Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new paper published in Nature pours cold water on the idea that a sudden melting of arctic permafrost might cause a spike in global temperatures.
The abstract from the paper;
Large quantities of organic carbon are stored in frozen soils (permafrost) within Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. A warming climate can induce environmental changes that accelerate the microbial breakdown of organic carbon and the release of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane. This feedback can accelerate climate change, but the magnitude and timing of greenhouse gas emission from these regions and their impact on climate change remain uncertain. Here we find that current evidence suggests a gradual and prolonged release of greenhouse gas emissions in a warming climate and present a research strategy with which to target poorly understood aspects of permafrost carbon dynamics.
Read More: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v520/n7546/full/nature14338.html
Unfortunately the main paper is paywalled, but I think we get the general idea. And unless the climate starts to warm again, we won’t even get the slow release predicted by the authors of the paper.
For the last few years, alarmists have been test marketing various ideas to replace the failed carbon scare, with mostly unencouraging results. Methane appeared to be one of the big hopes, but this new paper eliminates any serious possibility that the “permafrost bomb” will be a viable replacement for the carbon scare.
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Top: The total daily contribution to the surface mass balance from the entire ice sheet (blue line, Gt/day). Bottom: The accumulated surface mass balance from September 1st to now (blue line, Gt) and the season 2011-12 (red) which had very high summer melt in Greenland. For comparison, the mean curve from the period 1990-2011 is shown (dark grey). The same calendar day in each of the 22 years (in the period 1990-2011) will have its own value. These differences from year to year are illustrated by the light grey band. For each calendar day, however, the lowest and highest values of the 22 years have been left out.
http://www.dmi.dk/uploads/tx_dmidatastore/webservice/b/m/s/d/e/accumulatedsmb.png
Current Surface Mass Budget of the Greenland Ice Sheet
Here you can follow the daily surface mass balance on the Greenland Ice Sheet. The snow and ice model from one of DMI’s climate models is driven every six hours with snowfall, sunlight and other parameters from a research weather model for Greenland, Hirlam-Newsnow. We can thereby calculate the melting energy, refreezing of melt water and sublimation (snow that evaporates without melting first). The result of this is a change in the snow and ice from one day to the next and this change is shown below. All numbers are in water equivalent, that is, the amount of water the snow and ice would correspond to if it was melted.
The model has been updated 20 May 2014 and now gives a better picture of what happens with the meltwater. Earlier a large amount of the meltwater was treated as loss in the form of runoff from the ice sheet. The new model is better at taking into account the part of the meltwater that refreezes on its way to the coast, and this then remains a part of the ice sheet. This update means that the new maps, values and curves will deviate from the previous ones. Everything shown on this site, however, is calculated with this new model, so that all curves and values are comparable.
http://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/
Comparison of snow coverage in 2014 and 15 on April 9.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/testimage.2.sh?first=20140409.jpg&second=20150409.jpg
We don’t have good enough thermometer data and what data we have doesn’t go back far enough. We don’t really know if the planet is warming or cooling even today, because the data is that bad. Everyone can agree that the temperature today is not the hottest or coldest it has ever been. The concentration of CO2 is not the highest or lowest it has ever been. We could be on an upward or downward temperature trend that is part of a longer term oscillation and we wouldn’t know. We have no way to separate the theoretical heating component of CO2 from everything else. To say we *know* the earth is *heating* up because of *CO2* is triply not being honest. One reason I am a skeptic is the overselling of the non facts that CAGW is based on. Another reason is the overselling of the accuracy of proxies and the relevance of models that can’t reproduce anything measured. Show me all the charts of arctic temperatures you want but it doesn’t prove any relation between CO2 and arctic temperature. We have satellite data for 40 years. That is not long enough. We have a handful of ground based thermometers for 100 years. That is not long enough, enough coverage, or accurate. Even if the temp were increasing there are plenty of plausible reasons other than CO2. Done. Move on. Find real evidence. Build a real working model. In the meantime be happy that burning hydrocarbons fertilizes the world. Could be that every 5th plant or animal is alive because of oil? Wait… We don’t even know if the increased CO2 in the atmosphere is from burning hydrocarbons.
When I was a resident of upstate New York a long time ago I personally experienced the same scenario as stated above ……….. only on a different “time scale”.
Whereas the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions are currently experiencing their per se “climate change” on a millennial “time scale”, ….. my per se “climate change” residency time in upstate New York was measured via a yearly “time scale”.
Thus, each n’ every year, for 20+ years, the Springtime warming of the upstate New York “climate” quickly melted all the snow and ice ….. which initiated the start of environmental changes that accelerated the microbial breakdown of organic carbon and the release of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. And who knows what all was outgassed from that winter accumulation of decomposing cow manure?
And that initial start of microbial breakdown of organic carbon was quickly followed by the “greening” of the vegetation …. which was “sucking” that carbon (CO2) back out of the atmosphere and re-sequestering it back in the soil and the newly growing plant biomass.
Its truly amazing, verging on the “unbelievable”, that the proponents of CAGW would tout the scientific fact that the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions are incapable of outgassing their dead biomass sequestered carbon until after their per se “wintertime” has ended and the “warming” has commenced, …. while at the same time, ….. those same proponents of CAGW are claiming that the lower latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere are capable of outgassing humongous quantities of their dead biomass sequestered carbon (CO2) during the “wintertime” when everything is extremely cold and/or frozen.
Maybe I should ask Ferdinand E for an explanation because that is what he is always touting as a “fact of science”.
Walt D at 8:27 wrote
Those who grew up in the South (in the US) were most likely raised as fundamentalist Christians. They were taught that the Earth is about 6000 years old, man and dinosaurs coexisted and that the theory of evolution is baloney. These beliefs did not go away even after many of them obtained degrees…
Walt D is an ignorant bigot, or an intentional liar.
I grew up in the heart of the southern US, have lived worked and raised a family in most of the old “Confederate” states and can confirm that this statement is incredibly ignorant, small-minded, provincial, and incorrect to boot. While the residents here are more likely to consider themselves religious than in other parts of the US, religion here is and has long been very diverse, and only a tiny percentage would argue that the earth is 6000 or so years old. On the other hand, I am not going to cast-out folks just because they have different beliefs, as Walt might desire.
I was taught that tolerance is a virtue. Alinsky taught that ridicule is a weapon.
+1 From an agnostic
I will judge each as one and for who they are, not by what group others class them in.
There seems to be some argument over the datasets. As in a noticable amount of alarmist “dont use RSS use the other datasets’ pushback on the ‘no warming in 18 years’ claim.
Heres the 4 datasets – HADCRUT, GISTEMP, UAH, RSS since 1997. 0C warming for RSS, and 0.1C to .15C for the other datasets. RSS is an outlier:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/trend/plot/uah/from:1997/plot/uah/from:1997/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1997/plot/gistemp/from:1997/trend/plot/rss/from:1997/plot/rss/from:1997/trend
From 2001, all the datasets are shows practically no warming. HADCRUT is flat, RSS is declining slightly, UAH up a few hundredths of a degree, GISTEMP up less than 0.05C (eyeballing the slope). Average of all 4 datasets would be practically no warming – less than 0.03C warming on average, or a decadal warming ternd of 0.02C. “Practically no warming this century thus far” seems a fair summation:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/trend/plot/uah/from:2001/plot/uah/from:2001/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2001/plot/gistemp/from:2001/trend/plot/rss/from:2001/plot/rss/from:2001/trend
For those skittish souls wanting to get their knickers in a twist over sudden and catastrophic release of an awesome amount of methane into Earth’s atmosphere, look no further than a whopping great earthquake along the Anatolian fault disrupting the huge volumes of methane at the deeper levels of the Black sea.