Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A study published by scientists at the University of Buffalo claims that global warming will increase snowfall in the arctic, slowing the rate of sea level rise.
A history of snowfall on Greenland, hidden in ancient leaf waxes
… An early study in this field finds that snowfall at one key location in western Greenland may have intensified from 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, a period when the planet’s Northern Hemisphere was warmer than it is today.
While more research needs to be done to draw conclusions about ancient precipitation patterns across Greenland, the new results are consistent with the hypothesis that global warming could drive increasing Arctic snowfall — a trend that would slow the shrinkage of the Greenland Ice Sheet and, ultimately, affect the pace at which sea levels rise.
“As the Arctic gets warmer, there is a vigorous scientific debate about how stable the Greenland Ice Sheet will be. How quickly will it lose mass?” says lead researcher Elizabeth Thomas, PhD, an assistant professor of geology in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences who completed much of the study as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“Climate models and observations suggest that as temperatures rise, snowfall over Greenland could increase as sea ice melts and larger areas of the ocean are exposed for evaporation. This would slow the decline of the ice sheet, because snow would add to its mass,” Thomas says. “Our findings are consistent with this hypothesis. We see evidence that the ratio of snow to rain was unusually high from 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, which is what you would expect to see if sea ice loss causes snowfall to increase in the region.” …
Read more: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2016/05/044.html
The abstract of the study;
A major increase in winter snowfall during the middle Holocene on western Greenland caused by reduced sea ice in Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea
Precipitation is predicted to increase in the Arctic as temperature increases and sea ice retreats. Yet the mechanisms controlling precipitation in the Arctic are poorly understood and quantified only by the short, sparse instrumental record. We use hydrogen isotope ratios (δ2H) of lipid biomarkers in lake sediments from western Greenland to reconstruct precipitation seasonality and summer temperature during the past 8 kyr. Aquatic biomarker δ2H was 100‰ more negative from 6 to 4 ka than during the early and late Holocene, which we interpret to reflect increased winter snowfall. The middle Holocene also had high summer air temperature, decreased early winter sea ice in Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea, and a strong, warm West Greenland Current. These results corroborate model predictions of winter snowfall increases caused by sea ice retreat and furthermore suggest that warm currents advecting more heat into the polar seas may enhance Arctic evaporation and snowfall.
Read more: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL068513/abstract
WUWT recently reported a study published in Nature, which claimed there would be a 14.7-19.5c rise in Arctic temperatures over the next 200 years. Now we have also learned that global warming will increase snowfall in the Arctic.
Settled science anyone?
This is a second order effect at best meant only as apology for why sea level is increasing more slowly than expected. This effect is but one of many reasons interglacial sea level response is not linear. It is an S curve with the bulk of the “easy” SLR long since past. Squeezing the last 20 meters out of the system takes a Really Long Time.
Unless the next glacial stage comes early the final 20 m of rise WILL happen.
“This is a second order effect at best meant only as apology for why sea level is increasing more slowly than expected. ”
Is it?
Not slower than IPCC projections.
http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/files/2012/10/Figure-25.png
That’s the third assessment report lad, you sneaky snook as my 5 year old likes to say
Using a chart Sks you like, you scammer, Not fond of disingenuous people.
AR5 high estimate is 15cm not 6.
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_Fig1-10.jpg
Bogus that is AR3 report projections
Cherry pick fail
gymnosperm May 25, 2016 at 7:20 am
“Unless the next glacial stage comes early the final 20 m of rise WILL happen.”
Yup. If the Earth keeps the warm streak alive and SLR at around 3mm per year, we’ll get that extra 20m in about 6,500 years. That’ll give me a good story for the great-great-great… great… great-great-grand-kids. I can tell them wondrous stories of what Florida was like back in the day.
Well the Laurentian Ice Shield redux #34 is overdue, “paleo-chronologically” speaking.
That ice shield doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Snow happens. Buy a shovel. Gas powered snow blowers will be banned by the Left to prevent the world from getting too warm. The irony.
They can pry my trac-drive snowblower from my lifeless, frozen hands.
I have 2 of them shovels. I only use them for compost though, not much use on snow in Galveston County.
Lol, anyone who lives leeward of a large body of water where it gets cold enough to snow knows what this is.
Dick Goddard’s retiring?
You talk of “Lake-effect” snowfall.
Not the same mechanism that is the subject of this paper.
LE snowfall is a function of the instability of a cold airmass to heating from below, and the uptake of moisture into Cb cloud.
Much more complicated is the process of a general warming of the Arctic,
Unstable air originates from a cold airmass flowing over warm.
Moist air entering the Arctic is (obviously) warm flowing over cold.
IE: the air becomes MORE stable.
It is warm advection induced with the added complications in the changes to the PJS.
Everything else being equal, of course we know that warmer air can hold more WV. Don’t we?
This is lake effect snow, cold air blows over open water, and then it snow over the colder land. And when the lakes freeze, the faucet turns off. exactly what the quote from the paper says.
Everything else being equal, of course we know that warmer air “can” hold more WV. Don’t we?
It can, but it can also hold very little too.
“This is lake effect snow, cold air blows over open water, and then it snow over the colder land. And when the lakes freeze, the faucet turns off. exactly what the quote from the paper says.”
Nope.
Because, air entering the Arctic must be warmer than that resident.
Yes, it advects over water as opposed to ice.
However it is still NOT unstable to SST’s.
So it is NOT LE snowfall.
It’s much worse than we thought! It now is understood that climate change is causing science itself to become disastrously unsettled! Run for your lives!
This should have been obvious decades ago. at least it was to me. Ice cores are processed in fixed size segments sometimes called ‘bags’ and during warm periods, there are significantly fewer years per bag then during cold periods which clearly indicates more snow falls during warm periods than during cold periods. Furthermore, more evaporation means more precipitation and this means snow at the polls. Again, it should have been obvious that a warmer climate means more snow at the poles which have always remained cold, otherwise, the ice would have melted and we would have no ice cores to analyze.
There you go again with that logic stuff! That has no place in climate science. If it did, the models would work.
Well that can’t be right. It has always been cold at the poles. Never any warm air eva! The ice cores all show cold, never warm. Eva! The only time it has ever snowed or been warm in the Arctic has been cuz humans made it happen. Stick with the talking points!
From the article: “Precipitation is predicted to increase in the Arctic as temperature increases and sea ice retreats.”
IF temperature increases.
That’s a big IF.
This is just the warmists trying to get headlines out ahead of what might be a cold La Nina winter. The actual science of it is irrelevant – that more water in arctic air means more snow should be a no-brainer – it’s more the fact of the study itself. The sheer number of these studies ought to clue in the casual observer to how much money is flowing through the AGW pipeline – personnel, equipment, travel, etc. all requires funding – all to produce what should have been an obvious conclusion, and then justified with a spurious connection to Global Warming, so it can then be released as headline – a headline designed as a pre-emptive defense mechanism to spin against the possibility of both a cold winter and the lack of rising seas.
Tomorrow there will be another one. Rinse repeat.
I’m afraid you are correct, Joel.
The violent swings and commodity catastrophes of stock market indices are more predictable than anthropogenic climate change spreadsheet modeling geographers.
Ha ha 😉
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/05/25/alberta-carbon-tax_n_10129256.html Alberta Carbon Tax Could Cost Families More Than Estimated:
To summarize –
The earth has numerous climate control mechanisms that self-correct for natural as well as man-made events. So, it doesn’t really matter what man does because Mother Nature will fix it, even if the ultimate solution is to get rid of the source of the problem entirely.
It’s always Global Warming.
http://www.dropbox.com/s/hmqic8tvkh79vk5/GlobalWarming3.jpg
Yep. It happened in the President’s oval office. And they used all the original weapons, with a final twist in the tale.
The gun came from the gunroom used to stockpile all the guns taken from US citizens. The axe was used to chop off the heads of denying infidels, a trick they learned from terrorists. The knife was used to carve out all the individual freedoms from the constitution. They poisoned the minds of the voting public. The syringe was filled with anti-truth serum. The fireplace poker was used to prod the poisoned minds of the voting public to protest against independent thinkers. The shillelagh was taken off the dead body of a short red-headed leprechaun as they pried her guns off her dead body. But the twist of the tale is that in the end they had hung themselves with their own rope.
http://globaltoynews.typepad.com/.a/6a0133ec87bd6d970b0192acc887c3970d-popup
Well darn. My Clue response had too many weapons in it and ended up in the trash bin.
A paper for everything. No matter what, no matter how, Global Warming dun it, just like the cartoon above shows. Very apt.
Stop Press: Global warming ‘likely to cause new ice age’ say scientists.
Google ‘doublethink’, and ponder…
“..may have intensified from 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, a period when the planet’s Northern Hemisphere was warmer than it is today.”
warmer than today! I didn’t think this kind of thinking was legal! I get it though: everyone on the beleaguered thermageddon team is beginning to see that we are, as skeptics have been telling us, heading into cooler times. Grant metabolisms are just trying to get ahead of the curve!! The next 10 years (remember this!!!) will be dominated by papers rationalizing the cooling and holding forth the certitude of future warming.
So, im confused. If we want to slow sea level rise, should we be buring more or less fossil fuels?
Pace of change is important. Relative to warming events in previous eons, our own warming event is probably rushing forward more rapidly. We are in uncharted territory and should do something about it. There are upsides (and downsides) to acting against our part in global warming even if ALL the science is wrong. Maybe the human race could survive if we do nothing and the science is correct, but…
You would be wrong. Using just ice core data without tagging on modern direct temperature records, a clear and unmistakable pattern is demonstrated. When rising out of a stadial glacial ice sheet period, the rise is very fast. When falling back down into another stadial glacial ice sheet period, the fall is a jagged stair step back down.
Now don’t come back and say something about current temperatures. Splicing ice core temperature proxies with direct measurements is statistically unsupportable.