From the UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER and the “300 years out canary in the coal mine meme” department, comes this press release with absolute certainty. I tend to ignore any science that uses the favorite phrase of activists “The Barnes Ice Cap is like a canary in a coal mine”.
Study involving CU Boulder shows Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island will melt in about 300 years because of warming climate
The Barnes Ice Cap, a Delaware-sized feature on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, is melting at a rapid pace, driven by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that have elevated Arctic temperatures. The ice cap, while still 500 meters thick, is slated to melt in about 300 years under business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions.
The results provide compelling evidence that the current level of warming is almost unheard of in the past 2.5 million years, according to the authors. Only three times at most in that time period has the Barnes Ice Cap been so small, a study of isotopes created by cosmic rays that were trapped in rocks around the Barnes Ice Cap indicated.
“This is the disappearance of a feature from the last glacial age, which would have probably survived without anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions,” said Adrien Gilbert, a glaciologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia in Canada and lead author of the new study published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
While the melting of the Barnes Ice Cap will likely have negligible effects on sea level rise, its end could herald the eventual dissolution of the larger ice sheets like Greenland and Antarctica, said CU-Boulder Professor Gifford Miller, a study co-author.
“I think the disappearance of the Barnes Ice Cap would be just a scientific curiosity if it were not so unusual,” said Miller, the associate director of CU Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research who has conducted research on Baffin Island annually for the past five decades. “One implication derived from our results is that significant parts of the southern Greenland Ice Sheet also may be at risk of melting as the Arctic continues to warm.”
Elevated sea rise created by a melting Greenland would automatically cause the Antarctic Ice Sheet, whose dimensions are controlled by sea level, to also shrink in size, Miller said.
The Barnes Ice Cap is part of the Laurentide Ice Sheet that has covered millions of square miles of North America episodically since the start of Quaternary Period roughly 2.5 million years ago. The ice sheet grew and shrank over time as Earth went through various climate cycles, and the ice was a mile thick at present-day Chicago about 20,000 years ago. It started receding substantially around 14,000 years ago when Earth slipped out of its last ice age.
The ice cap stabilized about 2,000 years ago until the effects of the recent warming caught up with it. Miller was conducting research on Baffin Island in 2009 when he realized the ice cap had shrunk noticeably as compared to images from a few decades earlier. He recruited Gilbert and Gwenn Flowers from Simon Fraser to develop a model of how the ice cap might behave in the future.
In the new study, the researchers used their model to estimate when the ice cap would disappear under different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. They project that under all future emission scenarios the ice cap will be gone within 200 to 500 years. For a moderate emissions scenario that assumes Earth’s greenhouse gas emissions will peak around the year 2040, they project the ice cap to be gone in 300 years.
“The geological data is pretty clear that the Barnes Ice Cap almost never disappears in the interglacial times,” Miller said. “The fact that it’s disappearing now says we’re really outside of what we’ve experienced in 2.5 million-year interval. We are entering a new climate state.”
The Barnes Ice Cap is like a canary in a coal mine, said Miller, who also is a professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Geological Sciences. Even if humans stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the ice cap would still disappear in the next few centuries.
In 2010, the project received a boost from Waleed Abdalati, current director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (a joint venture of CUBoulder and NOAA), who was NASA’s chief scientist at the time. Abdalati supported the flight of a NASA plane monitoring ice loss in the Arctic to revisit the Barnes Ice Cap.
In addition to measuring changes in the ice cap’s height, researchers used ice-penetrating radar aboard the aircraft to reveal its hidden, sub-glacial topography. The measurements were key for the computer model subsequently developed by Gilbert and Flowers to predict the evolution of the Barnes Ice Cap.
###
“The Barnes Ice Cap is part of the Laurentide Ice Sheet that has covered millions of square miles of North America episodically since the start of Quaternary Period roughly 2.5 million years ago.”
Drive a stake through its heart.
Should we be worried. Even in an ice age the ice in the arctic region was probably the same as today.
“The Arctic Ocean between the huge ice sheets of America and Eurasia was not frozen throughout, but like today probably was only covered by relatively shallow ice, subject to seasonal changes and riddled with icebergs calving from the surrounding ice sheets. According to the sediment composition retrieved from deep-sea cores there must even have been times of seasonally open waters.”
Linear thinking in a cyclical world…. Max Photon
Isn’t the Juneau Ice Field also left over from the North American ice sheet?
At 1,500 sq miles, it is almost the size of Delaware, 1,954 square miles. It is much deeper than The Barnes Ice Cap – as much as 1,370 metres (4,490 ft) thick at Taku glacier (which is growing in mass, by the way).
“Since 1946, the glacier has been monitored by the Juneau Icefield Research Program, which has documented its rate of advance since 1988 at 17 metres (56 ft) a year. The advance is due to a positive mass balance; that is, more snow accumulates than snow and ice melt.”
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taku_Glacier
and:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneau_Icefield
The Juneau Icefield has been retreating since 1700. Not sure how thick it was 20,000 years ago compared to the Barnes Ice Cap, when the ice was a mile thick in the Chicago area.
The Last Glaciation – Northern Hemisphere – included Juneau: https://www.iceagenow.com/Ice-Age_Maps.htm
Three hundred years? I can’t wait…oh drat none of us can! They get paid for this drivel?
Yes, they get paid…highly paid, with our hard earned tax dollars.
Imagine that.
Wow- getting paid to watch ice melt and play computer games. It doesn’t get any better than that!
I stopped reading at “…develop a model of how the ice cap might behave in the future.”. This is where the article diverged from science to #fakenews.
It is hard to believe that grown men are making lucrative careers out of inventing Chicken Little fantasies straight out of their over-active imaginations, and not only are half the adults in the World buying their nonsense, but calling them scientists.
I am reminded of a scene for a great movie:
https://youtu.be/M3W9Z7XBzYc?t=8s
All I can say about this “research” is:
a) I hope no public $$ were used, and
b) Haaaa, Haaaa, Haaa, Haaaa, Haaa!
Anthony,
Rather than simple rejection, have you any alternative science to submit to CUB ?
One doesn’t have to be a great scientist to spot a bad one.
All those great scientists who make drugs that don’t work are laughing all the way to the bank. Is that a problem?
The sine qua non of “science” is the testing of a hypothesis. Computer models can’t test a hypothesis – they can only flesh out the details of a hypothesis. Since this paper merely rests on the theoretical output of a computer model, it by definition is not “science” at all, so I don’t know what you mean when you suggest that Anthony should present “alternative science.”
WTF. Why CUB? Based on the criteria of Obama administration, it has the same credibility as Pravda.
What about Greenland? It is somehow not part of the Pleistocene remnant? A remnant unlikely to decline very much prior to the end of the interglacial.
On a shorter time scale,we call this “spring.” Evidently in some quarters, it’s unwelcome.
+100
Isn’t much of the Arctic almost a desert at the present time? Lack of snow and lots of dry wind. I would suspect more ice lost to sublimation than melting. Similar circumstances to Mt Kilimanjaro.
According to some, soon it will be to hot to live anywhere except the poles, so it’s probably a good thing that the ice is melting there. /sarc
Step right up. Watch the weather change. It’s been happening for eons on a scale that is pert near unfathonable. Except for the enviros, They have it all figured out.
.
I was surprised to learn a few years ago that the Columbia Icefield on the Continental Divide between Jasper and Banff, had all the glaciers melt by about 7000 years BP and that the glaciers that are there now and receding since the Little Ice Age cooling were formed new again from scratch just in the last 5000-6000 years. (Sorry I have no source for this, but would appreciate confirmation if others also know this. I heard it on a radio interview of a glaciologist that was drilling the icefield) The wiki article does’t go into much detail about the the actual icefield dynamics, other than they are now melting away again since 1850.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Icefield
So things would have had to have been extra extra warm after the Younger Dryas period circa 12,900 years BP. to melt away that much ice so quickly from a full blown ice age when there would have been much more ice than all of present Antartica. That would be a lot of heat, some say more than can be accounted for by than just much warmer temperatures in the first optimal climate warming that lasted maybe 3000-4000 years. So, we now know that the climate was much warmer 7000 years BP and if I understand correctly, the oceans were a fair bit higher than today. So why do they say now is is an unprecedented warming in earths history? And how are they able to get away with it, with most everybody actually believing everything they say, and I am an ignorant denier that knows nothing. And then Gov’ts impose taxation to stop the ‘sea level rise’ and issue decrees that we will keep earth’s warming to less than a two degree warming, and we are apparently already 1.1 degrees up since 1850, a hundred years well before any significant use of fossil fuels. I guess you just have to follow the money…and influence of power. But that a majority of people still believe this has me wondering about the theory of the wisdom of the crowd.
Unfortunately, even today, Canada’s major conservative news paper has an article about the gloom and doom of too hot to now survive. It is so depressing just reading this claptrap from supposed people who actually went to University. I am now so suspicious of all science that makes me not believe any peer reviewed science paper from academia. I guess doom/gloom sells more papers, and also helps academia get research funded for the alarmism that politicians can take us all to the cleaners on, and they use this carbon tax revenue to get themselves re-elected. Please someone, tell me how have they been able to get away with this for so long? I am not stupid, and I know when I am being played…
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/record-heat-in-2016-and-this-year-expected-to-propel-the-earths-climate-into-truly-uncharted-territory
No news there Ron W. We all knew that 2016 would be the warmest ever years ago. And we know that 2017 will be warmer than 2016, and 2018 will be warmer than 2017, and 2019 will be…. (you get the idea). Don’t know why they bother trying to sound surprised when they control the outcome by cooling the past. Plus, calculating the global average by gridding of very irregularly spaced data points opens up all kinds of opportunities to tweak the outcome by varying the gridding parameters without having to change any of the data.
Once in a while we get a year that’s cooler than the last one by a few hundredths of a degree, just to make it look real.
That “few hundredths of a degree” is in no way justified by the accuracy of the instruments, either. The thermometers used in the weather stations are only accurate to what, +/- 0.5 C? It’s impossible to statistically justify using those to claim accuracy to two decimal places.
Many of earth’s glaciers have formed recently. The Holocene Climatic Optimum, which ended around 5000 years ago, finished off many glaciers. Some reformed during the increasingly cooler cold periods in between the subsequent warm periods, each less balmy than the preceding, ie Egyptian WP (c. 4 Ka), Minoan (c. 3 Ka), Roman (c. 3 Ka) and Medieval (c. 2 Ka). Big surprise! We’re in the Modern WP, right on time, and yet again less warm than the preceding one, following the coolest yet cold period, the LIA.
The trend is not our friend.
“I think the disappearance of the Barnes Ice Cap would be just a scientific curiosity if it were not so unusual,”
Not the least unusual. The ice has been melting and receding ever since it started shrinking when it covered Manhattan at the start of the current interglacial. In fact there’d be no Barnes Ice Cap if all the rest of the ice wasn’t already gone. It would just be an indistinguishable part of the enormous mass of ice extending to the mid-Atlantic region.
Someone should tell these genii at Boulder about interglacials; the knowledge obviously hasn’t penetrated. As for Simon Fraser University? Right…..
A 300 year event for only the third time in 2+ million years is an extreme out-lier. It means some climate conditions are changing much more rapidly than they usually do. Whether rising gas levels in a mine are an appropriate metaphor remains to be seen.
As yet there’s no “300 year event”. There’s an ice cap that may melt all the way — that according to their figures has been melting as far as they go back, which is only the late 19th century. And it’s a tiny remnant of a massive ice field that melted to allow this interglacial — just as it has for all the other interglacials in the last 2 million years, none of which we have hard information about how rapidly they changed on an annual basis.
Given that this is a remnant of the same mighty field that ended the previous interglacial, “canary in a coal mine” would only be appropriate if the ice cap was growing instead of shrinking. The end of an interglacial *really would be* catastrophic climate change. In the unlikely event that AGW prevents the next glaciation, it would qualify as massively beneficial climate change.
“In the unlikely event that AGW prevents the next glaciation, it would qualify as massively beneficial climate change.”
Ok BAU, move along, nothing to see. But if there is anything “massive” it will certainly be beneficial. Awesome for you the science is in and your optimism unbounded.
The output of this study is based on a model.
Are you seriously claiming that the end of the glaciation would not constitute catastrophic climate change? This really is settled science. The short-lived ice age scare of the 70s didn’t end because there was any doubt about the negative effects of returning to glacial conditions. It ended because we were warming.
What I’m most curious about is this claim in the conclusions:
“The Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated throughout the Holocene, until finally reaching an approximate mass balance equilibrium ~2 ka and stabilizing as Barnes Ice Cap. After 2000 years of little change in its dimensions, recent observations show that the ice cap is now losing mass at all elevations, despite the continued decrease in summer insolation [Berger and Loutre, 1991].”
Checking the references shows Berger and Loutre to be concerned with the decrease in summer insolation, not the stability of the ice cap for the last 2000 years (which also had decreasing summer insolation, of course). Meanwhile, their figure 2 shows a steadily *declining* ice mass balance as far back as it goes, shrinking about 10% in less than a century prior to the calibration period (starting 1960), despite minimal anthropogenic forcings in that period. Nowhere in the article is this discussed. That the ice cap *would have* survived this interglacial absent anthropogenic forcings is not actually either claimed or modeled.
OK Tony, I’ll bite. What caused it the other times? You know, before man was putting CO2 into the atmosphere. I know you don’t know; it’s a rhetorical question. The point is, whatever caused it before could be in play now as well. This is why the “it must be us” argument does not get any traction here.
Oh, and those 3 other times, it went into a positive feedback catastrophic death spiral hot house earth, from which the earth never recovered. Right? We know it didn’t, maybe the death spirals of old didn’t happen because there were no prophets of doom back then?
More than 99% of the ice that’s melted since the end of the last glacial maximum melted long before humans began emitting greenhouse gases in any significant quantities. I don’t think it’s something to fret about.
^ My comment on the Facebook post by the local Boulder Daily Camera on this story, which was featured prominently. I alsoposted the chart of Holocene sea level rise. Interestingly, I got very few responses, two likes and no one called me a denier, an idiot, or a fossil fuel shill.
Their projections are based on CMIP5 which begs the question reagarding the climate effects of CO2 and has been wrong in terms of predictions. The predictions thay have made are just fantasy. They did not say much about what happened to this patch of ice during the Eemian, when temperatures were higher than today, sea levels were higher, and there was more ice cap melting.
I always read that as CHIMP5, and picture 5 chimps battering away on computers to come up with some random climate catastrophe. Apparently it’s not an infinite number of monkeys needed, only 5. 😉
I resemble that remark!
Puh-leez! Chimps and humans are apes, not monkeys.
(“Monkey” is a paraphyletic group, anyway, since we apes and Old World monkeys are more closely related to each other than either clade is to New World monkeys.)
Master Primate, you have my abject apologies!
The GCM is basically a weather simulation that thy have modifyed to run long enough in finite time to simulate climate change. The weather simulations are not very good past 15 days but they ignore that fact. They have increased the spatial and temperal sampling intervals so that the simulation of climate for several decades can be performed in finite time. The increaseing of the sampling intervals adds to the instability of the whole process but they just ignore that problem. The weather simulation does not have code to acount for any changes in CO2 so they just add code that adds warmth to the system as a function of increasing amounts of CO2. They are guessing as to how CO2 affects climate so they generated a plethora of different models to cover their guesses. The computer results are just as they programed them to be since they have begged the question. The fact that all of their results do not adequately predict what has actually happened does not seem to bother them. They should reach the conclusion that the range of their guesses as to the climate sensivity of CO2 are all wrong but no, apparently they have concluded that Nature has been wrong and they are in their right to adjust what nature has done in order to fit their models. In the end they have spent a lot of money but have learned nothing. It is all politics and not science.
Then there is still time for him to take a little skiing vacation on it.
Makes it sound like it is as certain as a train schedule, rather than a wild ass guess straight off the top of his head.
I suppose we file this one with “The end of snow” doomsaying, and the “Arctic ice-free by 2014” fearmongering…as if an unfrozen ocean is a fearsome thought?
Yup, right into the same file…the circular one.
With the rest of the worthless trash.
It is rather strange that this study comes to exactly the opposite conclusion compared to a much larger study in West Greenland, just across Davis Strait. And that study used a considerably more sophisticated method to calculate exposure time:
http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14199
It has been proven that a number of medium altitude glaciers in the French Alps had completely vanished during the roman and medieval optimums. The 16th-19th Little Ice Age made them reappearing in the shape we know them currently, on the way to slowly vanish again
If the Barnes Ice Cap is undergoing a similar fate, who cares ?
Perhaps Barnes cares – whoever that is! I’m not sure I’d like to be named Barnes and having a completely melted ice cap on Baffin Island blamed on me. The horror!
“The last piece of the ice sheet that once blanketed much of North America is doomed to disappear in the next several centuries”
Next several centuries?
Yeah. Geological time is just incomprehensible to some people.
“Geological time is just incomprehensible to some people.”
It’s much worse than that Tony. Some claim mankind can adjust the climate and place their ideal at the end of 1800’s.
Presuming this adjustment is possible, why to the little ice age? When year without summer/crops starved to death 15% of my people? When even more had to abandon their homes to survive? Mass immigrating to foreign lands across the ocean?
Why are my people purposefully forced to this type of terrible choices again? I want an explanation, particularly from you as the loudest proponent of this crime against my people on this website.
““I think the disappearance of the Barnes Ice Cap would be just a scientific curiosity if it were not so unusual,” said Miller, the associate director of CU Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research .. “
Last time I visited New York it was completely free of ice. Likewise Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec and other cities. Has Miller been there recently?
Another Colorado hit piece?
A Bogart hit or not.
But it does bring into question about what is being smoked in Colorado.
The alleged research is melting ice. Yet the cover photo is Boulder CU Professor Gifford Miller is picking through what looks to be pieces of jasper. Is he looking for jasper shards and flakes from the passage of man?
That would be a major story! Finding flaked stones from under the last of a piece of ice age ice. That would throw the whole out of Africa concept into a spin.
Then again, it could be flakes from passing primitive hunter bands; especially if the ice builds and then retreats.
Which brings up the question whether any one bothered to try and actually determine age of the ice in question?
Maybe, if the Colorado whiz professor bothers to check, he could find his own WWII debris and ponder why ice age frozen water has war debris in it?
Then again, if they were serious they would have wondered how far the ice retreated during previous warm periods and how far the ice advanced during the cool periods.
Nope, they’re only interested in studies that result in doom and gloom.