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Arctic Ice May Melt By 2040
Dekortage writes in with a new study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research suggesting that the North Pole may be clear of ice in summer as soon as 2040, decades earlier than previously thought. From the article: "'As the ice retreats, the ocean transports more heat to the Arctic and the open water absorbs more sunlight, further accelerating the rate of warming and leading to the loss of more ice,' Holland said in the statement. 'This is a positive feedback loop with dramatic implications for the entire Arctic.'"
Does this mean the sea level will rise some?
Bite my shiny metal ass.
This is a tipping point. It doesn't matter if global warming is manmade or a natural cycle. Cutting your carbon emmissions will not stop this feedback loop. Once reached, this feedback loop will continue until all the ice is melted during the summer, and there is NOTHING we can do about it with current technology.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I've already started buying beach front property in Nevada.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Who can even make heads or tails of all this global warming stuff?
We get reports like this, within a day of getting reports like cows cause more greenhouse gases than cars, planes, and all other forms of transportation put together
Say what you want, but I'm quite skeptical of their ability to accurately forecast this stuff...haven't there been sensationalist reports like this for the last 40 years? All of which were disproven when more accurate methods of forecasting came around?
Yes, which means the same mass takes more volume. When submerged ice (the majority of the ice in question) melts, it becomes more dense (same mass, less volume) which means it actually LOWERS the water level. Add in the amount of ice that is above water in the Artic channel, and the total change in water levels will be negligible.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Ever notice how people that are skiing wear sunglasses?
That's because ice reflects sunlight.
Take all the energy that the polar regions reflect because of sunlight, and instead add it to the ocean in polar regions.
That's the math they're saying they did, and the answer they came up with is : the polar cap melts fast!
If you don't want to buy it, do a counter study. As is, their results seem fairly clear and robust. Not saying that they're exactly right, but a counter argument needs to be more then you saying "NOOOOOOO".
Am I the only one who notices that as soon as Zonk goes "off duty" for approving front page articles, the quality of the articles themselves immediately improves?
What does that have to do with it?
If I'm bleeding to death, the fact that the knife wounds are bleeding out faster than the gunshot wounds, and the fact that in the past I've gotten nosebleeds, so its not unusual for blood to be coming out of my body isn't really all that important. Dealing with the blood loss is.
HELLO? CAN ANYONE SEE THIS?
I'm writing from the future to tell everyone that the polar ice caps melted in 2045, and Atlantis was found underneath what was once called the North Pole. The earth's magnetic poles are in the middle of swapping, so it's about 135 degrees Fahrenheit there today.
Good news, though: Duke Nukem Forever is being released next year!
If this turns out to be true then those guys with comments like "I will be dead anyway before the environment changes significantly" do really have something to worry about.
Also it's estimated that two-thirds of the coral reefs will be gone in 30 years which is about the same timescale as the melting of the ice in the article.
No, no, no you have it all wrong, lets imagine a real future:
Arctic Ice May Melt By 2040
Posted by kdawson on 13:40 Tue December 12, 2043
Arctic Ice May Melt By 2040
Posted by Zonk on 12:10 Tue December 14, 2043
Arctic Ice May Melt By 2040
Posted by cmdrtaco on 17:40 Tue December 15, 2043
Arctic Ice May Melt By 2040
Posted by Zonk on 17:49 Tue December 15, 2043
Arctic Ice May Melt By 2040
Posted by Zonk on 23:34 Tue December 19, 2043
liqbase
Because not all of the ice is floating. There is a significant amount of ice in the Greenland Ice Cap. Melting of this will cause the sea level to rise. Interestingly, it will also cause Greenland itself to rise by a small amount due to the release from the weight of the ice. There is also non-floating ice on the Canadian Shield islands. In addition, if you assume that melting of the Arctic ice cap will be accompanied by at least some melting of the Antarctic cap, there could be a sea level rise of from a few meters to several meters. This is enough to cause a severe disruption of human populations.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
If the North Pole melts alone... Then no.
But Chances are that Greenland will almost melt in the process.
Therefore we will notice an increase in sea level if the Arctic ice melts but it will be due to Greenland ice melting.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
isn't anyone worried about the antarctic? If it warms up there, more and more fools will make expeditions there, and awake the Old Ones!
...while all that ice melts, it lowers the salinity of the oceans, thus displacing warm currents from where they are to somewhere else, thusly altering the global train of weather systems, thusly contributing to a "little ice age", reinforced by CO2 in the stratosphere?
Sounds paradoxical, but that could be one outcome of losing the polar ice cap... an ice age.
http://www.discover.com/issues/sep-02/cover/
Personally, I think we'll see just that -- a little ice age lasting a century or two. The scary part is, according to some, we could see this in our own lifetimes.
Oh well. I used to live in North Dakota. Bring it on.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
The liberal moonbats are at it again. They're using all this "science" to provide us with "answers" about things which are essentially unknowable. And why? It's a vast liberal conspiracy that is meant to try and gain the hearts and minds of the weak willed and fey. But we modern conservatives are made of stern stuff!! We don't need "science" to tell us about the world around us. We use what's right in front of us: reality. If global warming WERE happening, which it isn't, it should be warmer outside today than it was in the past at this time of year. And even then, those liberals spin everything and flip-flop. You tell them that it's actually colder and they say that's a sign of global warming! What tricksters!! Well thankfully, the world has joined the conservative party and after the landslide win for Bush in 2004, it's obvious that things are NEVER going back. Don't believe in the lies that the liberals tell you or try to scare you with. It's purely scare tactics of a dying belief system. Instead, accept that as rugged individualists, we in the conservative parties will triumph over any adversity. We are strong. We are adaptable. Even IF global warming were happening WHICH it isn't, business would build special suits, vehicles and housing and create new materials to live on a hotter planet. The market will decide! And besides, my Enron stocks are way up there today. Thanks Cheney! :)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I mean:
Land
~~~ = Sinkholes?
Ice
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
You seem to know a lot more about this than the real scientists... maybe you should let them know!
Seriously though, you're as guilty as glossing over things as those you criticize. How do you expect these "great forests" to grow without any sunlight because the sky is constantly overcast? How will our crops grow?
But the real problem is, clouds don't just reflect sunlight, they also trap heat. And guess which one they are more effective at? You can take a look at our solar system for a clue: Mercury's peak temperature, despite being very close to the sun, with dark rock, no clouds, and no protective atmosphere, is still cooler than Venus, even though Venus is almost twice as far from the Sun and receives only 25% of the solar radiation. Clouds are part of global warming, not a solution. And even if they were a solution, they would be a very unpleasant one: almost all of our renewable energy is ultimately solar-based.
Random and weird software I've written.
No it is not, according to RealClimate. Snowfall may be increasing at the interior of Greenland, but it's offset by an accelerated dumping of ice into the ocean at the periphery.
From RealClimate:Emphasis added by me.
uhg, my inability to express this analogy is frustrating me. Your first paragraph is what I was posting about. If the only change enacted on the environment is to melt either the submerged, or non-submerged ice, and no other effect is allowed.
While I was writing it, I was applying the logic such that you could replace the submerged half of the formula with dry land. If you break it out into two sperate formulas (submerged ice melting reduced total volume, non-submerged ice melting increases total volume) and you can assume that the volume of water displaced equals the total volume of the ice above and below the water line, then you can state that: ice that is not submerged will increase the volume of water by the same amount as what it would have displaced if it were partially submerged, and the inverse of that for finding the volume of water displace by the submerged ice. When dealing with the two formulas together, the net change in a controled environment is 0.
Since you can then figure out water volume of non-submerged ice, you can then figure out how much volume you are adding to the water body by melting ice that is on dry land.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
From parent post: The critical point for Greenland is whether the increased rate of glacier motion more than compensates for the greater accumulation on the surface. While the broad picture of what is happening is consistent between these papers, the bottom-line value for Greenland's mass balance is different in all three cases. Looking just at the dynamical changes observed by Rignot & Kanagaratnam, there is an increased discharge of about 0.28 mm/year SLE from 1996 to 2005, well outside the range of error bars. This is substantially more than the opposing changes in accumulation estimated by Johannessen et al and Zwally et al, and is unlikely to have been included in their assessments. Thus, the probability is that Greenland has been losing ice in the last decade. We should be careful to point out though that this is only for one decade, and doesn't prove anything about the longer term. As many of the studies make clear, there is a significant degree of interannual variability (related to the North Atlantic Oscillation, or the response to the cooling associated with Mt. Pinatubo) such that discerning longer term trends is hard.
Emphasis added by me.
I don't know if anybody caught this, but in the article it said the temperature in the Candaian Arctic this past October were 9.3 degrees C warmer than the October average between 1951-1980. Interesting. Why use those years? Why not 1981-2005? Or 1921-1950? It should be noted that the earth was actually COOLING from 1940-1970. I have a suspicion the author of the study is picking a baseline favorable to his conclusions.
Let's see, the Arctic starts to melt freshwater into the North Atlantic adding to the fresh water close to the Greenland Icesheets which are already pouring into the North Atlantic. The fresh water, which is less dense than salt water fails to sink, breaking the conveyor currents, which results in less warm water into the North. Less warm water mean less warm air moving north resulting in colder weather in the North which will, in time, freeze leading to new ice on the polar cap.
Not that we will enjoy it too much....
For the sake of Peace, the Sword.
I guess that 40 years ago, it would have been within the knowledge and ability of people to predict that cutting down the forests in Africa would cause a drought. Certainly, it's indisputable that humanly-deforested regions have suffered longer, more severe droughts since being deforested than at any time prior.
In recent years, there has been strong evidence that zooplankton levels are inversely proportional to temperature - cooler weather, more plankton; hotter weather, less plankton.
Does this mean that global warming is real? Define real. The globe is warming, that's irrefutable. Is it caused by human activity? Well, define activity - are you including deforestation, pollution, changes in the biological infrastructure of the planet, etc? Or just a select set of these? Also, and this is the billion dollar question, how much does the cause matter? If the planet is warming to the point where the current life is incapable of survival, who gives a damn about the causes? The latency inherent in the system is on the order of decades to centuries - changing the causes today won't be fast enough to stop the planet overheating, even if all causes WERE under human control. Why not take care of the problem right now and address the causes when we've got time?
I do believe humans are the primary cause, because although natural sources are often much greater, they are much more sporadic and much more regional. Humans have generated non-local sustained inputs, and those simply didn't exist before. Nor is the process linear. Not even remotely close. Saying that X is greater than Y by a factor of Z is only useful if you can use Z to make some useful observation. If the system is non-linear with both positive feedback and negative feedback loops that are themselves non-linear, you have what is known as a chaotic system. Chaotic systems have two properties - they are acutely sensitive to initial conditions, so any error in measurement will explode out of all proportion in almost no time at all, and they are non-differentiable, so that you can't accurately solve any given step even if you DID know the initial conditions. This means that you cannot directly equate human activity with natural activity and hope to get useful results. The best you can do is equate mechanisms and distributions to see what MIGHT be comparable.
However, my opinion of human activity is of no consequence. If humans cut out all pollution tomorrow, we would not start to see the benefits until a hundred or so years after global warming reached crisis point. If you want to do something effective, don't target the stuff that is pointless. Fixing human activity is like re-wallpapering a house that's on fire. Some things can be left to later.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What you're missing here is that methane has a much larger global warming effect per carbon atom than carbon dioxide does.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Actually, no. Sea level will still rise: though only by a little. The water from the ice is less dense than the sea water around it because the sea ice typically contains less salt. Hence, more floats up above the water than bouyancy would suggest, which reduces the water level as it gets frozen, and increases the water level when the ice melts again.
l
Search for 'salinity' in http://www.radix.net/~bobg/faqs/sea.level.faq.htm
Must admit I accepted this too until the argument was put to me recently. Fact is of course that the ice is fresh water (less dense) than the sea water it floats in. Check out the links posted elsewhere to physorg about this. Archimedes principle is about the force of the ice pushing down and displacing an equal weight of sea water. But since the ice is lower density then the volume of sea water displaced is less than the volume of the fresh water in the ice ... even after melting. So when floating ice melts in sea water the sea level goes up. Check here, not just the reasoning but also the actual experiment to prove it.
Bitter and proud of it.
That doesn't seem obvious.
Heat can be transfered away much more quickly by the flow of water around the floating ice than it can by just the air around the landlocked ice. I would think that the floating ice would melt much sooner.
i've long since learnt not to believe 3rd and 4th hand interpritations of science. this guy just sounds like he's produced a bogus model in order to get some PR and some funding. this kind of bad science is hurting us.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I have no doubt we are going to face warmer and warmer weather. Like you point out, Siberia may well become the world's new bread basket.
Sometimes I feel as if I am standing on a highway, and off in the distance, there is this big truck heading right for me. In about three minutes, its gonna be right on me! What do I do????
Well, realizing what it is, and what rules it will follow, I am gonna get my ass off the highway, and watch it pass.
As we deplete our oil resources ( which is a far greater concern to me right now ) we may find the increased insolation a blessing - if we can figure out how to use it.
And there's the key as far as I am concerned.
In all of our history, we - as a people, have thrived by using our intelligence to direct natural laws to produce a desired outcome. This is one helluva time to stop doing that.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Therefore, they are incapable of ever making any correct predictions and should be ignored.
Exactly what do you need to become "convinced", and afterwards, what then? If you'd just throw up your arms, then you're not adding anything to the conversation.
Sure, there have been sensationalist *and* rational reports like this for 40 years... and now we're watching the forecasts begin to noticably pan out. The bitch of it is that back when the effects weren't far above the noise level, the powers that be claimed "we don't see it", whereas now they're saying "we can't afford to do anything about it."
Note, the "cow" report is just dealing with methane, not carbon. Its in the nature of combusting hydrocarbons that methane is mostly burned by planes, trains, and automobiles before the byproducts exit the tailpipe, so it doesn't take many farting cows to stay ahead of the curve, nevermind 1.5 billion of them. Methane is a more efficient greenhouse gas, but for overall effect it's outpaced by the sheer bulk of carbon-based gases we add to the mix.
Frankly, I'm pretty sure that the cause of your and very many others skepticism can be traced directly to the PR departments of ExxonMobile and their peers, who have spent big bucks on shills and astroturfing. They picked up their tactics directly from Philip Morris and their peers (using the same PR firms), who succeeded in conning at least a couple of generations of customers that there was nothing wrong with a lifetime of smoke inhailation.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I've noticed that there are certain people (Almost always of the type that read slashdot, intelligent often engineer types) that are triggered by certain topics into discussions that start to remind me of those given by the religious (although these people tend to not be religious and are actually quite logical).
The main subject that really gets them riled is nuclear power. They get extremely upset at the concept of nuclear bans and will tell you, in detail, exactly why no alternative can work.
Another subject (I wonder if it's the same people, or just the same type of people with different trigger subjects) is this "we are changing/aren't changing the atmosphere). They are very passionate about how it's not us changing the world, coming up with a huge volume of reasoning (look around the threads in this discussion for some examples).
A third is free market--how regulation is the cause of all Americas financial woes.
The interesting thing is, in all cases nothing is really lost by being careful and taking some time to make sure we really are right. There is no reason to be so upset by the thought of keeping companies from opening nuclear plants across the US (Well, unless that's what you do for a living), but there are HUGE potential problems if not done correctly, meaning without enough regulation (we've all seen companies cut corners on safety when it effected profits).
Same with the environment. Religious folks aside (that's not the people I'm talking about), why do some people get so insistent that it's not us changing the environment? It might hurt some companies, but just like the nuclear issue, being safe isn't going to effect the vast majority of the people, including the people I've seen make these arguments.
Without getting into the issue at all, can anyone tell me why they feel so strongly for nuclear power, free market, or mans inability to effect his planet.
Now I really don't care about the issues, I know there are sides, I want to know about personal motivations. Do you really think your lights will go out or your bills will be higher without nuclear power? and if so, is that really so important to you to make you evangelic about it?
Same with the subject at hand. Maybe the facts will go one way, maybe the other (Not trying to start a fight, don't care about the facts right now), but what makes your response "Humans didn't cause it!" rather than "Damn, we better do something about it, build a solar shield or something!". (Actually, I'd guess many feel both responses, but always seem to reach for the "Humans didn't cause it" post first.
The only thing I can guess is that these are people of very strong personal morals who, if they felt that they were contributing to such a problem, would have to do something about it, so they convince themselves of a point that lets them do what it is they want to do and not feel guilty. I can see free marketeers doing the same thing--using it as an excuse to not care about others (which they may otherwise have to do) it doesn't apply to the nuclear thing in any way I can see (Honestly, this is the one that truly baffles me)...
Please reply if you have any insight into the issue because it drives me nuts. I'd really like to hear from an x-pro-nuke or x-free marketeer who has done some soul-searching and has some personal insight into why it was so important to them.
...it may not.
I'd like to nominate this for a really terrible piece of science reporting.
Number of probabilities reported: zero.
Number of fractional changes reported: zero.
I'm quite willing to believe that the loss of Arctic sea ice and the shrinking ice cap are significant and we should be worried (although not, of course, about the polar bears, who have weathered far greater climate fluxuations than this.) But this article gives none of the information that a rational person would require to make a judgment on the issue.
The science on global climate change is imperfect, but certainly not junk. The reporting on global climate change is another matter entirely...
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Here's the full abstract. Note that 1 of 7 computer models showed total ice melt by 2040... the worst case scenario. Gotta love how the media grabs the flashy stuff. Holland, Marika M.; Bitz, Cecilia M.; Tremblay, Bruno Future abrupt reductions in the summer Arctic sea ice Geophys. Res. Lett., Vol. 33, No. 23, L23503 http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL028024 .shtml
Abstract
We examine the trajectory of Arctic summer sea ice in seven projections from the Community Climate System Model and find that abrupt reductions are a common feature of these 21st century simulations. These events have decreasing September ice extent trends that are typically 4 times larger than comparable observed trends. One eventexhibits a decrease from 6 million km2 to 2 million km2 in a decade, reaching near ice-free September conditions by 2040. In the simulations, ice retreat accelerates as thinning increases the open water formation efficiency for a given melt rate and the ice-albedo feedback increases shortwave absorption. The retreat is abrupt when ocean heat transport to the Arctic is rapidly increasing. Analysis from multiple climate models and three forcing scenarios indicates that abrupt reductions occur in simulations from over 50% of the models and suggests that reductions in future greenhouse gas emissions moderate the likelihood of these events.
One of the things that confuses me about tidy feedback loops is that there is no mechanism for their reversal. If the factors that cause increased heat amplify themselves, why hasn't the planet died out from such a runaway loop? Because there are important variables and inputs outside the simplified scope of consideration.
I freely admit I have no idea how well validated their model is. It may be the shit, but it's tackling a formidible set of dynamics. There's nothing wrong with this (that's just science), but it is a bit less than quiet objectivity telling the mass media that X is going to happen. Epidemiologists seem more valid to argue that the H5N1 virus will wipe out a third of the globe (which some have done). Both are suggested by the evidence, but neither are as well documented outcomes as smoking or eating salmonella.
The media loves to seize on scare stories, however, because the public respond to it, so anyone who wants to have their study reported has to punch it up. As other posters have mentioned, each subsequent "boo!" headline desensitizes them to the message.
Part of the message, as I understand it, is that things are already bad, and getting worse. This state of affairs should lead people to activism without reminder. If people were suffering, they would react. Absent current intensity of the problem, one is left convincing people that things will get worse, and relatively soon, because most people aren't motivated by hazy, future problems. Much like it took rising gas prices for people to reconsider their fuel usage, it will take some tangible pain before people do anything about CO2 emissions.
I'll be curious to see what the world is really like in 30 years. I imagine that there will be some warming, with minimal, local effects on overall populations. People will adapt. There will continue to be wars and starvation in various places, and fingers will point in varied directions about it.
Now, if the avian flu people are right, egh...Because admitting we need to be careful is the first step to admitting there is a real problem, and if there's a real problem we all have to face some very uncomfortable changes. Much easier just to ignore it and carry on.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke