibble that faith requires believing, science only requires acceptance, thus the greenhouse effect does not require belief, that is.
Never mind, I take it back. Tree stumps have a long historical record of being smart enough to function as anvil stands and tables. Given that you’re just automatically throwing off any knowledge that’s being dropped on your head, you’re not even good enough to be a tree stump.
“J Martin says:
October 20, 2012 at 2:07 pm
Gary Lance,
Again you completely ignore the fact that the sun provides ALL our heat and is in the process of taking it away again, instead you seem to think that co2 magically generates heat. Sunspots are declining and in the past that has always led to cold periods, sometimes severe cold. Some sort of cold period is already inevitable over the coming 20+ years.
I know the mass media have brainwashed themselves, the politicians and a lot of unfortunate people that co2 will deliver runaway warming, but the effects of co2 are logarithmic and so co2 has done most of the warming it can do, what’s left is about half a degree C to come.
The World is not going to see runaway warming and didn’t even when co2 was at several thousand parts per million.
The suns magnetism is declining and sunspots could be gone by 2020, today we are at a solar high, except that that solar high is only half the height of recent highs. Despite the solar high and co2, temperatures have remained flat, so as the solar high soon declines to an extended low the inevitable result will be long term cooling.
The state of the Arctic is an irrelevant side show to the real issue, namely how will mankind fare if we get another Dalton, Maunder or worse.
Your passionately held views are derived from a very narrow viewpoint and consequently are the complete opposite of reality.
You are currently completely off your head. You have many hundreds of hours of reading ahead of you. Please move house to the North Pole and soon.”
Try provng what you say, like was the LIA from 1350 to 1850 or from 1550 to 1850? The Maunder Minimum was from 1645 to about 1715, so how could it start the LIA?
No sunspots is 1/4 watts per square meter less than maximum sunspots or 1/8 watts per square meter less than the average of a sunspot cycle. Our greenhouse gas emissions and other anthropogenic changes is estimated at 2 watts per square meter and 3 watts per square meter, if we remove aerosols.
The albedo change in Europe caused by cutting all those forests was as much of a factor in cooling as the Maunder Minimum. Mankind wasn’t adding more CO2 than the oceans could handle in those days, so the Milankovitch cooling was also in effect.
Your Maunder Minimum is less than natural variablilty of cloud cover. It’s 0.0365% less than average solar radiation and it couldn’t start the LIA without a time machine.
Gary Lance says:
“The feedback mechanisms haven’t all kicked in yet. A planet mostly covered with water can easily hide warming.” The ARGO buoys show oceans are cooling.
And:
“I’m not an alarmist” [heh]
And:
“The problem with your analysis is, scientists have looked at everything and greenhouse gases are the only thing they found.”
That is a textbook example of the Argumentum ad Ignorantium, the argument from ignorance: “Since we can’t think of what else it could be, then it must be because of CO2.”
Gary Lance has never responded to my comment that showed CO2 lagging temperature. In fact, CO2 lags temperature on all time scales, from years to hundreds of millennia. However, there is no empirical evidence showing that a rise in CO2 causes a rise in temperature.
So once again I challenge Mr Lance to post a similar chart, but which shows that a rise in CO2 causes a subsequent rise in temperature. I have provided solid empirical evidence showing that changes in CO2 are a function of changes in temperature. If Mr Lance wants credibility, he needs to post a chart showing that ∆CO2 is the cause of ∆T. I don’t think he can post any such information. But we will see.