North Pole notes (continued)
This is a continuation of the previous (and now unwieldy) post on the current Arctic situation. We’ll have a proper round up in a few weeks.
This is a continuation of the previous (and now unwieldy) post on the current Arctic situation. We’ll have a proper round up in a few weeks.
22 August 2008 at 5:30 AM
Latest (July) ARCUS Expert Assesment now out.
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/report_july.php
22 August 2008 at 5:32 AM
Well, it’s been awfully cold today in Suva (Fiji), where I live, during the wintertime as well as the summertime, so I am not surprised about anything happening up over.
22 August 2008 at 7:18 AM
Re: #1
Well 4 of the proejections are already wrong.
Many people seems to be fixed on sea ice extent, which gives no indication of volume or thickness of the ice.
Sure if we get the right wind conditions, the remaining ice can be compacted to below the 2007 minimun.
The best indicator, although not perfect is sea ice area, as it gives a better idea of the condition of the ice, and takes in consideration the concentration for each pixel.
This is why I prefer Cryosphere Today as an indicator of the ice state (this was an unpaid endorsement
).
Right now its late August, and surface melt north of 80 will be at a minimun. I figure there is about 0.3 million sq km of ice left to melt in the Fox Basin and Siberian and Labtev sea, which will/should melt due to water temperture.
We stand a good chance of beating last years sea ice area. However I beleive the sea ice extent will end up in the high 4’s million sq km.
The end result, after a particularly cold winter, a greater volume of ice will have melted this year, than last.
With no multiyear ice in the beufort sea, the first year ice that forms will be constantly destroyed by storms, and will be at a much larger scale than last year.
Meanwhile the remaining first year ice, will not become second year ice, as it will be flushed out into the Atlantic by the trans polar current.
We will start 2009 in the same state as 2008, and if the winter is mild, and we get an early summer melt like we did in 2007, then Santa is going to be swimming.
22 August 2008 at 9:54 AM
RE: #3
As I understand it, the concentration calculated from the passive microwave data is sensitive to melt ponds as well as to open water. Thus, your claim that the actual ice area for each pixel can be found using this calculation is likely to be incorrect. For this reason, I tend to look only at the extent calculation, not the area. In spite of that, I think an increase in melt pond area would be just as important as an increase in open water area, as the melt ponds have lower albedo than ice or snow.
E. S.
22 August 2008 at 10:00 AM
It is clear that the NSIDC graph is correct, and that the 2007 UIUC maps are not precise enough to be used for quantitative analysis.
Comment by Steven Goddard — 21 August 2008 @ 20:17
So pixel-counting seems quite valid to me, and appears to demonstrate that older UIUC images are simply not accurate.
Since these images are widely linked, shouldn’t they do something about it before more unsuspecting pixel-counters are lured to their death?
Comment by dipole
I find that the UIUC maps seem to compare very well with the high resolution images obtained with the AMSR-E imager, see below for a comparison on 8/11/07:
http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsredata/asi_daygrid_swath/l1a/n6250/2007/aug/asi-n6250-20070811-v5_nic.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/deetest/deetmp.7104.png
The NSIDC image looks rather similar too to be honest when one considers its lower resolution (for day earlier):
http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/images/20070810_e
22 August 2008 at 10:16 AM
The Arctic sea ice is a key indicator of climate sensitivity. I saw a graph the other day of 1979-2007 satellite data projected onto the IPCC scenarios chart for sea ice loss and its worse than the worse scenario. However is 1979-2007 statistically significant enough to warrant a doubling of climate sensitivity. If it is then has anyone run a CGM of when climate sensitivity was doubled and if so, what were the range of scenarios then plotted agaisnt actual satellite data ?
22 August 2008 at 10:58 AM
Might it be that albedo feedback will now play a lesser role in AGW destruction of the summer artic ice cap? Blogging as a passive, uneducated observer, it seems to me that wind and wave generation are playing an increasingly important role in the destruction of the summer ice cap. Ozone loss has increased the speed of artic winds and AGW has moved the summer storm track poleward; therefore it could be that increased wind speeds and duration will allow the destruction of the ice cap through wave-driven mixing of surface waters and increased importation on warmer Pacific and Atlantic waters into the Artic Ocean after sun-driven melting has come to a stop. Perhaps the summer melt season is being prolonged by these other than albedo feedback global changes. Perhaps a whole new crop of experts needs to be recruited; that is scientists and engineers who predict wave height and power based on wind speed and duration and fetch.
22 August 2008 at 11:09 AM
Re #5. There is a reply from UIUC/CT on Anthony Watts site concerning claims of inconsistency between their images and other published data comparing 2007 and 2008 Arctic ice.
They do indeed confirm their image sequence is generated consistently and suggest that comparisons based on pixel-counting are invalid because of mapping distortion.
I did try to incorporate mapping distortion into my own pixel-counting adventure but was still unable to reconcile the figures. Evidently I was either using the wrong projection, or perhaps made some other error.
22 August 2008 at 11:49 AM
Francois Marchand. was it cloudy?
Great report by Cecilia and company. Goddard is a trend setter for his colleagues, they will
use first impression “common sense” one dimensional reasoning to proclaim an “ice recovery”.
While the real argument is why it melted just as much or more than last year with the temperature record cooler?
22 August 2008 at 12:06 PM
Remember that Maslowski’s 2013 prediction puts polar bears, walrus, narwhales, and ring seals at risk in the very near future. (see for example http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080818/116103830.html & http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/multiple-polar-bears-discovered-swimming/story.aspx?guid=%7B9D938E1B-7204-4D4E-8ACF-9EC53B685635%7D&dist=hppr.
Remember that navy is rather careful. A navy captain that runs his ship aground is likely to lose his command. I expect that Maslowski is also careful.
Besides, I got the same result using another approach.
Further more, lack of sea ice puts open water on all sides of Greenland. That means any summer breeze in the Arctic will bring rain to Greenland. And, rain melts ice. That is a subtext that no careful navy man would say these days.
22 August 2008 at 12:22 PM
dipole Says: 22 August 2008 at 11:09 AM
> Re #5. There is a reply from UIUC/CT on Anthony Watts site …
Would you mind providing a quote/cite/link?
“There’s a pony there somewhere” just isn’t sufficient motivation to go look.
22 August 2008 at 2:16 PM
NSIDC has worked with Mr. Goddard to get to the bottom of the issue with the UIUC and NSIDC images and as has been mentioned in the comments above, he has posted a correction. I thank Mr. Goddard for his cooperation in this matter.
Regarding sea ice area, as Eric Swanson (#4) responded already, yes area estimates can have potentially large biases because of surface melt. This tends to make the area calculations too low. It still can give reasonable results for comparisons between years, though some of the difference between years can be changes in melt instead of changes in real area. Extent is more stable and consistent because, while the sensor may underestimate the specific concentration, it does a good job capture the threshold between ice and water (using a 15% concentration for the threshold).
Another issue with area for long-term tracking is that you can’t estimate the area within the pole-hole around the North Pole. This is a problem because different sensors, with different sized pole-holes exist between 1979-1987 and 1987-present. So you can’t do a 1979-present trend with area (this cropped up in some blogs earlier, saying 1980 area was the same as this year, but neglecting the fact that the pole hole was larger in 1980). For extent, we can safely assume that the pole-hole is filled with at least 15% ice. This is a very safe assumption. Or it least it has been - it may not be for much longer, though I think we’re pretty safe now for this year.
Walt Meier
Research Scientist
National Snow and Ice Data Center
22 August 2008 at 2:23 PM
Here’s the opening of William Chapman’s post on wattsupwiththat dated 22/08
William Chapman (07:27:26) :
Hi Folks,
There is no difference between the data or the way the 2008 and 2007 images were produced in the comparison images on the Cryosphere Today. The apparent differences Mr. Goddard observed between the NSIDC values and those produced comparing images from the CT are almost entirely due to the mistake of using pixel counting to compute area on severely distorted satellite projections………….
22 August 2008 at 4:07 PM
I’d be interested in knowing some details on how the Cryosphere Today images are created. I found it quite easy to discover on the NSIDC site to understand where the data came from and how it was processed, but I wasn’t able to do that from the UIUC site. Could well be I just overlooked it or that it’s described elsewhere. Does anyone know?
22 August 2008 at 4:10 PM
Plea to the Contributors — you’ve locked the prior thread with the last 2 posts being vehement affirmations of the now-discredited pixel-counting method. Could you all at least place a pointer there at the end to this continuation?
Else — as I notice happens quite often — the last few postings in the closed thread leave a quite wrong impression.
For the lazy or naive or new reader coming along later, who might not find all the scattered bits, it’d be a kindness not to leave that misapprehension easy to fall into.
22 August 2008 at 4:37 PM
It looks to me that the Northwest Passage will open in a week
The I look at
Daily Updated AMSR-E Sea Ice Maps
http://www.iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/amsre.html
It look to me that also Northeast Passage will open
Yesterday and day before was line of open water all the way
22 August 2008 at 5:13 PM
The losses have failed to slow down in the last few days, but the current ice extent is still well above 2007. Closer to 2005 than 2007. The slow down could start any time. The regrow is due in a month. So it aint over until the fat lady sings!
22 August 2008 at 6:16 PM
I think I have figured out what is going on with the UIUC images. I am pretty sure that the archived images are actually showing the extent of ice at 50% cover or more; and that more recent images are showing the extent of ice at 30% cover or more.
To check this, I have taken NSIDC satellite data, and made my own images. I have projected them on the globe using a viewpoint above the pole which has a tangent to the surface at about latitude 27. This gives a very close match for the land masses in the UIUC images. I can overlay bit maps and get quite close agreement.
I can then compare the area weighted sum of NSIDC satellite data (f13 channel, ~25km grid) with an area weighted pixel count of UIUC images; also with the reported data at JAXA.
For 12-Aug-2007
36683 pixels of ice on the UIUC image
4469014 sq km projected area
4201452 sq km at 50% or more, by simple count of NASA data
5057390 sq km at 30% or more, by simple count of NASA data
5679174 sq km at 15% or more, by simple count of NASA data
5421094 sq km at 15% or more, reported by JAXA
Some small differences are to be expected from processing differences; but basically the UIUC projected area lines up well with the extent of 50% ice, and JAXA lines up with the extent of 15% ice as reported.
For 11-Aug-2007
47822 pixels of ice on the UIUC image
5882718 sq km projected area
4612971 sq km at 50% or more, by simple count of NASA data
5783576 sq km at 30% or more, by simple count of NASA data
6462289 sq km at 15% or more, by simple count of NASA data
6291563 sq km at 15% or more, reported by JAXA
This time the UIUC projected area lines up well with the extent of 30% ice, and JAXA still lines up with the extent of 15% ice.
Furthermore, I have projected the NASA data onto bitmaps, projected to align with UIUC images, and I get close agreement with the images using 50% for 2007 and 30% for 2008.
I’m going to stick my neck out and predict that the UIUC archived images are actually showing the extent of ice at 50% or more, and that the recent UIUC images are showing the extent of ice at 30% or more.
22 August 2008 at 6:36 PM
Re: 16
About Northwest passage: Polarstern is now crossing it. Meteorological reports: http://www.awi.de/en/infrastructure/ships/polarstern/current_meteorological_data/
Position: http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shipposition.phtml?call=dblk and http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/Polarstern_visual.png
Ice report (2008/08/22, 21:00UTC): 44092 :
4 — Close pack ice 6/8 to
22 August 2008 at 6:36 PM
Oops. In my previous comment, the second set of figures should be labelled 11-Aug-2008.
Here are the sources of data I used.
UIUC images are obtained from UIUC Compare daily sea ice, gives a side by side of any two days.
Extent of 15% cover sea ice is reported at IARC-JAXA
Satellite data in near real time for recent dates, available from DMSP SSM/I Daily Polar Gridded Sea Ice Concentrations, data from NASA and made available through NSIDC.
Older (and better reviewed) satellite data from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I Passive Microwave Data, data from NASA and made available through NSIDC.
22 August 2008 at 7:13 PM
#16 NW Passage:
Called first here last year (#77 and #89) for 10 August, although NSIDC subsequently put the historic event at 11 August 2007. Looks like the McClure Strait route will open 2-3 weeks later this year.
22 August 2008 at 9:04 PM
Re: #12
I can understand how sea ice area can be biased because of melt ponds, however this should only be an issue in July and August for the most part. By the time of the September minimun, my understanding is that the melt ponds would be frozen, and most likely snow covered.
Likewise in the fall, the sea ice extent can be biased by wind conditions that can force the compaction of the ice or vice versa loosen the ice over a wider area, making year to year conditions more biased to weather conditions.
I would think that sea ice area would be a better predictor of ice conditions, when it comes to determining the true sea ice conditions at the time of the sea ice minimun.
22 August 2008 at 11:44 PM
# Hank Roberts Says:
22 August 2008 at 12:22 PM
“Would you mind providing a quote/cite/link?”
Sorry about the delay in replying. The thread in question is this one, which I see is also the subject of a couple of other recent posts here:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/arctic-ice-extent-discrepancy-nsidc-versus-cryosphere-today/
But looks like discussion is not dead yet.
23 August 2008 at 1:50 AM
Just read Jim Hansens’s report from a recent trip to Germany and a meeting with the German Minister of the environment Sigmar Gabriel. Jim Hansen has an excellent way of condensing information and presenting it in a very digestible form. His emphasis or rather crusade is to leave as much as possible of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground and fast track alternative energy sources..he touts a new revolutionary 4th generation IFR or Integral fast breeder reactors which eliminate almost all the negative aspects of current reactors..ie 99% of the fuel rods are utilised..the remaining 1% can be easily stored on-site and can not any more be used for weapons grade material. It does not need water cooling and is much more earthquake resistant than any other station..and here’s the knockout….we have enough existing fuel rods even spent fuel rods to power these stations for a few centuries!!.
World’s energy problem..sorted!!!
In Jims article there is also a fantasic counter to the contrarian angle that the world is now actually cooling and an ice age is imminent.
What he also says is that even if we stop coal use tomorrow and only use oils and gas until they dry up that will still irreversably melt the remaining ice with the resultant consequnces we all all aware of. Here’s the link for that report..GREAT READING!!…http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080804_TripReport.pdf
I have also come across a website which daily maps the ice melt in the arctic and antarctic..very interesting indeed!! Here’s the link… www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_nic.png
23 August 2008 at 3:22 AM
Been reading about Greenland’d Ilulissat glacier and it it now travelling at over 2metres/hour- much much fater than at any time in the past; this glacier also has significant numbers of moulins futher up onto the landmass so the melt water lubrication of the bedrock is significant. Those glaciers with fewer moulins tend to move slower than the ones with more melt water pond and moulins. The IPCC predictions of sea level rise only took into account the forcasted rise in greenland temps and thus the consequent increase of the ice melt but not the amount of water vanishing into these huge holes in the pack ice. When this is factored in the rate of glacial ice becomming floating ice will definately and significantly narrow the time frame for serious sea level rise mitigation action on a global scale.
23 August 2008 at 4:27 AM
Fret not too much about the small stuff. Over-analysing this year’s ice extent is like looking at ‘weather’. We need to look at the longer trends to pick out the ‘climate’ of the artic ice.
We have watched the multi-year ice practically vanish over the last 12 monts, and as others have said, the ice that remains will be like fluff in front of the weather this coming winter.
If I was a polar bear I would be renting a place on solid ground sometime soon, and plotting the annual ice area running averages on the wall.
23 August 2008 at 7:27 AM
#22 LG Norton,
I was already aware of the issue Walt Meier has stated. However as I’ve already said before I still think Extent runs the risk of overlooking increasing areas of less than 100% concentration, due to thinner ice. AFAIK there will still be melt ponds around the time of the minima. But whatever method one chooses when using imperfect data one has to compromise.
For my own purposes and considerations I continue to use Area with “advice” from NSIDC’s extent, AMSRE/Terra/Aqua and all the other information available. But it’s crucial that anyone talking about this understands the indices and associated caveats.
PS useful page at Hamburg University supplementing their ARCUS outlook: http://www.ifm.uni-hamburg.de/~wwwrs/seaice/amsr-e.html
23 August 2008 at 9:45 AM
So the same people who think that photographing weather stations gives better information than measuring temperature also seem to think that counting pixels on a map projection “proves” that graphs generated from the underlying data are wrong?
Cryosphere Today should switch to a mercator projection. Voila! More ice in the north than ever before! Just count those pixels!
23 August 2008 at 11:55 AM
Dipole, sorry, same problem. You link to the thread.
At the top of the thread it says “see correction below - Anthony”
Search “correction” and you find —- no pony. I’m sure there’s one there somewhere. Where, exactly?
Did wossname publish a correction in the Guardian? Anyone have a direct link to that and a quote?
23 August 2008 at 12:16 PM
29, Nigel,, it is good to micro-analyze, otherwise someone will count pixels (mixing water mixed with ice) as to make a picture mean something other than what happened. Its good to see how innocent and fragile contrarian theories are. They get blown away by the smallest wind.
#28 Lets see now, people taking pictures of weather stations? Fascinating! How they do figure out temperature from taking a picture of a silly weather station? Geography lesson. Longitude shrinks as one approaches the pole, so area is smaller where the ice is.
23 August 2008 at 12:44 PM
Hank Roberts:
Right at the bottom of Mr. Watts’ post is this added correction (however be aware that Bill Chapman has asserted the UIUC maps are correct, according to his post there, and Mr. Chapman claims that Mr. Goddard’s projection is incorrect):
NOTE OF CORRECTION FROM STEVEN GODDARD:
The senior editor at the Register has added a footnote to the article with
excerpts from Dr. Meier’s letter, and a short explanation of why my analysis
was incorrect.
To expound further - after a lot of examination of UIUC maps, I discovered
that while their 2008 maps appear golden, their 2007 maps do not agree well
with either NSIDC maps or NASA satellite imagery. NSIDC does not archive
their maps, but I found one map from August 19, 2007. I overlaid the NSIDC
map on top of the UIUC map from the same date. As you can see below, the
NSIDC ice map (white) shows considerably greater extent than the UIUC maps
(colors.) The UIUC ice sits back much further from the Canadian coast than
does the NSIDC ice. The land lines up perfectly between the maps, so it
appears possible that the UIUC ice is mapped using a different projection
than their land projection.
Click for larger image
Because the 2007 UIUC maps show less area, the increase in 2008 appears
greater. This is the crux of the problem. I am convinced that the NSIDC
data is correct and that my analysis is flawed. The technique is
theoretically correct, but the output is never better than the raw data.
Prior to writing the article, I had done quite a bit of comparison of UIUC
vs. NSIDC vs. NASA for this year. The hole in my methodology was not
performing the same analysis for last year. (The fact that NSIDC doesn’t
archive their maps of course contributed to the difficulty of that
exercise.)
My apologies to Dr. Meiers and Dr. Serreze, and NSIDC. Their analysis,
graphs and conclusions were all absolutely correct. Arctic ice is indeed
melting nearly as fast as last year, and this is indeed troubling.
- Steven Goddard
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/arctic-ice-extent-discrepancy-nsidc-versus-cryosphere-today/
23 August 2008 at 1:15 PM
Uh, it’s the UIUC that makes the projection - that’s how you take the spherical earth and smooch it down to a flat piece of paper or digital image for viewing on a computer screen.
Is it really hard to understand that the map can be correct but trying to analyze the underlying data from the pixels, rather than directly from the data, is … ill-advised?
Is it really hard to understood that the maps aren’t generated without the notion in mind that someone will try to invert it to retrieve the original data, because no one sensible will do that?
Is it really hard to understand that counting pixels on a projection, without taking the distortion inherent in any map projection into account, after it’s been JPEG’s once, etc etc … and then taking that so-called “analysis” and shouting to the world “the NSIDC graph generated from REAL DATA is wrong!” is just … STUPID?
captcha is “Sherman found”, odd, because in my case it’s “Sherman lost” (having moved recently from my old house on Sherman street!)
23 August 2008 at 1:21 PM
An computer-generated image, where you don’t know just how it’s been processed, is “raw data”?
Goddard ought to just give up on trying to justify his pixel-counting analysis. Even Watts admits that the original image that Goddard worked from had been JPEG’d once before ending up on the website in PNG format. Even if it hadn’t, what guarantee would one have that it hadn’t been (if it were me, I’d just put it up in JPEG in the first place, just to make the silliness even more apparent)?
A map projection is not raw data, regardless of postprocessing, and when you don’t know that postprocessing doesn’t include lossy compression …
Geez.
23 August 2008 at 1:27 PM
I just thought someone should point out that ice area looks like it might be bottoming out: it was 3.653 million km2 on 19th Aug and now (23rd Aug) it is 3.669. Note that it bottomed out at this point last year as well. If the 3.635 of 2 days ago were to be the lowest of the season, then this would be 24% more than the 2.92 a year ago. Even if it drops to 3.50, this is still 20% more.
In this light, Goddard may have been onto something after all (somewhat fortuitously I admit) and statements like the following I noted above may turn out to have been somewhat premature.
“We have watched the multi-year ice practically vanish over the last 12 monts, and as others have said, the ice that remains will be like fluff in front of the weather this coming winter.”
23 August 2008 at 2:16 PM
Walt, Great to see you in here!
I apologize for missing out on this continued thread for so long. And please pardon my ignorance of the discussion thus far. I see a lot about pixel counting and what not.
If I may summarize my own perspective, naive though it may be. We’re losing the sea ice. Volume is on a decreasing trend and existing forcing levels combined with the ups and downs of natural variability are playing a role.
The media of course continues to cherry pick data out of context due to their own lack of understanding the context.
Generally speaking, we are talking about loss of the ice and in my mind that should be getting us to think about other things like the degree of positive feedback that will cause as more and more dark water is exposed during Arctic summer.
And what is that going to do the the circulation patterns?
These are the questions that I would love to talk about.
How much will global warming accelerate, especially when you consider that the Schwabe cycle is going to be getting back in gear soon and at the same time as more dark water is exposed?
Again, my apologies for not keeping up on the thread and jumping in late. Honestly, I did not realize there was such a debate in the thread till the continued page popped up
23 August 2008 at 2:50 PM
RE # 34
Chris, you said;
[Even if it drops to 3.50, this is still 20% more.]
I am not hair-splitting when I say the 2008 ice extent began melting from an area of 13.8 MM sqkm versus 13.2 MM sqkm in 2007. If 2008 melt stops at 3.5 versus 2.92 last year, total melt in 2008 would be about 10.3 MM sqkm compared to 10.28 MM sqkm last year. About the same, would you not agree?
Lots of heat released and lots of fresh water entering the Arctic ocean.
John McCormick
23 August 2008 at 2:51 PM
Re: #22, LG Norton
You make good points. Yes, melt pond and surface melting effects occur primarily during mid-June through mid-to-late August. By September, even though there may be melt occurring at the edge, much of the surface of the pack ice has begun to refreeze..
And extent can be affected by winds. Winds played a role in the late dip in 2005 (making the extent minimum among the latest on record) and in last year’s record. But generally the impact of this isn’t terribly large.
There are also other factors that affect area more than extent, namely atmospheric emission, changes in other surface properties beyond melt (e.g., ice thickness, snow cover, frost flowers, etc.). All these lead to false variability in the area estimates.
In reality, both area and extent can yield insight into the ice conditions (using both area and extent can give a sense of the compactness of the ice, at least outside of the peak melt period) and both generally give consistent information in terms of trends, variability.
However, NSIDC feels that using both area and extent can lead to confusion in the public and that extent is a more stable, more consistent parameter to measure.
John Reisman (#35) - hi John! - makes some good points. Despite the confusion and some skeptical viewpoints, the reality is that Arctic sea ice is decreasing, the volume as importantly as the extent/area, and there will be some substantial impacts of this fundamental change in the character of the Arctic.
For any that might not be aware, there’s discussion on the ice thickness/volume, along with extent/area on our NASA-funded sea ice analysis web site:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Look for our next update in the next couple of days.
Walt Meier
NSIDC
23 August 2008 at 3:00 PM
Not really. Remember, his claim was that this map, using pixel counting to compute ice extent, proves the NSIDC graphs of ice extent to be wrong …
Extent. Not Area.
23 August 2008 at 3:02 PM
The last poster mentioned positive feedback from water exposed during the Arctic summer. I don’t want to diminish from the possible effects of this over a period of years. However, I would like to add a perspective that some may not have considered re: this past year. If you compare Arctic ice area http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg with Antarctic area http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg over the past year, you will see that the Arctic anomaly has averaged ~ -1 million km2 while the Antarctic anomaly has averaged ~ +1 million km2, and the values for the midsummer months have been close to those averages.
I’m aware that the positive anomaly in the Antarctic may just have been a blip. However, the interesting point to note here is that the ice boundary in (SH) midsummer in the Antarctic is at a significantly lower (i.e. further from the pole) latitude than the ice boundary in (NH) midsummer in the Arctic (there’s a whole continent before you get to the sea ice!) Thus, the cooling albedo effect in Antarctica per km2 of extra ice at the margin is likely to have been greater than the warming effect in the Arctic per km2 of extra open water, and so for the past year at least, the net global positive feedback from ice albedo changes looks to have been (surprisingly) minimal.
23 August 2008 at 3:04 PM
Addressing the pixel-counting issue:
A proper description of it is, as someone above named it, “ill-advised”. However, if the projection isn’t too distorting, it is a relatively easy back-of-the-envelope calculation that provides a decent rough estimate. If it’s an equal-area projection, then it will actually give the correct value. NSIDC’s standard sea ice products are not equal-area, but the polar stereographic grid used is true at 70 N. Thus, with summer sea ice historically having its ice edge near 70 N, such a pixel-counting method can work reasonably well. In fact, I and others, in collaboration with the NSF-funded Science Education Resource Center, helped develop an educational module to work with our data, using the approximate pixel-counting method.
One key thing about the exercise is that it uses the actual data and is a count of the data pixels, not pixels in an image, which has less chance of further distortions that can occur in producing an image. The problem with the UIUC images is that the projection is more distorted, as well as other issues with the images, that Mr. Goddard and others have discussed in previous posts.
Walt
23 August 2008 at 4:07 PM
Re #36 John
There are lots of statistics that can be presented here, including the one I cited re: absolute minimums 2007 vs 2008, and the one you cited re: absolute melts.
Ultimately it depends on your viewpoint. I would say that the key issue this year has been what happens in the summer melt season, so I would assign less importance to the brief extra ice that was around on the fringes of the Arctic circle (not in the Arctic Ocean, note) at the end of winter, thus enabling your 10.3MM to match the figure of 2007. Rather I would look at what has happened since the beginning of May, when the melt season gets going in the Arctic itself.
What you will see is that the anomaly never diverged very far from -1MM in May, June and July. It’s only in August that it took a sharp tumble (caused incidentally by persistent anomalously warm southerly winds over the Siberian seas) that has now bottomed out (n.b. the wind pattern has finally changed in the last few days)
So the average anomaly has not been nearly as low as it was last year, it’s just that the ice area was briefly very high at the end of winter, and has been briefly very low in the last couple of weeks. I therefore disagree with your characterisation of the situation as “Lots of heat released and lots of fresh water entering the Arctic ocean.” My characterisation would be something along the lines of “consistently significantly greater ice area and extent throughout the main melt season, albeit with the gap narrowing briefly towards the end”. Also if area is indeed bottoming out now and does not dip below 3.5MM, then I could perhaps add the statistic of >20% more multiyear ice, since presumably any first-year ice from last winter that survives this season becomes multiyear?
#38 Fair point - when I said “onto something”, I simply meant that he may have been onto something with his theme that “Arctic Ice refuses to melt as ordered”. Certainly looks like he was dead wrong in what he said about the NSIDC data,
23 August 2008 at 4:27 PM
Walt:
“NSIDC’s standard sea ice products are not equal-area, but the polar stereographic grid used is true at 70 N.”
vs
“Thus, with summer sea ice historically having its ice edge near 70 N”
Must necessarily mean that the products are not equal area.
Rather like saying “the sinusoid is evenly positive and negative around the zero mark, so when we take from 0 to 0.1 it’s pretty accurate to go for that”.
Now that may mean that the overall effect isn’t a lot different, but your statement didn’t say that.
Cheers.
23 August 2008 at 4:29 PM
I would say that as far as albedo changes are concerned,the difference between 1 year ice and multi year ice is negligible. It’s all white.
What does matter is how easy it will be to change the ice cover next time.
23 August 2008 at 4:41 PM
Lawrence Coleman,
Is the report of Hansen’s trip available on line?
[Response: At his website - gavin]
23 August 2008 at 5:11 PM
Enough of Goddard…… He apologized, there is hope after all! There are other ways to see what happens to the ice aside from counting pixels. One must be aware of all 5 major league ice physical vectors to observe (as often as possible) before jumping to any pixel conclusion, namely: ocean current, tides (gravity), momentum, winds, pressure, all to be watched continuously and then there is temperatures for a melt, sea (from multiple layers) and air unfortunately 2 meter height may not be enough, ice temperature, also clouds are important, radiation input, and I am missing a few. Let it be a warning for those who try to outsmart great work such as
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/report_july.php
and others, but NSIDC 15% extent minima is confusing, and I think 50% or more would be better for the lay. Even studying conservative CT 2008 daily ice map is comparable to 2007. In looks now,
Now that Goddard apologized, the big question remains, since the surface temperature record
shows a cooling compared to last year, why did the ice melt just as much and a litte more (till september 20)? Something somehow must give, Even the winds and clouds were unfavorable…
Then why , anybody has a clue? I already suggested that the weighted temperature of the atmosphere was just as warm as 2007. I am all ears for other ideas.
23 August 2008 at 5:38 PM
In case it wasn’t clear, when I called it “ill-advised” I was speaking specifically of doing it to the images published on a website.
Hacking on the data pixels themselves is another thing altogether, and makes a lot of sense.
23 August 2008 at 5:40 PM
I just took a look at Goddards article “Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/15/goddard_arctic_ice_mystery/
There are more than a few contextual problems with the perspective representation. I’m glad Walt and Steven were able to get the truth illustrated though.
The real problem in my view is context though. We are in the low end of the Schwabe cycle, so some solar energy .3 W/m2 is removed until the cycle swings back up. That along with things to complex for me to imagine in natural variability are at work in the short term. Context is critical when explaining anything related to the climate and pieces of data.
Other things I noticed include: First “some scientists” are not all scientists regarding the ice free north pole comment. I actually did not here any scientists predict that the polar ice cap would “disappear this summer”.
When he talks about the NSIDC graph, first he states it is “an alarming graph”. Really, it’s just a graph and alarming is an insightful claim that conveniently sets him up for his coup de gras statement, i.e. that the”ice has grown in nearly every direction since last summer”. That is true, but that means nothing to the overarching trend. i.e. no relevant context.
Unfortunately this is cherry picking the data. By taking a single day v. another single day, or even a year and trying to say it proves something is certainly improper when the true contextual relevance depends on the long term trends within the scope natural variability on the new path that we have set our atmosphere on.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/07/global-trends-and-enso/#comment-91593
Arguing about the details has some constructive purpose certainly, so that we may all understand this better, but it seems to me that the main problem with the article was not merely cherry picking out of context, but it’s tone out of context with the bigger picture.
23 August 2008 at 5:46 PM
Having now read Hansen’s account of his trip, I urge others to do so, but his attitude to “4th generation” nuclear power is not as unequivocal as Lawrence Coleman suggests. He’s recounting his own reading of a book by Tom Blees; and he’s very interested but not wholly convinced. Myself, I’m sceptical - Blees does not appear to be technically qualified, there’s always some new form of nuclear reactor just round the corner that’s going to solve all the problems of waste, proliferation, etc., and none of these “4th generation” plants yet exist or, so far as I can make out, are even planned.
23 August 2008 at 5:47 PM
BTW, I was obliged to remove most of my #46 to get it past the ludicrously over-sensitive spamometer - e.g. the title of Blees’ book. Hansen gives it, and parts are available online if you google Blees’ name and the title.
[Response: The book is “Prescription for the planet” (website) (PS. a hyphen will work to defeat the filter - sorry for the inconvenience). - gavin]
23 August 2008 at 7:02 PM
Wayne - “…why did the ice melt just as much and a little more…”
As I have been informed, the 2007 melt was caused by warm ocean currents and this year warm winds seem to be the cause for the recent drop.
But more importantly, why is everyone so focused on this years ice extent being a little greater than last year’s? These things fluctuate from year to year, but the long term trend is the important indicator. Since ‘79 the trend is down with occasional outlier extents. The last two years haven’t changed that. If anything the trend is accentuated.
23 August 2008 at 10:43 PM
Partially curiousity, since last year’s record (and this year’s near-record) were unexpected. I mean, if you’re talking to the genuinely curious who accept science.
On the denialist side, there’s an obvious interest in saying “2007 was meaningless, because 2008 was less bad!” (ignoring statistical analysis of long-term trends), and associated bullshit.
After last year’s press on the issue, obviously one expects press interest this year.
23 August 2008 at 11:48 PM
#48 Nick Gotts,
I was struck by Hansen’s inclusion of Blees’s account of the Clinton decision to deep six the 4th Gen program 14 years ago. I’ve noted that any mention of nuclear causes almost everyone who thinks there is a need for urgency in addressing climate change to “go nuclear”. It’s like reading “the climate is always changing and Gore is fat” posts, or discussing biofuels with the only heir of an Iowa farmer. Makes me wonder who has a financial stake in specific alternative energy sectors. The reaction is positively carboniferous.
More, it makes me wonder why alarm is nearly always expressed about 2nd Gen plants and fuel cycles, and doesn’t ever seem to deal with how 4th Gen addresses their concern. Partially I think it’s because “no nukes” has been mother’s milk to “the movement”, particularly in its American realization. Nuclear = bad is settled policy.
Yes it’s wise to evaluate unproven claims skeptically, but, as Hansen points out, there don’t seem to be any deal breakers, and much potential.
24 August 2008 at 12:05 AM
# 50 weather tis better and # 51 dhogaza,
Besides the desire to have a new “We’re No 1” foam hand to beat others over the head with, I’ve been keenly interested at the amount of recovery the annual system would make. I’ve concerns about a rapid acceleration in the rate of albedo loss.
24 August 2008 at 1:20 AM
Stuart Jensen..Ok. I might have rather flipantly said “worlds energy problems sorted” in actuality as Hansen mentioned a raft of approaches is needed, with ‘nuclear’ being an important factor. Case in point..how may solar cells, wind turbines, hydro power stations, hot rock plants are needed to replace fossil fuels, not just repace them but to to meet the growing energy needs of the world in say 50 years time..to me..it clearly says nuclear must be a front runner in the fossil fuel replacement process..basic common sense! 2nd gen plants still need copious supplies of reliable water to cool the rods and their efficiency is still pitiful and the waste products will still be white hot radiaoactively in many hundreds of years time. They take a long time to plan ie feasibilty sudies, environmental impact studies, geo tech studies..etc..etc; and then to eventually build them. I’m sure if leading universities were given sufficient funds to nut out all the cobwebs in 4th gen nuclear technology we would get one off the ground within 5-7 years. I’ve noticed there are hundreds of respondants who say how things cannot be done but only a handful who actually innovate and find and develop ways so that what was a ‘ludocrous’ idea is finally accepted as revolutionary and a stroke of genious by the prev.scorned inventer.
24 August 2008 at 3:22 AM
About nukes.
Sodium spontaneously combusts in air. IFB reactors full of sodium and plutonium make a highly effective dirty bomb. A 911 or even a fire. Even generally competent operators screw up. Heard of the Windscale fire? Plus as it is sealed unit, you can not see what is inside. Unexpected cracks/leaks would be a problem to detect and fix. Any government could easily say its weapons grade material it was in the box, but really it had been transfered to other uses or partners. There are more examples of material diverted by governments than straight stolen.
But governments would not lie about nuclear stuff - would they?
There are reasons this stuff was cancelled in the 1990’s. There are no miracle solutions to energy production.
24 August 2008 at 5:12 AM
RE 45 and some others:
I’ve read a lot of discussion about whether sea ice area or extent is more important. Thinking of the qualitative change in arctic sea ice, I think most would agree that the possibility of an ice free arctic (not just north pole) is crucial. How about if the metrics was the ice area north of 80 degrees (or maybe 77)? That would focus the metrics on the crucial area. And, here, I guess, definitely ice area, not extent.
This metric would leave out the more southern areas which always melt anyway almost completely. Concerning the discussion of this year’s total melt area vs. the minimum (compared to 2007), I would say that melting of the excess ice due to a colder winter is not all that important. That especially is the kind of ice that melts anyway and the melting is not in any way affecting the melt in more northern areas. I do acknowledge is slightly greater albedo because of this larger ice area, for some months.
Additionally, thinking of the albedo effect, the time integral of ice area wouldbe quite interesting metric, too - perhaps scaled by sun angle (intensity of sun’s radiation).
24 August 2008 at 6:31 AM
The polar stern has just crossed the Northern Route of the North West Passage in 4 days at an average speed of 9 knots.
Polar stern crosses NW Passage in 4 days
They have not posted a weekly science report of the passage yet, but it will be found here.
Polarstern weekly report location
It should be an interesting read when it comes out.
24 August 2008 at 8:26 AM
“I’m sure if leading universities were given sufficient funds to nut out all the cobwebs in 4th gen nuclear technology we would get one off the ground within 5-7 years.” - Lawrence Coleman
What makes you sure about that? Is Sean Egan right to say “4th generation” IFR nuclear plants are sodium-cooled and difficult to monitor? If not, why not? The nuclear industry and lobby, AFAIK, are not united behind these plants - why not, if they’re so full of promise? What would prevent a government diverting material from such plants to military use?
Stuart Jensen, I’m not “going nuclear”, I’m asking questions. As I’ve said on this site several times, I don’t favour nuclear power, primarily because of its close connection with nuclear weapons, but I am open to persuasion.
24 August 2008 at 1:59 PM
On sea ice melting in the Arctic — assuming that the heat is being provided by somewhat warmer water entering underneath the ice, the people first able to see the results would be the submariners, right? Looking up from below, looking at the shape of the ice?
And perhaps some surface change in elevation, slightly, across large areas, assuming ice is melting off below, the surface should settle down slightly — detectably?
That should be happening long before the ice would start to break up and open water increase, wouldn’t it?
Just curious asking about the pattern of changes expected. Oh, and, would this be expected to vary according to where warmer water is entering the basin?
I don’t recall anyone coming up with a submersible that can drop below the ice, get carried by the current, and change its density if it gets hung up in the ice to drop down below the obstacle. Ought to be doable, I’d think. It’d have to hunt for thin ice or openings to rise up and send data, or else be able to drop down (or lower a speaker down) to the “deep ocean sound channel” level at which sound in some frequency ranges propagates over great distances and use acoustic signals.
_____________
Hertz, among
24 August 2008 at 3:32 PM
Hat tip to William Connolley (”Stoat”), a different and in some ways better Arctic sea ice chart (with link to download the sea ice data):
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
24 August 2008 at 3:34 PM
Existing types are full of actuality. I can’t speak for the industry but if I were it, I would be afraid oil-and-gas-taxing governments wanted to delay my expansion by making it contingent on the completion of very slow research by said governments.
It should excite suspicion that questions of the kind this research is putatively meant to answer — how can nuclear power plants, and their waste, be entirely harmless to neighbours and entirely unhelpful to nuclear weapon seekers — are all lies by insinuation.
The false insinuation is that the appearance of innocence on all three counts that has been shared, throughout all time to date, by PWRs, BWRs, Magnox, AGR, CANDU reactors, a small handful of prototype helium-and-carbon reactors, and another small handful of prototype sodium-cooled fast reactors is, somehow, just an appearance.
But if you understand the conflict between governments’ fossil fuel interest and their duty to regulate nuclear power, you know that it can’t be just an appearance. If the civilian nuclear industry had anything to hide, no government would be slow in dragging it into the light. Quite the opposite: they routinely keep nuclear plants shut down without giving any adequate reason, e.g., Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. Imported natural gas is expensive, both in lives — as at Skikda, Algeria — and in money, and it looks as if the Japanese government is getting some of the money.
The usual unannounced IAEA inspections, along with the technical advantages of using material from other sources.
24 August 2008 at 5:16 PM
#61 G.R.L. Cowan,
I’m afraid that’s just more of the same nuclear lobby rubbish, and fails to answer any of my questions. The civilian nuclear industry in the UK at least has repeatedly been caught out trying to hide problems - and not by the government. Somehow, IAEA inspections don’t seem to have prevented India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa and North Korea using nuclear power programs as a cover for developing nuclear weapons, and most people are not convinced they will prevent Iran doing the same.
24 August 2008 at 5:33 PM
#56 Lauri,
If albedo alteration is the underlying issue, then it seems to me you’re correct in noting that the timeframe when relatively larger insolation reaches the surface is the period of most concern. I’ve been pondering for several days the plot for 2002 (partial) through the current season of Arctic ice extent from the International Arctic Research Center (IARC-JAXA) at the link Hank Roberts posted in # 60.
From mid April to about a week after the June solstice, the majority of the period of highest insolation, the chart shows the area of ice coverage varying the least between years. Last year’s large excursion from previous seasons was yet to start. Only about the 1st of July and into the period of declining insolation, did 2007 show less ice than any of the most recent years.
For the rest of the 2007 melt season, the reduced albedo camel’s nose stayed under the edge of the retreating ice and delayed refreezing during the building of a strong La Nina.
There were a number of other contributing factors affecting ice reduction last year, and I haven’t seen yet any attempts to produce a synthesis that untangles all of the processes at work.
One thing that seems obvious to me is that the area available for ice to form in the Northern Hemisphere during the cold season is restricted. The land area surrounding the Arctic Ocean and heat carried by the Atlantic Conveyor limit the southern extent of ice. The warm season’s northward progression of temperatures high enough for melting, simply has less ice to affect.
I’d think the implication is that the loss of albedo from an earlier disappearance of seasonal snow cover may be of more immediately significant than similarly timed ice loss, at least until the we observe an earlier start of ice reduction along the continental edges. Then we’re really in for it.
24 August 2008 at 5:37 PM
> If the civilian nuclear industry had anything to hide,
> no government would be slow in dragging it into the light.
Somehow this does not seem like the same world I’ve been reading about. N. Korea? Iran?
It’s the simple existence of large volumes of transuranic elements that’s the issue for the world.
Of course we can imagine uses for them. Unfortunately so can people with shorter time horizons.
24 August 2008 at 5:41 PM
By analogy with Godwin’s Law, I would like to propose Molnar’s Law: All climate-related comment threads eventually contain a discussion of nuclear power. Alas, by Stigler’s Law of Eponymy, I won’t get credit.
24 August 2008 at 6:15 PM
Re #61
It is not the government, greenies, or the nuclear industry that is stopping the expansion of nuclear power generation. It is the people. The man in the street does not want to have the next Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Windscale [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield ] built in his/her neighbourhood.
Nuclear power may be safe, but tell that to the marines
Cheers, Alastair.
24 August 2008 at 8:06 PM
#60:
Does having real money on the outcome affect the quality of data presentation? But it’s a shame that he, like others, doesn’t zero-scale the y-axis.
NWP, MODIS, low-res, Friday - looks open to me…
G.
24 August 2008 at 8:31 PM
Your fear is groundless: what I wrote was my own independent understanding of the matter. You may not wish to share this understanding, but others will.
The analogy between pistons in cylinders and bullets in guns is apt. Well, with a little elaboration. Suppose most of our personal transport were by horse, and horses were heavily taxed, and cars began to, um, proliferate.
Immediately, many persons on public stipends begin to worry that cars are being weaponized: modified to throw projectiles out of their cylinders when a fuel-air mixture is ignited in them, rather than peacefully pushing a captive piston.
Car licensing therefore comes to include a requirement to declare one has no intention of doing such alterations, and submitting the cars to inspections to prove this.
But guns also proliferate; usually in households that are entirely equestrian, but sometimes in households that also have cars. Someone like you therefore remarks that the inspections have not prevented the weaponization of cars.
In Israel’s case, you say it even though no-one in that household has ever acquired a car, and in North Korea’s case, you say it although the householder asserts he has made a car but does not attempt to license it and is never seen driving it.
25 August 2008 at 5:57 AM
G.R.L. Cowan,
You’re right with respect to Israel - apologies. However, your gun/car analogy is utterly absurd: the materials, skills and technologies for nuclear power and nuclear weapons are intimately related. Any state can leave the NPT at 3 months notice, so an excellent strategy for any state wishing to acquire nuclear weapons would be to set up a civil nuclear power programme, accumulate as much of the prerequisites of bombs as possible under that cover, then leave the NPT.
25 August 2008 at 7:42 AM
#68 –That was a truly horrible analogy. If the point you are trying to make is that the proliferation of nuclear (peaceful) is completely different from nuclear (apocalyptic), why muddle it? The problem with your position is not a lack of apt analogies, it is a lack of recognition that the viability of both energy programs and weapons programs depend on mastery of the set of technologies behind refining and enriching uranium.
You’d probably make a more hay if you went the MAD route and argued in favor of total proliferation of all the technologies germane to both kinds of programs.
But ultimately, doesn’t MAD (and every other argument in favor of nuclear proliferation) fail to satisfy the same set of objections?
“the general opinion is that most states are not in a position to safely guard against nuclear use, that (Kenneth Waltz) under-estimates the long-standing antipathy in many regions, and that weak states will be unable to prevent - or will actively provide for - the disastrous possibility of nuclear terrorism.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation
25 August 2008 at 8:35 AM
I notice that James Hansen is now with James Lovelock on nuclear power in his affirmation of 4th generation fast breeder reactors. I no doubt believe though that although they agree on the use of nuclear to replace coal and more besides I doubt that the scale of the problem can be tackled in time. I read somewhere that in order to tackle 1 GB carbon emissions we would have to build 15 nuclear plants per year for 50 years (in order to keep BAU going). Not likely I would suggest.
Even if we have a solution we need to be able to ramp up in ways that we never have before, not even during WW2 perhaps.
25 August 2008 at 9:13 AM
Pete, #71
I guess you’re talking replacing the entire US generating capacity (~1000 GW).
Building power plants is business as usual. They last how long? 30 years? 50 years? 70 years? The entire US generating capacity probably has been completely replaced in the past 50 year, so why would doing that again in the coming 50 years be an effort of WW2 scale?
25 August 2008 at 9:21 AM
So, how’s the Arctic looking these days?
25 August 2008 at 9:30 AM
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/plot.csv
25 August 2008 at 9:39 AM
Alastair McDonald wrote: “It is not the government, greenies, or the nuclear industry that is stopping the expansion of nuclear power generation.”
There has been no expansion of nuclear power in the USA for decades because nuclear power is an economic failure, and investors don’t like to throw money away. Private industry simply won’t touch nuclear power unless the taxpayers underwrite all of the costs and all of the risks — and not only the risks of catastrophic accident, but the risks of economic loss.
That’s why the nuclear industry has been demanding — and in recent years receiving — tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies before they will stick a shovel in the ground to begin building even one new nuclear power plant. (Meanwhile, Congressional allies of the fossil fuel and nuclear industries have been blocking renewal of even the meager investment and production tax credits for wind and solar, in an effort to set back the growth of these industries.)
The fact is that none of the so-called “next generation inherently safe” nuclear reactors touted by the industry even exist. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found serious problems with every proposed design, and has approved none of them for construction.
Fortunately there is no need whatsoever for any expansion of nuclear power. The USA has vast commercially exploitable wind and solar energy resources, that are more than sufficient to provide several times as much electricity as the entire country uses, with today’s technology — enough for all current needs and to electrify our transportation systems as well. Wind, concentrating solar thermal and solar photovoltaic electricity generation can be brought online much faster and at lower cost than nuclear generated electricity, and once the infrastructure for harvesting abundant, limitless, free wind and solar energy has been built, the generation of electricity produces zero GHG emissions, which is not true of the nuclear fuel cycle. And this can be done with none of the toxic pollution and grave dangers of nuclear power.
Nuclear power is a dinosaur industry that should be relegated to the trash heap of technological history along with fossil fuels. Many gigawatts of wind and solar generated electricity will be online in this country before a single new nuclear power plant is built. I would not be surprised if some new nuclear power plants are built — or at least started — because of the industry’s powerful political connections. But every dollar spent on nuclear is a dollar wasted, a dollar that would be far more effectively spent on improving efficiency and deploying clean, renewable energy sources.
[Response: I hate to encourage hugely off-topic discussions, but Amory Lovins’ recent paper on this is pretty illuminating. - gavin]
25 August 2008 at 10:27 AM
G.R.L. Cowan wrote: “If the civilian nuclear industry had anything to hide, no government would be slow in dragging it into the light.”
That assertion is not supported by the track record of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the USA. David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer who worked in the industry for 20 years before joining the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote this past February in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
This situation certainly does not inspire confidence in any notions of a fast-track expansion of the USA’s nuclear power industry from the current 104 reactors to 150 or more, as proposed by at least one prominent politician — let alone the hundreds more that would be required to “replace” all coal-fired power plants.
And again, even with hundreds of billions of dollars in public subsidies and the evisceration of safety regulations and opportunities for public review of new nuclear plant proposals, there is no way that buildup could be accomplished in the time frame needed to address global warming. Efficiency improvements and clean, renewable energy from wind, solar, geothermal and biomass can do the job. Nuclear power cannot do the job, nor is there any need for it.
25 August 2008 at 10:34 AM
Lovins’s paper is quite good. As usual.
25 August 2008 at 11:16 AM
Should we be revising our projections of when the methane hydrates start melting, with this faster scale removal of sea ice cover over the Arctic Ocean ?
25 August 2008 at 11:25 AM
Nature just had an interesting news feature overview of non-carbon electric sources. It includes assessments of each source’s potential contribution to the total mix. It is available w/o subscription:
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080813/full/454816a.html
25 August 2008 at 11:30 AM
Energy programs do not depend on uranium enrichment. Britain’s first foray out of the weapons arena into civilian power didn’t require any isotopic separation at all, and neither does the scheme in the paper I link from my website.
Their relation is analogous to the relation between the materials and skills required to make (gun barrels, bullets, and propellants) and those required to make (engine blocks, pistons, fuel and air feed systems).
That the relationship is fundamental doesn’t allow anyone to pretend that denying a region cars will effectively deny it guns, nor that allowing it cars will help it get guns, nor that its coincidental acquisition of both proves the cars were just a cover. Nor is there any incentive for foolish arguments along those lines.
In the nuclear case, as you know, there is indeed such an incentive. (What is it?)
25 August 2008 at 11:49 AM
#73 Hank,
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
I’m not trying to predict this and I’m most likely wrong, but I would not be completely surprised if we get pretty darn close to last years melt.
It will probably come out above, but I have a funny unscientific feeling about this. Not having good knowledge of the current ocean temps and currents the slope looks like it has some inertia.
Will be interesting to see where it is in 3 weeks.
Captha is being creative: ransom West
25 August 2008 at 11:51 AM
Re #72. No I am talking globally. We emit 8 billion tonnes of carbon per annum and in order to limit and then eradicate it we Prineton University developed a method of splitting this into 8 GB chunks of 1GB each. In order to eliminate 1GB of carbon we would need to erect 15 large nuclear stations per annum for 50 years and we still need to eradicate 7 GB more plus the 50% growth factor by 2030. In addition nucleari is not CO2 free is it!
25 August 2008 at 11:56 AM
Re #74
Hank,
I’ve been watching http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm for some time now. Recently the three day average rate of ice loss fell to 43,000 sq km per day, but now it is back up at around 59,000 sq. km per day. This means that within two days the total extent could be less that the minimum in 2005, making this year’s melt at least the the second greatest. At this rate it will also take 20 days to exceed 2007 record. It just depends whether it keeps melting at that rate.
Cheers, Alastair.
25 August 2008 at 12:26 PM
Global warming IS happening. These scientist need to look right in front of their faces and see that it is real; that it is happening. Stop trying to come up with excuses to make you seem smarter than the other scientists who can actually see whats really happening. And the sad part is; when the ice caps are a few minutes from collapsing and all of us are going to die, they’ll still make up other excuses.
I’m a 13 year old girl. And it’s sad that I can see what is happening but these scientist that are supposedly brillant and can come up with a “logical” reason for the “mysteries” in the world can’t see whats right in front of their faces.
By the time they actually will live up to the fact that they’re wrong and global warming is real, the polar bears, the seals, the penguins, all arctic animals and other animals all over the world, will be either extinct or there will only be a few of them left. Then they’ll leave our world FOREVER. Just because of these stupid scientist and humans who don’t care at all about them because they’re selfish.
Yesterday, when I came on the internet I saw a story on aol. It said that a certain frog’s(i can’t remember the exact type)population was rapidly decreasing because of the warming climate. It said that the warming climate was causing a fungus to grow which was poisionus to the frogs. This really annoyed me because these frogs are suffering because of US! Us as in the human race. And because of us, this frog population will go extinct unless it adapts to the fungus and to the rising temperatures; which will take years that they don’t have.
After reading that article last night, i thought about the previous winter. In Philadelphia, the winter wasn’t really cold at all. There was only about two or three weeks of actually winter. There was no real snow, only flurries which didn’t even stick to the ground. This is a very sad thought to think that my last real snowfall was when I was about my little brother’s age, 8; or maybe even younger. To think that in a few years, everyone might be able to wear shorts in the winter and not be cold at all is a really horrible thought to me. And if that would be normal temperatures in the winter, then could we even survive a summer? Again, we would have to adapt to hotter temperatures; which would take hundreds, maybe even thousands of years that we don’t have. Just think about the human time line, how long it actually took us to evolve to this; from chimpanzees and gorillas to modern homo sapiens like us; it took a long time to become what we are today.
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”
— Rachel Carson
25 August 2008 at 1:00 PM
Re #83
This means that within two days the total extent could be less that the minimum in 2005, making this year’s melt at least the the second greatest. At this rate it will also take 20 days to exceed 2007 record. It just depends whether it keeps melting at that rate.
If we talk about melt rather than the arrangement of the ice this year is already firmly in second place by ~0.5 Mm^2.
25 August 2008 at 1:37 PM
I hope post 84 gets noticed.
Scientist while pointing out AGW, are not shouting and harassing the powers that be enough.
WE need more of you to stand up and be counted loud and clear!
There needs to be more activism in line with that of Hansen. He is the only one that anyone really notices. Stand up and be noticed guys.
This is a catastrophic situation.
25 August 2008 at 1:55 PM
The NSIDC update for today begins:
25 August 2008 at 4:43 PM
#80 [G.R.L. Cowan],
What utter rot you do talk!
From the site of the FAS:
“India’s nuclear weapons program was started at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Trombay. In the mid-1950s India acquired dual-use technologies under the “Atoms for Peace” non-proliferation program, which aimed to encourage the civil use of nuclear technologies in exchange for assurances that they would not be used for military purposes. There was little evidence in the 1950s that India had any interest in a nuclear weapons program, according to Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Under the “Atoms for Peace” program, India acquired a Cirus 40 MWt heavy-water-moderated research reactor from Canada and purchased from the U.S. the heavy water required for its operation. In 1964, India commissioned a reprocessing facility at Trombay, which was used to separate out the plutonium produced by the Cirus research reactor. This plutonium was used in India’s first nuclear test on May 18, 1974, described by the Indian government as a “peaceful nuclear explosion.”"
Incidentally, I went to your website, but can’t find any paper such as you refer to. Maybe the information is buried somewhere in your paper recommending nuclear reactors in large land vehicles (!!!), but a quick scan suggested there’s hardly room to describe a scheme for proliferation-resistant nuclear power generation.
25 August 2008 at 5:22 PM
84, Well said, Amanda Eldridge !
What we are watching is a terrible tragedy. But I don’t think it is fair to put so much blame onto scientists. They are not all bad ! They’re often the first ones to notice the problems and tell the public. Often, the public doesn’t want to hear. IMO, the bad guys are the politicians, and the oil and coal and petrochemical industries, and the people who invest money in those companies. They don’t care about frogs or walruses, only profits.
But everybody who drives in cars and flies in airplanes is making things worse…
You tell ‘em ! It’s your future that’s being robbed.
http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview.html?gclid=CPru6fD_qZUCFSAbEAodOE4Qjw
http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2027
25 August 2008 at 6:17 PM
#45 [Wayne Davidson]
I can’t find anything in the literature, but I have a strong suspicion that ice at 0°C cools air faster than ice at subzero temperatures. At the melt-point it’s primed to absorb a sudden energy hit, using latent heat to become water.
This could explain why the melt goes on, even though the air temperatures seem to be steady or falling. Cause and effect goes the other way - the continuing melt is reducing air temperature. Can anyone tell me when significant areas of ice in the Arctic and Greenland reached melt point? 1998 maybe? If so, this could explain the temperature “plateau” that the denialists get so excited about.
25 August 2008 at 6:21 PM
Amanda, it’s posts like yours that give me hope. Thank you for your comment and please keep pursuing your interests in biology and climate science.
25 August 2008 at 6:38 PM
Re 86 - I did that (spoke up about climate change and hydrology in the Upper Midwest). As a result, my career as a hydrologist with NOAA National Weather Service ended. NWS has downplayed climate change for many years.
25 August 2008 at 6:59 PM
Wow Amanda (#84)! I wish more of my students were as clear in their thinking and as articulate in their expression as you are. Well said!
25 August 2008 at 7:03 PM
> everybody who drives in cars and flies in airplanes
Well, the big immediate difference people can make is:
– insulate their buildings, and
– add a solar hot water booster on the sunny side.
Those are really simple, immediate improvements anyone can do.
25 August 2008 at 8:12 PM
Re 92, Commiserations, pat neuman, I also lost my job for speaking out, but it was the right thing to do. It was very tough, but no regrets. I kept my self-respect. I mean, just look at a few of these links…how can we be allowing this to happen ?
http://www.well.com/user/davidu/extinction.html
25 August 2008 at 8:27 PM
#83 Alastair, You need to study present ice thickness:
http://seaice.bplaced.net/gfs.html
Il looks like 2007 will be beaten, the high melt rates at cool temperatures are due to thin ice.
#84 Amanda, my advice for young people is for them to lead the way, stay in shape, use bicycles for every need of single transport. I sympatize with your generation, but it need not do the same mistakes as the previous ones. There is also a need to go modern, electric in a real way, I suggest a study of what we can do, Look at previous generations great accomplishments, ie one example
the minirail, once dreamed of at an old worlds fair, became a reality at another, then vanished, except for a few places…:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPZHQE14HRs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rd9BE1fHjM
Once upon a time…. There was a city within a city, with no cars…. 2 small little islands with 200,000 people visiting a day.
Hank, and #90, Jack… True physics demands a search for balance, net heat energy accounting is needed. Gistemp Northern Hemisphere running average temperature is similar to the late 90’s, but summer ice coverage is similar to 2007, the warmest year in Northern Hemisphere history. There is no such thing as a graph trend forcing the outcome of ice extent, there is such a thing as a net accounting of a) How much ice volume melted, b) how much Heat is required to melt it and c) where did the heat come from?
25 August 2008 at 9:25 PM
When I go to Cryosphere Today
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
and run the 30 day animation for the N. Hemisphere, I am puzzled by what I see.
The sea ice seems to form in large sheets and dissipate from one day to the next in various parts of the Arctic. One day there appears to be a lot of ice, the next day much less.
Is this actually a reflection of what is happening or some kind of artifact of the imaging?
25 August 2008 at 10:04 PM
I wanted to see the current state of affairs in the north, so I spider-searched through the links. Here’s a good one for anyone interested.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
August 25: “Sea ice extent is declining at a fairly brisk and steady pace. Surface melt has mostly ended, but the decline will continue for two to three more weeks because of melt from the bottom and sides of the ice.”
25 August 2008 at 10:33 PM
Pat Neuman ad CL, I’ve said this before and I say it again: Kudos and we need more people like you in all government agencies and even in the legislative and judicial branches. You did the right thing.
25 August 2008 at 10:48 PM
Dear Amanda,
You are right to be upset. My daughter is also very upset. It is often difficult to know what to do. Keep writing, reading, talk to your friends, remember to not waste resources. There are many of us fighting to try to preserve the planet for your future. The scientists are not to blame — they are trying to discover the truth of the matter, and some are trying to educate the general public. But it is not easy for them because there are many politicians and carbon-based energy companies lined up against the scientists.
25 August 2008 at 11:01 PM
Daryl Jones wrote in 98:
Walt Meier of the NSIDC had informed us that there would be an update in the next couple of days back on the 23rd of August.
He wrote in 37:
It looks like you found it, and it would appear to be something people here might like — going into some depth on the difference between this year and last in terms of surface vs. bottom melt, the downloadable self-updating Google Earth kml animation of sea ice concentration, etc.
*
Captcha fortune cookie:
TRAILS calendar
26 August 2008 at 2:33 AM
Phillipe Chantreau, 99, thank you. Much appreciated !
26 August 2008 at 2:55 AM
Amanda, keep on pushing! The older folks may be in charge for now, but your generation will be suffering the impacts of global warming — and someday will take charge.
The Sacramento Bee had another great article by Tom Knudson this past Sunday, “Sierra climate change puts range’s species on the run.” It looks at evidence that spans nearly a century that shows that many critters have moved up to 2,000 feet (610 meters) upslope in the Sierra Nevada in response to warming temperatures.
http://www.sacbee.com/sierrawarming/story/1181298.html
This may be a subscription site, so if you cannot access it, please respond and I’ll get a copy to you.
{Capcha: “and Pleads!”}
26 August 2008 at 6:44 AM
I’m always at a loss when a young person asks me what to do about the state of things. With your whole life ahead of you on this planet we’ve hurt, you should be telling old folks like me what to do - just as you’re doing, only someday people might listen. Thanks, Amanda.
26 August 2008 at 8:25 AM
Phew! sorry for having stirred up a hornets nest on the nuclear issue, but as Pete Best pointed out Both Jim Hansen and Jim Lovelock are on the same wavelength when it comes to the importance of nuclear in attemping to mitigate CC. It seems to me we have ‘NO’ choice in this matter. Sure we have to build 15 Nuclear power plants for 50 years, but how many coal powered or gas or diesel powered plants will that replace??
No they are not perfect..not by a long shot..no-one is saying they are..but we have to cut CO2 emmissions to close to zero in a hurry..anyone will a better idea please put your hand up. No technology at present can deliver such huge quantities of base load power..nothing can!! Put it this way re: nuclear waste and the possibility of it being used for malicious purposes. Should we do nothing and fart around with adhoc renewables and witness the destruction of planet earth or should we take a chance with nuclear which at least can promise clean energy and a real chance at reducing CO2 to below 350ppm and the sustainability of our earth..I know what my 3y/o son would say!!
26 August 2008 at 9:19 AM
Re #96
Wayne,
that is a very interesting set of maps! Just what I have been wanting to see, especially the wind. I had assumed that the surface water would be either flowing in or out through the Bering Strait, but in fact the wind is blowing away from there in both directions. In general, it seems that at present the Arctic is effectively isolated from both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
Thus, the ice melt seems to be, like other aspects of the weather, rather chaotic. I feel that if one does make what turns out to be an accurate prediction then it is just luck.
I have been following the Japanese http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm graph and downloading the data automatically into a spreadsheet.
Using it, I am generating a running average of the daily melt over five days, and then dividing that into the amount by which today’s ice extent exceeds the historic values. I only show that if it is positive, and it gives me the days until the ice will reach that value.
Currently, on the map dated 25-8-08, there are only 0.05 days! remaining until the ice reaches the 2005 minimum, and 15.5 days until it reaches the 2007 minimum. This is using a daily average melt of 67,000 sq km/day, but yesterday the rate was only 51,000 sq km/day, so you can see that my method is no more accurate than eye-balling ice thickness.
NSIDC says the melt will continue for two or three weeks which brackets my 15.5 days, so I agree that it will be pretty close.
Cheers, Alastair.
26 August 2008 at 9:35 AM
Lawrence Coleman,
You are, as nuclear advocates often do, simply ignoring counter-arguments. Briefly, demand reduction, energy efficiency and renewables can all bring about major reductions in emissions faster than nuclear build. Your use of terms such as “do nothing and fart around” indicates little other than the intellectual bankruptcy of your approach.
26 August 2008 at 9:37 AM
Re #105, just not sure that we can logisically meet such a huge building program and eliminate the other 7 wedges to. Each wedge represents a vast amount of carbon. We achieve another wedge but becomming more efficient on a massive scale and another one by planting nillions of trees and another one by building 2 million 1 MW wind turbines but it all needs doing at the same time.
This is way beyond WW2 effort I would suggest and as it takes 15 years to build a nuclear power station and another age to research 4th generation so that we do not need to dig up anymore Uranium but reprocess what we already have then I am suggesting that Uranium supplies will deplete within 100 years otherwise.
Its all a bit scary.
26 August 2008 at 10:39 AM
Re: 106
They just updated the IIJS graph, and we are now officially below 2005 minimun for sea ice extent.
I am expecting the rate of decline to slow. However if you look at the NSIDC sea ice extent. The rate of decline has kept a pretty constant slope since the third week of June.
I keep expecting the slope to change, however if things keep going the way they have been for another week, then, we will beat the 2007 ice lost in extent.
The Cryosphere Today sea ice area has seem to flat lined, however I suspect the refreezing of melt ponds is offsetting the ice lost, and eventually the sea ice area will make another dip.
It is still to warm for sea ice to form in the arctic (other than sheltered bays with little mixing), and the ice south of 78 North is still melting, so the bias must be due to melt ponds refreezing for the Cryosphere today results.
26 August 2008 at 10:46 AM
#108–
I don’t understand the insistence on building massive wind farms of the scale you suggest….I mean, how many back yards would have to have a 40-foot tower w/turbine in order to supply half the electricity suburban America uses?
Anyway, I hope some day to live in a country where patriotism is expressed by how much electricity one’s flag pole produces….
26 August 2008 at 10:47 AM
“Both Jim Hansen and Jim Lovelock are on the same wavelength when it comes to the importance of nuclear”
So is Iran, Pakistan and a whole lotta goat herders.
Good luck with that.
26 August 2008 at 11:21 AM
Lawrence Coleman wrote: “Both Jim Hansen and Jim Lovelock are on the same wavelength when it comes to the importance of nuclear in attemping to mitigate CC.”
Both of them are brilliant people and genuine visionaries in their fields (climate science and ecology respectively). Neither one of them is particularly knowledgeable about energy issues. Their support for nuclear power is, frankly, based on ignorance.
Lawrence Coleman wrote: “It seems to me we have ‘NO’ choice in this matter.”
That is an assertion that is likewise based on ignorance. There are plenty of other choices. Full implementation of available efficiency technologies could save more electricity than is generated by all the nuclear power plants in the USA. Capturing waste heat from industrial smokestacks and using it to generate electricity could produce more electricity than is generated by all the nuclear power plants in the USA. The USA has abundant wind and solar energy resources that can be harvested using today’s technology to produce several times as much electricity as the entire country uses.
Not only is nuclear power NOT the “only choice”, it isn’t even a very effective choice, and it is the least cost-effective choice, and is a completely unnecessary choice, for elimininating GHG emissions from electricity generation.
26 August 2008 at 11:47 AM
Re #111, hmmmm, Yes but they are not the world greatest energy guzzlers are they like the USA and the EU are and Iran has lots of its own oil and gas reserves and Pakistan has a small economy.
26 August 2008 at 11:50 AM
Re #112, I still doubt that you would tackle a single wedge cost effectively. In fact energy efficiency is a great idea and would work well at first until you realise that a BAU of 2 to 3% per annum would mean that within 15 years all of your efficiency gains would be undone.
Maybe we need to take a look at capatalism itself?
26 August 2008 at 11:53 AM
Thank all of you for agreeing with me. well for the most part.
When I wrote that I did not entirely mean to put all the blame on the scientist, but they need to help find something that we can do. There are some who are doing a lot but we need the help of everyone.
26 August 2008 at 11:55 AM
Re the opinion that our situation is so dire that we have no choice but to go hard and fast with nuclear, along with other low emmissions technologies.
That paper Gavin linked to above- The Nuclear Illusion by Lovins and Sheikh (27 May 2008 in draft) - makes it clear that nuclear is radically more expensive than all other electricity generation options. And that this why no one is building them in the US in spite of massive subsidies. They argue that therefore, spending money on nuclear power plants would soak up huge amounts of capital that would then not be available for other technologies that give you much more CO2 abaitment for your investment buck.
26 August 2008 at 11:58 AM
Hate to go further off topic, but it should be pointed out that solar power is not exactly carbon emission free.
Silicon based photovoltaic cells are expensive because they require large amounts of electric power to refine silica into pure silicon. That electric power is produced primarily from Coal fired plants.
So, solar power actually contributes to CO2 emissions and deploying solar panels in some locations with low solar potential may result in a net electric consumption. That is, solar panels may not produce more power than what is consumed in their manufacture and installation.
26 August 2008 at 12:27 PM
> solar panels may not produce more power …
Andrew, what’s your source for this statement?
It needs a time frame to be meaningful. Where do you get the statement and what time span is it describing?
I put your phrase into Google and did not find any support for your claim, unless you are talking about very short time spans, far shorter than the lifetime service available from the panels. Pointer please?
26 August 2008 at 12:31 PM
Andrew, #117, anyone whose played a RTS like Sim City or X:BtF knows that you create an energy plant AND a silicon plant right next to each other. The energy plant uses silicon wafers to create power from solar and the silicon plant uses energy from the energy plant and raw silicon to create a silicon wafer. Which goes into an energy plant that creates power that goes to ….
Energy payback of solar panels DOES get worse as you go to places not suited but the payback time is still much shorter than the lifetime of the cells.
Which would lend us to the idea that we should prioritise the solar power plants but that would have all the power generation where the people don’t like to live.
And so a compromise is reached.
26 August 2008 at 12:33 PM
On topic developments,
sea ice extent is now below 2005 minimum
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
-195000 km2 in two days.
and today’s Bremen picture looks scary near the Beaufort Sea (I hope I am not mistaken):
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_nic.png
And the East Siberian pocket is also advancing towards the pole.
Looks like the melt is still going strong.
26 August 2008 at 12:34 PM
Andrew wrote: “solar panels may not produce more power than what is consumed in their manufacture and installation.”
That is just plain false. According to the US Department of Energy:
This is true of PV panels built from crystalline silicon, the most expensive and resource-intensive of today’s PV technologies. Thin-film PV is much less expensive and requires much less resources and energy to manufacture so the energy payback time is even less.
It is certainly possible to generate enough electricity from PV to power a factory that manufactures PV panels, in which case the manufacturing process is emissions-free. And in any case, once the panels are operational the generation of electricity is 100 percent emissions-free, which is not true of the nuclear fuel cycle.
And again, PV is not the only clean renewable source of electricity: we also have wind turbines and concentrating solar thermal technologies, both of which are already in mainstream use and growing rapidly.
There is no need for nuclear power to address global warming, period.
26 August 2008 at 1:17 PM
Amanda Eldridge, 115
Here’s something people can do, that is good fun AND good for the planet
http://www.simondale.net/house/
(See my post on Bridging the Divide thread, sorry to be off topic )
26 August 2008 at 1:36 PM
> below 2005
> http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Yeek! and trending down. Well, I’m just looking at red pixels on that chart there, has anyone looked at the data file availalble?
______________
ReCaptcha: earth’s Shrinkers
26 August 2008 at 1:41 PM
First, regarding this years sea ice summer melt in the N. Hemisphere:
The total volume of ice loss is the greatest ever, if you take the winter maximum extent from March 08 and subtract where we are now (late August), the N. Hemisphere lost more sea ice in total volume than ever…
This year would have been far worse if not for two things:
1) The now fading La Nina event cooled the N. Pacific, and kept the temperatures somewhat moderated, thereby decreasing the early summer melt. Had we been in a El Nino year, you could expect that we would have had a much more severe melt even than we did.
2) While not discussed at much length, the current Solar Minimum for sun spots is having some net cooling effect (as all minimum sunspots cycles do).
It will be quite interesting to see how the approaching Solar Cycle 24, combined with a resurging El Nino in the next few years will play out on the arctic ice melt. I think 2013 prediction for an ice free summer arctic will be close…
Finally, on the issue of a rapid move to nuclear…too late for that…should have started 20 years ago. Too much carbon dioxide forcing already in the system…and when the n. sea ice is gone, the postiive feedback loop for warming will really be unleashed…even without the massive methane that already is being released around the arctic.
26 August 2008 at 2:08 PM
@post 112 - ‘Capturing waste heat from industrial smokestacks and using it to generate electricity could produce more electricity than is generated by all the nuclear power plants in the USA.’
What fuels those industrial smokestacks? Sounds like a perpetual motion scheme;)
26 August 2008 at 2:47 PM
Re #95
CL, I’m interested in learning more about how you lost your job for speaking out. I’m at npat1hotmail.com
26 August 2008 at 5:02 PM
Re #123
Hank,
I have been downloading the data recently, and reported my findings at #106. Since then I have discovered that the data is updated twice a day, and that report is now 12 hiurs out of date.
Note also that the daily melt is not constant. During the last ten days it was: 73k, 69k, 77k, 80k, 27k, 45k, 56k, 55k, 73k & 122k sq km/day. So it was constant at around 75k, dropped to 27k, then slowly recover back to 73k, then jumped to 122k. I reckon it is anyone’s guess what it will do next. Looking at the maps it could continue to increase or it could tail off as we go into Septmber and the days get shorter.
Cheers, Alastair.
26 August 2008 at 5:12 PM
Jim Cross Says:
> 25 August 2008 at 9:25 PM
> When I go to Cryosphere Today … sea ice seems
> to form … and dissipate
Jim, I suspect you’re watching the change from 100 percent (white) to slightly less than 100 percent (blue). Look at the color chart on the page, and look up what “percent” they’re talking about to interpret the animation.
26 August 2008 at 5:34 PM
regarding solar cell payback periods [this is all off-topic, but since the moderators allow].
I’s sitting in the Hot Chips Conference at Stanford, at which the keynote talk an hour ago was by Richard Swanson, CTO of Sunpower. I’m sure there are references, but this is as recent as it gets:
Someone asked that exact question. He said:
1)That (the idea that solar cells never pay back energy cost) seems to derive from a ~1975 article in Scientific American, but he sees it pop up in policy documents and articles to this day. It may have been true then, but not so for a good while.
2) He says the current energy payback time is ~2 years.
3) It will get better [he showed slides of Silicon Valley companies doing interesting things to reduce cost and energy, such as Solaicx.]
4) Solar companies warrant modules for 25 years. The Rancho Seco PV farm has been there for 30 years and still going fine, and the packaging techniques are similar, and failure modes have been wells-studied by NREL for decades.
5) Since ~2000, Sunpower has reduced silicon use from 15gram/W to 6 g/Watt [and energy to create the silicon is a big piece.]
6) All of this is still fairly early in applying volume chip manufacturing expertise to solar cell expertise, and in people actually designing for solar-grade silicon, as opposed to solar using “left-over” supplies and equipment.
7) Half the installed $ cost now is in installation; they’re working hard to reduce that, with preconfiguration, and of course with shingles/BIPV.
=====
SO: if energy breakeven is 2 years on warranty of 25, that’s an EROI = 12.5:1, or if they last as long as Rancho Seco so far, that’s already 15:1. Solaicz thinks they can grow crystals up to 5X more efficiently, but that remains to be seen. Still, Sunpower is a serious company, and I’ve heard Swanson before and he’s serious. So are the people at Applied Materials, so when these folks talk about expected cost curves, they have track records.
As a swag, I don’t see why one can’t expect to get EROI = 20-40 in another decade or two.
26 August 2008 at 5:37 PM
#106 Alastair, A follow up on your reasoning with respect to the melt and salinity. I think that this year will be different, because a lot of 1st year ice has melted, saltier first year ice, I dont think anyone knows how much fresh water was dumped from old ice, but I suspect that a vaster saltier 1st year melt will delay the freeze up and increase this years melt late in the season, just as a huge fresh water melt in 2007 has caused a greater freeze up. On CT the gap between 2007 and 2008 extent is vanishing more and more every day. Despite again, not so favorable conditions. I suspect some warmer air than measured at 2 meters a factor in this years melt. The physics of ice and air interactions needs very close scrutiny, if warmer air is responsible, as I think so, we have to find it.
#126 Pat is a hero. As those who know heroes, they dont always have it easy in life, I hope our admiration to his resolute stance, incorruptable opinion, makes him feel a little better,……….
26 August 2008 at 5:58 PM
#124
“The total volume of ice loss is the greatest ever”
This is an assumption that many are making, but it’s far from proven. 2007 certainly involved the greatest volume loss in recent years: no one can dispute that large areas of multiyear ice melted away, and other areas thinned significantly. As I understand it, NASA measurements showed that average ice thickness went down to ~1.5m, from ~2-2.5m in previous years.
But in 2008, much of the new ice was thin “first-year” ice, especially at the March 2008 maximum extent. Thus it was very low volume, and you have to take this account when assuming volume reductions. In terms of the ice now remaining, it is relatively high concentration (compared with last year) at >80 degrees north, and it’s not clear at all there’s been a further reduction in thickness in much of this area. Have a look at what the buoys say about thickness http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/newdata.htm
Apart from the one which has drifted into open water in the Beaufort Sea, they show higher thicknesses than you would probably expect (half of them show a thickness of ~3m)
“The now fading La Nina event cooled the N. Pacific, and kept the temperatures somewhat moderated, thereby decreasing the early summer melt”
The La Nina event also caused the briefly high late winter ice extent on which your claim about record volume loss depends.
Also to be technical the La Nina event is currently on a short term trend towards a comeback http://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/SeasonalClimateOutlook/SouthernOscillationIndex/30DaySOIValues/ (I’m *not* saying that the short term trend will necessarily continue, just a point of interest. Also bear in mind that if the PDO has really shifted into “cool” phase, we ought to see more/stronger La Ninas and fewer/weaker El Ninos)
“Had we been in a El Nino year, you could expect that we would have had a much more severe melt even than we did”
Perhaps, but the complete lack of any discernible effect of the 97/8 El Nino would make me less than certain of this http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.jpg
“the current Solar Minimum for sun spots is having some net cooling effect”
It quite likely is (by now at any event), however it didn’t prevent far northern Canada having record heatwaves in July (hence Beaufort Sea melt, following winter break-up of ice) and far northern Siberia having record heatwaves in August (hence melt in Siberian seas caused by persistent warm southerlies). In other words, it’s possible for the areas most relevant to Arctic summer ice melt to have bucked the averages on this occasion while not representing an exceptional warmth at higher latitudes taken as a whole. (Indeed MSU satellites show the area north of ~60N (”NoPol”) to have had its coldest June/July combined average since 2000 - narrowly “beating” 2004)
26 August 2008 at 6:11 PM
A tad off-topic, but amusing in an if-I-don’t-laugh-I’ll-cry sort of way.
A letter-writer in Nanaimo, B.C. (Vancouver suburb) just wrote his local paper to say that British scientists were projecting 2008 to be “the coolest in 100 years,” and wasn’t this warming swindle a bunch of hokum?
Turns out the original BBC story was headlined “coolest this century”–meaning, of course, the 21st. So we expect to see the coolest year since–2000!
Here’s paragraph 4 of the original: “Even so, 2008 is set to be about the 10th warmest year since 1850, and Met Office scientists say temperatures will rise again as La Nina conditions ease.” I guess our bold skeptic didn’t read that far.
I wrote the paper to note the correction; I wonder if they will bother! As Oberon said to Puck,
“still thou mistakest, Or else committ’st thy knaveries wilfully.”
[Response: You will see lots of this kind of willful confusion. We should count the numbers of times various players use ‘century’ versus ‘in the last 8 years’ or ’since 2000′ (or various permutations depending on how much of a stickler you are for arithmetic). I would not be at all surprised to see a number of similar ‘confusions’ arise. - gavin]
26 August 2008 at 6:18 PM
#127 “the daily melt”
I know this is just shorthand, but you need to be careful here. Sea ice extent as I understand it measures the total area with >15% sea ice. Obviously this is affected by the compaction or otherwise of ice floes by the wind.
Area is much better for measuring “melt” since it is, as I understand it, essentially extent times concentration. And area reduction (see Cryosphere today) in the last few days has slowed substantially, with even a couple of days of area gain, such that the average daily reduction for the last week has been ~20k. Not to mention it is still ~23% above the 2007 minimum (3.58MM vs 2.92MM) and 2007 was already at ~3.00 by this point last year. (Area tends to bottom out earlier than extent because re-freeze starts around this time close to the North Pole while compaction of ice continues for several weeks on the ice periphery)
#130 “…I suspect that a vaster saltier 1st year melt will delay the freeze up and increase this years melt late in the season, just as a huge fresh water melt in 2007 has caused a greater freeze up…”
Does salinity really have such a big effect? It seems to me that the greater freeze up in winter 2007/8 was caused by the colder far north Pacific SSTs, amongst other things.
If you compare SST anomalies in the Arctic circle now compared with a year ago, they are significantly lower on average, and I would have thought this will dwarf any effects of salinity, such that (net) freeze-up starts earlier this year, rather than later.
26 August 2008 at 6:29 PM
#131 (My earlier post)
“As I understand it, NASA measurements showed that average ice thickness went down to ~1.5m, from ~2-2.5m in previous years.”
I couldn’t remember the exact figures, have now looked them up and I was slightly off: in 2007 the average thickness went down to 1.3m, from 2.3-2.6m in previous years
26 August 2008 at 7:56 PM
#133, Chris. “If you compare SST anomalies in the Arctic circle now compared with a year ago, they are significantly lower on average, and I would have thought this will dwarf any effects of salinity, such that (net) freeze-up starts earlier this year, rather than later. ‘
That is even more facinating, if true, this years melt is even more a mystery than I previously thought, but sst’s seem warmish:
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/climo&hot.html
Also Ice extent spread out everywhere else last winter, not only near the Pacific, Alastair’s point still makes sense. We need to wait and see what effect this years melt has on the feeze up.
26 August 2008 at 8:57 PM
Regarding #124:
To follow up on the approaching Solar Max event of 2012 combined with an El Nino event about the same time, has anyone seen any data (backtesting perhaps) to show the relationship between Solar Max events, El Nino events, and global temperatures? Certainly we know there is some relationship between sunspots and global temperatures (at least for the N. Hemisphere).
This would be interesting to see…
R. Gates
26 August 2008 at 10:25 PM
Re: comment #132
Dear Kevin,
That was not the only thing wrong with that BBC article - I wrote to the author about the “decade of cooling” mistake and about how the “cooling” predicted was only for a small region of the Northern Hemisphere, and also about how confusing it was to write “coolest of the century,” etc.
Never heard back from him, of course.
26 August 2008 at 10:31 PM
R. Gates, try
www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/01/el-nino-global-warming-and-anomalous-winter-warmth/
26 August 2008 at 10:50 PM
Maybe of interest:
http://climatespin.blogspot.com/
Monday, August 25, 2008
Known unknowns on ice
This time last week I was at Los Alamos National Laboratory for a meeting that discussed building a Community Ice Sheet Model, inspired by the success of the Community Climate System Model. (Eventually CISM will be part of CCSM). ….
26 August 2008 at 11:17 PM
Can we hope for more from Dr. Bitz soon?
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~bitz/PSC_weekend.jpg
26 August 2008 at 11:25 PM
Chris wrote in 133:
Wayne Davidson responded in 135:
True — but in most areas it appears that surface melt has been greater than bottom melt due to warm ocean, whereas bottom melt dominated last year.
Please see:
Wayne Davidson wrote in 135:
Well, personally I think Alastair’s point holds some water.
The freezing point of sea water is about -2 C.
Please see:
Ask A Scientist
General Science Archive
Freezing point of sea water
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen99/gen99263.htm
We could be two degrees cooler and still see pretty much the same given this year’s vs last year’s ice. And currently nearly all of the melting taking place is bottom melt due to warm ocean, not surface melt.
Please see:
Also, if numbers are correct — see what tarmov pointed to in 120:
… then it would appear that the melt has been picking up for several days now. And I have noticed we have a new hurricane building by Cuba.
Please see:
ZCZC MIATCMAT2 ALL
TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM
HURRICANE GUSTAV FORECAST/ADVISORY NUMBER 5
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL072008
0900 UTC TUE AUG 26 2008
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2008/al07/al072008.fstadv.005.shtml?
… from:
Hurricane GUSTAV Advisory Archive
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2008/GUSTAV.shtml?
A number of recent papers have been implicating hurricanes as a major engine of oceanic poleward advection.
For example:
See also:
Investigating tropical cyclone-climate feedbacks using the TRMM
Microwave Imager (TMI) and the Quick Scatterometer (QuikScat)
Ryan L. Sriver, Matthew Huber, and Jesse Nusbaumer
Revised Draft, April 27, 2008
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~huberm/2007GC001842-pip.pdf
Tropical Cyclone–Induced Upper-Ocean Mixing and Climate: Application to Equable Climates
Robert L. Korty, Kerry A. Emanuel, AND Jeffry R. Scott
15 FEBRUARY 2008
Journal of Climate, Vol 21
26 August 2008 at 11:42 PM
Another $0.02
I’m increasingly persuaded that Pielke, Sr. is probably going to turn out to be closer to the truth concerning global warming, climate science, and probably legitimate concerns/criticisms of the IPCC and the global warming “concensus.”
On the other hand, I believe that considering the risks and uncertainties involved that it is prudent to press for vigorous action regarding fossil fuels and the rising CO2.
27 August 2008 at 12:35 AM
New update (Aug 26) at NSIDC website, with more numbers coming tomorrow. Now beyond the 2005 minimum. Odd (and neat) to get two updates on sequential days. Possibly because there’s been an increase in the number of people visiting the website?
27 August 2008 at 2:37 AM
Re: 115 Amanda Eldridge
All scientists, all the credible ones with no vested interests or the ones that haven’t been bought out by the coal and oil companies want a solution to climate change ASAP. You’re 13..you’ve got a whole life in front of you, my son’s 3y/o. I would do anything to ensure that he receives just as good if not a better life than mine, that is why all this governmental (almost all governments) dithering on this subject drives me nuts. They want conclusive proof of this and that, more studies done.., more committees, more concrete evidence that climate change actually is happening, and the more time that passes the less chance we have of fixing this dilemma. What you can do Amanda is write to your local government member like you’ve done to us and explain your concern..make these insensitive bureaucrats wake up and listen to a voice of the future of this wonderful planet..yours!!
27 August 2008 at 3:01 AM
#135 Wayne
“That is even more facinating, if true, this years melt is even more a mystery than I previously thought, but sst’s seem warmish…”
Yes I agree the sst’s are warmish in the Arctic, but if you want evidence they are significantly cooler than last year here’s a site where you can compare:
http://sharaku.eorc.jaxa.jp/cgi-bin/amsr/polar_sst/polar_sst.cgi?lang=e
(Note: map for Aug 08 is only up to 26th, but it seems pretty clear the difference is already established; in any event, you only need to look at the way that subzero temperatures have spread in the Arctic recently to see that the SST anomalies are not going to come close to those of 2007)
To me there’s little mystery: 2008’s strong melt was caused by a combination of particularly thin peripheral ice and localised warm winds. At the same time, temperatures overall have been significantly lower than in 2007 (almost 1C less on average north of ~60N for June/July according to the MSU satellite “NoPol” figures) and the seas on average in the Arctic are significantly cooler. Since as you go into September, any continued melt is increasingly by the sea rather than the winds/sun, I would be surprised if the net refreeze starts later. (I say “net” because there is already evidence of refreeze recently in the Arctic Basin http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.1.html and this isn’t just due to melt ponds refreezing, as temperatures were down to -5 to -8C for several days at the North Pole. I find the following site particularly useful to get this kind of meteorological info by the way http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/analysis/ )
27 August 2008 at 3:26 AM
Just a further note, here’s the link to the MSU data by region:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
I didn’t want to make too much of it, after all remember it’s for the lower troposphere as opposed to surface, and there’s a lack of clarity over what NoPol represents - though I think it’s from 60N to 82.5N (beyond which the satellite doesn’t cover). It was just the best evidence I had to hand to illustrate my point that temperatures overall at high northern latitudes appear to have been lower this summer than last.
27 August 2008 at 5:31 AM
Lawrence Coleman writes:
Geothermal. It’s available 24/7.
Fallacy of bifurcation and fallacy of complex question both in the same sentence! Nice going.
I’m sure he’s echoed by three-year-olds around the world.
27 August 2008 at 5:35 AM
Andrew writes:
That problem is self-correcting. The more PV cells produced, the more the electricity will be coming from them and not from coal plants.
27 August 2008 at 6:15 AM
Re #133 where Chris wrote:
You are correct. “Melt” is just a shorthand for the “difference in the daily ice extent shown on the IARC-JAXA Information system”. Other systems may give different values for ice extent, or may quote ice area. But none gives ice volume on a daily basis, which would yield a true melt value.
When the ice is less concentrated it will be thinner. This is shown by the low concentration around the edge of the ice pack where the ice is melting. Thus a better indication of ice volume than the area, calculated by multiplying extent by concentration, would be to multiply extent by the square of the concentration, but that would still not be exact.
However, when the ice extent reaches zero so will the ice volume, and there will be an exact correlation.
Cheers, Alastair.
27 August 2008 at 7:21 AM
John Mashey, at 129, wrote :
“regarding solar cell payback periods [this is all off-topic, but since the moderators allow].”
Hmmm. What about what this guy says ? Is it way off the mark ?
“The current favorite for alternative energy is solar power, but proponents must close their eyes to all questions of scale. According to Gerhard Knies, the world’s deserts have an area of 36 million km2, and the solar energy they receive is equivalent to 300 ZJ (1 ZJ = 1021 joules), which at an 11% electrical-conversion rate would result in 33 ZJ. The EIA’s “World Consumption of Primary Energy” tells us that total energy consumption in 2005 was approximately 0.5 ZJ.
To meet the world’s present energy needs by using solar power, therefore, we would need an array (or an equivalent number of smaller ones) with a size of 0.5/33 x 36 million km2, which is 360,000 km2 (140,400 square miles) — a machine the size of Germany. The production and maintenance of this array would require vast quantities of hydrocarbons, metals, and other materials — a self-defeating process.”
quoted from http://sorrynogas.blogspot.com/
Seems to me that if USA could reduce it’s dependence on oil, it could spend some of the 40% of tax dollars, currently going to the military, on research and development of better ways of doing things, hopefully before we all get into such a mess that nothing sensible can be organized, because we get overwhelmed by critical emergencies, the chaos of multiplying wars, refugees, famines, etc.
“In fact, the purpose of our overseas bases is to maintain US dominance in the world, and to reinforce what military analyst Charles Maier calls our “empire of consumption.” The United States possesses less than 5 percent of global population but consumes about one-quarter of all global resources, including petroleum. Our empire exists so we can exploit a much greater share of the world’s wealth than we are entitled to, and to prevent other nations from combining against us to take their rightful share.” from
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/09/chalmers-johnson-on-pentagon.html
I’m not anti-American. Europe is just as bad, not to mention Russia, China, etc. Once one nation goes all-out to grab diminishing resources, likely we’re all sucked into a negative free-for-all, a desperate feeding frenzy, that’ll be impossible to restrain. It’s here already, some will say, but it could get much, much worse.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/08/26/manufactured-famine/
27 August 2008 at 7:53 AM
#141 Timothy:
“in most areas it appears that surface melt has been greater than bottom melt **due to warm ocean**, whereas bottom melt dominated last year.”
[double asterisks my emphasis]
No, surface melt depends on air temperature, wind and sunshine; bottom melt depends on the ocean temperature under the ice. Colder SSTs (sea surface temperatures) in the open water surrounding the ice imply colder sea temperatures under the ice as well, hence less bottom melt.
“We could be two degrees cooler and still see pretty much the same given this year’s vs last year’s ice”
I find this claim extraordinary. Is it really plausible that the salinity over millions of km2 of Arctic sea is so different from a year ago that the thin ice which has melted in the last few weeks will only reform at a temperature an extra 2C lower than when it melted, compared with last year?
Wayne’s argument (#130) depends on the assumption of “vaster saltier 1st year melt”. But this is weakened by two further points: (1) he also claims that “a huge fresh water melt in 2007 has caused a greater freeze up” i.e the first year ice is fresher than it would normally be; (2) new ice that forms gradually at temperatures not far below zero has surprisingly low salinity in any event (through brine rejection).
Moreover, you’ve been highlighting the relatively large surface melts this year: the surface ice/snow is the freshest of all!
The story is different away from the Arctic ocean. Consider the following comparison of 2005 minimum ice with 2007 minimum.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=15&fy=2005&sm=09&sd=15&sy=2007
Notice that there is nothing special about the 2007 melt on the Atlantic side, and consider that the Atlantic side is dominated by the Gulf Stream and powerful depressions over the winter bringing strong winds and waves (i.e. lots of mixing of the water). I find it hard to see how changes in salinity could be such a major influence on late winter sea ice here. If you look at the Pacific side, then the Bering Strait is relatively narrow, and the sea ice in the summer always melts well into the Arctic ocean from here. So again, colder winter SSTs in the North Pacific would seem a much more credible explanation of greater ice extent in winter 07/08 than relatively small average changes in surface salinity channelled through the Bering Strait.
“it would appear that the melt has been picking up for several days now”
Please see my post above #133 re: the inaccuracy of equating ice *extent* with “melt”.
If you look at ice *area*, you will see that by this more accurate measure, “melt” has been only ~100,000km2 *in total* in the last 5 days (3.681 million km2 on Aug 21st down to 3.579 million km2 yesterday.
As for hurricanes, I might be concerned if tropical SSTs, surface air temperatures and lower troposphere temperatures were at record highs. But this is a very long way indeed from being the case at the moment.
27 August 2008 at 8:52 AM
#149 Alastair:
“When the ice is less concentrated it will be thinner”
Not necessarily - ice often becomes less concentrated following break up/dispersal, in the absence of melt. For example, the following buoy from the edge of the Beaufort Sea (where I understand ice was broken up last winter by storms) still shows ice thickness of >3m, despite southward drift:
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2008F.htm
Yet ice is clearly what you would describe as “less concentrated” where the buoy is located:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.some.000.png
“However, when the ice extent reaches zero so will the ice volume, and there will be an exact correlation.”
In fact, especially in this scenario, there would be a complete lack of correlation. If the ice extent reaches zero (and we all hope this won’t happen of course) then this will mean that any remaining areas with ice will have coverage of 0)
Well, for the sake of argument, let’s consider the areas in the Arctic where ice coverage is currently 0. As of yesterday there was ~5.23 million km2 with coverage between 15% and 100%. So let’s say that there is currently ~500,000 km2 (that’s ~500,000,000,000 m2) with coverage between 0 and 15%. And let’s assume that the average ice thickness in these areas is a mere 0.5m. Thus, total ice volume in this large area of *zero ice extent* is very approximately a conservative 250,000,000,000 m3.
I know this doesn’t prove very much, but I don’t think the quoted statement does either
27 August 2008 at 9:03 AM
For some reason the Wordpress system seems to have left out some symbols and words from my previous post, making the second part of it look rather ridiculous!
I’ll spell out the relevant parts again, all in words, so that hopefully this time it all appears properly.
“…this will mean that any remaining areas with ice will have coverage of less than fifteen percent and more than zero.
Well, for the sake of argument, let’s consider the areas in the Arctic where ice coverage is currently less than fifteen percent and more than zero…”
27 August 2008 at 9:24 AM
Me, in comment 80
Nick Gotts, from comment 88
Supposing his intent not to have been a discouraging display of reading incomprehension, can anyone help him?
Remember, what I advertised was an enrichment-free nuclear fission power scheme, not a proliferation-resistant one. Advertising the proliferation-resistance of a fission power scheme would be like advertising the bidirectionality of a manual screwdriver. It would be more revelatory to find one that wasn’t.
[Response: Please don’t play games - no has time for that. If you want to point someone to a specific paper, please include the link. - gavin]
27 August 2008 at 10:05 AM
Chris: Google search for “less than” +symbol +”Wordpress” will find the answer at codex.wordpress.org/Glossary.
Ironically, you’ll have to “view source” to actually see what I’ve pasted in below from the codex.wordpress.org/Glossary page. That’s Catch-22:
Glossary « WordPress Codex
use < for the less than () symbol ….
codex.wordpress.org/Glossary
27 August 2008 at 10:16 AM
Chris quoted me and then responded in 151:
The phrase “due to warm ocean” was meant to modify the noun immediately preceding it: bottom melt, not this year’s melt. However, I can see how you might have been confused… sort of. In any case, I think people are more familiar with surface melt — and that at least at the popular level it is overemphasized. As such I didn’t think it required any explanation — but I thought the phrase “bottom melt” could be elaborated upon with just a few words for someone just coming in.
Chris quoted me and then responded in 151:
Given the volume of last year’s melt? And you yourself said earlier that this year was only a degree cooler throughout most of the Arctic for June and July:
You had written in 145:
Sure, there are millions of square kilometers of ocean, but it is the Arctic, and the ice that melted covered pretty much the same. And there is ocean stratification. Due to a difference in buoyancy between salt water and fresh water, if I’m not mistaken.
27 August 2008 at 10:26 AM
Re #153 where Cris says:
“…this will mean that any remaining areas with ice will have coverage of less than fifteen percent and more than zero.
Well, for the sake of argument, let’s consider the areas in the Arctic where ice coverage is currently less than fifteen percent and more than zero…”
But these areas do not exist! Or, if you are going to be pedantic are very small. See Bob Grumbine’s sea ice map. The red areas 16-21% ice concentration only occur as a thin line on the edge of the pack, and in the North Atlantic edge not at all. The ice pack has an edge. The edge is normally sharp and there is very little low concentration ice there.
Earth science is different from the physical sciences. They have laws which are true until proved false. In earth science, every law has an exception, probably even this one! Therefore it is wrong to become too precise when discussing earth science matters.
Whether or not this years melt, ice extent, ice area, or ice volume is a new record will not determine whether there is an ice free Arctic in the summer of 2013.
Cheers, Alastair.
27 August 2008 at 10:28 AM
Oops, in #152 the guesstimated total ice volume in “zero extent” areas with ice coverage up to the 15% threshold should have been much lower at a mere ~18.75 billion m3 (I forgot the step of multiplying the overall area by 0.075 to get to total ice coverage, before multiplying by average thickness)
Not that it really matters as it was a somewhat facetious reply to a somewhat facetious point
I’ll try and avoid posting for a little while as I think I’ve done more than my fair share for now!
27 August 2008 at 11:15 AM
Re #90, Jack Mist:
> “I can’t find anything in the literature, but I have a strong suspicion that ice at 0°C cools air faster than ice at subzero temperatures. At the melt-point it’s primed to absorb a sudden energy hit, using latent heat to become water.
> “This could explain why the melt goes on, even though the air temperatures seem to be steady or falling. Cause and effect goes the other way - the continuing melt is reducing air temperature. Can anyone tell me when significant areas of ice in the Arctic and Greenland reached melt point? 1998 maybe? If so, this could explain the temperature “plateau” that the denialists get so excited about.”
Like Jack, I found nothing on the effect he proposes, for or against. Current research is normally subscription-only, I understand that. Basic science is freely available though - and “how ice melts” is about as basic as you can get!
I had the equipment to hand (and a bit of spare time) for a quick&dirty test of the theory: I took a length of drainpipe, set it horizontal in a freezer, half-filled it with water and froze to -10°C. Tilted it slightly downwards. Fan and air thermometer at one end, air thermometer at the other, plot the air temperatures as the ice warms. There was a slight but definite downward jig in air temperature as the melt point was reached, but there might be another cause - aircon kicking in at the wrong time, for instance. It would need much more precise measurement and better equipment to prove anything.
27 August 2008 at 11:15 AM
Ok I am just going to post one more, to reply to a couple of other posts that have just come in.
Firstly, #155 Hank, thanks for the info on Wordpress, and the carefully worded presentation which enabled me to access it without the same problem occurring!
#156 Timothy:
“The phrase “due to warm ocean” was meant to modify the noun immediately preceding it: bottom melt, not this year’s melt.”
I can see how my reading of what you said was a poor reflection on your level of knowledge, and for that I’m sorry. But it doesn’t change my point that average Arctic ocean temperatures were, and remain, lower than at the equivalent date last year, and now that surface melt has slowed, the predominance of bottom/side melt means that other things being equal, net re-freeze should be earlier.
Of course, other things aren’t necessarily equal in particular because of salinity. Then the question has to be addressed of just how different the overall salinity levels are. They would have to be hugely different to make net refreeze commence at SSTs a full degree C lower, let alone 2C lower. And I’m just not convinced of this, for some of the reasons expressed in my earlier post. In other words, I’m perfectly aware of ocean stratification, but it’s the quantitative argument I’m concerned about re: higher salinity vs colder SSTs. (Another thing you need to consider by the way is the choppiness of the open water - it’s not as if the fresh water is always sat calmly on the top with no mixing)
Meanwhile, the net re-freeze of the last week continues in any event over the main Arctic Basin area of sea ice: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.1.html
27 August 2008 at 11:27 AM
And just one very final post! (I hope….)
#157 Alastair: “But these areas do not exist! Or, if you are going to be pedantic are very small.”
Of course they exist lol!!!! The map you link to doesn’t have any precision below 16% so of course you can’t see them! Check out the following map for the eastern Beaufort and you’ll see that the areas of less than 10 per cent coverage but not ice free are larger than all other areas combined!!!!
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/prods/WIS40CT/20080826180000_WIS40CT_0003936564.gif
27 August 2008 at 11:54 AM
#145 Chris, Thanks for the cool links! If the SST data is right the mystery deepens, 2007 sst’s were caused by clear slies. Warm winds? Only from the Beaufort, as far as I know. Its been more cloudy than compared to last year, SST’s are lower, average temperages are colder, yet the melt is virtually the same. Only a volume calculation would disprove my hypothesis. I suspect
at the very least an equal volume melt, at cooler surface and SST temperatures. That is a mystery
which deserves a lot of attention. Winds were indeed a factor, they reduced compression by mainly going against the sea current and tides, causing the ice the spread out more, increasing albedo compared to last year. I dont see your wind point at all, if the winds carried warmer air by advection the temperature record would have been much warmer…
27 August 2008 at 12:10 PM
G.R.L. Cowan,
I apologise for writing “proliferation-resistant” instead of “enrichment-free”; few experts seem to share your confidence that most approaches to civil nuclear power are proliferation-resistant. I assume you are referring to “How Fire Can Be Tamed”, at http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/235_248.pdf, the main topic of which is fueling cars with metals, and which, in the middle of the text, gives a 2-page informal description of what is, as far as I know, a completely untested proposal for a novel form of nuclear reactor. I’m afraid I am not prepared to take such a description as good evidence it would work. Perhaps you can point me to a source, preferably a peer-reviewed article, where the idea is worked out in more detail?
27 August 2008 at 12:25 PM
Re #161
The blue color on the map you showed stands for ‘open or bergy water’, a few floating bergs are enough to qualify.
27 August 2008 at 1:15 PM
One final post, honest….?
#162 Wayne - cheers, glad you like the links.
I had to reply to your post, because I think the warm winds (combined with the thinned ice following summer 2007) are absolutely critical. I’ve been following the weather maps throughout August, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the persistent southerly winds over a broad swathe of the north Siberian coast for much of the month brought extremely anomalous warmth (certainly compared with the recent decade) and were the key driver of the rapid melt in the Laptev/East Siberian/Chukchi seas (as well as adjoining parts of the central Arctic Basin) since then. As a start, you could check out the temperature records for Tiksi on the Laptev coast which was in the heart of the zone of anomalous warmth
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/RussianFeder/Tiksi.htm
The reason this may not show up in the Arctic temperatures overall is that it was balanced by colder weather elsewhere. For example on the Beaufort Sea - but the trouble was here the ice had already mostly gone, after the hot July centred in N / NW Canada. So all the cold did was to keep the Beaufort Sea colder than it would otherwise have been.
I would say that broadly, what happens in the Arctic reflects global temperature trends, with a lag, and modified by changes in weather patterns/ocean currents etc.
So from summer 07 to summer 08 the world got cooler and this was reflected to some extent in Arctic temperatures, but the record melt of 07 had a big knock-on effect, and weather patterns were unfavourable to a major ice recovery. As for summer 09, we’ll have to wait and see……………
27 August 2008 at 1:46 PM
It occurred to me that the issue of salinity might apply more to the first-year ice than to the melt-water. If first-year ice were, say, 30% more saline than multi-year ice, might not that result in a freeze/melt temp several tenths of a degree colder than that of the nearly-freshwater multiyear ice? It seemed alluring; if this idea were correct, then you might expect to see just the sort of difference in the curves for 2007 and 2008 that we observe.
A little poking about was more than enough to show that my understanding was way too simple to draw conclusions, however. (See this interesting site: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_7_158/ai_65301546) Internal structure of first-year ice sounds pretty complex, and I can’t decipher how this structure would act in terms of–well, let’s call it “apparent freezing point”.
However, it seems clear that first-year ice is relatively more frangible than multiyear ice, even correcting for its typical thinness. The more finely comminuted the ice, the more surface area for bottom melt action, and the more rapidly the ice can melt.
27 August 2008 at 2:09 PM
I probably should have said “frangible and porous!”
27 August 2008 at 2:25 PM
Re #130 where Wayne wrote:
Wayne,
I found it hard to imagine warm air creeping in from the Pacific or Atlantic sea surfaces below 2 metres and covering the Arctic. Then I realised that I already knew where it came from - the greenhouse effect!
It is generally believed that the greenhouse effect works high in the troposphere. See Busy Week for Water Vapor. But as that thread explains, Phillipona et al. [2005] had reported that water vapor was acting near the surface in Europe. You commented that you thought the same was happening in the Arctic.
In fact the greenhouse effect was first measured by Horace-Benedict de Saussure using a box 1 foot by 9 inches by 9 inches. He obtained temperatures of around 110C (230F.) [de Saussure, Journal de Paris, 108, April 17, 1784]
What is happening is that the greater concentrations of CO2, operating in the bottom 9″ of air, are now leading to the ice melting. This increases the water vapour density, which through its greenhouse effect drives the melting even faster. I’ll put more details on my blog. Have to read “Busy Week for Water Vapor” again and Philipona’s response.
Cheers, Alastair.
27 August 2008 at 4:01 PM
Chris,
If you cherry pick the area and time you map, of course you can show charts with of less than 15% ice. I already wrote that every rule has an exception. The ice has an edge, whether you are willing to believe it or not.
Cheers, Alastair.
27 August 2008 at 4:23 PM
#165 Chris, Lets look at this a little closer:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008&month_last=7&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=07&y
It wasn’t that warm over Beaufort in July, Certainly not on the Russian side of the Pole
North of Seberia was cold in June as well.
So this is the set up, you have much colder cloudier weather, which affected the Russian side in question,
If NOAA is accurate, Russian side ice had an average anomaly of +2 C in August… In our days of higher Arctic temperatures, this was quite a mild heat wave. Must wait for a formal August result. Total volume loss is the big number to wait for. If anyone may publish?
Alastair, Interesting, there such a thing as different air temperatures at ,5, 1, 1,5 meters,
been there done that, it depends on so many factors, but its possible. 2 meter high measurements over ice in the summer, most likely give a cooler reading than the air just above, But near ice level, a few centimenters above, that is an idea worth investigating at a much grander scale.
http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/upper/cymo.gif
is the closest upper air measurement to the Arctic available on the net, if someone knows another www link to particular arctic stations, it would be nice to look at more northern profiles. But this one shows a typical inversion.
At any rate, one fast ship can circumnavigate the world above the arctic circle in no time now:
http://www.seaice.dk/iwicos/latest/amsr.n.comb.20080826.gif
27 August 2008 at 5:43 PM
The latest Bremen AMSRE shows a substantial area of low concentration heading into the pack from Beaufort Sea along the 120degWest line of longitude.
This can be seen in the following visible NASA satellite images:
Terra
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?T082400200
Aqua
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?A082401540
27 August 2008 at 5:49 PM
#120 tarmov
#123 Hank
Yeah, the thing that is different about this is that the melt curve is slightly convex, not concave. That indicates a different inertia to me.
I’m not saying we’re going to bust last year but the thermal inertia seems to have a little extra heat in the water and the pattern is funny compared to other years.
2004 has more in common with the melt rate pattern. If this goes on for two weeks we will be close. If it goes for three, I’d bet we will likely pass 2007.
I just wish I knew more about the currents to understand it better.
#124 R. Gates
I think 2012/13 is a pretty good guess at this point barring new data and when 24 and El nino gear up.
#127 Alastair McDonald
I think it’s mostly coming form underwater warm currents. Something did change. If anyone knows the current current dynamics that could explain it, I’m all ears.
#135 wayne davidson
This is puzzling if true. I am suspecting that there was a current shift of some sort but have n ow idea if anyone is looking for or found anything that indicates it?
#145 Chris
I think the mystery is the odd acceleration while indications are cooler. Maybe, it’s ice thickness vs. temperature since the ice is thinner than a previous year and the melt rate dynamic is taking advantage of the break up capacity?
A sort of cascade effect once the thickness reaches a certain point combined with the warm water still under the ice.
The surface melt has pretty much stopped but according to a knowledgeable friend, the ocean side melt can go for anywhere from 1 to 3 weeks from now. It’s still up in the air…, so to speak.
27 August 2008 at 5:56 PM
Hi Wayne,
That last link is a day out of date. It should now be:
http://www.seaice.dk/iwicos/latest/amsr.n.comb.20080827.gif
Cheers, Alastair.
27 August 2008 at 9:29 PM
#172–”I think the mystery is the odd acceleration while indications are cooler. Maybe, it’s ice thickness vs. temperature since the ice is thinner than a previous year and the melt rate dynamic is taking advantage of the break up capacity?”
Also, porosity and relative fragility due to brine pockets & channels in the first-year (as opposed to multi-year) ice. See the description on the NSIDC site, as well as on the site I linked in my #166.
28 August 2008 at 1:52 AM
Alastair,
Just an idea…. Does ice absorb significant amounts of IR? I couldn’t find anything
concrete, but the literature I read indicates so,
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v26/i6/p771_1
I suspect Thermal IR properties of thinner sea ice as somewhat involved in all this. However, it requires a “mirror” zone of air, not so high above, which is equally warmer than 2 meter temperature measurements. Presumably near the ice as yu suggest, or well above, below or at lower dominant cloud levels. Thanks to the links from Chris, we can discount a warmer sea current, because there is no indication of warmer temperatures. THe solution is in the air and ice.
28 August 2008 at 2:33 AM
Re 147 Levenson.. Geo Thermal great!..if you are lucky enough to live in a geologically active region of the world. Same with tidal wind generators..except if you happen to live in landlocked country or one where the difference between low and high tide isn’t very great. All these techologies are fine but I think you will see the percentage nett energy output of renewables if falling further behind while coal/oil and gas derived energy are still rocketing ahead laregly thanks to the US, China, Japan and India. The wide spread use of photo voltaics or sun reflector systems is the cleanest and greenest and potentially the cheapest to produce, roll-out, deploy etc. Their efficiency is going up almost every year and indeed would be the ‘best’ continual source of power. So why aren’t governments embracing the concept, subsidising the cells so that almost everybody can afford them??
Would you happen to have a link to show what percentage of electricity is being generated by renewables as opposed to fossil fuels - 10 years ago up to the present?
28 August 2008 at 2:48 AM
Looking at the uni-breman website just now, I would say the north-west passage is officially open or if not a medium sized icebreaker could do the rest. If you want to go for a dip at lat 90 degree N better dust off your snorkel..I think it’ll happen again this year!
28 August 2008 at 6:10 AM
I haven’t explained what I think has happened in the last 4 days to cause the average daily extent reduction of ~81,000 km2 (which has caused such a fuss!) compared with the average daily reduction of ~46,000 km2 in the previous 4 days - you can download the daily data from IARC-JAXA here http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Up until about a week ago, there had been low pressure stuck for several weeks roughly just north of the north-central tip of Russia, feeding persistent strong southerly winds up over much of the north Siberian coast. The ice had been persistent here until the end of July, so it took a while for melt to get going (and therefore for the SSTs to pick up) But the more open seas were exposed to wind (and sun - anecdotally, it was sunnier than average at Tiksi on the Laptev coast), the more “fetch” the winds had and the more the seas could be warmed, and waves/chop/currents set in motion against the retreating ice edges and individual floes/local ice packs. (Please note this is a one-sentence simple summary, there’s more to it than that.)
The low which formed at the beginning of August was intense enough to be called a storm (a “summer” storm if you like since it brought strong mild winds, rather than any freezing temperatures) and it resulted in a period of high exent reduction (daily average reduction 105,900 km2 from 3rd-7th August) which caused a similar fuss to the most recent one. Of course, it was followed by a 4-day period of just 48,500 km2 average daily reduction, as the ice packs settled and the southerly pattern temporarily eased.
About a week ago, the weather pattern finally shifted, with a strong low moving from close to the north pole towards the East Siberian sea, bringing northerly gales, sub-zero temperatures and even snow to large areas that had previously been anomalously warm. This almost certainly dispersed a lot of the sea ice (into warmer waters) which had previously been blown against the main pack, as well as increasing the “slosh” of the warmed seas against the clusters of ice that had become separated/fragmented from the main pack. So paradoxically, a shift in weather pattern bringing a sharp cooling over wide areas also brought (temporarily?) a sharply increased ice extent (coverage greater than 15%) reduction and associated localised increased melt. The weather pattern is remaining relatively cool over large areas, so the question is, what happens now that the outlying clusters of ice are close to being largely melted/dispersed? Is it possible that we can’t read too much into the very recent trend? Is it possible that it doesn’t have the “inertia” that has been claimed earlier on this thread?
One very interesting perspective comes from considering what happened in the Arctic in summer 2004. Compare the extent reduction of the last 3 weeks then and now:
08,06,2004,7424063
08,27,2004,6024844
= -1,399,219 km2
08,06,2008,6579844
08,27,2008,5175313
= -1,404,531 km2
The first thing that is clear is that there is nothing “unprecented” about the recent 3-week trend, taken as an overall average.
So what was happening in 2004: was it a season where there was a lot of very late season melt? Not at all: consider the following article on the “Short Arctic Summer of 2004″ - freeze-up was actually earlier than in previous years.
So what happened to extent in the next 3 weeks in 2004?
08,27,2004,6024844
09,17,2004,5821250
= -203,594 km2
Now I’m not optimistic enough to expect that the reduction in the next 3 weeks of this year will be that small - there’s various reasons why I think it may well be significantly larger. But the 2007 minimum was as follows:
09,24,2007,4254531
In order to match that, 2008 will still have to lose a further 921,000 km2, and even to finish within 10 per cent of it 2008 will have to lose a further 495,000 km2. So, as has already been said, the outcome is still “up in the air”.
A further note: there is little discernible difference in SST anomalies between Aug 2004 and Aug 2008
http://sharaku.eorc.jaxa.jp/cgi-bin/amsr/polar_sst/polar_sst.cgi?lang=e
08,27,2008,5175313
09,17,2008,???????
Hope some of this is useful!
Chris
28 August 2008 at 6:12 AM
I forgot to add the link to the article on the “Short Arctic Summer of 2004″:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/essay_untersteiner3.html
28 August 2008 at 6:32 AM
Lawrence Coleman writes:
Or even if you aren’t. Google “hot dry rock geothermal.”
28 August 2008 at 7:48 AM
wayne davidson wrote in 175:
If that is the case then we are currently experiencing surface melt. However the guys at NSDIC say its pretty much all bottom melt at this point. That and higher salinity (with ocean level salinity resulting in a two degree reduction in melting point and the effects of salinity being linear) would seem capable of accounting for a great deal given the fact that this is almost all new, saltier ice after last year’s melt. Particularly since temperatures have been less than a degree cooler from last year. And given the fact that concentration is low and the ice is thin, there is less ice to dampen the waves over broad stretches — so that should delay refreeze somewhat.
In either case, if you can figure out how an atmospheric effect can result in bottom melt but little or no surface melt please let me know. At the moment I am just going to sit back and watch the ice melt.
28 August 2008 at 9:16 AM
#176
So why aren’t governments embracing the concept, subsidising the cells so that almost everybody can afford them??
As far as I know, Germany is the only country that does this. Other countries have limited subsidies.
Energy from pv is still the most expensive there is. Wind is currently favoured for this reason and another very important one: wind is much more constant than solar.
In the winter in Europe a pv panel delivers around 1/6th of the power that it delivers in the summer. But the energy demand in the winter is higher than in the summer. Average wind is slightly higher in the winter, so that is a much better match.
Until there is a viable solution for seasonal energy storage at any significant scale, pv for Europe and many other regions in the world is not attractive at the current price level.
28 August 2008 at 9:37 AM
181–
This post seems to agree with Wayne D’s on the “ice” part–which, as stated, I suspect may be important in what we are seeing.
We sure seem to have a growing spectator sport on our hands here!
28 August 2008 at 10:28 AM
PDO? Subpolar gyre?
http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2008/08/jpl-jason-1-slowdown-of-sub-polar-gyre.html
28 August 2008 at 10:45 AM
Re #152
Not necessarily - ice often becomes less concentrated following break up/dispersal, in the absence of melt. For example, the following buoy from the edge of the Beaufort Sea (where I understand ice was broken up last winter by storms) still shows ice thickness of >3m, despite southward drift:
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2008F.htm
Since last january that has been the case in the Beaufort sea, lots of broken old ice which is in low concentration now, however the individual ice is often ~3m thick however it is melting rather rapidly. Some of the old buoys in that region are indicating near total melt, here for example:
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/buoy_plots/ice2007E.gif
The one Chris referred to above is new, less than a month’s data but has melted ~10% in three weeks.
28 August 2008 at 10:51 AM
Re: 181 “all pretty much bottom melt at this point”
No, I don’t think so. The bouys are restricted to non-Russian waters and that’s where the temps are still high and are causing surface melt.
28 August 2008 at 11:02 AM
#181 Timothy, I agree that bottom melt is happening now, and also there should be higher salinity. However I think in terms of every component. If the air was dramatically colder
the melt would stop quite rapidly, The atmospheric contribution has been huge, even now. I am deeply interested in knowing why a likely equal volume of ice has melted under colder air and water conditions. Lately I came to think about Thermal IR contributions from clouds and thinner ice feedback combo, Is there other factors causing this melt to be so substantial under apparently colder temperatures? The idea floated about that first year ice is less salty than old multy year ice does not pass the tea tasting test.
#183 Kevin , you might be a spectator, but I don’t believe thinking is a sport!
28 August 2008 at 11:05 AM
Kevin McKinney wrote in 183:
I’m thinking this bottoms out around 4,033,000 km^2 (give or take 20,000 km^2) on about 30 Sept 2008.
Strictly my amateur guess, though.
28 August 2008 at 11:06 AM
Andrew, what’s your basis for those statements?
28 August 2008 at 11:24 AM
Photovoltaics (PV) CO2 emissions…
I realize this sure seems like OT, but since climate change and the melting of sea ice is due to rising atmospheric CO2 levels, we need to accurately understand how to reduce CO2 emissions and not be mislead about PVs potential as a solution.
$4.68: Cost per peak watt for PV
20%: Fraction of cost needed to refine silica into silicon
$0.92: Electric cost per peak watt PV module
$0.03: Wholesale cost of coal fired electricity in China
31 KWH: Electric need to produce 1 peak watt PV
4 hr/day: Typical equivalent sunlight for PV installation in Germany or US
7700 days: Time needed for PV to produce power consumed in production
21 years: Time needed for PV to produce power consumed in production.
Understandably, PV manufacturing executives will tell a far more optimistic story.
Yes, the numbers can be tweaked up or down, but from what I can tell, the PV industry is trying to sell themselves as something that they are not.
28 August 2008 at 11:38 AM
#178 Chris, it all makes a pretty story except for two things.
1. you are talking about extent all the time. Assuming that the melt is only happening from the Extremities of the Ice. Nothing could be further from the truth today. OK Area is unreliable because of the meltwater issues, but compare these two.
1.
2004
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsredata/asi_daygrid_swath/l1a/n6250/2004/aug/asi-n6250-20040828-v5_visual.png
Today (although the link will update tomorrow)
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_visual.png
The clear and quite extensive melt inside the leading edge of the ice is massively different from 2004. I’d suggest that there is no single point of contact, except the SST figures. More on that in a second.
2.
I have noticed the the entire Ice cap has been moving in response to the wind. Stacking up on Svalbard and the islands off Russia then pushing down on the Archipelago and opening up from the islands and Svalbard.
I’ve never seen that before. Have you?
Back to the SST. Clearly there is a massive difference between the SST for 2004 and the SST for 2008.
It’s quite simple really, there is nearly 1 Million sq km “More” warm sea this year than in 2004 where the sea was insulated under the ice. I’d guess that would be a pretty huge energy budget even at the same SST as 2004? I’m no good at Maths and equations but even I can see that raising 1 Million sq km of water by a degree or two “C” is some massive amount of energy. Energy which will power yet more fall and spring warming in the Arctic.
Or did I get that wrong?
28 August 2008 at 11:42 AM
I don’t know if captcha got me or not so I’ll repost
#178 Chris, it all makes a pretty story except for two things.
1. you are talking about extent all the time. Assuming that the melt is only happening from the Extremities of the Ice. Nothing could be further from the truth today. OK Area is unreliable because of the meltwater issues, but compare these two.
1.
2004
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsredata/asi_daygrid_swath/l1a/n6250/2004/aug/asi-n6250-20040828-v5_visual.png
Today (although the link will update tomorrow)
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_visual.png
The clear and quite extensive melt inside the leading edge of the ice is massively different from 2004. I’d suggest that there is no single point of contact, except the SST figures. More on that in a second.
2.
I have noticed the the entire Ice cap has been moving in response to the wind. Stacking up on Svalbard and the islands off Russia then pushing down on the Archipelago and opening up from the islands and Svalbard.
I’ve never seen that before. Have you?
Back to the SST. Clearly there is a massive difference between the SST for 2004 and the SST for 2008.
It’s quite simple really, there is nearly 1 Million sq km “More” warm sea this year than in 2004 where the sea was insulated under the ice. I’d guess that would be a pretty huge energy budget even at the same SST as 2004? I’m no good at Maths and equations but even I can see that raising 1 Million sq km of water by a degree or two “C” is some massive amount of energy. Energy which will power yet more fall and spring warming in the Arctic.
Or did I get that wrong?
28 August 2008 at 11:46 AM
#190
Andrew,
Interesting numbers. I have a few questions for you.
In Germany a PV panel produces typically 800 Wh per Wp per year. So with an energy cost of 31 kWh per Wp, that would mean 31.000/800 = 38 years energy payback time, not 21. Can you comment on that?
How did you get to an energy cost of $0.92 / Wp? Simply 20% of $4.68? Is the cost of refining silica into silicon only electric cost? No machines? No labour? Isn’t the $4.68 price not an end user price including margins for the manufacturer and reseller?
How did you get to the 31 kWh energy cost per Wp? Divide $0.92 by $0.03? Isn’t the $0.92 / Wp based on the price that the manufacturer pays to the energy company?
Can you enlighten us a bit on the justification of this calculation? No offence, but to me it seems you just typed a few numbers into your calculator without really understanding what the numbers mean.
28 August 2008 at 12:07 PM
#190, Andrew, your figures are well thought out but they fall down on one small fact. You are calculating the number of hours per day with Bright Sunlight. which is what you need to produce the 1 peak watt PV.
However there will be at least two more hours on average where the cells will produce half your 1pwPV.
Taking the figure to 5 from 4 reduces your years from 21 to16.
Using mirrors to focus sunlight could reduce it even more.
If the manufacturers produce PV cells to generate their own power for manufacturing then the figure drops even more.
OK the German government are skewing the market by subsidising this, however at the end of the day there will be millions of households who will input power to the grid. Microgeneration in other words. which means their energy security will be much higher than if they had not done it.
Which is an entirely different equation.
28 August 2008 at 12:28 PM
Andrew, (#190)
You might be interested in a more careful calculation of energy payback time:
http://www.nrel.gov/pv/thin_film/docs/lce2006.pdf
Energy payback time in Southern Europe (more comparable to the US) is 1.7 to 2.7 years, much shorter than your calculation. Part of your problem may be that you
are basing you calculation on a retail price for solar.
Chris
28 August 2008 at 1:30 PM
wayne davidson in 187 wrote:
First year ice is more salty than old multi-year. The salty bits melt first — before the icier bits, drain out as brine, and then the wind and the waves compactify the ice over the years. But I assume you misspoke. And then of course we have the other factors: thin ice, waves, a lower freezing point / melting point, etc.. Don’t see a need to invoke some mechanism for surface melt where melting is taking place almost entirely at the bottom.
In any case, I am at work, so I have to keep it short at this point. But what do you think? 220,000 km^2 below last year’s sea ice extent minimum by the 30th of next month?
28 August 2008 at 3:37 PM
#191 SSTs:
Late August SST 2008 vs 2007 and 2008 vs 2004, °C.
[data from: http://nomad1.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?ctlfile=oiv2.ctl&varlist=on&ptype=map&dir=&lite=1 ]
G.
28 August 2008 at 3:55 PM
i hesitate to introduce yet another topic, but this is fascinating:
http://www.livescience.com/environment/080711-nhm-sea-stripes.html
http://www.livescience.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display.php?s=environment&c=&l=on&pic=080714-sea-currents-02.jpg&cap=A+worldwide+crisscrossing+pattern+of+ocean+current+striations+has+been+revealed+through+measurements+made+by+drifting+buoys+over+a+period+of+more+than+20+years+and+through+satellite+readings+of+ocean+velocity.+Blue+bands+represent+westward-flowing+currents+and+red+bands+indicate+eastward-flowing+currents+that+move+at+roughly+1+centimeter+per+second.+Credit%3A+Nikolai+Maximenko%2C+University+of+Hawaii&title=
can anyone pint me to similar research on these slooooow currents ?
28 August 2008 at 4:48 PM
220,000 km2 is right around the size of utah, right?
28 August 2008 at 5:12 PM
#175 Wayne Davidson
NSIDC mentioned that it is the undersea current doing this and pretty much all bottom melting. I think the sun is to low on the horizon at this point.
Did you folks see the NSIDC chart today.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
28 August 2008 at 5:48 PM
Timothy, A cup of Tea with first year ice is bitter, drinkable, if you have no choice, tea with old multi-year ice is as good as Iceberg tea! So you are right, first year ice is more salty, but I didn’t misspoke,
For extent minima forecast calculation, someone out there can take this map:
http://seaice.bplaced.net/gfs.html
Calculate the area of deep bue, that would be an intelligent estimate of how much more ice is about to vanish.
28 August 2008 at 5:58 PM
Hey I’m a geologist turned Quaternary oceanographer and aspiring climate scientist. These fields aren’t as different from one another as some may think.
28 August 2008 at 6:00 PM
Detail further to #196–
“Multiyear ice has distinct properties that distinguish it from first-year ice, based on processes that occur during the summer melt. Multiyear ice contains much less brine and more air pockets than first-year ice. Less brine means “stiffer” ice that is more difficult for icebreakers to navigate and clear.” (NSIDC: All About Sea Ice: Characteristics: Multi-Year Ice.)
“. . .sea ice is a porous material made up of pure ice laced with brine-filled cavities and air bubbles.
“Unlike other porous materials, such as sandstone or bone, sea ice’s microstructure and bulk properties can change dramatically over a small temperature range. Sea ice becomes permeable and brine can travel through the solid when temperatures rise above about -5∞C, if the brine-volume fraction is 5 percent and the salt content is 5 parts per thousand.
“. . .In polar regions, a snowstorm can elevate the ice temperature and push down on the surface. Brine cavities grow larger and connect, so the ice becomes permeable. Sea water percolates up through the ice to flood the surface. . .
“. . .once percolation begins, brine pockets quickly connect with each other to create large-diameter brine channels along which most of the fluid transport takes place.
“During the 1999 voyage to Antarctica, [mathematician Kenneth] Golden, Victoria I. Lytle of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart, Australia, and their coworkers ventured out onto the ice to examine brine channels in the field. They used chain saws to cut out slabs of ice 15 to 26 inches thick. Beet juice scrounged from the ship’s galley revealed the intricate brine pathways threading through the ice.”
(Science News Online:http://se02.xif.com/articles/20000812/bob10.asp)
28 August 2008 at 8:22 PM
#200 John, Interesting, the ice is disappearing at locations where SST’s are -4 C…
http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/analysis/351_50.gif
Its not a simple thing to analyze.. But the over all picture, straight thermal physics, may be easier to understand.
28 August 2008 at 8:58 PM
Apparently the Gas Hydrates on the ocean floor are beginning to melt.
Arctic Ocean beginning to release methane
This article was written in April, but apparently now ships in the arctic are beginning to see these methane burps.
On another note, has anybody taken a look at that huge area of fast ice along the North Eastern Coast of Greenland. From what I can remenber, it has always survived the summer melt, but now MODIS has shown that it has broken into large flows, and soon will drift out to sea.
28 August 2008 at 9:58 PM
Clathrates + permafrost release = we’re screwed
My 2 cents.
28 August 2008 at 11:21 PM
#204 Wayne Davidson
I keep thinking there was some sort of circulation shift somewhere that no one is picking up on?
I am very interested in the why or how at the moment.
28 August 2008 at 11:37 PM
Andrew, let’s compare two possible energy sources: Alberta tar sands on one hand, and solar photovoltaics on the other.
Tar sands are a mixture of gravel and bitumen, an extremely heavy crude oil. There are hundreds of different compounds in oil sands, and many of them are toxic, and are left behind as residues of the processing. See Naphthenic Acids Contaminated Tailing Pond Waters in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region (2005)
So, that’s the cost of contaminating huge amounts of water with toxins. By comparison, solar PV plants can be made extremely clean - see the Italian Helios PV plant, for example.
Once in operation, no water is needed for solar PV or wind turbines - but oil sand extraction plants and coal-fired plants and nuclear power plants will always need large volumes of water in order to stay in operation.
As far as energy use goes, it turns out that three to five times as much carbon dioxide is emitted by oil sands processing as by normal petroleum refinery operation. Those resources should not be developed at all - they should be left in the ground, and Canada should start focusing on wind and biomass (as they are a bit far to the north for solar).
Coal is not any better, despite what the $2 million ACCCE coal campaign would tell you. We can’t even remove sulfur, mercury, arsenic or selenium from coal, let alone capture and store the CO2 - the one highly-touted effort to do that, FutureGen, has been a technological flop so far, with no end in sight. FutureGen was supposed to separate coal into a stream of H2 and a stream of CO2, with the CO2 to be buried - but no aspects of the technology are all that reliable, with the main problems being the usual ones with coal - the sulfur and arsenic and mercury and selenium, and the highly toxic sludges produced as waste.
What about energy costs? It’s already clear that solar PV factories can be operated using power derived entirely from solar panels and wind farms - this is called the solar breeder concept. A one giga-watt solar power system could probably keep a large-scale manufacturing plant going.
Take a look at Volvo’s renewable-energy based production plant in Ghent, Belgium:
http://www.cospp.com/articles/print_screen.cfm?ARTICLE_ID=330136
Notice that they use a mixed system - wind turbines, biomass furnaces, and solar PV panels - to meet all their energy needs without resorting to fossil fuels. If a large-scale truck factory can do that (producing 40,000 trucks per year), then so can any other industry.
29 August 2008 at 12:17 AM
Re #205
On another note, has anybody taken a look at that huge area of fast ice along the North Eastern Coast of Greenland. From what I can remenber, it has always survived the summer melt, but now MODIS has shown that it has broken into large flows, and soon will drift out to sea.
Yes, I was discussing that with someone earlier this year, it’s the ‘egg-shaped’ bit near the top middle of this MODIS picture from about a month ago, it was even larger at the minimum last year.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2008203/crefl1_143.A2008203145500-2008203150000.2km.jpg
Look at it now (~ a week ago, rotated ~ 90º counter clockwise):
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?T082322055
You can see there’s a huge chunk missing from the south and some major separated fragments in the north. I’m guessing it’s been fed by what looks like a glacier to the west so if the fast ice goes you’d imagine there would be consequences for the flow?
If you’ve got a fast link check it out at 250m resolution, it’s dramatic!
29 August 2008 at 12:56 AM
#176 Lawrence Coleman,
Spend some time nosing around the links at:
http://www.smu.edu/geothermal/
Per BPL, clicking on the google layer at:
http://www.google.org/egs/
then the link at U.S. Geothermal Resource (3-10km depth) produces some breakdown on the potential at state by state resolution. What’s particularly useful is the depth at which potential is available for a general area displays by clicking on the pie graphs for each state. The needed holes are rather costly, and they get more so the deeper you have to go. All areas are not equally endowed, with much of the nation’s population being left rather deep and cool, if not exactly high and dry.
All may not be as dire for the many as a casual glance might indicate. There seems to be a bit of a breakthrough that should cheer the distributed generation fans. One workaround on the depth issue:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/17524/page1/
A 1 page gloss on the Alaskan project at Chena Hot Springs, a natural spa area that has a long (by Alaskan standards) history of use. They do space heat, and grow much of their food in a greenhouse with geothermal:
http://www.ase.org/uploaded_files/dinner_nominations/Andromeda/Chena%20Hot%20Springs%20Resort%20-%20Andromeda.pdf
They are installing one at a Florida oil well this summer, per a recent report.
29 August 2008 at 2:44 AM
Re Ice melt, I wonder how this fits in with current thinking about how it is unprecendented.
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/050/mwr-050-11-0589a.pdf
and
http://books.google.com/books?id=_-5rQMHKLi8C&pg=PA334&dq=%22the+cold+that+has+for+centuries+past+enclosed+the+seas%22&sig=_9Iyy4d8NVxnctLuL-rwQXMJcPE#PPA334,M1
Interesting I thought.
[Response: So the ice near East Greenland allowed travel to 10º 30′ W between 74 and 80º N? Shocking. And it got warmer two years after 1815? I wonder why. And how does the Svalbard temperature rise to 1922 compare to temperature today? - gavin]
29 August 2008 at 2:54 AM
Re: 205 Norton: Just read that article..sent shivers down my spine. 500+billion tonnes of methane hydrates aready issuing to the arctic sea surface.I saw that no-one was willing to speculate on a time frame for complete hydrate melt. Only that, that would depend on the arctic ice melt above with subsequent warming of the sea bed to higher than -1C as is happening already. Methane is 20X more potent than CO2..that’s the eqivalent of 10+ trillion tonnes of CO2. If this is true we will be witness to the last century of inhabitable planet earth!!
Ok! if mankind is a smart as it believes it is..there is a solution..right???
29 August 2008 at 4:23 AM
There is an article in the UK newspapers the Independent about the sea of galilee drying up and the water levels becomming dangerously low. If there any evidence of any of this being attributed to climte change as well as humans pumping a lot of water for grow crops.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/a-biblical-tragedy-in-the-sea-of-galilee-912338.html
29 August 2008 at 4:41 AM
A just-in article on ’spiegel on-line’ http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,574815,00.html says that the NE and NW passage are now open for the first time in history. What’s quite sobering I thought was that the arctic melt for summer 2008 will be about as severe and maybe even more than summer 2007. This given the fact that the air temps have been cooler this year in the northern hemisphere…shows how strong the forcing is of a still relatively warm arctic ocean. It also indicates to me that we have free fall! - each consecutive year from now should set a new record.
29 August 2008 at 7:46 AM
Re #211
It’s interesting that Terry brings up retreat of the ice in the N Atlantic in 1922 but fails to mention that the same year an expedition to Wrangel Island (off Siberia) was stranded because the island was ice bound and the supply ship couldn’t make it. A Soviet expedition landed there in 1926 and were trapped there for several years by heavy ice and were finally relieved by an icebreaker in the summer of 1929 (which at times could only make a few hundred meters/day).
29 August 2008 at 8:32 AM
[206,Philippe] - “Clathrates + permafrost release = we’re screwed
My 2 cents.”
Let’s not get down-hearted. We can still make a difference. I’m almost resigned to losing the Greenland ice sheet, though if biochar sequestration is all it’s said to be by some, even that might not be lost.
If the clathrates are as bad as you think, then it just shifts our influence from trying to save the Himalayan glaciers to trying to save the East Antarctic ice sheet. For sure, a world which involved the melt of all ice except the EAIS would be problematic, but saving ourselves 70m of sea-level rise would still be worth doing and give us a much better chance.
29 August 2008 at 8:55 AM
Terry, I’m curious — how did you come across the material you posted here? Where did you find it? Did you know it was about the years right around the huge volcano? I’m wondering if you were fooled? Did you find that on some blog that misled you about its context?
Did you find it yourself, looking for cool years, but not understand it?
No shame fooling yourself (or even being fooled) once. Lesson is: it’s a mistake to try to find something to prove what you want to believe.
With science it works the opposite way. Don’t be fooled again.
29 August 2008 at 10:01 AM
Looking at the latest NSIDC extent graph, and comparing with the one from two days previous:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_extent_hires.png
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20080827_Figure1.png
Interesting differences. Obviously some of this is the wind pushing ice about and the 15% criterion at play.
However, it looks like the Canadian archipelago is starting to freeze up again, and also some of the open areas of the Beaufort Sea (north of Alaska?). The 2007 minimum looks safe.
Anyone else see the Morgenstern paper in GRL? Sounds like O3 might explain the discrepancy between Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice trends.
29 August 2008 at 11:02 AM
Could someone here give me an accurate answer as to how much of the heat trapped by our greenhouse gases, and the extra water vapor they’ve created, is being stored in the ocean’s waters? I’ve read everything from 10% to 90%.
[Response: The answer is closer to 90%. But it’s possible there is some confusion over what you are asking. Do you have links to the different assessments? We might be able to explain them. The reason why the ocean is taking up so much is because of the heat capacity of water - it takes much more energy to warm the oceans than it does to warm the air (or melt the ice). So for a temperature rise that is roughly comparable in air and surface ocean, the energy change is much larger in the ocean. - gavin]
29 August 2008 at 11:28 AM
L G Norton, 205, said :
“…but apparently now ships in the arctic are beginning to see these methane burps.”
Do you have a source for that report, please ?
Timothy, 216, answering Phillipe Chantreau’s
“Clathrates + permafrost release = we’re screwed”
said “Let’s not get down-hearted. We can still make a difference.”
Interesting remark. Being happy or depressed is irrelevant, the glaciers keep on melting regardless of anyone’s mood.
I don’t fight because I expect to win or lose, I fight because it’s the only right thing to do.
I thought we were screwed 30+ years ago, when the first plausible predictions of this scenario were publicized, and people failed to act in a rational manner to avoid the danger.
I think folks have to ask themselves why they are worried. For one’s business investments ? For one’s own survival ? Or, for one’s children’s future ? Or for civilization and the human species ? Or, for all the living things on the planet ? Why ?
Trashing the biosphere shouldn’t be something we are down hearted about - what’s the appropriate response ? The whole human race should apologise to the universe for the insane crime we are committing here…
to paraphrase Joni Mitchell,’they paved paradise and put up a parking lot, and then the parking lot fell down on their heads and killed them all’…
I fight because my conscience tells me that a bad thing is happening, and I can’t stop it, but I don’t have to join in…
I’m happy every day, because I’m *alive* and I prefer to be happy, even though this horrible event is unfolding, where everything I have loved - the good people, the forests, rivers, lakes, the wonders of the oceans and high mountains - it’s all slipping away forever…because of human stupidity and ignorance.
Despair is pointless. Do something.
Learn how to make shoes for yourself, because if all that methane comes out in the next decade, there aren’t going to be any shipments of Chinese shoes coming to the shops…likely, there aren’t going to be any shops with anything at all…
or, am I wrong ?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7580294.stm
http://www.countercurrents.org/goodchild230808.htm
reCAPTCHA seems to get ever spookier..’DYING determinedly’
29 August 2008 at 11:39 AM
Just been catching up on a week’s worth. I hope, good citizens of Real Climate, you can forgive one more off-topic diversion, because if you are still reading, Amanda Eldridge, you might be just the person to sort this whole mess out!
Because you are right - you and your generation will be the ones who suffer. Please read as much as you can, get as informed as you can, get help where you can. The science community (and Real Climate) is here to help - it is scientists who have raised the alarm, after all. But so far, no-one has heeded that alarm. In the end, it comes down to the world’s politicians… and this is where you come in!
Yours is the first thing I’ve ever read from a child where I can feel the ANGER. That anger is right, and what is needed - our generation has failed and is dumping its responsibility on your shoulders. What if millions of 13 year olds across the world got as angry as you? So start a website - get all the help you need from friends and family. I even have a catchy slogan to get you started - next to a picture of the Earth, put “You Broke It, You Fix It”, and get kids who agree to sign up. And say it loud and proud to the politicians of the world - the deals they make in 2009 ending up in Copenhagen in December will probably determine what sort of a world you will live in. The world needs to hear your collective voice screaming as loud - and as soon - as it can!
29 August 2008 at 11:44 AM
CL #220:
““Let’s not get down-hearted. We can still make a difference.”
Interesting remark. Being happy or depressed is irrelevant, the glaciers keep on melting regardless of anyone’s mood.”
But if you go now “we’re boned” all that’s left to do is give up. How many people who give up get anything done? If we’re going to give up, we might as well go big time. Run up HUGE debts, trash anything we want, break any laws and find the nearest attractive creature that can’t run away from amorous advances.
After all, if we’re doomed, might as well go out with a bang, eh?
‘course that seals our fate: we really ARE boned because of our decision it was too late.
Or take the positive view and at least, even if you’re wrong, you’ve enjoyed working on something new and interesting, maybe even gotten life to last longer. Maybe, even if we’re wrong, something later will give us a massive opportunity to change. E.g. space elevators and useful large space station/cities could be achievable before we get a runaway CO2 catastrophe.
But if we give up, we really are doomed.
29 August 2008 at 11:54 AM
To go WHERE NO SHIP has gone before, Congratulations on Polarstern
http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/Polarstern_nic.png
Placing human eyes amongst the open water North of Beaufort, a new ice free ocean has its first ship. True exploration and science at its best.
29 August 2008 at 12:01 PM
Re: #209 -
Phil. Felton notes the changes in the ice along the North Eastern coast of Greenland. It would appear that the winds have forced the broken ice to move northward. Recall that last Winter, there was a considerable flow of sea-ice in the opposite direction, that is, out of the Arctic Ocean thru the Fram Strait. Here’s a link to an animation.
http://www.homerdixon.com/download/arctic_flushing.html
Notice the apparent storm caused shattering of the sea-ice in the Beaufort Sea (the lower RHS of the screen) early in the animation. With the extent this year again approaching record minimums, I think we will see a similar flow pattern repeated this coming Winter, if the prevailing winds are a repeat of that seen last year. There might even be an increase, if the land fast ice continues to break up and thus the effective width of the Fram Strait would be greater. That would translate into major flows of fresh water in the form of sea-ice into the East Greenland Current, thence into the Labrador Sea. I think this can only continue to freshen the waters in the Sub-Polar Gyre and the Nordic Seas.
Does anyone have any oceanographic data on the strength of the THC sinking in the Greenland Sea this year? I don’t mean the data from the RAPID current array from Florida to Spain. I’d like to know, were there any of those “Convective Chimneys” found in the Greenland Sea?
E. S.
29 August 2008 at 12:47 PM
Gavin: In answer to your response in #219, one reference is the following, in which it says the oceans hold 80% of our trapped heat.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/02/02/climate.change.report/
Then on page 106 of Robert Henson’s book, “The Rough Guide to Climate Change”, second edition, he puts the percentage at 10%.
I have read other estimates that it’s 90%.
With your resources, I’m sure your figure of 90% is correct.
29 August 2008 at 1:06 PM
Mark, 222,
Am I mis-reading you, or did you mis-read what I wrote ? Perhaps I didn’t express it very clearly. *I* will NEVER give up. Nor will I party the final days away in glorious rioting…(if that appealed to me, I’d be doing it anyway, regardless of AGW).
My point was perhaps too subtle. If the prospect of global cataclysm is truly upon us and unavoidable, then almost everybody is going to go through some heavy emotional and psychological re-adjustments and re-evaluate their motives. What I’m saying, is that one’s mood is an independent variable, which can be consciously selected. But this isn’t the place for a seminar on the inner game and all that…
Well said, Kent Guy. Love and rage !
Spooky reCaptcha does it again ‘Amanda 1901′
29 August 2008 at 1:52 PM
Nice imagery available, for example:
http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/modis_Oden.png
29 August 2008 at 2:42 PM
re Phil Fenton (209):
This image of Northeast Greenland shows the fast ice is fast no longer. I wonder if anyone has instruments on that particular outlet glacier. It would be fascinating to see how much it speeds up as the blockage to the sea is cleared. And if you go down to 250 meter resolution, you can see meltwater ponds on the main glacier.
Timothy Chase: I agree that we can’t lose heart, but some days it is hard. But my 10 year old daughter is having serious worries about her future. She doesn’t know the half of it, but still she worries about just growing up and having a family of her own. So I do what I can.
reCAPTCH: Change Jr.
29 August 2008 at 2:56 PM
Re #130
I suspect some warmer air than measured at 2 meters a factor in this years melt. The physics of ice and air interactions needs very close scrutiny, if warmer air is responsible, as I think so, we have to find it.
Wayne one thing to consider is the Greenhouse effect! As we are told frequently (and as you know from your daily life), the length of daylight is falling rapidly in the N polar regions, however the IR isn’t. See here for example:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np_weatherdata.html
Note that the short wave (solar) is about 1/3rd of its midsummer value while IR has hardly dropped.
29 August 2008 at 3:08 PM
RE 220 & 222, here’s an attitude I can ID with:
Excerpts from: “The Delusion Revolution: We’re on the Road to Extinction and in Denial,” by Robert Jensen, AlterNet. Posted August 15, 2008. http://www.alternet.org/story/95126/the_delusion_revolution%3A_we%27re_on_the_road_to_extinction_and_in_denial/
“Our current way of life is unsustainable. We are the first species that will have to self-consciously impose limits on ourselves if we are to survive…”
Then it goes on about how we need to change our conception of the future, and ends with:
“We should not be afraid to face the death of the old future, nor should we be afraid to try to earn a new one. It is the work of all the ages, and it is our work today, more than ever. It is the work that allows one to live, joyously, while in a profound state of grief.”
I know I thought some 18 years ago (when I became more intensely aware of GW & started reducing our GHGs cost-effectively) that all I’d have to do is tell people about it & how they could save money while saving the earth, and they’d tell others, who’d tell others, and I could get back to my regularly scheduled life, including reducing our GHGs. Instead it’s been like a nightmare of wall after wall of denial and lack of clear understanding. But now with growing talk about GW, I’m beginning to feel a tad bit more optimistic — just hope the talk turns to walk in time to avoid the really bad stuff.
29 August 2008 at 3:13 PM
Re #228
It’s Felton by the way but no big deal.
Yesterday’s image was too cloudy to see that detail but the one you posted from today shows how much breakup there has been since the one I posted from 10 days ago. It’s spectacular if you view it at 250m resolution, the ‘fast ice’ has been smashed to smithereens, another few days and the glacier will be exposed to the sea!
29 August 2008 at 3:43 PM
To Jack Roesler (225):
Thanks for catching the discrepancy between the value in my book of “at least 10%” for the percentage of total AGW-trapped heat that’s gone into the oceans in the last half-century and the values of 90%+ found elsewhere. I don’t have notes with me right now, but I believe I obtained the 10% value by comparing total anthropogenic radiative forcing (~1.6 W/m2 in IPCC AR4, p.131) to the increase in global ocean heat content (~0.21 W/m2 in IPCC AR4, p.387).
None of my reviewers changed the “at least 10%” value, but I can’t square it with the 90%+ values noted here today. Any thoughts?
–Bob
[Response: The 90% is the where the total anomalous heat has gone (Levitus et al, 2002). Your calculation isn’t the same thing at all, and actually isn’t quite right. First off, the net forcing in 2006 is not the net imbalance in 2006 - the planet has partially warmed up already and so some part of the total forcing has already been adjusted to. Hansen et al (2005) estimated the current imbalance at about 0.8 W/m2. Next, the flux going into the ocean this year (or this decade) is not the same as the averaged flux since 1960. It is likely to have increased as the forcings have increased. In fact, almost all of the 0.8 W/m2 estimated imbalance is likely going into the ocean (once you’ve averaged over enough ocean ‘weather’ like El Nino/La Nina etc.) (see this discussion for more details). So, I think the bottom line is that the 90% is correct. (Sorry!). - gavin]
29 August 2008 at 4:36 PM
Re: 220
The source of the article is from Natalia Shakhova, currently a guest scientist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who is also a member of the Pacific Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok.
I wonder if some reporter took her out of context
Here is another of her articles, showing the burning of methane on the arctic ice
Igniting methane on the arctic ice
29 August 2008 at 4:39 PM
Re methane/hydrates. I’ve been following this issue at Hot Topic (eg here, and see links in that post), and I think a couple of things are germane. The first is that it would seem unlikely that the entire store of methane hydrate on the Arctic sea floor would “burp” at once. However, a chronic leak could still have the potential to have dramatic impacts. The global warming potential of methane is usually quoted as 23 times CO2, but that is on a century timescale. Over 20 years, the GWP is 72. The impact of even small increases in atmospheric methane could be profound.
Perhaps David Archer could chip in, provide more enlightenment on the work that’s being done in the seas off Siberia, and deliver some kind of assessment of our vulnerability to methane hydrate releases in the Arctic.
29 August 2008 at 4:41 PM
Wayne, based on the latest info at the nsidc site, I think there’s a good chance (about 90%) that Arctic sea ice extent in 2008 will drop below the record low set in 2007.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Also,
http://www.desmogblog.com/palin-denies-climate-change-realities-on-first-day-as-mccains-running-mate
29 August 2008 at 5:43 PM
Not the ‘entire store’ but there are arguments for ‘burps’ in the past (craters in the seabed, for example). Once a layer of sediment starts to lift off of a deposit, removing some pressure and letting seawater in, a layer or bed could turn into a storm of bubbles very quickly.
http://doi:10.1016/j.margeo.2005.12.005
http://www.ifremer.fr/biocean/acces_fr/rapports/Appel_3divefr.htql?numcruise=122&numdive=272
29 August 2008 at 5:48 PM
> next to a picture of the Earth, put “You Broke It, You Fix It”, and get kids who agree to sign up.
And call it to the attention of the very few who own and control most of the planet.
http://www.lcurve.org
“You will not be outraged by outrageous statistics if you don’t comprehend the numbers.”
29 August 2008 at 6:42 PM
Hi Pat, Hope the guys will come up with a few answers with respect to this melt, I got some serious concerns related to about how we are judging the rate of GW increase. My estimates in March or April are getting close with respect to ice, however surface temperatures are said to be cooler, which does not match either current ice extent, neither refraction sun disk expansions
which agree with the melt extent. Montreal summer 2008 sun disk data show no cooling as well.
Hence its difficult to project anything from surface temperatures data, its understandable why models dont fit to surface data, otherwise they would never give coherent forecasts. I dont know if Alaska is also showing some cooling on your surface plots, if they do, The digging for answers must be deep.
29 August 2008 at 8:21 PM
gavin’s inline in 232.
Some of the heat imbalance goes into warming (and weakening or even melting) the ice sheets. Of course, at some point the strength of the ice foundation fails, the potential energy of the ice sheet is converted into kinetic energy, and all of the energy does end up in the oceans, but perhaps the process has some interest that is worth thinking about.
29 August 2008 at 9:33 PM
Phil. Felton wrote in 229:
Phil, the graphs are impressive!
Wayne, I know you were asking earlier about the emissivity of ice. Turns out to be fairly high, but variable, depending not just on the wavelength or angle but type of ice.
Here is one source to check out:
… and another:
Emissivity of Ice and Water
Almost Perfect Black Body Radiators
http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/staff/pplassma/MedImaging/PROJECTS/IR/CAMTEST/Icewater.htm
29 August 2008 at 9:42 PM
Regarding hydrate happenings: Once a patch of hydrate begins to degas it will create an up-welling bubble stream that resembles an airlift pump. This will promptly induce an upward water flow with the development of a circulating cell which will pull water from beyond and above to the source of the bubble stream.
This import of energy will then support the degassing process and could well lead to the rapid collapse of the locally-available hydrate area. The induced water velocities could readily approach those required to strip un-compacted sediment off hydrate deposits.
So the risk of a blow-out from a significant area is high and real, and would be limited only by the physical layout of the deposit and the resistance of the overburden sediments to erosion and heat transfer.
The evidence at the surface would be the methane gas delivery via a mass of bubbles, accompanied by discoloration of the water carrying sediment, as well as significant surface disturbance as the circulating cell provides an outward vector to the surface waters. The core of the up-welling could present a danger to any floating object, due to the reduced density of the ‘water’ in the stream.
Are there satellite sensors in orbit that can detect methane blooms, or keep an eye out for the surface signatures?
29 August 2008 at 11:32 PM
Hank Roberts wrote in 237:
Please see:
… but on a related note:
Bill Gates checks out Canada’s tar sands
Posted by Lisa Stiffler at August 21, 2008 11:32 p.m.
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/environment/archives/146697.asp
30 August 2008 at 5:07 AM
patn said
“Wayne, based on the latest info at the nsidc site, I think there’s a good chance (about 90%) that Arctic sea ice extent in 2008 will drop below the record low set in 2007.”
About 90%?
On 9 August 2008 extent was 852k km^2 behind 2007 (per IJIS data)and there was 1311k km^2 extent reduction after 9 Aug in 2007. Reductions would have to be 65% faster than 2007. (2007 was fastest decline in last six years.) Note I am cherrypicking 9 Aug which was a maximum in the extent difference to make the 2008 rate of decline look good.
We are now about 456k km^2 behind with 410k km^2 melt left in the 2007 season. So now we need 111% faster than 2007 to reach a record. I think this indicates we are not keeping up with the rate required to reach a record.
That doesn’t mean we will not have a record. As we approach September the extent reductions may well become more variable. I am sure some better analysis than that is possible. However, I do wonder when I start counting the number of factor involved: water salinity, SST, depth of warm water temperature, areas of different ice thickness, ice concentration, first year ice/salt levels in ice, air temperatures at 2m and other heights, wind directions, storms/wave heights and angles etc.
There are a lot of factors. So are speculations based on a favourite subset of information likely to be overfitting the results to the inputs considered? Doesn’t it really need models that try to take all these factors into account?
Anyway 90% seems a pretty high figure when it appears to me that we are not keeping up with the required rate.
30 August 2008 at 5:14 AM
Gareth, #234. I would think that if we can get something down there and convert these hydrates to something a little less volatile in place and put them back there (heck, maybe using the pressures and the temperature difference to generate on-site energy), this would be a good thing for “geoengineering” to do. It doesn’t “fix” anything currently a problem, but it does remove a HUGE risk for the near future if the pessimists are right.
Better than, in my opinion, trying to take carbon out of the atmosphere and hide it underground (unless they found a way to turn it into graphite to be put in the oil wells with local CO2 neutral power generation)
30 August 2008 at 5:18 AM
CL, #226, I wasn’t thinking you were giving up, I was just using the quote to start off with.
ta.
30 August 2008 at 5:43 AM
There’s the Sciamachy Envisat data, but that wasn’t showing anything last year. It would be interesting to see an update.
And Mark: if wishes were ponies, I’d have enough to mobilise a tribe.
30 August 2008 at 6:32 AM
Note: The risks of Clathrate release, release of CH4/CO2 from permafrost, and other unknown unknowns are precisely the reason why I have argued strenuously that there needs to be more to the economic analysis than rising sea level.
The process of clathrate release is interesting. Back in the 90s, I reported on the modeling of limnic eruptions of the type that occurred at Lake Nyos in Cameroun. In this case, a CO2 vent feeds into the bottom of a deep volcanic lake. CO2 goes into solution in the cold, dense bottom waters, further increasing their density. The process is stable until something overturns the water. Then, the CO2 is released an the frothy mixture rises explosively to the surface like a shaken can of soda. In this case, though, you have 3 phase flow, so the dynamics will be even more complicated. Has anyone modeled this?
30 August 2008 at 9:03 AM
Reply to Crandles
In the 2007 NSIDC graph, the inflection point in the sea ice extent occurred just after 1 July. It is not clear that it has occurred yet this year — i.e. the rate of melting does not appear that it’s begun to slow down. The second derivative is not yet positive (or at least not recognizably so). So Pat N’s conjecture that there is a 90% chance that we beat the 2007 minimum is quite reasonable.
What is special about 9 August. You do seem to be cherry picking. And the numerical argument you present is a reminder of why we invented geometry. Look at the graph!
30 August 2008 at 9:16 AM
Mark, 245, Ah, I see. No problem
“People are so stupid and so destructive — we can do nothing for them.” So I withdrew from society. I thought I would leave and just sit on a hill and watch it collapse.”
http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/mollison.html
30 August 2008 at 10:20 AM
229 and 240, Many thanks Phil, that`s it! Of course its the greenhouse effect, but 3d graph as to where the IR is coming from towards the ice is crucial. Again,
I supect an inversion, 2 meters above the ice sounds reasonable that there is an inversion starting there. So there is Warmer air right above, bombarding the ice with thermal IR, in return the ice itself keeps this air quite warm at levels uncertain, but its a fair guess that clouds bounce back a great deal of Thermal infra red, greenhouse gases will only amplify this effect. So it is very possible that colder surface temperatures measured at 2 m above the ice are misleading. And that a better measurement would be to
pinpoint the warmest air above the ice, and see how thick and warm it is. Since no one is there except Polarstern, I hope they do regular radiosonde probings
of the Upper air. Gribb would give an idea as well, but I suspect that this warmer air is a huge thermal source. Enough as I already measured in the spring,
to be compared with 2007 density weighted temperatures of the entire atmosphere. The cooling in 2008 was near the surface, but the atmosphere remains just as warm as a whole.
I am also curious about Alastair 9 inch assertion, is there something there as well?
I would say that we are not seeing a major player
in this melt, so its safe to say that it will surprise still.
30 August 2008 at 10:37 AM
Re: 238
Hi Wayne,
Temperatures at Alaska climate stations through July this year have been below historical (1971-2000) averages. I’ll check the NWS website next week to see how August 2008 compares to recent 30 year averages.
30 August 2008 at 11:22 AM
re #248
Robert Matlock
How good is your late inflection point argument? 2004 had a late inflection point and after the inflection point there was very little reduction in extent. Not very reliable would be my reaction. Also, I would rather trust when the minimum has been rather than when the inflection point might indicate the minimum will be.
What is special about 9 August? Perhaps I expressed myself badly; I should have said high not good. Anyway just wanted to say that I was deliberately rotten-cherry-picking. If I picked say 1 August as the starting rate then the required rate would have risen from 37.5% to 111% faster than 2007 rate instead of 65% to 111%. The data would be better but it might cause people to wonder if I was cherry picking so making clear I was rotten-cherry-picking seemed appropriate.
There may well be reason to think the minimum will be later than 2007 and that would be a problem for my simple required rate calculations. There may well be reason to say a new record is more likely than not. 90% sounds overconfident to me. Would you really offer odds of 8:1 or better for a bet?
30 August 2008 at 11:59 AM
Re: pat n in 235, crandles in 243
I must admit that the melt isn’t quite keeping up with my own projections at the moment: it is about a day behind where I would expect it to be. However, there is a great deal of day-to-day variability. I will want to see where we are at on the 16th of September.
30 August 2008 at 12:33 PM
90% chance of a new record?
From my reading of the situation I agree with Crandles, however my main reason is I don’t see how anyone can predict what is to come due to the state of the ice, this is now in the hands of the weather. So probabilities like 90% seem gross overstatements of confidence to me.
At present NSIDC is showing a slight flattening, that doesn’t sway me either way.
#244 Mark,
Pessimists or realists?
If we are in a rapid transition to a seasonally ice-free state (I now think we are), then that implies substantial warming of the Arctic. Which will have secondary impacts:
1) Climatic shift.
If you warm the Arctic, and (crucially) increase humidity due to higher temperatures and more open water over 0degC, then you will change the relationship between the polar and tropical regions. This changes what happens in between the pole and tropics, i.e. climate in the northern hemisphere. Such changes would not be in the small-scale physics but in the large scale relationships, such as jet stream tracks affecting precipitation. Thinking of the atmosphere in the simplest possible terms - a heat engine - shows how inevitable this is. The impacts are not known but the worst are likely to be changes in timing and amounts of precipitation. But what practical impact will that have overall, on both humans and the Biosphere/Lithosphere/Oceans?
2) Clathrate outgassing.
A greater area of open ocean warms the oceans, just look at the
JAXA EORC plots you can look back to see that warming. Furthermore removing the ice increases storminess (due to water vapour) and storms assist vertical mixing, with less ice this happens over a wider area. There is already evidence of clathrates being potentially unstable and there being more risk of rapid outgassing than land permafrost (Shakhova). But how much methane will be released and how quickly?
3) Greenland and Sea Level Rise.
Remove the sea-ice from the North Greenland coast and you will warm the northern flanks of Greenland, which have been cooled by the expanse of ice across the Arctic Ocean. The ice cap has been large enough in the summer to effectively develop it’s own climate, keeping it markedly cooler than in the wider Arctic Basin. Warmer temperatures in the north of Greenland are sure to lead to a greater contribution to sea level rise. How by how much and how fast will sea level rise?
There are multiple permutations of the further/wider impacts of 1,2 & 3, that may enhance or offset the overall impacts.
All of the above were risks of climate change anyway, at some future point. If this is a rapid transition then they have just been pegged in our lot: They are no longer possible risks in the future, they are now things that are commencing and once started will proceed.
Were we looking at a seasonally ice free Arctic in 2050 we’d have time to learn more adapt and perhaps reduce our emissions severely enough to slow the process. If as I now fear we’re looking at an ice-free Arctic by 2018 we have barely any time to do anything before consequences hit. The only attainable option we may have now is to try to avoid a catastrophe by massive emissions reductions, reductions we will have to achieve as we struggle to cope with an unfolding disaster. And that’s ignoring the possibility of wider climatic destabilisation caused by impacts secondary to the Arctic’s 3 secondary impacts above.
It is quite possible that we have just run out of time.
30 August 2008 at 12:37 PM
Good for you Gareth.
Hopefully you’re not too tall for a pony.
30 August 2008 at 1:21 PM
# Gareth Says:
30 August 2008 at 5:43 AM
> Are there satellite sensors in orbit that can detect methane >blooms, or keep an eye out for the surface signatures?
>There’s the Sciamachy Envisat data, but that wasn’t showing anything >last year. It would be interesting to see an update.
>And Mark: if wishes were ponies, I’d have enough to mobilise a tribe.
I am not downplaying the problems with methane. I only note that the methane emissions will show up in the atmospheric concentration, measured by different organizations. Increase in concentrations pretty much stopped around 2000. We’ll see later this year if the observations on blurbs have any global importance at this time.
30 August 2008 at 5:19 PM
Lauri,
Last year, atmospheric methane began to increase again. The BBC reported NOAA’s 2007 figures here, back in April.
30 August 2008 at 5:26 PM
Re #232 (Gavin’s reply to my post):
We’ll fix this in the next printing of the Rough Guide. Thanks for clarifying.
And kudos to CobblyWorlds (#254) for an excellent summation of what we ought to be thinking about over the next few years as the Arctic melt continues.
For what it’s worth, I’ll lay 40% odds on this year’s melt surpassing 2007’s . . .
–Bob
30 August 2008 at 6:54 PM
> secondary impacts:
Don’t forget to get in touch with the biologists who were talking with Dr. Bitz back around the time of her thread here, who know some and expect to rapidly learn more about what part of primary ocean productivity depends on the sea ice cycle.
30 August 2008 at 7:20 PM
#251, Thanks Pat, follows the trend, cooler air less ice!
30 August 2008 at 10:08 PM
CobblyWoods wrote in 254:
I agree with your focus on the long range, the methane hydrates and so on, and I think that we could easily focus too much on what happens this year. But at the same time, I think we have entered a new regime of sorts. There haven’t been the big dips and turns that normally occur each year with sea ice extent. So much of it is new, thin ice. So what dips and turns we have seen have been fairly small. And there has been a trend of sorts for the past three months — one which is quite simple — the simplicity of which may be the result of this new regime.
Here is actual vs. projected:
Sea Ice Extent Since May 31, 2008
http://img337.imageshack.us/my.php?image=seaiceextentsince200805cs2.jpg
The data I based it off of was from IJIS and included their May 31 through August 27, 2008:
IJIS Web Site: Data of Sea Ice Extent
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
The last date of actual plotted is August 29, 2008 — which stands out as I omitted August 28, 2008. (However, that isn’t the reason why I omitted the August 28: including it would have meant downloading the data file again.)
Starting with June 1, 2008, I calculated the sea ice loss for each day relative to the preceding day, then I did a quadratic trendline for the sea ice loss. Then for each day, I project a sea ice extent equal to the total projected sea ice loss since May 31, 2008 beginning with the sea ice extent of May 31, 2008. There is no smoothing of the real data on my part — and the two curves are nearly on top of one another since early June. Based upon this projection, this year’s sea ice extent should fall below that of last year on September 16, 2008 and should reach this year’s record on September 30, 2008: 4,062,663 km^2. (Note: this is a slight correction from my earlier projection — where I had begun with June 1 rather than May 31 sea ice extent — while also beginning with the sea ice extent loss of June 1 — which requires one to begin with the sea ice extent of May 31.)
Now when I make that projection I am only being half serious. It isn’t based upon any physics, any analysis of the actual conditions, etc. and strictly amateur. But it is a very simple equation that rather accurately captures the evolution of sea ice extent for the latter half of this year so far. The weather has been the tiny wiggles. And the trend has been clear. Now at some point the trend will change, but then the fact that it changes will itself mean that we have learned something new.
31 August 2008 at 12:59 AM
Re 221 Kent Guy..Exactly wahat I was waiting for..and waiting..and waiting..A bit of ‘Anger’ and fear from the academic community..I think they are at last realizing the full implications of what is happening. Instead of treating this as just another academic exercise as they have done all through college and university..I feel they have crossed the threshhold. With directed anger you can acheive anything..you can put real pressure on respective governmental agencies if there enough of you who feel..rightly ‘terrorified’ of what the numbers you are numbly crunching actually imply for ALL of us. Now it is up to the scientists amongst you to do some forcing for yourselves..actually convey your fear and extreme concern and put this emotion into a logical and irrefutable protocol to present to your relevant authorities. A breath of fresh air came in the words of Amanda Eldridge..we can learn for that..humans are by nature ‘emotional’ creatures. The greatest oratories that have shaped our history have come from a deep feeling of ‘fear’ and ‘anger’ and concern. It is high time for all of to express our fear..to plagerize and modify an iconic saying..”I’m as ’scared’ as hell and I’m not going to take it any more”!!!
31 August 2008 at 1:15 AM
Yes Nukes. Now.
There is no perfect solution. If you are not considering nuclear, you are not seriously considering how desperate the situation is. You are not thinking rationally. You are putting idealism ahead of pragmatism.
Conservation has to be part of the solution. So does wind, solar, etc etc. However, we need additional baseload power that does not produce CO2. Wind and solar don’t cut it. You can’t build a power grid out of them. Sorry. Can’t do it. They can supplement the grid, but you still need baseload.
Most of the problems with nuclear are problems of policy, not Nature. The cost of nuclear is dominated by things like compliance with radiation limits that put exposure orders of magnitude below natural background levels, based on the absurdity of a linear-no-threshold (LNT) model of biological risk to radiation exposure, or other policy absurdities like the abandonment of waste reprocessing, which adds huge expenses to nuclear energy in the form of the overhead of completely unnecessary waste disposal of perfectly useful fuel.
Far more people have been killed just by coal trains alone than have ever been harmed by Western nuclear reactors, nevermind the thousands of people made ill by coal combustion products leading to asthma, cardiovascular problems, mercury poisoning, and nevermind the CO2 that coal puts out.
It is true that Atoms of Peace was an unmitigated disaster; it backfired like so many other well-intentioned programs. However, I would love somebody to explain to me how a change in policy stance by the US or EU towards more civilian nuclear power, or a resumption of spent fuel reprocessing by the US, has any impact whatsoever on global nuclear security. It is quite obvious that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon, but I fail to see why in the world that should have anything to do with whether we decide to get more electricity from civilian nuclear plants. Of course Ahmedenejad will grandstand on anything, but that’s not really news.
It is always the case with technology - always - that it can be used for good or evil purposes. You can use mills and lathes to make farm equipment, or you can use them to make weapons of war. That’s not a reason not to build mills and lathes.
31 August 2008 at 1:17 AM
PS Oops I meant Atoms for Peace, not Atoms of Peace.
31 August 2008 at 3:15 AM
#261 Timothy,
Perhaps I am being too harsh regards the amount of confidence possible.
That’s a very neat agreement, I’d been following the fairly constant lag between 2007 and 2008. I’d not tried fitting a curve. The match prior to August doesn’t surprise me, that it carries on thereafter does!
If it’s not too much trouble: Can you update and re-post when the minima has been declared, it’ll be interesting seeing how it plays out.
#258 Robert Henson,
I’m done making any kind of guess about this year, I just don’t know. But thanks for your comment.
31 August 2008 at 6:46 AM
Well he is really doing it. Lewis Gordon Pugh (The guy that did the 1KM swim at the north pole last year) is kayaking to the north pole.
Here is the blog of his progress.
Lewis Goron Pugh Kayaking to North Pole”
What I can’t figure out, is why he is attempting this from Svalbard. The ice is compressing in this part of the arctic. He should had started from one of the Russian islands in the Laptev Sea, maybe the Anzhu islands. The ice is more broken up on this side, and he would have stood a much better chance.
31 August 2008 at 7:06 AM
Re261 Timothy Chase
A very good fit so far. The minimum dates per IJIS are 2003 18 Sept, 2004 19th, 2005 22nd, 2006 14th, 2007 24th. Losses from 30 Aug to minimum are 2003 293k km^2, 2004 123k, 2005 347k, 2006 172k and 2007 361k.
So it seem a little strange that your fit of past data should be so aggressive in predicting minimum as late as 30 Sept and a further loss of over 1000k km^2. Have you tried seeing how you fit does with previous years and does this normally show that September is rather flatter than the quadratic fit prediction you have used?
31 August 2008 at 9:06 AM
Whoever is organizing Polarstern?…. they are having the right idea, they are right next to a rapid melt zone, Some answers will come from them. It is also important to show the world this wide open huge seasonal sea, the Kayak guy is going to have a rough rough time, a mix of rotten
and old ice awaits him. Its an extreme adventure, which will show how bad the ice has degraded,
but Polarstern has a view of the better picture, wide open water when there should be nothing but ice. From what I gather the ice continues to melt, the 15% graph is a little confusing, when thin broken ice spreads out it gives the idea that the melt has stopped.
[Response: Polarstern is run out of the Alfred Wegner Institute in Bremerhaven. - gavin]
31 August 2008 at 9:41 AM
LG Norton,
Re Lewis Gordon Pugh’s Team.
The main reason I can see for trying from Svalbard is proximity and visa’s/permission. The current 30 Aug thinning from some of the Russian islands is transitory.
This NASA Aqua image you can see from Svalbard to the Pole (distorted at the edge where the pole is).
Through the cloud it’s possible to get an idea of the state of the ice. Given that the maximum resolution is 250m per pixel it might be feasible there’s enough open water in the cracks for a Kayak to get through. However even if the cracks are big enough it’ll be like navigating a constantly changing maze. Give it a few years and he may be successful on a second attempt.
31 August 2008 at 10:00 AM
[no more nuclear please]
31 August 2008 at 10:25 AM
A bit of history:
Issue 20, Winter 1997
U.S.-RUSSIAN ATLAS OF ARCTIC OCEAN
“… On January 14, Vice President Gore announced a new atlas of Arctic oceanographic information in a press conference at the National Geographic Society. NSIDC is distributing this atlas. More than 1.3 million individual temperature and salinity observations on the Arctic Ocean collected over the period 1948-1993 from Russian drifting stations, ice breakers, and airborne expeditions were used to develop the atlas. Approximately 70% of the observations for the Arctic Ocean and shelf seas in this atlas are derived from Russian archives of formerly restricted data with 30% from comparable sources in the U.S. An article about the data in the February issue of National Geographic (”Arctic Breakthrough”, volume 191(2), p. 36-57) describes, in a forward by Vice President Gore, the negotiations with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin that led to the release of the data…..”
http://nsidc.org/pubs/notes/20/
Following links associated with that story shows a huge amount of information, particularly on ocean currents, was being tracked by the Russian and US Navy submarine fleet. It probably still is. I wonder what they know now?
31 August 2008 at 10:50 AM
CobblyWorlds wrote in 265:
Already planned on doing so — no matter how foolish it might make me look. I figure the least I could do would be to share my confusion.
31 August 2008 at 11:30 AM
I was just wondering; with the shift to a seasonally ice free arctic, could the presence of (relatively) warm, moist, less dense air over open water instead of ice in the summer cause net rising air transport and reversal of the polar cell circulation, the elimination of the Ferrel cell, and sinking, stable, drought producing flow in the temperate zones? If this did happen, it would have what Frank Luntz might call “significant impacts” on food production.
31 August 2008 at 11:43 AM
crandles wrote in 267:
You might not say that if you looked at the quadratic fit of the daily ice loss by date. The actual is rather jagged and the projected as smooth as a parabola — oddly enough. But the actual doesn’t remain on one side of the projected for very long, and in terms of ice extent it all seems to balance out rather quickly.
crandles wrote in 267:
The big question is, “How long will the same quadratic remain a ‘good fit’ for the ice loss by date?” If ice melt continues until September 30th, then I see no reason why the quantity of projected melt shouldn’t be of the magnitude projected, give or take a little. But can it continue until September 30th? Well, the minima for 2003, 2004 and 2006 were on the 18th, 19th and 14th, but the minima for 2007 was on the 24th. The 24th is 6 days after the 18th. That was a new record — although only by 2 days when compared with 2005. So I would argue that if we could reach the minima as late as the 24th, there isn’t much reason to think that the next minima couldn’t occur 6 days later — even if that will mean another record for lateness and extent. Anyway, the lateness would be the more remarkable of the two in my view.
crandles wrote in 267:
I haven’t tried previous years as of yet. Then again, it doesn’t look like previous years haven been this smooth before, either. But it would be something worth trying. Easy enough to do. The data from IJIS goes back to 2002, and while it has some holes to it, one doesn’t need complete data to lay down a trendline in Excel — not even a quadratic one. At the same time, I don’t expect it to work quite as well. We have much less old ice this year. Old ice helps to anchor the formation of new ice. And the new ice has been being blown to-and-fro by the wind this year much more so than previous years — or so someone else observed earlier in this thread I believe.
I will look into it.
31 August 2008 at 12:13 PM
Gentlemen,
I have been watching the breakup of that “landfast ice” on the north-northeastern coast of Greenland for some months now via the ENVISAT images on the Danish Institute of Technology’s website.
I have a few questions.
1. Why is it not called an “ice shelf”?
2. Does anyone know if it has ever entirely broken away before?
3. What is the name of the glacier, there, that is no longer being buttressed by the “landfast” ice?
4. Is anyone studying the flow of that glacier? My impression is that it is indeed flowing out now, but this is pure conjecture on my part based on the ENVISAT images.
5. Have y’all been watching the ice break up to the north of that position in an area that would seem “unmeltable” due to its position just south of all of the multi-year ice flowing by? And, note that the temperatures there in the north have been pretty low over the last month.
6. As regards the MODIS images — is there a schedule available of when new images of that area of Greenland become available? I don’t really know how to access the images.
7. The Jakobshavn glacier seems to be really going to town. When will the year’s data be released on flow rates, ablation of the ice sheet, and so forth?
I would mention that once I ran across a great link (unfortunately, I lost it) to google images of the topography of Greenland, and they were on the scary side of awesome because that topography looks like it is just made for ice to slide out, as these paths of least resistance have been carved out over the millenia.
31 August 2008 at 1:47 PM
Re: 254
Based on the on data plot trends on the nsidc website it is not a gross overstatements of confidence for me to say that 2008 extent will likely drop below the 2007 record low.
Furthermore, it is not a gross overstatements of confidence for me to say that the low in 2008 will likely occur later in the season than the historical average.
90% is a numerical confidence level I used to define the term “likely”.
NWS includes probability values in issuing their flood outlook guidance at river stations in the Midwest. However, the NWS hydrologic modeling and outlook methodologies are flawed because NWS has refused to even consider that climate change has been changing rainfall intensities, the timing of snowmelt runoff, transpiration rates and evaporation.
31 August 2008 at 2:11 PM
For Tenney’s question #1 (and perhaps for the Glossary reference collection:
“An «ice shelf» is a thick and extensive sheet of floating glacier ice, …
Sea ice which forms and remains attached to the coast is termed «landfast ice»; …”
www.pc.gc.ca/progs/amnc-nmca/systemplan/gloss_E.asp
(Found by searching Google: landfast ice shelf )
For #6:
You could ask at the MODIS/AQUA page. I find:
“Terra’s orbit … passes from north to south across the equator in the morning, while Aqua passes south to north over the equator in the afternoon. … Terra MODIS and Aqua MODIS are viewing the entire Earth’s surface every 1 to 2 days …” http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/about/
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/ shows the satellite tracks and time ticks for both satellites. Those have helped me look for a particular realtime image by seeing about when the satellite crossed my area of interest. No guarantee.
For other than the ‘realtime’ gallery selections, there’s a lag: “The MODIS snow cover and sea ice products from the Terra satellite…. processing and reprocessing schedule for all MODIS data determines the lag …”
http://nsidc.org/data/modis/faq.html
31 August 2008 at 2:25 PM
Yeek!
http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2008/08/climatologist-dr-jason-e-box-byrd-polar.html
_______excerpt follows_______
Climatologist Jason E. Box, Ph.D., with the Byrd Polar Research Center, has spent the last 14 years monitoring Greenland’s massive ablation.
…
“Estimates of sea level rise are now known to be significantly underestimated,” said Box. “The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] projected sea level rise of around one-and-a-half feet. But this did not take into account the profound ice sheet sensitivity now documented [in Greenland]. Sea level rise could be double, or more [than these predictions]. My best guess is a sea level rise of between three and six feet by the end of this century.”
31 August 2008 at 4:14 PM
Re #275
Tenney Naumer Says:
31 August 2008 at 12:13 PM
Gentlemen,
I have been watching the breakup of that “landfast ice” on the north-northeastern coast of Greenland for some months now via the ENVISAT images on the Danish Institute of Technology’s website.
I have a few questions.
1. Why is it not called an “ice shelf”?
2. Does anyone know if it has ever entirely broken away before?
3. What is the name of the glacier, there, that is no longer being buttressed by the “landfast” ice?
4. Is anyone studying the flow of that glacier? My impression is that it is indeed flowing out now, but this is pure conjecture on my part based on the ENVISAT images.
5. Have y’all been watching the ice break up to the north of that position in an area that would seem “unmeltable” due to its position just south of all of the multi-year ice flowing by? And, note that the temperatures there in the north have been pretty low over the last month.
6. As regards the MODIS images — is there a schedule available of when new images of that area of Greenland become available? I don’t really know how to access the images.
Tenney
I don’t know the answers to most of your questions but I’ve been following that area for the last month or so and the break up has been spectacular!
I look for the Modis pictures on this site.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/
I go to the little Terra map on the top left to see when the satellite crosses that region (usually between 1900 and 2100) and then look at the images indexed by time. Often they’re too cloudy but you find the odd gem!
Here’s last night’s, I think you’ll enjoy it, try 250m res.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2008243/crefl1_143.A2008243190000-2008243190500.2km.jpg
It seems to fit the definition of an ice-shelf, at least up to a week or so ago.
Based on Google earth a Dane called Jørgen Brønlund is buried near there, the glacier is ~12miles wide so that’s a big piece of ice that’s gone. I think it is Nioghalvfjerdsbræ & Zachariae Isstrøm and the triangulular island between them is Lambert Land and the one to the Nth with clear water behind it on this image is Hovgaard, the little side stream to the Nth is Spaltegletscher.
“GREENLAND” By ANKER WEIDICK http://pubs.usgs.gov/prof/p1386c/p1386c.pdf describes the ice as being in a “semipermanent condition of fast ice”.
For a study see here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/276/5314/934?ck=nck
http://www.scienceonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5763/986
Hope that helps?
31 August 2008 at 4:17 PM
Tenney Naumer,12:13 pm, 31 Aug 2008
2)re: name of glacier: Petermann ?
http://geology.com/news/2008/petermann-glacier-breaking-up.shtml
re:greenland topo:
http://membrane.com/sidd/greenland.html
toward the end, there is a link to an animated rotating view of the bedrock as well.
sidd
31 August 2008 at 4:19 PM
Actual vs. Projected Sea Ice Extent for 2007
Looking at 2007…
I did two charts.
The first is done exactly the same way as how I arrived at the projection for 2008.
I calculate daily sea ice extent loss for every day from June 1, 2007 to August 27, 2007. Then I fit a quadratic trendline to the daily sea ice extent loss and use that to calculate a projected daily sea ice extent loss. I then calculate a running sum of projected daily sea ice extent loss and subtract that from the sea ice extent for May 31, 2007 to arrive at a projected daily sea ice extent.
http://img530.imageshack.us/my.php?image=firstfit2007gg8.jpg
For anyone familiar with last year’s sea ice extent record, at least some of the results aren’t that surprising. The projection is a poor fit. After the first 30 days, the projected is considerably above the actual and remains that way for the next 30 days — throughout all of July. It then reaches its minimum on September 1, 2007: 4722767.9. The actual minimum was on September 24, 2007: 4254531. As such the projection underestimates the duration of sea ice extent loss by 23 days and 468,236.9 square kilometers.
The second chart was as follows…
Now if you will remember, the bottom fell out back in June of 2007, so I decided to try and avoid having that throw off the quadratic trendline by beginning with July 4, 2007 as day zero, constructing my trendline using only the daily sea ice extent loss from July 4 through August 27 of 2007. I then used the equation from that trendline to calculate a daily sea ice extent loss for the preceding days, then calculated a projected sea ice extent as the sea ice extent of July 3, 2007 minus the running total of projected loss (but plus the running total of projected daily sea ice extent loss for the days preceding July 3, where July 3 would have projected sea ice extent equal to the actual).
The results? Better after July 3.
http://img530.imageshack.us/my.php?image=secondfit2007pj3.jpg
In fact, it fits well for a stretch of about 70 days. The projected sea ice extent bottomed out on September 16, 2007 at 4552757.6. The second projection underestimates the duration of sea ice extent loss by 8 days and 298,226.6 square kilometers.
Hurricane activity, perhaps? If hurricanes in the Atlantic and cyclones in the the Pacific have a significant impact on poleward oceanic advection, they would act to prolong the melt.
For comparison, here is the chart for 2008 again:
Sea Ice Extent Since May 31, 2008
http://img337.imageshack.us/my.php?image=seaiceextentsince200805cs2.jpg
Will the actual and the projected begin to diverge before September 30, 2008? Perhaps, but if 2007 is any indication, it would appear that I am actually underestimating the duration and extent of the melt, not overestimating it.
In any case, once the old ice is gone, there is less to anchor new ice for new ice formation. The is less ice to dampen the wind-driven waves. And there should be more mixing of the surface layer of the ocean with deeper layers. All of this combined with infrared radiation that has remained fairly stable (even as the sun drops towards the horizon and visible light fades with the passing of the season) seem to be prolonging the melt in recent years. Meanwhile, hurricane intensity has been increasing.
31 August 2008 at 5:05 PM
You’d want to look at the ice to determine whether it formed from seawater as sea ice, or from snowfall that became glacial ice.
Might see if there are any ice cores on record from that location that would distinguish its origins.
___________________
“books whole-heartedly”
31 August 2008 at 7:35 PM
Correction on Second Fit for 2007:
There was a nasty inflection point which I hadn’t noticed (somehow!) that existed in extending 2007 back from July 3, 2007. It indicted I hadn’t used an absolute anchor in a formula refering to July 3, but was instead adding a running total by means of a relative reference to the previous day (relative to whatever day I was projecting).
New chart at:
Correction on Second Fit for 2007
http://img244.imageshack.us/my.php?image=correctedsecond2007wp8.jpg
Anyway, with a suitably oversimplified climate model, it might actually be possible to derive what sort of trendline the melt should follow.
*
A few last notes:
1. To have increasing melt that slows and is followed by freezing, you need a trendline that is at least quadratic.
2. By fitting the trendline to the daily sea ice extent melt rather than a trendline to the sea ice extent itself, one is able to keep the trendline quadratic over a fairly long period.
3. With higher degree trendlines you would be able “fit” any melt. Therefore they are not uniquely determined by the data.
4. The quadratic is uniquely determined by the data for the period from which it is derived — no matter how poorly it may fit due to either the weather (including hurricanes) or large scale structural changes in old ice.
5. Just as one may fit a linear trend which will be “realistic” over a suitably short period of time (assuming no inflection points), one should be able to fit a quadratic over a longer period, cubic over an even longer period, etc.. But I have avoided the cubic because it is not uniquely determined.
*
Is the trendline for 2008 realistic? So far, yes. But it has to break down at some point. And personally I expect it to break down when the internal dynamics nears the projected minima — due to outside forces that overwhelm those dynamics: hurricanes that extend the melting season with poleward oceanic heat advection.
Thank you for your patience in my rather amateurish exercise in curve-fitting.
31 August 2008 at 8:36 PM
Dear Hank,
Thanks! You know, Dr. Hansen has been talking about 2-4 meters sea level rise for a long time. Lemme c, when was the last time he was majorly wrong?
And while we can see that Greenland is starting to look pretty iffy, Dr. Hansen has always said that the main concern is the WAIS.
Temperature anomalies down there have been in the startling +20 degrees C for months (and it was winter down here).
You can see a 30-day animation of the temp. anomalies at this link (takes a while to load):
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/map/images/fnl/sfctmpmer_01a_30frames.fnl.anim.html
31 August 2008 at 10:22 PM
Dear Phil,
Thanks for those links, I have been trying to download the pdf file of the book, which is great, but I keep getting error messages halfway through. And that 250-m resolution image is fab.
And, it looks like Gavin may have been holding out on us — hmmmm!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080831151346.htm
31 August 2008 at 10:28 PM
sidd, thanks!
I love your maps. The glacier in question is on the east side at the 80th parallel.
1 September 2008 at 1:27 AM
Good times.
1 September 2008 at 6:53 AM
Re 283 Timothy Chase
“it would appear that I am actually underestimating the duration and extent of the melt, not overestimating it.”
I think I expected your method to be close for 2007 and 2005 and to overestimate for 2006 2004 and 2003 but I could be wrong.
Your method doesn’t use any data from past Septembers. A different approach might be to use the average of 3 days either side of each day for 2003 to 2007 to get the daily pattern from past years. Then use 31 August as a correct value and scale the daily pattern to get a best fit for May to August. Continue with the same scale of the daily pattern for a prediction.
What I am trying to say is why use your quadratic fit when you could use data from past years?
Doing this I get a minimum on 18 Sept of 4.79 million km^2.
If I minimise the errors for August then I get minimum on 19 Sept of 4.72 million km^2.
Due to the state of the ice I think the minimum will be lower than this. However note that this does build in the faster melt rate in August through the scaling factor.
Your prediction may turn out to be better than the above calcs but would this just be a fluke?
For 2003 my calc of the minimum was 47K km^2 out and for 2004 99k out. Note however I used data from 2003 to 2007, so I am using some data from these years so not a genuine attempt at a prediction without data from that year and I definately expect to be further out in 2008.
1 September 2008 at 7:45 AM
Updates from someone with a different perspective.
The average daily ice extent reduction for the last 4 days was 34,375 km2, compared with 80,469 km2 for the previous 4 days.
Temperatures at 6 GMT (Sep 1st) were -11C within ~3 degrees latitude of the North Pole, -9C to the N of Greenland, -6C to the NE of Greenland, -5C to the N of Spitzbergen, and -3C to the N of the Canadian Archipelago. It was -3C and snowing at ~81N on the Beaufort Sea side of the Arctic Basin, and -1C and snowing at ~78N on the Chukchi Sea side of the Arctic Basin.
http://www.uni-koeln.de/math-nat-fak/geomet/meteo/winfos/synNNWWarctis.gif
The SST anomalies (as of the last couple of days) continue to be colder than on the same date in 2004 on the approaches of both Pacific and Atlantic oceans to the Arctic:
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst_anom-040829.gif
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst_anom-080831.gif
(Of course the open water in 2008 that was previously ice in 2004 is warmer! What matters is what happens at the ice boundary, which is further north on average than in 2004, and further from the warmer waters on the periphery of the Arctic)
The SOI continues to lurch back towards La Nina, which suggests that there is an increasing chance the world will stay relatively cool or even become even cooler over the next year, which could be good news if you want the Arctic ice to recover.
http://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/SeasonalClimateOutlook/SouthernOscillationIndex/30DaySOIValues/
The buoy set in first year ice at ~88N on April 20th continues to show thickness of ~1.3m despite southward drift to ~83N (and the perfectly normal IR levels shown by its co-located PMEL Met Station - though incidentally the non-anomalously higher IR levels of the last two weeks couldn’t have anything to do with reflection from the two weeks of ~ 1-1.5m thick snow they have coincided with, I presume?)
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2008E.htm
The multiyear ice on the Beaufort Sea/Arctic Basin boundary continues to be >3m thick
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2008F.htm
and the multiyear ice a couple of degrees to the north of the Canadian Archipelago continues to be significantly thicker (~3.4m) than when the buoy concerned was deployed on Sep 9 2007 (2.8m)
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2007J.htm
The first year ice in the Central Arctic is doing just fine, at ~2m thick i.e. exactly the same as when the relevant buoy was deployed in April:
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2008B.htm
The less good news is that while sea ice extent reduction has slowed down in the last few days, sea ice area has seen further significant losses, now down to 3.239 or only ~11% higher than the 2007 minimum. Some might say that this suggests the previous slowdown in area reduction was an illusion caused by melt ponds re-freezing at the Pole. But remember that the melt pond issue could cut both ways: firstly, melt ponds can temporarily re-melt, and secondly, the temporary melting of the first winter snows (on the surface of the ice) can create the illusion of more open water than is actually the case.
“No matter where we stand at the end of the melt season it’s just reinforcing this notion that Arctic ice is in its death spiral,” said Mark Serreze, a scientist at the center [NSIDC]. The Arctic could be free of summer ice by 2030, Serreze said by telephone.
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN2745499020080827
Clearly it is justified for people to have a *notion* that Arctic ice is in its “death spiral”, and that the Arctic *could* be free of summer ice by 2030.
But we still have significantly more ice than this time last year (re: both area and extent), so I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to wait until 2008 ACTUALLY surpasses 2007 before joining those on this thread who are already confidently predicting doom.
1 September 2008 at 8:19 AM
RE # 254
CobblyWorld, you said:
1) Climatic shift.
If you warm the Arctic, and (crucially) increase humidity due to higher temperatures and more open water over 0degC, then you will change the relationship between the polar and tropical regions. This changes what happens in between the pole and tropics,
We all know what exists between the polar and tropical regions of Western North America; it is called the world’s grain basket.
When am I going to hear that the National Science Academy or any science body announcing the beginning of an exhaustive research to understand how the Arctic ice meltback will impact temperature and precip patterns in that vital part of the world?
Gavin, do you have some insight here?
John McCormick
1 September 2008 at 8:50 AM
The scientist, of course, is placing this second-lowest ever minimum in the context of a statistically significant trend that spans the entire satellite era when he makes his claim.
While you’re harping on 2008 vs. 2007 as though it’s meaningful. It’s not.
However, since we’re playing …
Ice area is not significantly higher than 2007.
As far as ice extent … well the jet stream shifted the last few days, bringing an unseasonal cold friend blowing into the pacific northwest from the northwest.
A high is bringing summer weather back to us this week. Not sure what implications there are for winds shifting up north, but if area is decreasing while extent is increasing, it would seem that wind’s doing it, and a shift could start compacting the extent again.
All guessing but that’s all you’re doing, too … but I only do it for fun, because I know that the trend, not 2008 vs. 2007, is significant and even if 2007 is “only” the second-most minimum in area and/or extent since 1979, it will add to that trend.
1 September 2008 at 9:53 AM
#291 Dhogaza
I’m as concerned as anyone else about the Arctic ice melting and its possible implications.
The reason I’ve been following events in the Arctic this summer, reading this thread, and making posts, is because I want to understand exactly what is happening, and if I have any potential insights then I want to share them.
I try to avoid responding to posts that tend to make broadly dismissive comments while avoiding specifics. However, on this occasion I will make a couple of comments.
“While you’re harping on 2008 vs. 2007 as though it’s meaningful. It’s not.
However, since we’re playing …
Ice area is not significantly higher than 2007″
The reason I’m “harping on 2008 vs 2007″ is because this is what many posters on this thread have been doing (since well before I joined in) and making assumptions such as that ice volume decrease this year is greater, or that the August melt in 2008 means the minimum is 90% likely to be lower than in 2007 - with obvious implications for the continuance of the longer term trends you mention. I’ve simply been joining in the debate. I’m certainly not “playing”.
I don’t think I overstated my point re: area if you read all that I wrote: “…sea ice area has seen further significant losses, now down to 3.239 or only ~11% higher than the 2007 minimum.” Your link is the graph which represents the numbers I quoted. And clearly if the falls of the last couple of days continue then yes the area will no longer be (arguably) significantly higher. (Although the one/two/three etc month averages will continue to be definitely significantly higher - if one prefers longer-term to shorter-term trends….)
1 September 2008 at 1:40 PM
crandles wrote in 288:
Well, what this assumes is that each year is basically repeating the same pattern at the same time as the previous years — give or take some noise. But there are some obvious changes taking place. As a matter of how the Arctic responds to global warming, we expect the minima in future years to continue to take place later and later in the year. But that is just the general trend.
More specifically, last year was a record not simply in minimum sea ice area or sea ice extent, but for the lateness of the minima itself. And as I have pointed out, there is very little multi-year ice left, the ice is thinner, meaning that it dampens the production of waves much less, waves tend to break apart ice, exposing it to the water. Larger waves will also tend to mix upper layers of the ocean with lower layers, and lower layers tend to be warmer. All of this tends to shift the minima further into what has traditionally been outside of the melting season. Your three days either way rule wouldn’t take this into account. It also wouldn’t take into account how drastically things changed with the destruction of so much multi-year ice in 2007, or for that matter, the fact that new ice is saltier and therefore will freeze or melt at lower temperatures.
Of course my method doesn’t explicitly take into account any of this either, but it at least has the virtue of not making any assumptions about the timing of the minima which clearly no longer hold. It is extremely simple, and by means of a quadratic fit to earlier data in this season uniquely predicts a simplicity of behavior which quite closely matches what has actually taken place — for a period of time in which the Arctic itself has become much simpler — given the flushing out of fresh water in previous years (which tended to protect the sea ice from the warmer layers of salty water below) and the loss of so much multi-year ice. It appears that the law of large numbers is playing a much more conspicuous role this year.
We will see what happens. The projection had tended to be slightly above actual sea ice extent, but recently fell slightly below. Now I notice that there was a slight bulge in the sea ice area graph but that sea ice area is beginning to fall back to its “mean behavior” for this year’s season, so I should see actual sea ice extent drop back down to the projection over the next couple of days.
In any case, I think the projection is an improvement upon the straight trend lines some were trying or impressions of what should happen simply based on what had happened in previous years on the same dates.
crandles wrote in 288:
Can you graph it? Could you make available the equations you used? (Might not work that well here — but a link to a graphic shouldn’t be that difficult.)
It sounds like a good projection — given the past behavior of the Arctic, and assuming things haven’t changed.
Anyway, the nice thing is that we will soon know one way or the other.
*
captcha fortune cookie: average escape
1 September 2008 at 2:41 PM
I’m as concerned as anyone else about the Arctic ice melting and its possible implications.
It’s interesting looking at Tide heights, (excluding atmospheric pressure deviation, and weather assistance) but they certainly appear to have been getting higher over the passed few years.
Although this does make getting a boat back into the water that little bit easier, it can also play havoc with one’s loafers.
Not to mention a few low lying , propserous and often quite useful bits of the planet.
With the certain inevitabitlity that, as the ice caps melt, the melt will increase due to the rise in temperatures rise in temperature !!!!!!! no one really seems to be talking about any kind of active steps to do anything about it.
Guess it depends on whos feet get wet and wether they’ve managed to get to Mars or not, before contemplating going to the expense of refreezing it.
or just another case of ‘Nero Syndrome’.
1 September 2008 at 6:46 PM
Biology that lives on the sea ice in the springtime:
Biology associated with sea ice (this study done in Antarctica, in December — around midsummer):
doi:10.1016/j.dsr2.2007.12.019
Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography
Volume 55, Issues 8-9, April-May 2008, Pages 1024-1039
Ice Station POLarstern (ISPOL): Results of interdisciplinary studies on a drifting ice floe in the western Weddell Sea
Short-term biogenic particle flux under late spring sea ice in the western Weddell Sea
“… two sediment traps were deployed at 10 and 70 m water depth under a drifting ice floe in December 2004. The amount and composition of the vertical particle flux under sea ice were determined during a period of 30 days in order to investigate the influence of biological processes in sea ice and on its underside on the flux…. A strong increase with time of the flux of chlorophyll equivalents, biogenic silica, and faecal material was recorded during the observation period, coincident with the increase in the concentration of chlorophyll a in the bottom ice layer above the trap array. The latter suggests a concomitant increase in the amount of food available for grazers, such as krill, in the bottom ice layer and on the underside of the ice floe, resulting in an increased downward transport of ice-algal material into the water column….”
1 September 2008 at 10:51 PM
Cryosphere today places 2008 almost tied with 2007 extent, the difference is so small, consider it a tie.
Now this is interesting, SST’s and surface temperatures are not favorable at all for melting ice. Yet
its happening, a clue, 850 mb data shows a greater warm air than on surface near the archipelago, inversions are not always at all at the same height every where over the arctic ocean, it is extensively cloudy as well a huge cloud area over the entire Polar region. Surface temperatures are generally much below zero over the Arctic ocean, yet the ice vanishes nevertheless. Its quite warm at 850 mb over NE Greenland where ice is unusually scarce at that location.
2 September 2008 at 4:04 AM
#292, I don’t think that many of us expect 2008 to surpass 2007 in melt or extent this year. That does not mean that the people who are trusted with watching and predicting the events in the Arctic feel any better about it.
It is, today, massively lower than either 2005 or 2006. 2005 was considered a major event anomaly, 2006 a near miss. 2007 a major event anomaly and it’s looking like 2008 will reinforce that trend.
What you are missing is that 2008 is tracking 2004 SST and atmospheric temperatures with >1M Sq Km less ice. Woods and trees come to mind.
This year the ice has become detached from almost all land, another first. Just how many firsts do we have to have before people understand that it is now out of control?
2 September 2008 at 4:35 AM
re 293
>”Can you graph it? Could you make available the equations you used?”
http://www.boincforum.info/boincuser/Crandles/ExtentDailyPatternPredictionGraph.JPG
http://www.boincforum.info/boincuser/Crandles/Extentdailypattern.xls
>”It sounds like a good projection — given the past behavior of the Arctic, and assuming things haven’t changed.”
That is exactly what it is trying to do.
I hear a lot of qualitative arguments for retreat greater than average or greater than 2007 which was a record but very little quantitative. How much faster 50%? double? tripple? There are some vage record is likely but is there any evidence that it will be tripple rather than the 50% I have build in based on August rate of retreat?
“my method doesn’t explicitly take into account any of this either, but it at least has the virtue of not making any assumptions about the timing of the minima”
Well look at the last graph of
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/sea.ice.minimum.2007.html
The trend isn’t large and is swamped by weather noise. Is building in an ability of my model to have a later minimum worthwhile? It would probably just be another fiddle factor allowing overtuning.
If this virtue allows crazy dates then I would prefer something more reliable.
>”how drastically things changed”
But is this known for sure in terms of its effect on trends? One way to see is to try to get a reliable prediction method based on past only and see how large the errors now are.
OTOH I don’t see much point in a method that appears less reliable, makes a prediction which is much more aggressive than the past would indicate and frankly (sorry!) appears to rely on a wing and a prayer that apparent changes are drastic such that they just happen to be about the size required to balance out the aggressiveness compared to the past. Simplicity is a nice virtue but only if reliable. Having said this, your prediction will probably turn out to be very accurate.
2 September 2008 at 7:46 AM
Been following the uni-bremen arctic ice extent site for a number of weeks now and what I am seeing is a rapid accelleration in the rate of ice melt. I do not know the exact current figures of the area of arctic ice at the moment but I am willing to say it has now reached a new all time record, in the last two days there is now a band of sea water separating greenland’s northern most coastline with the ice shelf, the ice is also rapidly breaking up to the north estern corner of the country. More worrisome in the last two days the NW and NE open sea passage is now very clearly defined. I can not beleive that soo much ice has melted in just 48 hours. The whole pack ice area around 85N, 165E and 145W seems much more fractured and eroded over the last few weeks. I am interested in the fate of the ice at 75N, 105W. I would say based on current melt rates that ice will be completly gone by mon next week.
2 September 2008 at 8:44 AM
re # 297
nEILt,
YOU ASKED:
[Just how many firsts do we have to have before people understand that it is now out of control?]
I say, tell it like it is: Arctic sea ice crossed its TIPPING POINT (maybe 2005–no matter when…it did)
The fact that future September satellite images of Arctic sea ice will never again look like those of 1979 is the reality 6.6 billion people will have to accept.
It is no longer about record-breaking. It is about adapting to what we do not know is coming next.
John McCormick
2 September 2008 at 8:52 AM
Re: 296 “Cryosphere today places 2008 almost tied with 2007 extent, the difference is so small, consider it a tie”.
Now (Cryosphere Today): 3.199.000 km2 sea ice area
2007 minimum (Cryosphere Today): 2.990.000 km2 sea ice area.
209.000 km2 is the difference.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/iphone/iphone.currentarea.series.html
Now (JAXA): 4.964.000 km2 sea ice extent
2007 minimum (JAXA): 4.254.531 km2 sea ice extent
710.000 km2 is the diference.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/plot.csv
2 September 2008 at 11:01 AM
Remember not to draw conclusions from the pictures; they tell you how the pictures are made and where they get the data they use to make the pictures.
For exampe from the main imagery page: http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/amsre.html
* We now calculate daily maps of combined MODIS - AMSR-E data Click Here!
o maps of MODIS RGB composites with AMSR-E ice contour lines
o maps of snow grain size calculated from MODIS data with AMSR-E ice contour lines
o maps of soot concentration calculated from MODIS data with AMSR-E ice contour lines
Other daily updated products
* Combined MODIS - AMSR-E sea ice maps
* SSM/I sea ice maps
You can look each of these up. Just as an example look at all the papers here about SSM/I from a simple Google search. If wossname had looked at these before counting pixels he might have used data instead:
http://www.google.com/search?q=SSM%2FI+sea+ice
SSM/I and AMSR-E L1B from inside IUP
The ASI sea ice concentration algorithm used here has been validated in several studies (Spreen et al. 2005, Spreen et al., 2008). However, no warranty is given for the data presented on these pages.
2 September 2008 at 11:14 AM
And here:
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsredata/asi_daygrid_swath/l1a/n3125/README.TXT
2 September 2008 at 12:24 PM
Crandles, #298.
Since 2007 had quite a stunning minimum, the *retreat* this year could be a record and yet still have more ice extent than 2007.
Precision is needed, my boy.
2 September 2008 at 12:56 PM
RE 299
Just visually assessing the Modis picture, it looks like one could sail around Greenland. I wonder how usual that is?
See http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2008246/crefl1_143.A2008246143500-2008246144000.4km.jpg (of course even better with a higher resolution).
It will be interesting to see Greenland ice mass reports once they get done.
2 September 2008 at 1:51 PM
Good news…
Tamino has entered the running — a statician who (it goes without saying) has a great deal more mathematical acumen than myself. He is giving a decidedly different projection of what the next few weeks will bring in terms of sea ice extent — with this year’s minima being reached on 20th of September, much earlier than what I have projected, and with last year’s record remaining secure for the time being.
Please see:
More Less Ice
September 1, 2008
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/more-less-ice/
*
captcha fortune cookie: ol Knight
2 September 2008 at 2:39 PM
But note Tamino said right up front there that it’s a statistical curve, not based on field conditions:
“Just for a little fun, I fit a 4th-order Fourier series to this year’s data and projected it into the future …”
Wind direction, ocean currents, and temperatures thereof made last year unusual.
Anyone know what the wind and water are doing this year? I haven’t seen much reported.
Most ocean info comes from buoys and anchored instruments that have to be retrieved, with time lag, or from navy instruments that aren’t immediately reported.
And have the petroleum companies started putting down instruments in the Arctic? Would anyone know?
They’d certainly want to be collecting data in advance of drilling. How do they instrument areas, or do they?
We do know last year’s melt left much less multiyear ice — making this year unusual.
2 September 2008 at 2:43 PM
Aha.
http://www.ioc-goos.org/
The Global Ocean Observing System
GOOS is a permanent global system for observations, modelling and analysis of marine and ocean variables to support operational ocean services worldwide. GOOS provides accurate descriptions of the present state of the oceans, including living resources; continuous forecasts of the future conditions of the sea for as far ahead as possible, and the basis for forecasts of climate change.
Wow: http://rucool.marine.rutgers.edu/atlantic/
2 September 2008 at 3:14 PM
http://www.ipy.org/index.php?/ipy/detail/arctic_sea_ice_in_the_news/
“… We now understand that an unusual weather pattern of warm winds and clear skies played a large role in 2007 melting, and we know that we started 2008 with an unusually large amount of new (first year) ice. An international group of researchers has, for the first time and starting from May, produced, shared, and compared monthly estimates of the 2008 minimum. Those groups, from 15 or more institutions, use recent, in some cases daily, satellite, ship and buoy data, climate models, weather models, and historical data in comparisons, correlations, extrapolations and estimations - you can follow their work in very interesting detail at the SEARCH Sea Ice Outlook page….”
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/index.php
2 September 2008 at 3:19 PM
OK, here’s the sort of thing I’ve been wondering about, including ice melt top and bottom info from buoys:
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/report_july.php
These reports run several months behind the calendar because they call information from a large number of different sources and researchers and complile it. These pages have a lot of images, links and data.
July’s report (the latest) includes the outlook for September, and so on.
——–excerpts follow————
“The outlook for the pan-arctic sea ice extent in September 2008, based on July data, indicates a continuation of dramatic arctic sea ice loss. The July Sea Ice Outlook report is based on a synthesis of 22 individual projections utilizing a range of methods. Projections based on July data show no indication that a return to historical sea ice extent will occur this year.”
“… Figure 3. Ice bottom and top melt reported by ice-mass-balance buoys.
Figure 4 shows the present (13 August 2008) surface condition as evidenced by the web camera image from the NPEO Automated Drifting Station, the location of the ice-mass-balance buoy installation nearest Fram Strait. Unlike previous years at this time, and aside from right around the web camera buoy, we do not see many melt ponds. At this site melt pond coverage has been minimal all summer, arguably due to the limited snow cover in spring. This helps explain why the first-year, 1.9-m ice has only melted 0.2 m on the upper surface and provides one mechanism by which first year ice may survive the summer. …”
2 September 2008 at 3:26 PM
One last tidbit from the above July report. I’d been looking for Dr. Bitz’s work and it is part of this compilation.
“… The following Figure from 10 August 2008 and the figures from Lars Kaleschke and Tom Agnew suggest, however, that there were large regions of low sea ice concentrations (black regions) within the boundary of sea ice extent at the end of July. While there may be some difficulty interpreting this figure due to summer melt ponding at the surface, the figure is certainly suggestive of further potential retreat in regions of thin first year sea ice. Such interpretations are important as some scenarios assume complete meltback of all first-year sea ice, while others limit meltback to ice classes thinner than a specific threshold (such as 1m). Total sea ice extent in early August declined at about twice the rate of any other time this summer (Bitz). …
[ http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/downloads/monthly-reports/july/Bitz-03-july-outlook.pdf ]
Text excerpt without figures from the above follows; long excerpt because this analysis discusses the statistics including autocorrelation/memory, which were mentioned recently in other threads.
Sea Ice Outlook based on Statistics of Observed Ice Extent and
Global Climate Model
July 2008
1. Name of contributor: Cecilia Bitz
2. Estimate of the sea ice extent for the Arctic as a whole for the month of September 2008
5.30 million square kilometers
3. Principal method
Statistical, based on observations and coupled climate model output.
4. Short basis for prediction
The 29 year observational record of September sea ice extent has zero autocorrelation at
one-year lag and zero skew. The correlation with the extent in the prior July is significant,
but the July 2008 extent lies very close to the long term trend. Therefore, my prediction for
September 2008 is an extrapolation of the long term trend for September. These statistical
relationships are in general agreement with much longer records that are available from the
Community Climate System Model version 3, CCSM3.
5. Longer basis for prediction
With little deviation from the long term trend in July 2008 and no significant autocorrelation
or skew from one September to the next in the observations (Fig. 1a), the conservative
estimate for the future is on the trend line in September. An extrapolation of the trend line
(Fig. 1b) to year 2008 gives 5.30 million square kilometers.
The observational results were compared with a statistical analysis of an ensemble of
20th and 21st century simulations and long control runs from CCSM3. With ensembles and
multi-century control runs giving far more degrees of freedom, it is clear that CCSM3 does
have a weak but significant autocorrelation in September ice extent from one year to the next.
However, the autocorrelation is so weak that it did not compell me to modify my prediction
based solely on the observations. In contrast, there is more considerable lagged correlation
between thickness and extent, as expected owing to the much much greater memory in
thickness.
Figure 2 shows that years with September sea ice loss comparable to the 2007 observed
loss are very rare.
—- end excerpt—
See links above for the real stuff, this is just a bit I grabbed as an excerpt to point to the real stuff.
2 September 2008 at 7:18 PM
Hank, statistical curves are OK in their place, but the Ice area fell off a cliff in the last week and has dropped to almost the same as 2007. In fact when Cryosphere Today gets the graph to the end of the month, the current melt should be just below 2007 for that short spike.
It’s going to be an interesting week or two, but the massive open water around Greenland and the Archipelago is unprecedented.
Anyone know how much of the multi year ice which was in those areas survived? Did it move on or did it just melt?
2 September 2008 at 7:18 PM
#297 NeilT:
You may be interested in the following comparisons. The first shows how in 1985, even by 2 weeks before this date, there was a huge amount more open water to the north of Greenland, the ice edge on the Atlantic side of the Arctic was already further north on average, the sea ice on the Atlantic side was lower in concentration, and there was already as much open water in the Laptev sea.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=08&fd=18&fy=1985&sm=09&sd=01&sy=2008
The second shows how in 1993 the low (~60 per cent) concentration sea ice on the Pacific side of the Arctic reached a similar line to now i.e. from near Banks Island in NW Canada across to the Laptev Sea, with enough open water especially on the Siberian side to make today’s map seem a lot less dramatic.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=01&fy=1993&sm=09&sd=01&sy=2008
What these comparisons say to me is that both sides of the Arctic have seen significant melt before and recovered.
“It is, today, massively lower than either 2005 or 2006″
If that’s what you call massive, then 1993 was massively lower than 1992. What does that prove?
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=01&fy=2005&sm=09&sd=01&sy=2008 [2005 vs 2008]
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=01&fy=1992&sm=09&sd=01&sy=1993 [1992 vs 1993]
“What you are missing is that 2008 is tracking 2004 SST and atmospheric temperatures with >1M Sq Km less ice. Woods and trees come to mind.”
Or maybe one should assume that someone looking at lots of trees generally knows they are in a wood? Of course I’m aware that 2008 has ~1M Sq Km less ice, as I’ve already referred to in a previous post. My point was that there is a precedent for a rapid August melt followed by a much slower September melt - the fact that the extents are ~16% different doesn’t fundamentally change this.
“Just how many firsts do we have to have before people understand that it is now out of control?”
It would be “out of control” if buoys had shown continued dramatic thinning this year, the ice extent had “overtaken” 2005/6 in June rather than August allowing albedo changes to have a significant effect, and Arctic temperatures had shown significant rises.
Instead we are in a situation where the seas and air are significantly colder than this time last year, with greater ice extent, area and even thickness, and thus a fair indication that Arctic re-freeze should set in earlier and more strongly.
#301 CT latest area is 3.221, and the 2007 minimum was in fact 2.92. So 2008 is still ~300,000km2 ahead or ~10%
2 September 2008 at 7:26 PM
I can’t understand all these hundreds and hundreds of posts about what is, after all, a regional weather event!
It’s as though this is has to be emphasised as most other Global indicators of AGW are showing a negative trend and it is a good bet that this will continue for the forseeable future.
Most modelers do not make a big issue of Artic sea ice melt as they clearly understand that the Arctic ice extent is controlled by many more factors than just Global temperatures.
The globe is more than the NH after all. You have to factor in the SH at some stage! So why is there hardly any discussion of global polar ice extent?
Let’s see, you cannot jump around over a few years data, when you are talking about the Earths climate.
Arctic sea ice has increased this year Antarctic sea ice continues to show, a medium term, increase in extent.
Global temperatures remain fairly stable with a slight cooling trend. Sea temperatures show no warming trend. There is no evidence of an accelerating sea hight increase.
The models are not currently in agreement with actual Earth conditions over the last seven or eight years. Therefore, no need to panic, let’s wait awhile and be more certain before we leap off the cliff!
Alan
2 September 2008 at 7:41 PM
Re: #307 You cannot predict the future by doing statistical analysis on a curve that is dependent on a multitude of multivariate data.
You predict the future by doing regression analysis on all the field conditions (solar loading, ice thickness, wind, air temperture, water temperture, ocean currents and probably a dozen others) variables.
Then you work out problems between the variables, such as autocorrelation, multicollinearity and heterosedasticity. By then you have downed a 40oz of scotch.
When that fails, you start fudging your data by using Principle Component Analysis or was that factor analysis, I forget which.
Serriously, we don’t know all the factors that contribute to ice loss, and we don’t have enought data to differentatte what will happen in the next few weeks.
Sit back and enjoy the ride.
2 September 2008 at 8:13 PM
LG Norton leads me to agree. The melting for the next few weeks will be influenced mostly by local weather, and how know predictable is that? The other thing is that so many conditions this year are vastly different from the previous years’ that it is not even like comparing apples to oranges, it is more like comparing raspberries to bananas.
However, Wayne’s comments #250 and #296 are very interesting because something sure is melting that ice.
“squalid and” (Could ReCaptcha actually be an AI bot experimenting on all of us?)
2 September 2008 at 8:24 PM
Alan Millar wrote on 2nd September 2008 at 7:26 PM
“Global temperatures remain fairly stable with a slight cooling trend. Sea temperatures show no warming trend. There is no evidence of an accelerating sea hight increase.
The models are not currently in agreement with actual Earth conditions over the last seven or eight years. ”
o dear me, i think every sentence above is incorrect. of course, i might be wrong.
2 September 2008 at 8:49 PM
sidd,
Then, again, you might not.
Speaking of accelerating rates of sea-level rise, what is the latest on that? Anybody know?
And, is the collapse of the landfast iceshelf off northeastern Greenland already affecting things further up the related glacier’s ice stream, or is that just my overactive imagination at work every time I look at the latest ENVISAT images?
(Link below is good only for about the next 14 hours or so.)
http://www.seaice.dk/iwicos/latest/envisat.GMM3d.n.20080902.gif
“Kickapoo France” LOLOL
2 September 2008 at 8:51 PM
Re: #289
Chris,
How can “The SOI continues to lurch back towards La Nina” ?
Has that ever occurred before?
2 September 2008 at 10:05 PM
Ah, the “La Niña will save us, as long as it happens every year and El Niño disappears” argument.
Wanna lay odds on that?
2 September 2008 at 10:08 PM
Ah, someone else who’s fallen for Lucia’s unpublished (and unpublishable), unstatistical, dear-lord-lets-toss-real-science-into-the-toilet bullshit.
Which, of course, is winning her the Nobel soon, because, you know, overturning a ton of established science with tard-thinking is JUST WHAT the Nobel committee looks for (NOT!)
2 September 2008 at 11:42 PM
#314: Weather? I think not, Polar ice maxima and minima extents is like a climate metric, more than weather. If you go back a little on RC, you will find literature explaining necessary temperature disparities between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Is not like CO2 will warm up the entire planet equally. By theory, the Northern Hemisphere will warm faster than the Southern, and lo and behold it does, and so the ice in antarctica behaves as the models predict.
#301 Thanks for the numbers , Cryosphere Today Ice extent is likely within an undeclared margin of error, 5% difference between 07 and 08 is likely within that margin. Although:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
The graph shows identical extent (look at anomaly in red). Bremen and Danish maps disagree
with Cryosphere, showing less ice. If you look at all the data it may be confusing. The melt in 08 was huge; there was an article around february 2008:
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/02/15/arctic-ice.html
Which has quoted an increase of average ice thickness by 10 to 20 cm with a gain of 2 million square kilometers. For those who say: “What’s the big deal?” it appears that Ice volume melt rivals 2007 with less sun, colder water and air…. Something to write about, as we say in Canada : Hey?
3 September 2008 at 3:07 AM
Alan Millar wrote on 2nd September 2008 at 7:26 PM
“Global temperatures remain fairly stable with a slight cooling trend.”
As you use the quantitative word trend, let me correct you. A trend is computed based on a series of data points. For temperature, the slope of the trend depends on how many years back you include in your trend. So is there a cooling trend? To inform you, I computed the trend value for trends of different lengths back to the history starting with 2007 as the latest data point. The data are NASA data, global surface temperature anomaly.
(http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.txt)
In the table below, the year refers to the beginning of trend years (e.g., 1995 0.036 means that the trend between 1995 and 2007 is 0.036 degrees Fahrenheit per year, i.e., 3.6 degrees for 100 years).
1988 0.0199
1989 0.0218
1990 0.0216
1991 0.0250
1992 0.0285
1993 0.0263
1994 0.0226
1995 0.0201
1996 0.0214
1997 0.0181
1998 0.0178
1999 0.0300
2000 0.0250
2001 0.0107
2002 0.0043
2003 0.0090
2004 0.0160
2005 -0.0250
2006 0.0300
2007 #DIV/0!
Only from 2005 to 2007 there is a cooling trend. Do you really want to base your knowledge on this two-year period only and neglect all the others?
3 September 2008 at 3:17 AM
RE 314
“The models are not currently in agreement with actual Earth conditions over the last seven or eight years.”
This topic has been covered extensively on this site, see:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/01/uncertainty-noise-and-the-art-of-model-data-comparison/
Please have a look at it. It explains the point very well.
3 September 2008 at 3:39 AM
Also, Alan Millar:
“The globe is more than the NH after all. You have to factor in the SH at some stage! So why is there hardly any discussion of global polar ice extent?”
I agree that there is currently a lot of talk and speculation about the year-to-year NP ice extent (while the longer trend is more important). However, the focus on the north pole (rather than south) has a justification. I’ll try to explain as well as I can.
Feedback mechanisms are strongest on the north pole. More warmth can relatively easy result in less ice, since it is all sea ice (unlike the south pole). When there is less ice, there is less reflection of sunlight, so the water will warm faster.
As I understand it, this is why global warming has the most impact in this region, and why so many people talk about it. (a look at this picture can put things into perspective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Global_Warming_Map.jpg)
3 September 2008 at 3:43 AM
Alan writes:
No, they do not:
http://members.aol.com/bpl1960/Ball.html
http://members.aol.com/bpl1960/Reber.html
3 September 2008 at 5:27 AM
NeilT @ 312: you can see from MODIS that the ice has moved away from the Greenland and Ellesmere coasts, rather than melting in place. Presumably this is due to wind.
It’s still very disturbing, though, because now that this ice is not fast, and is out in the ocean, it will respond more readily to the transpolar drift pushing it out of the Fram Strait.
Despite all the open water around Peary Land, Greenland is not circumnavigable at the moment because the Lincoln Sea is full of broken ice, and apparently so is the Nares Strait.
3 September 2008 at 5:29 AM
#292, Chris.
(I have been trying to post this for ages.)
It is not the area/extent per-se that’s changed my mind, although to see it this close has amazed me. It’s mainly the rate of reduction this late in the season, the latitude to which that reached, and the loss of perennial ice implied by both this year’s melt and the transport out of the Fram Strait. From my understanding based on the papers I’ve read, perennial ice can be seen as a damper. That’s because it’s less likely to melt to open ocean than first year ice (due to thickness and salinity/structure) it damps the impact of weather on the melt. The recent events suggest to me that something has changed in the Arctic, last year was not a fluke. What we are seeing is the impact of ice volume reduction.
Yes there are areas that haven’t thinned significantly, especially in the centre of the pack where a cold climate is provided by Greenland and the rest of the ice pack. But that story is not supported as you move away from the Canadian coast. (pdf here) - same as figure 4 of NSIDC 25 Aug 2008.
As far as I can see we have a pretty typical year’s weather starting with a good ice-growing winter (cold, lesser snow thickness), yet producing a quite remarkable drop. All year I’ve watched developments and until recently have not seen anything to really convince me that the ice was not likely to recover showing 2007 to be the sort of outlier Bitz(ARCUS) points to in the model runs. 2 years of very low extent makes them even less probable outliers, more years would compound that improbability. To my amazement there was (is still?) the chance the so-far unbroken 1-year-autocorrelation* rule might be broken. I don’t think that’s likely, but I bet it will be broken within 5 years. *’the year after a record minimum extent year never produces a new record’.
Graph 2 of Spreen/Kaleschke’s Sea Ice Outlook also shows what a distinct pair 2007/2008 are compared to previous years.
The main reason I had doubts about us being in a SICI (Small Ice-Cap Instability) type transition is because GCMs don’t show a rapid transition to seasonally ice free state. Over on the previous part of North Pole notes I asked why, apart from the shock of 2007, did people think we were going through a Small Ice-Cap Instability (SICI) type threshold, here. I got no answer. But this recent late melt acceleration seems to me to be exactly what I would expect if we were. For me the key factor this year has been volume/thickness. We are not seeing unusual weather causing the recent unusual melt, not in the way unusually prolonged clear skies caused* 2007’s (*or at least enhanced the impact of storms).
Have you ever seen Nghiem’s 2007 study of perennial ice extent? Nghiem 2007 “Rapid reduction of Arctic perennial sea ice.” 1.68Mb pdf, here. If not I recommend it, check out figure 3, March 2008 was down 1 million sqkm from March 2007. I keep going on about that paper but that’s only because I see it as a key observation.
Hope this formats OK, Nth attempt to post.
PS From the BBC, Major ice-shelf loss for Canada: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7595441.stm
3 September 2008 at 6:06 AM
#314 Alan Miller,
Typically I’d agree re weather, however the Arctic has ‘memory’ in a way that most other regional environments don’t. That memory means what happens one year can have a substantial affect on what comes next, e.g. 2007’s crash preconditioning the ice for this year.
Not the case on the appropriate (climatological) time scale. My reason for emphasis it’s a key issue is the potential it poses, see my post 254. In pursuing public opinion the denialist camp have manouevered themselves into irrelevance, so why would they factor at all? Public opinion is irrelevant to the ongoing process.
Why would we consider the Antarctic ice state when looking at what’s happening in the Arctic? They are at opposite sides of the planet, and whilst the Arctic is a polar sea surrounded by land, the Antarctic is land surrounded by an ocean.
It’s still closer to 2007 than any previous year, and 2007 was substantially below previous years.
I’ve lived in rough areas most of my life and have been in numerous “tight spots”, on many occasions had I waited for certainty I’d almost certainly not be typing this now: I’d be dead. This is the real world, sometimes one has to make the best judgment with limited and incomplete information.
All that said, as far as I’m concerned you think what you want Alan, persuade people that it’s not happening if that suits you. But beware because that persausion will no more stop this process than King Canute’s regal status could stop the incoming tide.
3 September 2008 at 7:41 AM
#328 Thanks very much for the detailed post and the links.
A few initial thoughts. Firstly, looking at the comparison between 2nd Sep 2007 and 2nd Sep 2008:
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsredata/asi_daygrid_swath/l1a/n6250/2007/sep/asi-n6250-20070902-v5_nic.png
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsredata/asi_daygrid_swath/l1a/n6250/2008/sep/asi-n6250-20080902-v5_nic.png
From 165 degrees W through 180 degrees, 165E, 140E, to at least 125E, the 2008 ice extends to a lower latitude ( ~77N to ~80N compared with ~81N to ~84N in 2007) The extra ice is all first year ice since it was essentially open water at this time last year. It is therefore by definition much thicker (i.e. thicker than 0!) and if it survives the next few weeks it will be good evidence of how ice can recover, as well as adding to the total of multiyear ice. Also from 75E to 30E the ice is significantly more concentrated this year.
On the other hand, there has been a retreat of the ice edge in the northern Beaufort from about ~74N in 2007 to ~76N now, and an area roughly the size of the new tongue at 165E to 180 degrees has thinned, which looks rather dramatic at first sight. However, note that the tongue has increased from ~10 per cent to ~90 per cent concentration, whereas the thinned area this year has merely gone from ~90 per cent to ~70 per cent concentration. Furthermore, there are currently signs of re-freeze in the area, and temperatures down to at least -5C are certainly helping on this front:
http://www.uni-koeln.de/math-nat-fak/geomet/meteo/winfos/synNNWWarctis.gif
“For me the key factor this year has been volume/thickness”
I couldn’t agree more: the 2008 melt season started with massively less multiyear ice than 2007, and a legacy of massively thinner ice all across the Arctic. And yet it STILL has greater extent, area and thickness.
“But that story is not supported as you move away from the Canadian coast. (pdf here) - same as figure 4 of NSIDC 25 Aug 2008.”
I’ve already explained above why this story is absolutely supported - i.e. the point about ice being indisputably thicker than open water.
But just to nail the point, take a closer look at the buoy data you refer to. I’ve already gone into a lot of detail on the buoys in previous posts. The only buoys which *appear* to support your point are the two with big yellow bars.
The one (2007E) on the edge of the Beaufort was right on the ice edge, and has drifted into open water, so has obviously seen a lot of bottom melt. Its neighbours show a different story: 2008F at Lat: 76.832 N Long: 139.974 W has still failed to melt to less than 3m thick
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2008F.htm
and 2007F at Lat: 72.609 N Long: 136.079 W appears to have shown no net melt at all since the start of the year despite substantial southward drift. i.e. still at ~3m thick
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2007F.htm
As for Buoy 2006C in the central Arctic (i.e. the other one with a big yellow bar), the melt here has been half that in 2007, such that the thickness is identical to a year ago. http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2006C.htm
This is a very exhausting process - I only want to establish the truth of what is going on, and yet I sense a massive resistance to points which I think should be obvious. Accepting there might be some truth to what I’m saying doesn’t mean that the strength of the AGW hypothesis is somehow called into question - I haven’t voiced an opinion on that. Whatever your hypothesis, I would say it is best if you examine things from all angles, and if the hypothesis is particularly strong then one shouldn’t have a problem with short term considerations which may not help to prove it as much as one might like.
3 September 2008 at 9:11 AM
Chris,
I would contend that to look at either 2007 or 2008 in isolation is to take them out of their proper context. In other words, a single record year is less important than the steady and seemingly inexorable decline in polar ice. A single record year could be weather–the decline is climate change. A month ago, we were wondering whether 2008 could nudge out 2005 for second place. It is now threatening 2007 for the gold. The interest in that race is due to the fact that people are wondering if we have indeed reached a tipping poing. While it is too early to tell, the rapid changes in the North when viewed in terms of the trends of ever decreasing summer sea ice, a melt season that extends later into the fall and globally rising temperatures make it difficult to argue that we’re in balance.
3 September 2008 at 10:22 AM
#331 I am perfectly aware of the longer term trend. I am also perfectly aware of the limitations of pre-supposing that trends will inexorably continue. That is why I have been trying to find out in as much detail as possible, and in all contexts, exactly what has happened in the Arctic in 2007 and 2008, and what the important drivers/factors have been. Seeing as there are already plenty of people asserting that we have reached or passed a “tipping point” on the basis of 2007 and 2008, I would say this is worth doing, wouldn’t you? Even if we are close to a “tipping point”, how can it not be worth trying to understand objectively what is actually happening?
3 September 2008 at 10:37 AM
#330 Chris, lets think a little. 2008 March , ice was thicker by 10 to 20 cm. From the start, ice extent was greater than 2007 by about 2 million square kilometers. Wouldn’t there be greater albedo? If so
from the onset, less melting was meant to be? So why is it nearly equal? Especially with all the weather favoring a lesser melt, more clouds, cooler surface and water temps and unfavorable winds…. Less old ice helps, but that does not mean something else is contributing to this melt…..
3 September 2008 at 10:39 AM
“Less old ice helps, but that does not mean nothing else is contributing to this melt…..”
3 September 2008 at 10:55 AM
Chris:
First, no one said that it is not worth “trying to objectively understand what is actually happening.” Your implication otherwise sounds like a cheap rhetorical trick.
Second, you stated above regarding some first year ice that may survive the melt season that “if it survives the next few weeks it will be good evidence of how ice can recover, as well as adding to the total of multiyear ice.” This strikes me as true but trivial. Has anyone said that it is impossible for first-year ice to survive and become multi-year ice? Of course not. The issue is that first-year ice is less robust. My read on this summer’s melt is that, given the weather, it would not have been a spectacular melt season had there not been so much first-year ice. The fact that it is anywhere near a record minimum seems to be largely due to the fact that last year’s exceptional melt led to there being a lot of new, less robust ice out there. And now, since so much of it has indeed melted again, it will be the same situation next year. At some point in the near future, the summer weather in the arctic is going to be less favorable for ice than this summer was, and even less of the more robust ice will remain afterward. And so on. The only ways I see this not being a “tipping point” leading to smaller and smaller summer ice area/extent, i.e. the only reasons I have thought of that the trend wouldn’t inexorably continue, is if the arctic started cooling and/or the summer weather became calmer than it has been for long enough for the ice to rebuild significantly. Do you know of any reason to believe either of those things will happen?
3 September 2008 at 10:58 AM
Mean air temperatures at NWS climate stations in Alaska (Barrow, Fairbanks, Kotzebue and Nome) in August, 2008 were below 1971-2000 averages.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=pafg
3 September 2008 at 11:23 AM
#336 thanks Pat. Well that does not mean that the entire atmosphere cooled…. It would be great if NOAA came about with DWT stats, which is very significant as it incorporates the temperature of the entire atmosphere. The way I see it now, is that 2008 had a very interesting shift in warm air location, further above the surface, which means the surface record got colder, however the atmosphere is just as warm. How did this happen? I am not sure. but the ice was surely affected by an IR heat source not far above it. Between 1000 and 850 mb height. There are very few upper air soundings over the Arctic ocean, so you must look and see if GRIBB is showing something.
3 September 2008 at 11:40 AM
#333
Let’s think a little bit more. When does the melt season really get going within the Arctic proper? Certainly not before late April as there’s still ice out into the Pacific.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=04&fd=25&fy=2007&sm=04&sd=25&sy=2008
So what was the situation in late April/May 08 compared with a year before? Looking at the JAXA data, I make the difference in extent about 2 per cent (e.g. 2.12 per cent on 25th April and 1.88 per cent on 1st May if you want me to be more precise)
04,25,2007,12700781
05,01,2007,12627813
04,25,2008,12970469
05,01,2008,12865156
So 2008 and 2007 started the melt season proper with very similar levels of ice extent. (I’m not really interested in the very thin ice floes that formed briefly out into the Pacific and Atlantic at the end of winter, thereby pushing up the maximum ice extent, before vanishing quickly around mid-April)
Can you prove your statement that “2008 March , ice was thicker by 10 to 20 cm.” ? I would be extremely surprised if this was the case over the Arctic proper (i.e. away from the Pacific and Atlantic peripheries). Here’s an example of a central Arctic buoy that was in 3m thick ice in March 2007, but only 1.8m thick ice in march 2008, yet has seen only half as much melt this year:
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2006C.htm
Meanwhile, I think it may have been you that speculated that the ice area as measured on Cryosphere today was essentially the same as a year ago? Well, that hasn’t happened yet. The minimum in 2007 was 2.92, and the lowest so far this year was 3.199 a couple of days ago i.e. 9.6 per cent above the 2007 minimum. In the last 2 days, ice area has gone up to 3.247, so that it is now back up to 11.2 per cent above the 2007 minimum (or approx 8 per cent more than this day last year)
The exact figure for today’s extent is 4924219 which is 6.7 per cent or 7.5 per cent above this day last year depending on whether you factor in the leap year, and 15.7 per cent above last year’s minimum.
(Incidentally, last year had 2 sub-minimums in extent with a difference of a mere 13,125 km2: 4267656 on 16th Sep and 4254531 on 24th Sep. To put this in perspective, the final correction made to today’s JAXA extent figure was 12,188 km2. Area minimum was on 16th Sep at 2.92 million km2 - google this and find a million hits to confirm it. So I wouldn’t assign too much significance to the precise date of 24th Sep last year re: extent)
Just to spell a couple of things out, albedo would not have been significant before mid-April due to the weakness of the sun, and after mid-April it was not significant because extent was comparable to all previous years.
Therefore, you are left with your mysterious belief in “something else” other than the variables which have actually been identified and measured. Would you care to elaborate, and perhaps provide some evidence? Personally I would say it’s quite simple: much of the ice, especially on the Siberian side of the Arctic ocean, was dramatically thinner, and therefore melted more quickly as the summer went on, probably helped by weather conditions in key areas.
3 September 2008 at 11:41 AM
Re #336: Need to be careful about using monthly averages from a few weather stations as indicative of anything to do with climate. Especially true when the stations are all located near each other.
3 September 2008 at 11:42 AM
3 September 2008 at 12:16 PM
#335
“First, no one said that it is not worth “trying to objectively understand what is actually happening.” Your implication otherwise sounds like a cheap rhetorical trick.”
I was responding to a post that dismissed a carefully researched and detailed post of mine with the argument “I would contend that to look at either 2007 or 2008 in isolation is to take them out of their proper context.” - perhaps this argument might sound like a cheap rhetorical trick to you as well? Seeing as I have no more taken 2007 or 2008 out of their proper context than have the other posters I have been debating with.
You summarise my analysis of first year ice as “trivial”. It’s hard to argue with adjectives (as opposed to evidence) and I think the onus is on you to make your argument more precisely.
Consider where open water was exposed in 2007 http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=15&fy=2006&sm=09&sd=15&sy=2007
and then consider what the situation is a year on:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=02&fy=2007&sm=09&sd=02&sy=2008
Why is this trivial? It seems clear that well over half of the open water exposed is now ice again. And this is before we talk about thickness, which you have ignored completely.
“the only reasons I have thought of that the trend wouldn’t inexorably continue, is if the arctic started cooling and/or the summer weather became calmer than it has been for long enough for the ice to rebuild significantly. Do you know of any reason to believe either of those things will happen?”
Here’s the Jun/Jul combined average from MSU for lower troposphere temperatures for the last 10 years in the “NoPol” region i.e. ~60N to ~82.5N:
1998 0.64
1999 0.46
2000 0.27
2001 0.68
2002 0.79
2003 0.85
2004 0.53
2005 1.04
2006 0.83
2007 1.47
2008 0.52
So I would turn the argument around and say, do you know of any reason to believe that 2005 and 2007 represent the likely temperatures of the next few years rather than 1998-2004, 2006 and 2008? Similarly, do you know of any reason to believe that summers should be stormier than normal in the next few years?
Sorry if my tone seems rather aggressive, but I’m only responding to yours.
I’ve made quite a few detailed points today, and I believe they are helpful and relevant. I’m going to try and leave it at that.
3 September 2008 at 12:48 PM
#340 That’s funny, I thought James Lovelock said…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/01/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange
3 September 2008 at 12:51 PM
Chris, We started out this year after a hard winter with a sea ice extent that was the highest in 5 years. We had a year with cooler temperatures than the last couple of years due to La Nina. And for most of the year, we stayed close to the profile of 2005. Then we just didn’t bottom out. Certainly, thinner sea ice played a role. However, it would appear that the dynamics have changed. It ain’t the same Arctic.
3 September 2008 at 12:52 PM
#338 Chris, read the article:
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/02/15/arctic-ice.html
It was a significantly colder end of winter over the North American Arctic side of the Pole.
Albedo is significant at every month, even a low sun has an impact. Increased ice surface automatically means more albedo, in April May June July, even in the places where you think ice is irrelevant: Bering strait etc.. Your single Buoy example is not very appropriate, it is even cherry picking.
Take this one:
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2007F.htm
Ice thickness has increased over the summer. The data is preliminary , by the way….
Single ice stations are affected by so many factors, that its dangerous to generalize from it. However: you still fail to recognize summer weather conditions:
cooler surface air, cooler water, greater cloud coverage and winds favoring scattering (greater albedo) of ice instead of compressing, all factors against a significant melt from happening. Yet it happened. I’ve stated that ice extent started at a much greater level than last year, that is well accepted pretty much everywhere, I look at graphs and Cryosphere today makes the melt extent almost , read the word, almost identical to last year. So I would say that, explaining a greater melt, from thinner ice makes sense, only if the melting conditions were similar.
3 September 2008 at 1:39 PM
Chris, from your posts you seem to have the impression that ice forms and melts entirely in situ. At least, that’s the only message I can take from your continued insistence on exactly which parts of the Arctic Oceas have ice this year but were open last year, and vice versa.
That’s simply not the case: sea ice is mobile and follows the wind and water currents. The patch of ice you’re so animatedly pointing to at 165E isn’t necessarily new, recovering ice - it is much more likely to be an area of older ice that’s moved over a bit. That in turn helps explain the reduction in ice in the Beaufort sea, and so on.
What we can say about this year’s ice coverage is that despite having started from a higher baseline, we have no more (or very little more) ice in terms of area than last year, but that the extent is slightly higher. That is, we have the same ice area, but more loosely packed. This is a vast amount of yearly melt, occurring despite the fact that conditions this year are much less favourable for melt than last year. Thus it appears that the thin first-year ice formed from last year has been largely unable to withstand even a cool summer. The fact that this year’s ice area is no greater than last year sets us up for the same thing to happen again next year - only will next summer be more favourable for melting?
Even according to your own flawed analysis, you draw the wrong conclusions. What if the new ice area at 156E is indeed first-year ice which has withstood this summer? That means that if this year’s ice area is identical (or nearly so) to last year, then we must have lost an area of multi-year ice equal to the area of first-year ice you’re trumpeting as evidence of recovery. If so, then we’ve just replaced the last remaining bulwark of tough multi-year ice with ice that’s still very new. Scarcely a comforting thought!
3 September 2008 at 2:53 PM
Chris,
Note that there are differences between every year in terms of a regional pattern of melt, the correlation between September extent and the extent in months earlier than July is noted as being poor. There is very little inter-annual correlation. Personally I don’t think there’s much gain in examining such differences in great detail. I’ve followed Quikscat over the winter, and have spent more time than is healthy
going over the National Ice Centre Ice Charts. There is a lot of movement in the ice due to the Transpolar drift and Beaufort Gyre NSIDC. However this movement is area-dependent. For example around the pole and Ellesmere Island it is less, because the ice gets packed up by the transpolar drift pushing ice from Siberia up to the North coast of Greenland, whereas in the Beaufort Sea and on the East coast of Greenland it is significant. Furthermore the ice in the central ice pack won’t melt as much as in the periphery as it’s surrounded by ice and is kept cold. Given their locations and the progress of this year I don’t see a problem for my position with what is shown by any of the bouys you point out. (Which is not to say that I dismiss what you have noted.)
Rather than get bogged down in the detail of the bouy data I’ll get straight to what seems to be the key thrust of your argument - this year as a prospect for recovery.
In terms of the prospects for recovery it’s worth bearing in mind the time-constants of ice response. Bitz & Roe did a paper examining the loss of thick ice; “A Mechanism for the High Rate of Sea Ice Thinning in the Arctic Ocean” Journal of Climate 2003. They found that because thin ice can grow more quickly than thick ice there is a biasing towards loss of thick ice. For example it takes at least 6 years to make a given volume of 6 year old perennial ice, however because some volume is lost each summer in practice it takes more than that. Ice listed as 6 years old will contain some younger ice (new ice that freezes in fissures) and older ice (moved about by circulation). The old ice becomes thicker due to compaction, as the ice pack compresses ridges are formed, ’sheets’ of ice overlap. In terms of thickness first year ice cannot get very much thicker than about 2 metres. That’s because additional thickness forms on the underside of the ice-pack, and for it to freeze there has to be a heat flux from the (relative) warmth of the water to the cold of the surface in the long Arctic night. The heat flux is inversely proportional to the thickness of the ice, so once the frazil ice has compacted and started to form ice-pack as we’d recognise it, growth is initially rapid but it then slows down. Furthermore snow will act as an insulator lesser snow cover will increase thickness, as happened last winter due to the late formation of ice in some areas (ARCUS May outlook report). So it’s a very quick process (1 year) to grow new first-year ice, but it takes much longer to replace the loss of old thick ice (many years).
This is why I brought up the Nghiem 2007 paper in my post above. That shows what I see as the real tipping point in figure 3, the area/extent is to some degree a distraction. Steven Goddard has asserted over at “Watt’s up with that” pretty much what you assert; that the survival of ice above last year suggests prospects for a recovery. However Nghiem 2007 shows a persistent and intensifying year-on-year drop in perennial ice as measured by QuikScat. So in past years where extent/area has gone up between years (e.g. 2005 to 2006) there has still been a drop in perennial extent, thus suggesting that this is not a significant factor and cannot be read as a sign of the reversal of the loss trend. By the way I think it’s reasonable to suggest that an extent increase from 2007 will probably be similar to 2005-2006, as things stand at the moment, and after 2006 came 2007.
Have you read Zhang’s team’s Sea Ice Outlook work using the PIOMAS model? Web page here. They took the weather of the years 2001 to 2007, as ensemble members 01 to 07 and used the weather to force the model from the initial condition of ice in March. What they found (top fig) was that only 2007’s weather caused a September minimum extent below 2007’s record, even then the drop was not as much as between 2006 and 2007. Their September minima for ensemble members 01 to 06 were all over 5 million kmsq, as things stand this year’s minima seems very likely to be below Zhang’s ensemble members 01 to 06, however in their paper they note tendencies towards regional overprojection, and their figures are September mean.
Zhang’s study is interesting because it is relevant to Kevin’s post 335. Rather than go on more I simply say I second what Kevin says.
3 September 2008 at 3:18 PM
#345 If you’re determined to disagree with someone, you can always appear to find a flaw in their argument and generalise it. I can’t cover every aspect of the Arctic ice scene in every post, and just because I haven’t gone into detail on the shifting of ice doesn’t mean it obliterates my argument. I’ve dealt with the issue of the August incursion of anomalous heat from northern Siberia in previous posts, along with numerous other issues, which explain my “flawed analysis” as you call it in more detail. As for the “vast amount of yearly melt” you refer to, I would be interested (and extremely surprised) if anyone could provide evidence that within the Arctic ocean (i.e. away from the Pacific and Atlantic fringes which are not relevant since they have always melted every summer in recent history) there has been a volume loss approaching that of 2007.
#344 I’ve explained my arguments - too much further debate would be needless repetition. The main thing I’ll say is that the weather conditions WERE more favourable to melt in the precise part of the Arctic that saw rapid melt of vulnerable first year ice in August i.e. the Siberian side. I followed the synoptic charts and weather data every day in August, and I watched the persistent warm southerlies eat up the ice in front of my eyes. I didn’t follow things so closely earlier in the summer so I can’t describe the causation behind the July Beaufort melt with any precision. But I do know that far north Canada had record heatwaves, and ice in the Beaufort had been broken up by winter storms.
I haven’t cherry picked with the Buoys. I’ve been over the data from each individual buoy ad nauseam - see e.g. #330. The big picture is that 2007 saw record minimum average thickness by the end of summer of 1.3m - see Maslowski/NASA, hence 2008 started the melt season with dramatically thinned ice despite a cold winter (this simply is incontrovertible); hence if average thickness is >1.3m at the end of this summer then 2008 has seen much less volume loss over the Arctic ocean.
I’ve consistently argued that an earlier and stronger re-freeze than last year is very plausible, despite the fact that last winter was relatively cold as people like to emphasise when talking about 2008 yearly ice loss (despite, as I keep having to repeat, the fact that most of the extra ice floes that were around briefly at the end of winter on the Pacific/Atlantic peripheries would have been of minimal thickness - who knows, a few cms in many areas?)
No one has agreed with me, or even recognised that I might have a point. Well, let’s wait and see what happens. The fact that the (western) Chukchi sea is now 4C colder than this time last year, the NW Alaska coast is back to being colder than the long term average, and the southern Siberian sea is colder than at any time since 2001 makes me reasonably confident.
3 September 2008 at 3:28 PM
Sorry should have said “southern part of the East Siberian sea” at the end of my previous post. (N.b the southern part of the Beaufort is currently 1C warmer than last year, but this is surprisingly little considering how much longer it’s been open water)
3 September 2008 at 3:49 PM
Re: 339
Temperature plots are available for public viewing at many climate stations in Alaska (back to about 1950), the Midwest (going back to the 1890s) and at Minneapolis MN back to 1820.
Beginning dates of snowmelt runoff at river stations in the Upper Midwest from 1900 to 2008 can also be viewed, for the Red River at Grand Forks ND, the St. Louis River at Scanlan MN and the St. Croix River at St. Croix Falls WI.
Plots of average dewpoints at a few climate stations are also available. Higher atmospheric humidity increases melt rates when air temperatures are above freezing.
Plots at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/npatnew
3 September 2008 at 5:47 PM
“No one has agreed with me, or even recognised that I might have a point.”
Chris I agree with you! It is obvious that there has been some recovery in the Arctic sea ice extent this year notwithstanding the poor intial conditions that you have amply demonstrated.
Having said that I don’t see much relevance, from this whole protracted debate, to the AGW question.
If the Arctic ice recovers to the long term average in the next few years does that falsify the AGW hypothesis?
If the Arctic ice falls to new summer lows in the next few years does that prove the AGW hypothesis?
The answer is absolutely no to both questions in my opinion. Why therefore, are people making so much fuss about it compared to other more relevant factors like sea temperatures, UAH satellte data etc?
Alan
4 September 2008 at 2:07 AM
Update on Sea Ice Projection
It appears that while the type of projection may fit the evolution of sea ice extent this year, it is fairly sensitive to the coefficients in the quadratic trendline for daily sea ice extent fall, and moreover, that the coefficients are themselves fairly sensitive to recent daily behavior…
There are now two projections using the same method. However, the first uses a quadratic trendline based on the actual daily reduction in sea ice extent for the period 6/1/2008-8/27/2008, whereas the second uses a quadratic trendline based on the actual daily reduction in sea ice extent for the period 6/1/2008-9/3/2008.
I believe the following two charts speak for themselves:
2008 Daily Sea Ice Extent Fall (6/1/2008-9/3/2008)
http://i38.tinypic.com/33xvgwk.jpg
2008 Sea Ice Extent
http://i35.tinypic.com/1236×6c.jpg
*
Captcha fortune cookie: obligations Moody
4 September 2008 at 2:36 AM
Ok! if we are resigned to the fact of no summer ice from 70N in a few years and then longer and progressively longer periods of an ice free state, how quickly will that huge area of dark warming ocean really affect global climate? I appreciate the climatic time lag for factors affecting the ocean can be substantial. The less reflective ice means that more of the suns energy is trapped in the atmosphere thus increasing air temps. In reality the area of arctica compared to antarctica is like comparing a fly with an elephant respectively. If the ice of antarctica was to melt at the same rate as arctica I’d start digging our family cemetry right now. What I’m saying is what affect will prolonged periods of an ice free arctic have on the world’s climate???
4 September 2008 at 3:35 AM
I understand your point, and agree that discussions on the ice extent over the course a few years may be a little overheated.
“If the Arctic ice recovers to the long term average in the next few years does that falsify the AGW hypothesis?”
Please see here for the development over thirty years:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.jpg
Note the trend. IMHO, if the arctic ice recovers to pre-1980 levels in the next few years that would be remarkable indeed.
Also a question: what exactly do you mean with “the AGW hypothesis”? There are many different observations, correlations and predictions involved here.
4 September 2008 at 4:01 AM
Alan:
Because the impact of rapid sea ice decline will be felt throughout the northern hemisphere, as the changing pattern of atmospheric and oceanic heat flows directly impacts NH “weather”. This is - potentially - rapid climate change happening now, and it threatens to bring even faster change by destabilising methane hydrates in shallow Arctic seas and speeding up permafrost thaw.
Serious enough for you?
4 September 2008 at 5:57 AM
There’s more Arctic ice this year than last year, in context.
4 September 2008 at 6:48 AM
Wayne, a note FYI re: albedo
“The extent of spring 2008 snow cover over Eurasia was the lowest on record for any spring in the 42-year historical satellite record. Conversely, North American snow cover extent was slightly above average. For the Northern Hemisphere, spring 2008 was the third least extensive spring snow cover.”
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080613_springtemp.html
#346 (Cobblyworlds) Thanks for your interesting discussion, which I find quite convincing regarding what has happened in recent years.
Here’s my initial response to the key issues you raise.
Formation of new ice: agreed, it was particularly sudden last year, as the very anomalously warm sea temperatures meant it was only much later in the autumn than average, when the air temperatures had got particularly low, that the ice was able to re-form and once it did it was very rapid. The re-freeze might have been even later were it not for relatively fresher surface water. Thus, at the date when re-freeze began in a given location, both surface ocean temperature and sub-surface temperature are likely to have been at or above the temperatures on the much earlier re-freeze date the previous year. And not only would the new first year ice have started life as relatively fresher water, but assuming it formed more suddenly there would have been less time for brine rejection. All of which would point to that ice being even more vulnerable during the 2008 melt season.
The 2007 Nghiem paper shows perennial ice was already down from 32.9 per cent in March 2005 to 25.5 per cent in March 2007 March 2007
( despite the wafer-thin evidence of recovery 2005-6 you refer to - yes 2006 minimum extent was above 2005 minimum, and 2006/7 max extent was fractionally above 2005/6 max extent; however, average extent appears to have been lower in 2006 than 2005, and min, average and subsequent max area all appear to have been lower in 2006 - http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.jpg )
So at that stage I agree there was justified worry about a potential tipping point, and that worry was borne out by the record summer 2007 melt. But if perennial ice was low in March 2007, presumably by March 2008 the line had dropped off the bottom of the already low graph position in Fig 3. So if we’d reached a tipping point, then summer 2008 would be utter meltdown whatever the weather conditions then or over the previous winter.
But remember the Nghiem paper associates the shift from perennial to season ice with the following changes:
“…the change in winter preconditioned the sea ice cover for more efficient melt and further ice reduction in summer. Winter preconditioning of summer sea ice coverage was associated with the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) [Partington et al., 2003] and with the Arctic Oscillation (AO) [Rigor et al., 2002]. The NAO index in positive phases is also correlated to the areal flux of ice export through Fram Strait [Kwok and Rothrock, 1999]. The monthly AO index also exhibited mostly positive values during September to November 2005 and March 2006 to March 2007, a pattern which enhances ice advection away from the coast of the East Siberian and Laptev Seas and increases ice export out of Fram Strait [Rigor et al., 2002].”
Here’s the most recent chart from the UK Met Office of observed NAO up to this year, showing the increase referred to plus a further increase into this year; but then a forecast to drop to essentially 0 over this winter.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/seasonal/regional/nao/index.html
Here’s a chart of winter AO up to winter 07/8
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/detect/climate-ao.shtml
Note winter 07/8 was also quite strongly positive.
But here’s observations for the last few months
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao_index.html
i.e. trending at essentially zero.
Unfortunately I can’t find an authoritative forecast for AO this winter, but I do know that there is generally accepted to be significant correlation between the two oscillations.
So what we’re left with is a situation where 2008 started with a stack of factors which suggested that if we were at a tipping point, proof would be inevitable over the summer. Minimal perennial ice even compared with March 07, significantly positive NAO and AO, record thin ice by a huge margin. But by the time the Zhang outlook was published at the beginning of August, 2008 was failing to to provide any proof whatsoever. Hence the Zhang prediction that only 2007 weather could now cause 2008 to surpass the 2007 record.
Well as I’ve kept trying to point out again and again, the weather in August WAS comparable to that of 2007, and now I’ve finally got some good evidence of this. RSS August lower troposphere temperatures have just been published, and they show a positive anomaly for 60 to 82.5N of +0.935, which is only fractionally below that of August 07 (+1.02), much higher than the combined June/July 08 average (+0.369 - note RSS and MSU figures are slightly different) and very much higher than the global Aug 08 average (+0.146 which is still quite a bit lower than the +0.367 of Aug 07)
http://www.remss.com/pub/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_1.txt
Considering how cold it’s been over the Alaskan/Canadian/Greenland side of the Arctic in August, I think it’s hard to escape the reality that temperature anomalies were particularly high over the Siberian side of the Arctic.
Yet 2008 STILL defies expectations. Extent remains 8.5 per cent above a year ago as of today, area is at approx 8 per cent higher, and thickness appears to be the same or greater, plus well over half the areas exposed as open water by the end of last summer are now covered in ice again.
Moreover, while 2007 left millions of km2 of essentially open water in which positive sea surface temperature anomalies were able to grow to pretty extreme levels - up to over +7C in the pivotal Chukchi sea area which is closest to the Pacific, and between the East Siberian seas, Beaufort, and Arctic Basin ice edge…
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst_anom-070902.gif
… in 2008 the Siberian seas/Chukchi/Laptev were “only just” melted by the warm August weather, leaving a legacy of large expanses of ocean barely above the (saline) freezing point, containing significant clusters of ice removed from the main ice pack e.g. in particular the cluster in southern part of East Siberian Sea, which extends to ~72N on the 165E line of longitude compared with the most southerly ice on that line this time last year at ~83N which is a huge difference, or other clusters too scattered to cross the 15 per cent threshold for ice extent/coverage on some of the satellite images e.g. currently off Point Barrow http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/prods/WIS56CT/20080901180000_WIS56CT_0003950692.gif
Since the seas on the Pacific side of the Arctic ocean are so much colder than this time last year (apart from the southern Beaufort which is currently cooling rapidly in any event) and currently being exposed to below-average air temperatures, it seems likely that the sub-surface waters will have more time to mix with (and hence be cooled by) significantly colder surface waters than they did last year, before overall re-freeze starts insulating them, even with this point almost certainly being earler than last year. Thus it would seem that re-freeze will be more gradual since it will occur as sea temperatures gradually dip below the freezing point over the next month or two, rather than last year when it only happened all of a sudden extremely late once air temperatures had got particularly cold.
See e.g. http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=10&fd=20&fy=2006&sm=10&sd=20&sy=2007
http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst_anom-071021.gif
and
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=10&fd=20&fy=2007&sm=11&sd=05&sy=2007
So I would even venture to say that there are now a “stack of factors” (to recycle my earlier phrase) to suggest recovery 08/9 could be significantly stronger than 07/8, rather than representing the wrong side of a tipping point. And of course this is not just a potentially stronger formation of first year ice, but also crucially a step to the next level of recovery since although minimum extent/area this year will be no more than ~10 per cent higher than last year (possibly a lot less than that, let’s wait and see….), all the ice which has survived this season will be a year older at the start of the 2009 melt season, more than compensating for the much-reduced loss of multiyear ice this summer.
4 September 2008 at 7:14 AM
#355: “There’s more Arctic ice this year than last year, in context.”
Here’s your implication, in context
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.jpg
Note that the anomaly only dropped below -1.5 this year from August, and was only below -2 for two days (now at ~ -1.9)
The 2007 anomaly continued its drop to -3 in October because of the very anomalously warm seas centered over the Chukchi delaying re-freeze. As I have argued, a repeat of this simply isn’t on the cards this year on current evidence, such that the six-month average anomaly will almost certainly continue to track close to the pre-summer-2007 level of about -1.2 (six months to end April 08 were approx -0.8, and six months to end August 08 were approx -1.0) and if recovery is stronger than in 07/8, the six-month average anomaly could easily be approaching at least pre-2004 levels by next year’s melt season.
4 September 2008 at 8:05 AM
RE # 352
Lawrence, you asked:
[What I’m saying is what affect will prolonged periods of an ice free arctic have on the world’s climate???]
That is the question the international climate science community must answer soon and the IPCC report on their findings. Thre is a world of food supply hangin in the balance. I am delighted you asked the question I have been asking the AMS for about four years with no response. Maybe the research is being conducted in secret so as not to shock the commodities traders into pushing grain futures into orbit.
John McCormick
4 September 2008 at 11:10 AM
Chris, there is no question about warming shores:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/04/19squaremile-ice-sheet-br_n_123795.html
There is no question about warm air advection from continents. However you need to look at the entire Polar cap, not near one shore or another, also observe what is happening far away from shorelines, look over, under and sideways in the middle and edges of it all. There is room for melting mechanisms we are not aware of, especially since a prominent ice model is off by 30 years.
Simple ice with respect to thermal IR is way more complex than simple sea ice.
Compression is one of them, scattering is another, open water tides breaking off ice shelves another. This year has been cloudier, over all cooler (surface air and sst’s) than last year. Yet the ice has melted just as much or more. I am far more interested in studying what happens when surface air is cooler, especially if melting is just as furious, than simply claiming the obvious… My latest measurements up Here in the Arctic, have shown DWT warmer than last year at the same date. The atmosphere is not a simple structure of gaseous molecules stratified by pressure, its again more complex and therefore difficult to understand, the models will be refined for many years to come. But your analytical approach lacks perspective just like the prominent Ice model does.
4 September 2008 at 12:15 PM
Chris, would you call the 10th tallest man in the world “short”?
4 September 2008 at 12:52 PM
Mark, judging by his growth in recent decades, would you say he will inevitably be taller than the tallest man by 2013? Or even 2030?
No I shouldn’t engage with this sort of thing. Read what I’ve written, and I’m happy to engage with detailed debate that doesn’t seek to ridicule or pre-suppose that perfectly sensible arguments are wrong.
#359 With the greatest respect, I would say you haven’t addressed what I have been saying. What you say about my arguments is pretty dismissive e.g.
“However you need to look at the entire Polar cap, not near one shore or another, also observe what is happening far away from shorelines, look over, under and sideways in the middle and edges of it all.”
and “…your analytical approach lacks perspective…”
Yet I’ve been going to great trouble to analyse as many different relevant factors (and locations) as possible, and consider all perspectives.
Unlike some who are happy to content themselves with witty one-liners
“My latest measurements up Here in the Arctic, have shown DWT warmer than last year at the same date.”
Please elaborate: this could be really interesting and relevant?
4 September 2008 at 2:02 PM
I’ve been going to great trouble to analyse as many different relevant factors (and locations) as possible, and consider all perspectives
And yet you seem to be missing the wood for the trees.
1) The ice area this year is at best fractionally greater than last year.
2) We are past the time of year when there should be open surface melt.
From these two fact, we conclude that area measurements should not be thrown off by surface melt and should give a true measure of ice coverage across the Arctic. Thus, the best evidence we have is that approximately the same area of the Arctic is covered by ice this year as last year.
This of course raises the next question - is the ice we have now thinner or thicker than the ice we had last year? We know that the total area is the same, so the only remaining parameter in terms of volume is the thickness.
You are trying to claim two things simultaneously, both of which cannot be true:
A) A large amount of first-year ice has survived the melt, and will mature into multi-year ice over this winter.
B) Overall Arctic ice is thicker this year than last.
As I said in #345, then if there has been increased survival of first-year ice, then there MUST have been an equal loss of multi-year ice, since the total area (first year plus multi-year) is the same.
So, either there has been no increase in survival of first-year ice (i.e. there is the same remaining ice volume as last year despite less favourable conditions for melting), or there has been increased survival of some first-year ice, while the last of the multi-year ice melts out. Neither is a comforting thought.
4 September 2008 at 2:33 PM
Isn’t there still open surface melt? The ‘Pole’ cameras have floated well south; the fisheye pointed straight up has liquid water on the lens and you can see the melt ponds around the edge of the image:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np.html
4 September 2008 at 2:48 PM
Chris, I would look at the patch of ice West of Wardle island, and marvel at its disappearance now, under less than favorable conditions…
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/Icefilm_Arctic.avi
My data shows ssts below 0 C and surface temperatures around 0…
A DWT is a weighted temperature of the entire atmosphere, while the winter just past was quite cold, DWT’s remained similar to last year.
Implying a shift in heat location, more than a true cooling. This extra heat has never vanished, and therefore might be affecting the melt through thermal IR
emissions feedback between the ice and the warmer layer. I would concentrate on how the melt is progressing rather uniformly now throughout the ice cap, at all locations not subject to floes, rather than concentrate on one location or another.
4 September 2008 at 3:36 PM
RE #359. Trying to get some traction on this rather slippery issue …
Examining the satellite image series, one can draw two inferences. The first is that the Arctic Ocean is a rather closed regional sea (which is not at all intuitive for people not using the polar map projection). The second is that ice boundary on the Atlantic side has hardly moved, which tells that warming of the Atlantic (or changes in the thermohaline circulation there) is not the reason for the observed anomalous melting.
Patterns of melt during June 2007 left an impression that the Bering straits could play a role. The Bering sea ((northernmost part of the Pacific) was anomalously warm. The strait is narrow (60 km) and shallow (50 m) and a prevailing current of 1 m/s northwards is maintained (though winds may reverse its direction temporarily). It syphons warm surface water into the Arctic Ocean, and this was clearly seen as a plume during the early stages of melting. Another plume was generated by the Lena river bringing water from the rather hot Siberian plains. Both plumes stay for some time on the surface as they are formed of warm and low salinity water, but are gradually mixed to some depth (depending on wind speeds). Heat due to solar radiation is also mixed in the same process.
Consider next the Arctic Ocean circulation pattern, as shown in
http://polardiscovery.whoi.edu/arctic/circulation.html
The anomalous melting is located over the Beaufort Gyre. The Gyre is wind driven. Somewhere it was stated that it can at times flip its direction of rotation due to a suitable wind pattern, which might explain the substantial differences between 2007 and 2008 behaviours.
Autumn ice cover changes the below-surface dynamics radically. Notably, wind effects diminish. Further mixing in the surface layer is reduced (if not stopped). Also the force maintaining the Beaufort Gyre drops. Even under the ice cover, the Bering Strait and the Lena river continue to supply some relatively warm and low salinity water. Possibly a lot of heat is trapped under the ice in a shallow (100 m ?) surface layer.
Come spring 2008, the melting started again and winds reinforced the surface mixing process. Winds dredge a part of the stored heat to the surface, reinforcing the other active (meteorology) processes. Melting this year was slower - presumably because of less favourable weather conditions (more clouds, lower solar input). With time, stored heat from the water surface layer was able to overcome the deficit and about the same area of melting was finally achieved. Maybe this also explains why melting continues despite air temperatures falling slightly below zero C.
Obviously, the polar cap has a peculiar role in cooling the Earth during a hemisphere winter. Energy radiated out is mainly transported by winds from the outside. Ice and snow are pretty good insulation materials and heat flow from the sea water (or glacier interior) is limited.
It is another matter how the global warming cascades down to influence this process. Surely it does…
Unfortunately, quantitative modeling of the above is well beyond my skills and capacities.
4 September 2008 at 4:45 PM
#362 Peter:
Ice area as measured at Cryosphere today is currently 3.279 million km2 (and has gone up for each of the last 3 days incidentally), that’s ~ 10 per cent higher than this day last year and ~13 per cent higher than last year’s minimum. I suspect that the true difference in ice area is even higher due to surface melt issues, but I can’t prove it. Furthermore, I would be willing to bet quite a lot of money that the true difference is even higher still due to a substantially greater area at greater than 0 and less than 15 per cent concentration ice this year, both multiyear and first year ice. The ice tongues at the western and eastern sides of the Beaufort Sea would be cases in point.
But in any event, even if CT is spot-on, you are the one who can’t see the wood for the trees. Let’s say total ice in the core Arctic area (say within the average summer extent minimum area lines of the last 3 decades) = t, oldest ice = o, intermediate-aged ice = i, second year ice = s, and first year ice = f
In 2007, the minimum extent was much lower (26.4 per cent to be precise) than that of 2006 - http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=15&fy=2006&sm=09&sd=15&sy=2007
In other words it seems very little first year ice from winter 2006/7 survived the summer 2007 melt. Since one year’s survived first year ice becomes the next year’s second year ice, the 2008 melt season started with very little second year ice. Furthermore summer 2007 saw a huge loss of multiyear ice and dramatic thinning of all ice.
Thus at the start of 2008 melt season, t = o [very low, and thickest ice] + i [very low, and quite thin ice] + s [very low, and thin ice] + f [very high, and very thin ice]
Between September 2007 and 2008, t [minimum] appears to have increased by at least ~ 10 per cent (subject to the chance of further reductions in the next couple of weeks). Of this 10 per cent, I would subdivide it as follows, assuming that the labels refer to what each type of ice will be at the following season:
o: fractional net increase [small amount of o melted, fractionally higher amount of i becomes o; ice becomes thicker overall e.g. http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2007J.htm
i: fractional net increase as with o [s has become i; ice becomes thicker overall]
s: LARGE INCREASE [all survived f has become s; ice becomes thicker overall]
f: this will simply be t minus o, i and s therefore it ought to see a decrease slightly smaller in magnitude than the increase in s
Thus at the start of 2009 melt season, t = o [fractionally higher than a year ago, and thicker ice] + i [fractionally higher than a year ago, and thicker ice] + s [much higher than a year ago, and substantially thicker ice] + f [lower than a year ago, and almost certainly thicker if autumn 08 re-freeze turns out to have set in earlier than in autumn 07]
I think you’ll find the balance of f and s is crucial, especially if you include s in the definition of multiyear ice. And this is before we start talking about relative loss rates of multiyear ice through the Fram Strait in summer 07 vs 08, or even how much ice all the way down to 1 per cent concentration, and including under melt pools, there really is now compared to a year ago.
Or to put it another way, even a 10 per cent increase in multiyear ice is significant (because the extra 10 per cent of ice this year will NOT be first year ice next year, but second year ice!)
#364 “I would concentrate on how the melt is progressing rather uniformly now throughout the ice cap, at all locations not subject to floes, rather than concentrate on one location or another.”
I find it hard to discern, never mind concentrate on a uniform melt when area has increased for the last 3 days and extent has increased today after a minimal drop yesterday.
Further note re: extent for those into long term trend extrapolation. Official extent (i.e. greater than 15 per cent coverage) is currently 8.8 per cent more than the equivalent date in 2007, an INCREASE from 6.9 per cent ahead on the 2nd July.
4 September 2008 at 4:48 PM
Chris,
I agree that as the waters are not as warm it’s possible that we may see an earlier and wider freeze than last year. However the Circum Polar Flaw Lead Team (ARCUS May) found that a significant factor in the delayed melt and late year low areal anomaly in the Beaufort Sea were storms fed by water vapour from the sea. Even without ocean warming as substantial as 2007 we may still see the role of thin ice being a factor in such storms once again preventing ice. Note that the current Beaufort Sea SST anomaly is of the order of +4 or +5 degC over a much greater area than last year.
The claim that this year should have caused a massive reduction in perennial ice.
Initial qualitative evidence will come as the Arctic cools down and less water vapour allows the first year and multi-year ice to be distinguished on QuikScat. After March 2009 Nghiem should produce his extent for that time - which will be comparable with the 2007 paper. Last year was exceptional (NSIDC Sea Ice News 2007), perennial loss this year will not be as large, but I think it will probably still be down due to:
- the melt in Beaufort/Chucki; timeseries of QuikScat shows the perenial break off from Banks Island in January 2008 was broken up and dispersed into the pack area of Beaufort Chucki where much of it melted out. This region visibly seems to represent a substantial chunk of the first year ice area around the pole (QuikScat day 71 2008).
- the loss through Fram Strait; NSIDC Sea Ice News and QuikScat/Bremmen AMSRE timeseries.
My point in presenting Nghiem 2007 remains - between 2005 and 2006 there was an increase in minimum area/extent, yet from March 2006 to March 2007 the perennial extent fell. There was no recovery, which seems contrary to your claim we should expect a recovery. In the years since 2002 there have been earlier and later freezes, and higher and lower extents from year to year, but there has been a persistent perennial loss.
This August is not the same as last year.
The key factor last year was a persistent anticyclone that compounded initial thinning caused by a storm (NSIDC Sea Ice News 2007, 10 Sept 2007, fig 4 & text). What warmed the ocean was that solar heating of the ocean under relatively clear skies, not just sensible warming, but also latent heat warming (which would appear in the troposphere). This year much of the most interesting melt zones have been covered by cloud, so it’s been damned hard to get a grip on what has been going on under the cloud - I know I’ve been trying. The rapid “catch up” in early August also involved an anticyclone, but this time it was not an increase in insolation that caused the rapid drop, it was atmospheric heat flux and winds dispersing ice (NSIDC Sea Ice News 11 Aug 2008).
So I do not see any reason to see the weather of this year or this August as similar to the weather of last year. This has been a year of weather fairly condusive to formation and survival of ice (unlike 2007), yet we are within a small margin of last year, and the reduction in both area and extent continues to catch up on last year.
Concerns about a tipping point are not limited to the recent years.
The reasoning is far more involved than just looking at the detail from one year to the next (although that is crucial for testing ice-models) e.g. The Thinning of Arctic Sea Ice, 1988–2003: Have We Passed a Tipping Point? Lindsay & Zhang, Journal Of Climate 15 Nov 2005.
4 September 2008 at 4:52 PM
Further note following previous post #366: I would also strongly re-iterate my arguments in #356 (which took me a lot of time and trouble to write!) re: how 2008 has defied expectations, and re: the likely greater strength of recovery in 2008/9 compared with 2007/8.
4 September 2008 at 5:51 PM
A further note to Peter: do not underestimate how thick first year ice can quickly become e.g. see the following buoy installed in 2m thick first year ice on 4th April 08.
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2008B.htm
The ice has failed to get any thinner than 2m in the meantime, thus it is set up to become a respectable thickness this winter as it enters its second year. And remember that we are told average ice thickness at the end of summer 07 was 1.3m. Thus we only need the average at end of summer 08 to be 1.43m for ice volume to have increased by 10 per cent (even if 2007 and 2008 ended up with identical minimums in extent/area)
#367 It seems to me that the openness (and obvious warmth) of the Siberian seas was far more relevant to the late refreeze last year than the state of the Beaufort - see e.g. http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=10&fd=15&fy=2006&sm=09&sd=15&sy=2007
This year the anomaly in the south central Beaufort may be currently slightly higher (~1C), but it is dwarfed by the extra magnitude by which much larger areas are cooler (e.g. Chukchi ~4C, East Siberian ~3C and these are precisely the areas whose warmth delayed the refreeze last year). In any event, take a look at current temperatures in the Beaufort - you will see that the anomaly peak you refer to is surrounded by a “triangle” of 0C waters surprisingly close - and likely to impinge further given the forecast for the next couple of weeks.
http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/analysis/351_100.gif
I’ve explained why I don’t think that an analysis of all relevant figures and averages for extent and area between 2005 and 2006 should have led one to expect a recovery then.
I fundamentally disagree with you about the August weather. It’s very simple: there was an anticyclone over the Beaufort, low pressure to the mid-north of Russia, with persistent southerlies being fed in between producing the perfect cocktail for ice melt consisting of high temperatures, southerly winds and sunshine over a massive swathe of the Siberian coasts. This is in no way consistent with the NSIDC News of 11th Aug which I read at the time.
Re: the future I guess we’ll just have to wait and see
4 September 2008 at 6:41 PM
#367: A very final point - it might be stating the obvious, but average ice thickness can increase between two years even as minimum extent DECREASES e.g. ice thickness increased between winter 2003/4 and winter 2004/5 (lower minimum extent in summer 2004 compared with summer 2003) This is because the AVERAGE extent and area, especially over the summer months, are more important than some may be willing to recognise.
I’m about to go away on holiday, so please don’t read anything into my silence
Good luck to all in getting to the bottom of the Arctic conundrum, whatever your point of view.
4 September 2008 at 10:31 PM
Note that NSIDC now has another update, with relatively full commentary on the August developments.
5 September 2008 at 12:18 AM
Again I stand amazed, the thinning of the ice is wider everywhere,
click on ice thickness:
http://seaice.bplaced.net/gfs.html
yet temperature anomalies are more or less not so hot with temperatures around 0 C….
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/map/images/rnl/sfctmpmer_07a.rnl.html
5 September 2008 at 6:37 AM
Actually just one very very final point before i go.
In #369 this was a typo: “…This is in no way consistent with the NSIDC News of 11th Aug which I read at the time…” It should have read that my analysis was in no way “inconsistent” with the NSIDC news.
However, anyone with a fine eye for detail may spot that there could indeed be a potential inconsistency. I referred to high pressure over the Beaufort in Aug, whereas NSIDC update of 4th Sep referred to high pressure over the Chukchi. In fact it was fairly equally over both, so you could refer to it being over either sea and still be right http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/map/images/fnl/slp_01_30frames.fnl.anim.html
Sorry if this is splitting hairs, but I hate to see good arguments being wasted because I haven’t pre-empted where minor flaws could be highlighted.
Also here’s an interesting link from the NSIDC, showing how the extra heat in the central Beaufort in Aug 08 (up to 2C higher) was dwarfed by a decrease of up to 4C over much wider areas on the Chukchi and Siberian side.
http://www.nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20080904_Figure4.jpg
So long…….
Almost…. Just read #372. You need to put thickness in context, not to mention the limitations of using satellite data to estimate it. Even taking the data at face value, the central Arctic area looks pretty much unchanged since a month ago, with thickness still greater than 1.5m throughout, and losses of no more than 0.2m. As for the periphery, I simply do not accept the maps’ suggestion that ~ 1 million km2 within the periphery has thickness of less than ~20cm. It simply doesn’t work like this - the ice doesn’t start at one cm at the edge and take up to a hundred miles to reach a thickness of more than 20cm. Check out the detailed Canadian ice service reports and their description of the ice off Alaska (much of which doesn’t even show at all on the satellite images, yet much of which is still-thick old ice), check out the buoys, even check out Lewis Pugh the kayaker’s report of getting stuck in “only” 1m thick (new) ice (at at least 80 per cent concentration) at 80.5N just north of Spitzbergen which shows as ~15cm thick on the most recent of your thickness maps. Even consider the main satellite pictures to see how misleading the thickness maps can be e.g. the latter show a significant area of zero thickness at ~155E on the Siberian side inside of the 80N latitude line yet the main AMSR-E picture from the same date shows the same area as virtually all being at least 50 per cent concentration ice, which I would be absolutely amazed to discover to be less than say at least 50cm thick.
As for the temperatures, maybe take a more appropriate animation from the same site and let people make up their own mind which side of the approx -2C threshold for ice melt the average air temperatures have been on the peripheries of the Arctic in the last week.
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/map/images/fnl/sfctmpmer_01.fnl.anim.html
Once again, so long……….
5 September 2008 at 11:30 AM
I don’t think that the GDAS/GFS ice thickness analysis uses any recent satellite or other observational data. It’s just a modelled thickness, derived from atmospheric conditions during the last months (or even years). And the model isn’t very sophisticated. Especially, it doesn’t include any ice movements.
Occasionally, the ice thickness is reset to zero because of missing ice concentration data that is misinterpreted as no ice. The triangle of near-zero ice thickness in the Chukchi Sea pointing towards the pole that is still present, originated 5 months ago. Some of the holes near the pole result from missing or wrong data from more than 1 year ago.
It seems that the model has been set up with some climatology data when it started (in 2005) and runs autonomously since then (assuming stationary ice). Alignment with reality only happens when the ice concentration at a point goes down to zero.
But the data are still useful for relative changes of thickness; the absolute thickness is only a rough estimate. However, the model seems to underestimate ice loss at clear sky conditions in summer and/or overestimate it under clouds.
The (incomplete) NOMADS GDAS archive has ice thickness data going back at least 1½ years. I plan to set up a long term animation the next days or weeks.
5 September 2008 at 4:07 PM
Chris wrote in 373:
That would mean going from 1.7 meters to 1.5 meters with only a 12% loss.
You may wish to look at the following numbers which I gleened from measurements on the ground represented on a map at the following webpage:
August 25, 2008
Arctic shortcuts open up; decline pace steady
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/082508.html
Thickness before melt season, thickness by August 20th, meters lost at surface, meters lost at bottom, percent lost
3.17 m before, 1.37 m on August 20th, 0.8 surface, 0.9 bottom, 56.8% loss
1.83 m before, 0.43 m on August 20th, 0.5 surface, 0.9 bottom, 76.5% loss
2.13 m before, 1.35 m on August 20th, 0.6 surface, 0.2 bottom, 36.6% loss - the Arctic Basin
1.99 m before, 1.32 m on August 20th, 0.2 surface, 0.4 bottom, 33.7% loss
2.90 m before, 2.01 m on August 20th, 0.6 surface, 0.3 bottom, 30.7% loss
2.92 m before, 2.01 m on August 20th, 0.5 surface, 0.4 bottom, 31.2% loss
2.79 m before, 2.39 m on August 20th, 0.3 surface, 0.1 bottom, 14.3% loss
The map is at the bottom. Judging from the map, the measurements taken are fairly representative of the ice losses throughout the Arctic. Either you should have looked at more recent material (after more of the melt had taken place) or looked for data that was more representative. Incidentally, the melt is still underway — and should remain so until late September or early October.
*
Captcha fortune cookie: crank 31.75
5 September 2008 at 4:17 PM
Asked this before and it seemed to get lost. Why has there been little excess melting in the ice north of Europe in the Greenland and Bearing seas?
[Response: Because the dominant drift of the ice is from Siberia across the pole to Greenland where is compresses and is generally much thicker than elsewhere. Therefore as it warms, the Siberian arctic/Beaufort Sea areas are first to go. - gavin]
5 September 2008 at 9:43 PM
Clarence , thanks for the clarifications and comments. Can you include total volume estimates with your next displays?
6 September 2008 at 11:37 AM
D Price #376:
Here is a link to a site that helped me to ’see’ the current mess the Arctic ice is in:
http://www.homerdixon.com/download/arctic_flushing.html
This link shows the curculations on the Arctic ocean:
http://nsidc.org/seaice/processes/circulation.html
Now that these huge ice shelfs (Ellesmere Island and Greenland) have fractured from being landfast, will these circulations alter significantly or were these circulations present under landfast ice?
What were circulations like ‘under’ these ancient(?) ice shelfs?
6 September 2008 at 2:50 PM
There is so much compaction , from almost all sides of the remaining pack ice, that there should be some significant reductions in extent during the next few days. Polarstern path looks quite interesting;
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/Polarstern_visual.png
it must be surreal, an adventure where no ship has gone before on such an ice free sea.
7 September 2008 at 6:24 AM
Sorry to come late to the party, I just stumbled on this fascinating and most instructive blog. My 2c worth re Lovins’ paper on Nuclear Power Illusion:
I thought the French not only get 80% of the electric energy from nuclear, they even manage to sell some of the excess to the Germans and Italians, and especially to the Danish, so they can keep the wind mills moving when the wind stops. So much for the claim that nuclear only works when subsidised. Italians liked it to much that now they are building their own nuclear power stations. And with re. the fear of nuclear bombs, look at the Japanese, the only ones who can really claim the right to be afraid of nukes: they have some 54 rectors in operation, and some 12 in the pipeline. Shall I also mention that the French pay one of the lowest prices for electricity in Europe, and have one of the lowest CO2 per capita in the world? So, Lovins’ illusion sounds more like self delusion
For a comparison of nuclear, wind and solar a la French, I recommend this site (in English)
http://www.manicore.com/anglais/index.shtml
7 September 2008 at 8:04 PM
Further to my earlier comment (#380) on Amory Lovins’ article, (suggested by Gavin in #75). Again sorry for being so late with my comments.
I printed Lovins article and I am reading it, slowly. I should say that the writing style in this article is not my favourite. I am a physicist myself, so I am not scared of physics!. The trouble is that this text reads a tad too much as coming from a contrarian. This is not the language of science, in my book at least.
After noting that the closing statement indicates that Lovins has published hundreds of papers and 29 books, I could not help myself, and I did a quick Scopus search under Physical Sciences, Lovins, AB. The search yielded 45 documents (not quite the same as hundreds) and an h-index of 4, excluding self citations. For the non-initiated, h = 4 means that out of the 45 documents in the database, 4 have been cited at least 4 times. In terms of what John Hirsch stated when invented the h-index (Wikipedia), for physicists, a value for h of about 10-12 might be a useful guideline for tenure decisions at major research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship; 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences. To quote from Jim Hansen’s trip report, the Lovins of my search would hardly qualify as a member of the relevant scientific community.
BTW, when I widened the search to Social and Health sciences, the h-number went up to 6, and the number of documents to 60, not much better. A sad case of mistaken identity, perhaps ?
7 September 2008 at 8:50 PM
http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search?q=author:Amory+author:Lovins
Results … about 318 for author:Amory author:Lovins
8 September 2008 at 1:27 AM
Thanks H-R, glad to know it wasn’t mistake identity, it was the wrong search engine! Even I look better in Google.
Here is a lovely quote from Lovins:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JZS/is_9_23/ai_n25005319/pg_5?tag=artBody;col1
“Amory Lovins, another critic and one-time British representative of Friends of the Earth, agrees. “If you ask me,” Lovins said in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1977, “It’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.” Ehrlich, Lovins, and almost all of the “green” leadership rightly recognize that nuclear energy would lead to prosperity. From their standpoint, that is the problem.”
And these are some alternative readings of the data Lovins used to produce his paper:
http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2008/06/amory-lovins-and-his-nuclear-illusion.html
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/08/north-pole-notes-continued/#comment-97754
8 September 2008 at 1:47 AM
hi does anyone out there know how to make a graph depicting uvb radiation versus latitude
8 September 2008 at 2:43 AM
andre grz writes:
Any sextons or deacons?
8 September 2008 at 2:43 AM
Results … about 318 for author:Amory author:Lovins
Now go through and count how many of those are duplicate entries. For example, in the first 100 hits there are five entries for “Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution” and seven for “Factor Four: Doubling Wealth-halving Resource Use”
8 September 2008 at 3:56 AM
#375 Timothy. I look at the most recent material all the time, whether NSIDC news or buoys. Do I really have to go through all this again? The NSIDC map you refer to took its data from, and only from, the Arctic buoys I have referred to many a time.
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/newdata.htm
It portrayed how much they had melted SO FAR THIS SEASON. To get context, you need to compare to them to their status at the same point last year (if available), and take into account drift, positioning and what type of ice they were installed in.
I already explained the context of the NSIDC map at e.g. #330.
#330:
“….I’ve already gone into a lot of detail on the buoys in previous posts. The only buoys which *appear* to support your point are the two with big yellow bars.
The one (2007E) on the edge of the Beaufort was right on the ice edge, and has drifted into open water, so has obviously seen a lot of bottom melt. Its neighbours show a different story: 2008F at Lat: 76.832 N Long: 139.974 W has still failed to melt to less than 3m thick
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2008F.htm
and 2007F at Lat: 72.609 N Long: 136.079 W appears to have shown no net melt at all since the start of the year despite substantial southward drift. i.e. still at ~3m thick
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2007F.htm
As for Buoy 2006C in the central Arctic (i.e. the other one with a big yellow bar), the melt here has been half that in 2007, such that the thickness is identical to a year ago. http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/2006C.htm….”
It therefore seems rather bizarre to me, and quite frustrating, that you should claim to be the one most in tune with measurements on the ground, as you stated
“You may wish to look at the following numbers which I gleened from measurements on the ground represented on a map at the following webpage:”
I’ve been following the actual measurements on the ground i.e. the buoy data, as well as other relevant data.
You say:
“Incidentally, the melt is still underway — and should remain so until late September or early October.”
Depends where you look. Not in a large area of the Chukchi Sea - see new ice in light pink http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/prods/WIS45SD/20080907180000_WIS45SD_0003957865.gif
You seem very confident that net melt/compaction will continue until much later than last year.
Let’s see what’s happened so far in September.
On Sep 1st, extent was 7.4 per cent more than a year previously.
Today, at latest data (sep 7th) of 4.75 million km2, it is 7.7 per cent more than a year previously. Or 338,000 km2 greater extent.
Let’s wait and see if your projection of ~4 million km2 at the beginning of Oct, or ~6 per cent less than the 2007 minimum, is really correct. I wouldn’t rule it out completely due to high relative amount of first year ice, the uncertainties of the weather, and the dangers of over-confident forecasting in any event.
But my personal opinion based on all the evidence I see before me, remains unchanged, that there has been a small recovery from last year, and colder sea temperatures mean an earlier re-freeze overall. (N.b. date of minimum extent will be of limited use in judging this)
8 September 2008 at 4:10 AM
North Greenland satellite
A great picture to see the situation on Greenland’s northern coast:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2008247/crefl1_143.A2008247183500-2008247184000.250m.jpg
8 September 2008 at 4:43 AM
#380:
thought the French not only get 80% of the electric energy from nuclear, they even manage to sell some of the excess to the Germans and Italians, and especially to the Danish, so they can keep the wind mills moving when the wind stops.
Another way to phrase this could be:
thought the French not only get 80% of the electric energy from nuclear, they are forced to sell some to the Germans and Italians, and especially to the Danish, when supply exceeds demand, and their nuclear plants produce excess energy because they can not be throttled down easily
Furthermore, the fact that the French get 80% of their energy from nuclear does not prove anything. That could be (and probably is) the result of massive government funding, i.e. taxpayer francs and euros.
The main point I took from Lovins article is that no company is prepared to invest in nuclear without significant government backing. I think this is true, and therefore the bottom line is: nuclear is not economically viable.
8 September 2008 at 5:58 AM
That’s of course not to criticise Amory Lovins, about whom I know precisely nothing, just to point out that Google Scholar is, um, not the best tool in the box.
8 September 2008 at 2:59 PM
#378 Dan C,
Most of the ice shelves that are going are up against land, such as inlets in Ellesmere Island. So they shouldn’t affect circulation in terms of their physical presence. Furthermore in terms of the overall area of sea ice along the Canadian Arctic Archipelago coast, the addition of fresh water they represent will not be a significant factor.
#365 Pekka Kostamo,
I agree about the addition of fresh warm water from Siberia being a factor to watch. However Gavin’s inline reply to #376 D Price is also what I see as the reason why the losses have been mainly in the Beaufort through to the Laptev Sea.
With regards mixing processes, you may find Yang 2004 “Storm-driven Mixing and Potential Impact on the Arctic Ocean.” of interest, 6.8Mb pdf available from Woods Hole Institute. I had in mind something more apt but can’t recall it, if I can find what I was thinking of I’ll post.
8 September 2008 at 5:45 PM
Thanks Anne (#389) for checking my grammar. You are quite right; my assertion does not prove anything. Perhaps, as suggested in another blog, we should just sit back and wait until the French go broke, or better still, stuff it up completely and either melt down France, or die from Leukaemia. Good riddance. After all, they gave us the French Revolution, the metric system, and a few good movies, but nothing else. Next, I suppose the Swedish and Belgians should go: they get more than 50% of their electricity from Nuclear. How about the Finish? The French are building one of their own reactors for them. Again this proves nothing, except that the French are very cunning. So, then again, maybe Nuclear is viable after all…?
Lovins, reluctantly, points out that the overall (in his view) decline in the number of nuclear stations, will be offset by the new ones the Chinese (among others) are building, although he quickly stresses (p.38) that Beijing is also installing significantly more wind power . Maybe this unbalance in installed capacity has something to do with the fact that the loading factor of nuclear stations is 90-95%, while for wind it is only 25-30%? Looks like the smart thing to do. Isn’t this what Dr James Hansen proposes?
This is getting too boring.
Anne, I still have to come across one pro-nuclear guy (or gal) that opposes efficiency, or the extensive use of wind, geo, solar, bio mass, etc., in any form. The antinuclear Greens make a sad mistake in alienating the pro-nuclear bunch. Together we can make a better world, or at least save our skins. Apart, we all are going to sink in CO2.
9 September 2008 at 4:21 AM
lea asks:
Find out what percentage of the solar radiation is in the UV range (I think total UV is abou 7% of incoming solar radiation). Multiply by the solar constant, which averaged around 1,366 watts per square meter for the last 50 years or so. Then apply Lambert’s cosine law:
I = I0 cos(theta)
where theta is the latitude, I0 the illumination perpendicular to the sun (percent UVB x solar constant), and cos is the cosine function.
Then plot I versus theta.
9 September 2008 at 4:26 AM
Right, Andre — if Anne says French nuclear is economically inviable without massive government support, she must want to kill all Frenchmen. Thanks for this interesting example of denier reasoning.
P.S. Gavin — I had to click preview six times to get Captcha text I could read. The comment someone else posted in another thread is quite right — Captcha is becoming harder and harder to read.
[Response: Remember that the idea is for you to decode something that OCR wasn’t able to. It’s possible that their pool of needed readings has shrunk to a harder kernel that really are impossible to decipher. I’ll look into it. - gavin]
9 September 2008 at 4:48 PM
To Anne (#389), maybe this post will dispel your doubts on the profitability of Areva, the French Nuclear company: their profit for 2008 went up to US$1.2 billion, up from a paltry 295 million euros the year before. Their waste treatment business is also growing.
http://www.macleans.ca/business/wire/article.jsp?content=b0829117A
(You can relax, Barton Paul (#494), and so can everybody in France…). Gosh, you two got me worried: maybe the French nuclear physicists never heard of a little known engineer called Sadi Carnot and were running their highly inefficient nuclear facilities at a loss. BTW, even Lovins has some words of praise for Areva’s achievements (read his paper, it is pretty illuminating, as Gavin said).