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.
###
Gone in 300 years?….. Yeah righto. Just like California’s drought would never end. These people just never stop. Always with the catastrophism.
Now let’s just think this over a bit more carefully. I don’t accept the hypothesis that CO2 causes global warming. CO2 merely is the second most important player in converting outgoing infrared to latent heat. But even if we did accept that hypothesis for the sake of argument, and we also accept that this remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet ought to be thought of as “the canary in the coal mine,” then how many other canaries are already dead from the melting of the other parts of that massive ice sheet that spread from Iceland to present day Albert (where the ice sheet didn’t end, merely had a new name), and which has been melting for about twenty thousand years or more? That’s billions and billions of canaries, enough to raise the sea around 140 meters. One more little canary won’t make much difference.
Very clever meme-setting though. We must act NOW in emergency fashion, to avoid a reality that MIGHT happen 300 years from now, but which has already been occurring for over 20K years. Who in the bloody hell do these people think they’re persuading?
From here, all the way to Albert. Ha ha ha, I meant Alberta, of course. It’s a Province. In Canada. Home of Gretzky (before he stopped being Canadian), the Calgary Stampede, Rocky Mountains… Keeps British Columbia from smashing into Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territory from falling onto Montana.
Q: Who in the bloody hell do these people think they’re persuading?
A: Mcleod…. and Griff.
Hey…
I don’t need ‘persuading’…
I just look at the published observations with a critical eye and observe that yes, the science is correct: humans are rapidly warming the planet
“Griff March 23, 2017 at 4:46 am”
Pure bunkum. Where is your science?
Here is just some of my science:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Which of their observations, statements and conclusions are wrong and why?
Their data looks accurate, their statements appear soundly based on their interpretation of the data, but as to their conclusions, I can’t determine correctness as they reach no conclusions.
Their is Zero data in that report which either indicates man is responsible or even involved.
______________________________bottom line____________________________
The Arctic is gradually warming (as it has since the depth of the little ice age) and ice is gradually declining over the 38 year satellite era, the Antarctic to a lesser extent.
No causation is reported
Griff you don’t need persuading because your mind was made up long before you looked at any data.
Not that you have ever looked at any data.
Less than 1C in 150 years is rapid warming? In what world?
BTW, a substantial percentage of that warming occurred well before the recent rise in CO2. But it’s still caused by CO2.
“Here is just some of my science:”
Indeed!? “your science”?
That is a laugh!
Did you even bother to check the link before posting it!?
Given your history of poor reading comprehension, I doubt it.
Since you asked.
The NSIDC site misrepresents reality while pushing ice loss meme.
Consider this, from the first sentence on the page:
What scientific site would ever use “appears to have reached”. Why waffle words when discussing facts?
Perhaps it is because the NSIDC knew they were trying to jump the gun in declaring a maximum?
Especially after changing code, algorithms, missing data infill methods and sources?
How about the Arctic sea ice graphic representations? It is just so nice of NSIDC to zero in on a small portion of the graph, skewing the axis?
Meanwhile: Ice Extent, NORSEX SSM/I
http://web.nersc.no/WebData/arctic-roos.org/observation/ssmi_ice_ext.png
Give the NSIDC and fellow agencies a couple of years. Maybe then you can depend on them for science.
ATheoK,
Interestingly, looking at that graph, the lines in 2010 and 2015 both take another large jumu up about this time. Calling the 7th the corner day could be a little Premature Speculation
“I just look at the published observations with a critical eye”
No you don’t.
You get an email to tell you that a debate is in progress on some blog that needs you to get over there and attempt to derail it.
Now go and apologise to Dr. Crockford for attempting to damage her professional credibility.
“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.”
Then the authors are scientifically incompetent nincompoops. Experiment: Take an ice cube from the freezer, place it over a fierce flame until half has melted. Then put the rest in the normal section of the fridge. It continues to melt. So these fools would proclaim “The level of warming in the fridge of that ice cube is almost unheard of since it was removed from the freezer.” Even having to explain it is humiliating.
I’ll worry about it in 300 years.
“The geological data is pretty clear that the Barnes Ice Cap almost never disappears in the interglacial times,” Miller said.
“Almost never” implies that it does happen sometimes and has happened in the past. The interglacial we are in now is already a relatively long one, as I understand it, so it is not surprising it is getting close to happening again, even if greenhouse gasses were not an issue.
He is lying through his teeth. There is no way to determine from cosmogenic isotopes how many times a given site has been ice-free during a given period. It is possible to (very roughly) estimate how large a proportion of the time a site has been ice-free. In this case I certainly agree that the Barnes ice-cap area has been ice-covered most of the time. Which isn’t exactly sensational since interglacials are only about 10% as long as glaciations.
“Study involving CU Boulder shows Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island will melt in about 300 years because of warming climate.”
____________________________________________
When I was young. Elder man talking about the world after / some ~20 years /
– It was about doomsday.
Now this clown:
‘Professor Gifford Miller,’ speaks of problems 300 years from now.
disgusting.
https://youtu.be/y2oKRKZnEoA
https://youtu.be/aTLU1Qx5ioI
The bloody thing is still 500 meters thick for God’s sake . but at least there are lots of ice cubes left for my gin and lime!
Other arctic news… arctic sea ice maximum was a record low in the 38 year satellite record, the arctic had a very warm winter and the ice is thinner than in last few years and of unusually low volume…
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
the extent is already at record low for this date and dropping sharply
Another sea ice record low on the cards for 2017.
Really there’s nothing going on up there??
You’re merely confirming what we all think, the climate is constantly changing, what you’re not doing is proving a connection to anything anthroprogenic or otherwise.
Then you accept that this is part of currently changing climate?
That is, part of the climate change now occurring is a reduction in sea ice?
So, if you do, the question is: why? and why is it that the levels are lower than previous low?
If you look at the science (and there are many papers examining the various cycles, ocean heat transport, etc, etc, which might affect the ice) there is only the human warming you can ascribe as the cause of the level of melt beyond that which natural cycles should/could produce
So Griffie, what caused the much lower levels of the 1930’s?
Griff,
Do you accept this is a part of an Ever Changing Climate?
Griff, it’s just ice. It comes and it goes, just like clouds.
Relax.
Griff: What is 38 years in a geologically perspective? (Hint: a percentage with a lot of decimal Places after the zero).
30 years is the standard period usually set for distinguishing climate trend from just weather.
If you look back and see where the low in the previous ice cycle was and what the length of previous cycles probably was, you see we are trending much lower than before at a point where we ought to be coming out of a cycle…
Who cares what the standard period is. That’s just a man made standard. It was also set up before we learned of the existence of 60 year and longer cycles in the climate.
Remember Griff, I am in for a $50 donation to WUWT if in Sept this year the read line drops below the 2016 line. Remember you making that statement?
I had missed your reply there… contrary to how it looks I don’t get back to read stuff here often.
If you clarify which chart we are using and the date, I could be on for that.
“Griff March 23, 2017 at 4:52 am”
It’s here at WUWT, you claimed that by Sept this year ice will be at a record low, lower than 2016. I ain’t gunna look for it, you made the post at WUWT. Given your reply today, I would have to label you a coward and not worthy.
A new record would be lower than 2012.
Griff’s guess might be right that starting from a low winter high, Arctic sea ice will go on to make a new record low, but that is far from a given, as he imagines.
Sea ice extent might get back into the normal zone by April or May. Or it could do as he supposes, and track lower than usual all during the melt season.
It was lower this winter because ice didn’t form in the areas where it typically melts earliest anyway, due to warmer water from the two super El Nino years. That lack doesn’t necessarily mean that the regions which normally melt later will melt sooner.
Record lows have previously been associated with August cyclones, so much will depend upon the WX this summer.
Whatever happens will in any case be because of natural WX, not man-made “climate change”.
“Really there’s nothing going on up there??”
There sure is, record snowfall on Greenland ice cap:
Yes, record precipitation. Unusual precipitation.
Part of a warm arctic with frequent intense storms over this winter period.
not a sign of cooling, eh?
Remember the snow accumulation/melt is only part of the mass balance on Greenland
Correct not a sign of cooling but also not a sign of human causation either
“nothing going on up there?”
Oh, yes, something’s going on up there, Griff. Some of the ice is melting. Sea live will thrive with more open water. Why doesn’t that make your heart sing?
WHO THE F CARES?!!!
The ice has decreased from the record high levels of 38 years ago.
So what?
giffiepoo;
There you go again, mis-stating, misrepresenting and just plain refusing to accept false science.
I posted above that the NSIDC has admitted, “changing code, algorithms, missing data infill methods and sources?”, for their Arctic ice estimates and graphs.
They even admit changing the “lowest year” because their revised code, algorithms and missing data infill procedures changed some monthly and yearly averages.
Then the NSIDC, without clearly identifying the changes tacks on data from a different source while pretending there is not a change.
The basic truth is that it represents a new unique data source that should be represented uniquely. Comparison between sources require caveats, without definitive declarations of lowest/greatest/least/most.
Typical climate science. They made it up, so they claim it is science.
The bald facts remain:
Arctic ice is following a natural yearly process of melt and regrowth.
Thirty years of satellite tracking, using multiple different and unique ice measurement satellites is not a true thirty year tracking.
Thirty years of satellite tracking only meet the minimum span of years for “climate discussion”! According to a prominent alarmist.
Thirty years of Arctic ice tracking is evidently not representative of a full Arctic ice cycle.
A cycle or cycle periodicity that is currently unknown.
Historical records indicate both greater and lesser Arctic ice periods.
Antarctic ice is doing extremely well.
Any claimed polar CO2 effect, obviously misrepresents weather as something greater.
On a side note and topic. I just spent a couple of hours reviewing the Senate Bill S:442 “National Aeronautics and Space Administration Transition Authorization Act of 2017”, signed into law by President Trump.
Along with the related funding document summary, “National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)” and the RPC Policy Committee summary provided:
Not a word can be found for oceans, weather, climate, temperature, NOAA, and all sort of similar silly stuff.
NASA is directed by Law to focus on space. Imagine that!?
That is what false science and advocacy achieves in a real world giffiepoo!
Is your salary dependent on some sort of handout from America? Looks like it is time to brush up on real work skills. Maybe you can help pull up those useless windfarm massive concrete bases?
Good healthy outdoor work!
Lots of healthy fish to catch and eat.
No crocodiles or deadly snakes to worry about.
Definitely no shortage of rain.
You’d love it giffiepoo!
Though you might find iron workers and offshore men tend to be the practical type.
I can remember watching David Bellamy, the now exiled BBC presenter, on Baffin Island talking about the LIA and how it be dated by the growth of lichens on areas which had previously been under ice and were now exposed. The dating was done by inferring the age of the lichens by how much growth there had been.
As the film is now locked away in a dark dungeon underneath Broadcasting House finding it on the Internet is impossible.
The papers the program was based on fortunately remain:
http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic58-4-341.pdf
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-glaciology/article/div-classtitleindications-of-recent-extensive-glacierization-in-northcentral-baffin-island-nwta-hreffn1-ref-typefnadiv/95C465FA4AD7E8914B76555F48131AA7
Part of the abstract of the latter is well worth citing:
“Studies of the geomorphology and rock lichen development north of the Barnes Ice Cap prompt the conclusion that 70 per cent of this extensive, interior region was covered by permanent ice some 300 to 400 yr. ago. Contemporaneously the northern Barnes Ice Cap was significantly larger than today; it dammed up a lake in the upper Isortoq valley, over 80 km. long and up to 300 m. deep. Excluding the ice cap less than 2 per cent of the area is glacierized today; this represents a dramatic reduction in surface area of the former ice cover. Similarly, significant recession of the ice cap implies that glaciers of the “Baffin type” are in a less healthy budgetary state than hitherto has been assumed.”
Written in 1962!
Very interesting. That extract seems to be irreconcilable with the claim in the paper (contradicting their figure and unsupported by an external reference) that the Barnes Ice Cap was in “an approximate mass balance equilibrium” and had “2000 years of little change in its dimensions” prior to “recent observations”.
You can have a look for yourself. Use Google Earth. Go to 70 N, 75 W, about 100 km altitude. See that light colored band along the edge of the icecap? That is lichen-free land that has been exposed since the LIA. Now go north to 70.5 N and 74.5 W and up to about 250 km altitude. All those light-coloured spots on the highest plateaus north of the ice-cap are lichen-free areas that had icecaps or permanent snow during the LIA.
“The ice cap, while still 500 meters thick, is slated to melt in about 300 years under business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions.”
Big deal!
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.”
Almost unheard of! Only three times!
So the fact is that the change is within natural variation.
What a load of cra
300 years?! Wow, that thing is hard to kill off.
So in 300 years we will finally be rid of that troublesome Laurentide ice sheet that was such a hindrance to life
So, business as usual also predicts rising use of oil, gas and coal for the he next 300yrs too. That’s reassuring.If we can stop the CO2 madness by 2040, we can also reassure Chicago that they can have their mile high glacier back.
“…doomed to disappear in the next several centuries…”
This is the sort of thing that gets me these days. The list of (seriously disastrous) things that will happen as a result of global warming seems to shrink every year, until we are currently left with only “extreme weather” and sea level rise; and extreme weather is fading out, as such things tend to, before it can become public knowledge that the statistics don’t support it.
So the poster boy for climate change is sea level rise. Which has supposedly increased to an unprecedented 3mm per year! (One and a quarter inches per decade…)
And yet the alarmist’s favourite disaster scenarios – New York the equivalent of Venice before the end of the century, Florida under water within decades – can’t possibly happen by any imaginable mechanism. Doesn’t stop them from plugging them though…
If all the planet’s mountain glaciers and small ice caps like this one melted, MSL might rise 20 cm, ie less than eight inches. Not going to happen. In many places, glaciers are growing. Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets, where serious amounts of fresh water are stored, are growing.
Nope. Greenland icecap is shrinking very slightly. As for Antarctica, nobody knows. the uncertainty in measurements is much larger than the supposed growth/shrinkage. Essentially the supposed change is completely due to whatever GIA (Global Isostatic Adjustment) you select, so you can pick your own result quite freely.
I stand corrected. Maybe increasing snowfall on the GIS has sped up glacier calving.
At the very least, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, by far the most massive, which matters the most, stopped receding some 3000 years ago, after the Minoan Warm Period, as shown by exposed ground isotopes.
This canary has been dying for alarmists for a decade:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110511080544/http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/science/story.html?id=41aeca3c-30a6-4847-88cd-8b1bc8a29d9c
If its oldest really ice dates only to the LGM (20 Ka), then obviously it’s normal for the ice cap to melt during interglacials, such as the previous one, the Eemian (c. 130-114 Ka).
It doesn’t follow. This ice-cap is not on an ice-divide, so the snow that formed that ice fell somewhere far to the west of where it is now, and it doesn’t tell you anything at all about conditions during the Eemian
However it seems extremely likely that there was no Barnes Icecap during the Eemian. There is quite a lot of proxy data from Baffin Land during the Eemian. It all points to temperatures 3-5 degrees warmer than now. Southern Baffin land may even have been forested.
Thanks.
Sounds almost as balmy as the Pliocene, when boreal forest lined the Arctic Ocean.
Would have been a nice place to visit, Eemian Baffin Island. Lots of big game, and I imagine birds and marine mammals.
Baffin Island ice has been increasing longer-term. It was more extensive during the LIA even than in the Younger Dryas cold snap during ice sheet termination:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027737910800262X
Melting glaciers and ice caps on Baffin Island contribute roughly half of the sea-level rise from all ice in Arctic Canada, although they comprise only one-fourth of the total ice in the region. The uncertain future response of arctic glaciers and ice caps to climate change motivates the use of paleodata to evaluate the sensitivity of glaciers to past warm intervals and to constrain mechanisms that drive glacier change. We review the key patterns and chronologies of latest Pleistocene and Holocene glaciation on Baffin Island. The deglaciation by the Laurentide Ice Sheet occurred generally slowly and steadily throughout the Holocene to its present margin (Barnes Ice Cap) except for two periods of rapid retreat: An early interval ∼12 to 10 ka when outlet glaciers retreated rapidly through deep fiords and sounds, and a later interval ∼7 ka when ice over Foxe Basin collapsed. In coastal settings, alpine glaciers were smaller during the Younger Dryas period than during the Little Ice Age. At least some alpine glaciers apparently survived the early Holocene thermal maximum, which was several degrees warmer than today, although data on glacier extent during the early Holocene is extremely sparse. Following the early Holocene thermal maximum, glaciers advanced during Neoglaciation, beginning in some places as early as ∼6 ka, although most sites do not record near-Little Ice Age positions until ∼3.5 to 2.5 ka. Alpine glaciers reached their largest Holocene extents during the Little Ice Age, when temperatures were ∼1–1.5 °C cooler than during the late 20th century. Synchronous advances across Baffin Island throughout Neoglaciation indicate sub-Milankovitch controls on glaciation that could involve major volcanic eruptions and solar variability. Future work should further elucidate the state of glaciers and ice caps during the early Holocene thermal maximum and glacier response to climate forcing mechanisms.
You have misunderstood that paper. Most of Baffins Land was still covered by the Laurentide ice-sheet during the Younger Dryas. It was the separate alpine glaciers in the coastal mountains that were smaller than now. The extent of the main ice-sheet during Dryas is not known, but here is a map that shows the situation during the Cockburn stage 8,200 years ago (i. e. 3,500 years after Dryas):
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/337/6100/1330/F1.large.jpg
I wondered about that. I was surprised that the Laurentide could have melted enough to have isolated a remnant on Baffin Island that early.
Re. Innuitian and Laurentide Sheets below, the distinction makes a difference both before they grow together and after they melt apart.
Last remnant of ancient North American ice sheet on track to vanish
‘Bout time — good riddance.
It isn’t really the “only remnant” since there is Pleistocene ice in the Devon Icecap as well, but a purist might argue that this is rather the last remnant of the Innuitian icecap since it is north of Lancaster Sound. However since the ice-sheets were confluent it is a distinction without a difference.
Old Big Climate claim: the Little Ice Age was only a Northern Hemisphere phenomena
New Big Climate claim: the Arctic will only ever get warmer over 300 years
“…“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….”.
“Probably” really???
You can’t trick me! It’s models, all the way down! (Models, turtles, who can tell anymore?)
Must be models of turtles