From Wiley
Study explores atmospheric impact of declining Arctic sea ice
There is growing recognition that reductions in Arctic sea ice levels will influence patterns of atmospheric circulation both within and beyond the Arctic. New research in the International Journal of Climatology explores the impact of 2007 ice conditions, the second lowest Arctic sea ice extent in the satellite era, on atmospheric circulation and surface temperatures.
Two 30-year simulations, one using the sea ice levels of 2007 and another using sea ice levels at the end of the 20th century, were used to access the impact of ice free seas. The results showed a significant response to the anomalous open water of 2007.
The results confirm that the atmospheric response to declining sea ice could have implications far beyond the Arctic such as a decrease in the pole to equator temperature gradient, given the increased temperatures associated with the increase in open water, leading to a weaker jet stream and less storminess in the mid-latitudes.
“In the context of decreasing Arctic sea ice extent, our experiments investigating the impacts of anomalous open water on the atmosphere showed increased heat transfer from the ocean to the atmosphere and warmer temperatures in areas of reduced sea ice. Comparing the model simulated circulation to the observed circulation for the summer of 2007 (the year of focus for the model experiments), we found the simulated circulation to be quite different than what was observed for spring and summer while more similar for autumn and fall,” said Elizabeth Cassano from the University of Colorado.
“This suggests the sea ice conditions in the months preceding and during the summer of 2007 were not responsible for contributing to a circulation pattern which favored the large observed sea ice loss in that year. The circulation during autumn and winter which was more similar between the model simulations and the observed circulation suggests that the reduced sea ice in 2007 was in part responsible for the observed atmospheric circulation during autumn and winter of that year.”
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Oh boy!
More failed models based on false assumptions to provide false evidence to justify wasting $trillions on an invalid theory promoted by governments to extort more taxes to spend more money they don’t have to be added to the $trillions in debt they already owe and have no intension of paying in full.
What could possibly go wrong with this scenario?
After 350 years of the Sun being active, the Scientists choose the 1970 to 2000 for their baseline temperatures. This is the warmest that the Earth has been in 350 years. The quiet Sun will deliver less energy to the Earth, with the result of sudden cooling. Solar cycle 24 is almost over. We are entering maybe 8 years of no Sun Spots and the Flux less than 100. From the peak of warming to the depth of cooling is -2.5C global temperature drop.
The mechanical way to determine what is happening is to monitor the height of the Indonesian Bulge. Less Solar energy, less trade winds, less Bulge. Less Bulge, smaller currents moving heat to the Poles. But, the Poles have been warmed, less ice, so more heat transfer into space. Watch the Northern Pacific for sudden cooling. Also, a “sudden” increase in Arctic Ice cover.
Antarctica, not surrounded by land masses, has started the “sudden” increase in ice cover. Watch the Antarctica Peninsula, it used to be the canary for warming. Now it will be the penguin of cold.
I’ve just finished reading this interesting and surprisingly non-alarmist article regarding viability of plants after having been buried under glacier ice for 400 years. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130528202549.htm
It is the clearest evidence of the cyclic nature of the polar zone climate. While I think we should study and understand these cycles it is abundantly clear our brightest scientists don’t have a clue as to what the long term trend is. It says as much in the article, and that was very unexpected. It cannot be over-stated that the modern warming period begins inconveniently at the end the LIA, and as such is a cherry-picked date for such things as time-series data used to prove mankind is destroying the planet. I’m thinking now of the recent Met Office disclosure that the claim of 0.8ºC since the late 1800’s has been wrongly claimed as significant. This is all falling together nicely to show the scale of alarmist disinformation.
Txomin says:
May 29, 2013 at 4:36 am
I run a simulation of me jumping off a cliff – The simulation indicates that I die. The result is I am still alive.
If WUWT is a conversation among peers, please let us use “begs the question” as Anglicization of the informal fallacy petitio principii, “assuming the initial point.” Otherwise, raising the point, evading the question or begging the question to be asked…
The model was “used to access the impact of ice free seas”. While they are at it, why not model the equally likely consequences of manure from flying reindeer over the Arctic? Just imagine the impact of that! Adding the nutrients to the sea would cause algal blooms and perhaps even some dead zones in places more highly impacted. Clearly, this condition is just too dangerous to risk, so for the benefit of all the wild creatures of the Arctic, we must simply ban Christmas. For the good of the planet, we have to ignore some crying children. Oh, wait, aren’t we supposed to do these things for the children?
“This suggests the sea ice conditions in the months preceding and during the summer of 2007 were not responsible for contributing to a circulation pattern which favored the large observed sea ice loss in that year.”
Low ice extent fails to promote circulation pattern that would favour ice loss…
“The circulation during autumn and winter which was more similar between the model simulations and the observed circulation suggests that the reduced sea ice in 2007 was in part responsible for the observed atmospheric circulation during autumn and winter of that year.”
Low ice extent helps to promote observed atmospheric circulation pattern during autumn and winter…
Sounds like seasonal affective disorder to me, how sad.
What about the chain of undersea volcanos in the arctic that all went off in 2007? Do five volcanos erupting for months on the sea floor under the arctic NOT have any warming power.
OOps, I meant to include this link about the volcanos: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080625140649.htm
More Models. Tail wags dog. Outcome will equal expectations of Whomever financed the study.
Give me empirical data to prove ANYTHING. Or STFU
If it’s models your crowing about, I won’t listen anymore!
Arctic ice is very sensitive and unstable…
….Arctic ice should be consistent and never change
only in climate science
Dr. Lurtz: “The mechanical way to determine what is happening is to monitor the height of the Indonesian Bulge. Less Solar energy, less trade winds, less Bulge. Less Bulge, smaller currents moving heat to the Poles. ”
Dr. Lurtz, I tried “Indonesian Bulge” in Google and got nothing other than references back here to WUWT. Could you elaborate, and also point us in the direction of discussions elsewhere regarding the phenomenon you mention?
It sounds like you’re saying that the trade winds reduce in intensity in a solar lull, resulting in less water being piled up in the area of Indonesia, and therefore less water (warm water) to be spilled toward the poles as the bulge dissipates? Is this correct, and are any measurements taken? And do you have a professional interest in this process? Just curious.
Well, here’s some actual science (from Geologists!) talking about recent data showing surprisingly frequent warm intervals at the poles.
http://www.umass.edu/researchnext/geoscientist-julie-brigham-grette-presents-lake-el-gygytgyn-research-findings
She seems to be assuming CO2 is causal, so I’d love to have the data analyzed by someone who doesn’t make that assumption, but the sediment cores certainly show an ice free arctic has been a recurring (though infrequent) event. Natural variability seems to be quite high.
Arctic ice area is at the 30 year average. Trend is dead flat there.
Antarctic ice is well above the 30 year average and trending higher.
Data from the Cryosphere page. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
The polar see-saw, whereby arctic warming is offset by antarctic cooling is a well known natural cycle. It is exactly what we see happening today.
Yet climate science is unable to explain the cause, so they pretend it is not happening. Instead they try and blame it on CO2. However, the polar see-saw predates industrialization. It cannot be a result of human activity.
Climate models are largely nonsense because they ignore the advances in understanding Chaos. Instead they consider Chaos to be noise. It isn’t. Noise is random. It is self-cancelling. Over time, you expect the positive and negative noise to be roughly equal and thus if you average the signal, what you are left with over time is the average signal. This is the basic mathematics of the IPCC climate models.
However, Chaos is not like this. It only looks like noise, but in reality it is quasi-cyclical and varies infinitely over time. The cycle is similar each time, but never the same. We see this in such things as ENSO, the solar cycle, the ocean cycles, the Bond cycles, the ice-age cycles, etc., etc. Chaotic fractals. Cycles at all time scales that never quite repeat. Strange attractors.
What Chaos tells us is that you cannot average chaos the way you average noise and expect it to cancel. You cannot do a linear regression on your temperature time-series and treat it like a Gaussian distribution. The result will be nonsense. Worse than nonsense, it will be misleading. What you think is a trend will suddenly head off in an unexpected direction
This is what happened to the climate models. They were plodding along in their linear fashion and suddenly around 2000 they went off the rails. And continue to do so, because they treat Chaos as noise. It isn’t. Noise is much more predictable.
The great hope for the climate models is that Chaos will cause temperature to again unexpectedly change course, but this time in the direction of the climate models. At which time we will hear a great hue and cry that the models were right all along. Just like one can predict the weather with a toss of the coin, 1/2 the time you will get it right.
Oh, about my link above, I should point out that the data in question covers the last 3.6 million years. So we’re talking about “frequent” intervals in that time frame…
From the abstract on her paper:
2.8 MILLION YEARS OF ARCTIC CLIMATE CHANGE FROM LAKE EL’GYGYTGYN, NE RUSSIA
The reliability of Arctic climate predictions is currently hampered by insufficient knowledge of natural climate variability in the past. A sediment core from Lake El’gygytgyn (NE Russia) provides a continuous high-resolution record from the Arctic spanning the past 2.8 Ma. The core reveals numerous “super interglacials” during the Quaternary, with maximum summer temperatures and annual precipitation during marine benthic isotope stages (MIS) 11c and 31 ~4-5°C and ~300 mm higher than those of MIS 1 and 5e. Climate simulations show these extreme warm conditions are difficult to explain with greenhouse gas and astronomical forcing alone, implying the importance of amplifying feedbacks and far field influences. The timing of Arctic warming relative to West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreats implies strong interhemispheric climate connectivity.
I wonder what thier model results would show if they set the year round sea ice to be at 70 degrees North?
What if the ice was at 60 degrees North?
What will the world look like when the current warm period ends?
There is growing recognition that reductions in Arctic sea ice levels will influence patterns of atmospheric circulation both within and beyond the Arctic.
Maybe, but a few months at most. One yr (2007?) with open Arctic water adjacent to N Alaska in autumn, N Alaska was still cold because the prevailing surface air-flow was coming from the cold land to the east & southeast.
AleaJactaEst says:
May 29, 2013 at 3:42 am
“Two 30-year simulations, …… The results showed…”
data from simulations aren’t results.
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Nor are simulations data.
cn
Bob Tisdale says:
May 29, 2013 at 4:44 am
Another model-based study. Doesn’t anyone know how to analyze data anymore?
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Bob, are the kids being taught to treat model simulations as data?
Do their professors tell them it’s correct to analyze data from one model and treat it as input to another model?
It appears they believe they are analyzing data.
cn
DP, I’m not sure how many of our “brightest scientists” are actually giving their attention to this matter…
Rod says:
May 29, 2013 at 7:24 am
Questions -> Answers:
1) Indonesia Bulge -> This is my definition.
2) A reference -> http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011GL049576/abstract
A careful search will reveal many additional sites.
3) The scientific community thought that sea level was uniform around the world. This was dis-proven when the Geo Satellites revealed that the water levels were not uniform.
4) Western South America, at the equator, is 0.5 meters less than the middle of the Pacific.
5) Indonesia is 1.0 to 1.5 meters higher than the middle of the Pacific.
6) My research revealed that the west bound Pacific Ocean currents (10 degrees N/S of the equator) are created by the Trade Winds caused by the Hadley Cells, driven by the Sun. These currents are slow (0.2 miles/ hour) but enormous in scale -> 100 times the fresh water rivers.
7) The water keeps piling up, so it must go somewhere. Both North/South creating the major surface Pacific Oceans circulations.
8) The same thing happens in the Atlantic just north of the equator. Western Africa is 0.25 meters less than middle Atlantic, but the Gulf of Mexico is 0.75 meter greater that middle Atlantic.
9) This again is driven by the Atlantic Trade winds.
10) This Gulf of Mexico Bulge only drains North due to the geographic constraints. This is one of the major contributors to the Gulf Stream.
I am retired so, by definition, I have a non-professional interest.
By revealing this information, I would hope that other researchers would make accurate measurements.
Dr. Lurtz says:
May 29, 2013 at 9:19 am
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Thanks for smart analysis of valuable data showing the extent to which it is indeed, the sun, stupid.
These people simply don’t know what is going on in the Arctic. The Arctic is warming and has been warming since the turn of the twentieth century as Kaufman et al. proved. They had a two thousand year Arctic temperature record which showed that for most of this time there was nothing but slow, linear cooling in the Arctic. Then warming suddenly started at the turn of the twentieth century. There was no increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide at that time and this rules out carbon dioxide as a cause of warming. From 1940 to 1970 the warming paused, then resumed, and is still going strong. Its original cause very likely was a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system which began to carry warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic. That is why the Arctic is still warming even now despite the lack of global warming that has lasted for15 years. For them to find the year 2007 unusual is not wrong but their theories about it are dead wrong. What happened was that in 2007 there were strong poleward winds in the Bering Sea area that pushed much warm water into the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait. This warm water melted a large batch of sea ice north of the strait in the Chuckchi Sea and poleward as well as on both sides of it. At the same time, the eastern side of the ocean near Russia was left undisturbed. This was a one-off event that has not been repeated and has no significance for the rest of Arctic history. What is happening now is a steady Arctic warming caused by the warm water carried north by currents. The source of their warmth is the Gulf Stream. Record shows that the warming was interrupted for thirty years in mid-century and was replaced by cooling at the rate of 0.3 degrees per decade. This cool interlude most likely corresponded to a temporary resumption of the former flow pattern of currents. Since nature is fickle, what has happened before can happen again. Hence, we should be ready for a repeat performance anytime now. Needless to say, this has huge implications for utilization of Arctic resources.
Arctic Observing Summit (April 30 – May 2, 2013, Vancouver, Canada) white paper
“Status of the Beaufort Gyre Observing System (BGOS, 2003-2013): goals, objectives, capabilities, challenges and sustainability”
“The significant negative trends in observed sea-ice extent and thickness have prompted numerous ongoing debates about the root causes and resulting consequences of the rapid Arctic climate change; at present there are insufficient definitive observations or substantiated theories to reach a consensus among the different opinions.”
“Ocean changes in the BG [Beaufort Gyre] Region (BGR, Fig. 1 left) have been as prominent as the disappearing sea-ice cover; in the period 2003-2012 the BGR accumulated more than 5000 km3 of liquid FW [Freshwater], an increase of approximately 25% (update to Proshutinsky et al., 2009b) relative to the climatology of the 1970s (Fig. 2).”
“Changes in the FW balance influence the extent of the sea-ice cover, the surface albedo, the energy balance, the temperature (T) and salinity (S) structure of the water masses, and biological processes in the Arctic Ocean and its marginal seas.”
“Greater than half of the Arctic Ocean’s liquid FW is concentrated in the Canada Basin, centered in the BGR (Fig. 1, left), while more than half of the solid FW is stored against the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) and Greenland in a solid FW reservoir of multiyear ice.”
“This volume [20,000 km^3 on liquid FW in the BGR] is at least 5 times larger than the total annual river runoff to the Arctic Ocean and approximately two times larger than the amount of FW stored in sea ice in the entire Arctic Ocean.”
“On the other hand, EWG [Environmental Working Group Atlas of the Arctic Ocean, 1997, 1998] data can be used to conclude that the BGR FW reservoir is a permanent feature of the Arctic Ocean and can be considered as a flywheel of Arctic Ocean circulation (P2, Proshutinsky et al., 2009b; 2013).”
“This suggests [data plus model] that measurements obtained in the BG are representative of the entire Arctic”
“Annual hydrographic surveys (Fig. 4) are made in conjunction with BGOS to obtain long-term water property observations at standard locations to document interannual changes in FWC, heat content, and geochemistry. In addition to changing sea-ice and FWC, significant variations have been observed in ocean heat content (e.g. Jackson et al., 2010, 2011; McLaughlin et al., 2011) and geostrophic currents (e.g. McPhee et al., 2009; Fig. 4). Based on Ice Mass Balance Buoy data deployed during a BGOS expedition, Perovich et al. (2008) showed that an increase in the open water fraction resulted in a 500% positive anomaly in solar heat input to the upper ocean, triggering an ice– albedo feedback and contributing to the accelerating ice retreat. Numerous hypotheses have been put forward…”
http://www.arcticobservingsummit.org/pdf/white_papers/status_beaufort_gyre_obs_system.pdf
So basically after much study and data collecting the scientists are unsure and need to keep monitoring the Arctic to try and figure what is going on…others say nothing is going on, just usual (unusual?) natural perturbations so get over it and go home and get a “real job”.