Arctic Now Reinforces Own Warming
From EarthSky (“A Clear Vocie for Science” — & an excellent site indeed) the following sober account:
Sober new report from 200 polar researchers: Arctic now reinforcing own warming
The effects of climate change in the Arctic are already here, says a 2011 study by 200 polar researchers, and those effects include a much reduced covering of snow in the Arctic, a shorter winter season and thawing tundra. Moreover, several feedback effects – including one where melting Arctic permafrost releases carbon to the atmosphere, and another where decreased snow-and-ice cover means more absorption of the sun’s heat into Arctic ground – is already happening to create faster warming than before, according to these researchers.
Overall, the new study suggests that changes in the Arctic are taking place significantly faster than previously expected, and that more changes can be expected. Scientists presented the new research on the Arctic at a conference in Copenhagen on May 4, 2011. Margareta Johansson, from Lund University, is one of the researchers who created the report, serving as editor of the two chapters on snow and permafrost. She said she believes the recent changes are part of a long-term warming trend.
The changes we see are dramatic. And they are not coincidental. The trends are unequivocal and deviate from the norm when compared with a longer term perspective.
A fragment of the ice cap washed up on the shoreline of Southern Iceland. Image Credit: Nick Russill
The report is called Impacts of Climate Change on Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic. Close to 200 polar researchers contributed to the report, which these scientists call “the most comprehensive synthesis of knowledge about the Arctic that has been presented in the last six years.” The Arctic Council’s working group for environmental monitoring (the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program) organized the report, which will serve as the basis for the fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), expected to be ready by 2014.
It has been known for some time that – over the past decades – Earth has not been warming uniformly. The polar latitudes appear to be warming faster than equatorial latitudes, for example. Measurements of air temperatures around the globe indicate that the most recent five-year period on Earth has been the warmest since 1880, when monitoring began. Other data, from tree rings to a number of other things, show that summer temperatures over the last decades have been the highest in 2000 years.
In the Arctic, in the span of recent human memory and measurement, Arctic snow cover in May and June have decreased by close to 20 percent, the winter season has become almost two weeks shorter and the temperature in Arctic permafrost has increased approximately half a degree to two degrees, according to this new report. Johansson said:
There is no indication that the permafrost will not continue to thaw.
The melting permafrost in the Arctic is expected to create a feedback loop, whereby even more carbon is released to the air. That is because large quantities of carbon are stored in the permafrost. Johansson said:
Our data shows that there is significantly more [carbon in Arctic permafrost] than previously thought. There is approximately double the amount of carbon in the permafrost as there is in the atmosphere today.
The carbon comes from organic material which was “deep frozen” in the ground during the last ice age. As long as the ground is frozen, the carbon remains stable. But as the permafrost thaws, there is a risk that carbon dioxide and methane, a greenhouse gas more than 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, will be released, which could increase global warming. Johansson said:
But it is also possible that the vegetation which will be able to grow when the ground thaws will absorb the carbon dioxide. We still know very little about this. With the knowledge we have today we cannot say for sure whether the thawing tundra will absorb or produce more greenhouse gases in the future.
Feedback effects of this type are of major significance for how extensive global warming will be in the future, say these researchers. Margareta Johansson and her colleagues present nine different feedback effects in their report. In addition to the carbon released from melting permafrost, one of the most important right now is the reduction of the Arctic’salbedo, in other words its brightness or reflectivity. The decrease in the snow-and-ice-covered surfaces means that the Arctic is not as reflective as it once was. Thus it reflects less solar radiation back out into the atmosphere. This radiatoin – essentially heat – is absorbed instead, with temperatures rising as a result. These researchers say the Arctic has entered a stage where it is itself reinforcing climate change.
The future does not look brighter, these researchers say. They point to climate models showing that temperatures will rise by a further 3 to 7 degrees. In Canada, the uppermost meters of permafrost will thaw on approximately one fifth of the surface currently covered by permafrost. The equivalent figure for Alaska is 57 percent. The length of the winter season and the snow coverage in the Arctic will continue to decrease, and the glaciers in the area will probably lose between 10 and 30 percent of their total mass – all this within this century, according to these researchers. They suggest there will be “grave consequences for the ecosystems, existing infrastructure and human living conditions.”
These researchers also say that new estimates indicate that, by 2100, global sea level will have risen by between 0.9 and 1.6 metres, which is approximately twice the increase predicted by the U.N.’s panel on climate change, IPCC, in its 2007 report. This is largely due to the rapid melting of the Arctic icecap, they say. Between 2003 and 2008, the melting of the Arctic icecap accounted for 40 percent of the global rise in sea level. Johansson said:
It is clear that great changes are at hand. It is all happening in the Arctic right now. And what is happening there affects us all.
Bottom line: Some 200 polar researchers have released a new report is called Impacts of Climate Change on Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic. They presented results from this report at a climate conference in Copenhagen on May 4, 2011. The Arctic Council’s working group for environmental monitoring (the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program) organized the report, which will serve as the basis for the fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), expected to be ready by 2014. The report suggests that the effects of global warming in the Arctic are now readily apparent and that feedback mechanisms are at work to increase warming: essentially, the Arctic is now reinforcing its own warming. Margareta Johansson, from Lund University, is one of the researchers behind the new report.
Gallup survey: Worldwide, blame for climate change falls on humans
“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux
This is VERY sobering.
I enjoyed the articles as I do most of your postings. I read a lot of articles on a wide variety of topics from politics to the environment to entertainment and more. I do feel I know as much about rap as I’ll ever need. I like diversity and challenge so make a point of giving both “sides” a fair reading. Like crosswords, this intellectual exercise is intended to save my wee brain from deterioration. As an old and tired mugwump, this may be a vainglorious exercise.
That said, here are some opposing opinions (oh horrors). Most are referenced or quoted. Those that are not simply come from my own point form notes that I aimlessly seem to collect. I have time these days.
James Houston, director emeritus of engineer research and development for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Robert Dean, professor emeritus of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida reported on their examination of historical data from tidal monitors around the United States. They determined that sea levels rose very little in the 20th century. The rate at which they are rising has slowed considerably and this deceleration has likely been occurring for the past 80 years.This finding is consistent with what they and others have found from checking tidal gauges worldwide. What little sea-level rise there was in the last century was insignificant. These findings are contrary to the predictions by computer climate models that show the sea rising quickly and catastrophically as global warming melts glaciers and polar ice caps.
Many claim that Ocean cycles such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), El Niño/La NiñaSouthern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) may better explain climate fluctuations. I have no idea.
A general rise in global ocean levels depends, naturally, on how much of the melting ice starts on land. All melting water does not end up in a sea. Average global temperatures are measured at surface levels or by satellite and not in the deepest depths of the oceans. A 1C increase in the oceans at all depths is both unrealistic to contemplate and would take millennia to occur. Millenia planning is, shall we say, an inexact science in fact, it’s not a science at all. The oceans do not behave like water confined to a cylinder in their thermal expansion characteristics when changing temperature. While the Arctic has experienced net melting ice over the last few years, this does not seem to be the case overall in Antarctica.
A word about the Amazon Forest, the lungs of the Earth, lest we forget that beleagured area. It suffered a large drought in 2005 and an even larger one in 2010. The population of river dolphins and other species were devastated. Many climate scientists feared the worst. “Having two events of this magnitude in such close succession is extremely unusual, but is unfortunately consistent with those climate models that project a grim future for Amazonia,” said Simon Lewis, from the University of Leeds, co-author of “The 2010 Amazon Drought,” a paper published in Science in February of this year.
Three months after that dire outlook, the doom and gloom is lifting. The Amazon and its species have made a dramatic comeback, so much so that the river populations of dolphins now exceed pre-dought levels, even in one of the hardest hit drought areas.
The answer may lie partly in a 2009 study of the 2005 drought conducted by 66 (somewhat less than the 200 in the Arctic but still…) scientists at Leeds that found the Amazon’s trees, even at an advanced age, to be vigorous in growth and resilient to drought. What could possibly explain these twin capabilities?
They say it was the unusually rich concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide reduces the rate at which trees respire, letting them survive low water conditions. Carbon dioxide also provides the carbon that trees need to take in and grow.
Oliver Phillips, inThe Changing Amazon Forest published by the Royal Society, stated that, “While there have been widespread changes in the physical, chemical and biological environment of tropical trees, the only change for which there is unambiguous evidence that the driver has widely changed and that such a change should accelerate forest growth is the increase in atmospheric CO2. The undisputed long-term increase in concentrations, the key role of CO2 in photosynthesis, and the demonstrated effects of CO2 fertilization on plant growth rates make this the primary candidate.”
CO2 to the rescue?
Matthew Penn of the U.S. National Solar Observatory, predicts that sunspots could all but disappear beginning in 2015 (their number has already been greatly reduced over the past 18 months). The sun has a great deal more impact on Earth’s climate than do idling SUVs. There are laws against “idling” anything where I live. The Northern Hemisphere was dominated by Ice Age like weather for 500 years from the 14th through the 19th centuries. Could we be looking at another Mini Ice Age? That was the threat during the 70s. In fact it was front page news, again where I live. Old people , like me, remember that.
The UN was forced to make an embarrassing admission that it was wrong six years ago when it issued a dire warning that by now 50 million people would have been forced to become environmental refugees by the onset of global warming. On the other hand, flooding is threatening much of the U.S. and western Canada. Rain, melting ice, poor flood control and in some cases, living too close to the rivers seem to be the cause. It has never been good to fool with Mother Nature. So much for the thought that rising water in one place creates farmland in another. In North America its the farmland that is being covered by water.
Enough. These are but a few of the things that caught my eye. The only thing I know for sure is that that entire issue has become entirely too politicized. Last year, several dozen members of the Royal Society revolted at how the famous institution had been used as a political instrument. Politics is an arena in which the environment will ultimately lose. Up here in the not too frozen, just over the border north, the environment gets a great deal of press but the voters are checking the other box. They want jobs. They have seen the costs in Europe and the collapsing economies. I suspect it is not too different in the U.S.
Just what I have read. You coverage is excellent and far more in depth than mine. Keep up the good work. At the very least you are educating me. That’s pretty good. Many schools abandoned the project as “impossible.”