Slashdot Mirror
One-Degree Rise In Temperature Causes Ripple Effect In World's Largest High Arctic Lake (folio.ca)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from FOLIO Magazine: A 1 C increase in temperature has set off a chain of events disrupting the entire ecology of the world's largest High Arctic lake. "The amount of glacial meltwater going into the lake has dramatically increased," said Martin Sharp, a University of Alberta glaciologist who was part of a team of scientists that documented the rapid changes in Lake Hazen on Ellesmere Island over a series of warm summers in the last decade. "Because it's glacial meltwater, the amount of fine sediment going into the lake has dramatically increased as well. That in turn affects how much light can get into the water column, which may affect biological productivity in the lake." The changes resulted in algal blooms and detrimental changes to the Arctic char fish population, and point to a near certain future of summer ice-free conditions. The findings document an unprecedented shift from the previous three centuries, challenging scientists' expectations of how such a large system could respond so rapidly to a one-degree rise. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
In my country the temperature varies from -30 C in winter, and +30 C in summer. If the themperatures chang in the future to -29 C in winter, and +31 C in summer. Why should this change the climate so much as it is claimed, when there is already a 60 C change year around?? I call BS on the climatechange.
This lake is almost always covered in ice year round and, from 2007 to 2012 had a mean summer temperatures of -4.9C. The increase in temperature is warming and melting the surrounding permafrost, which drains into the lake, raising both its level and temperature ... This affects the algae and fish in the lake, which affects the people that fish the lake -- as well as everything downstream.
From: Lake Hazen
Although air temperatures in this area often rise above 10C in July and August, Lake Hazen remains ice covered in most years.
From the actual study in Nature The world’s largest High Arctic lake responds rapidly to climate warming. (linked in the TFA):
A decrease in seasonal ice cover resulted in warming of surface waters and, more importantly, allowed planktonic algae to fill a niche which was previously climatically inaccessible, re-organizing the ecology of the lake at the base of the foodweb.
Collectively, rising air temperatures, increasing glacial melt and runoff, decreasing summer lake ice cover, shifts in primary producer communities and declining fish condition demonstrate the coupling between watershed changes and in-lake conditions and processes.
This vast, deep lake, the High Arctic’s largest freshwater ecosystem, has experienced drastic changes in the last decade, despite its volume, thermal inertia and hypothesized resilience to climate change.
Such changes, and their consequences, are certain to increase further as warming of northern latitudes continues into the future, undoubtedly jeopardizing the security of traditional freshwater foods and other ecosystem services for northern Indigenous peoples throughout the Arctic.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yeah we all know that the climate has changed before. This is not news to anyone. But when people say the temperature has changed before, this is what they mean:
https://xkcd.com/1732/
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The output of the Sun has been observed for quite a while, including using satellites over the last 50 years and there hasn't been a big change in the output that would have the affects we're seeing. If you have evidence of a large change in the output, please post a link.
It's true that the models of solar induced warming aren't the best, with some saying a degree every 10 million years and some say less, but the basics are pretty simple. The Sun gets hotter as it converts hydrogen into helium and since a helium, atom is 4 times heavier then a hydrogen atom, the Sun gets denser and fusion speeds up and over billions of years there's quite an affect. Not over centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Probably should not believe and predictive models of climate that doesn't also have an accurate, predictive model of the Sun. Coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled.
You do know that we measure the sun's output, right? And have been doing so for many decades?
We know that the observed warming is not due to changes in the solar output because we measure the solar output.
Coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled.
Which is why climate models account for many things.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If there is only one variable that affects the Earth's climate, it would be the output of the Sun.
True enough. But we measure the output of the sun, and have been measuring it for many decades. We know that in fact that it is not changing. So we can discard that as a source of the current warming.
If there was a second variable, it would be the kinematics of the Earth about the Sun.
Indeed; this is the Milankovitch cycles, which are currently believed to account for ice ages. The main orbital perturbations have a cycle time on the order of 100,000 years. So they are definitely not responsible for changes in temperature on time scales of less than millennia.
It's worth noting, however, that the effort involved in understanding Milankovitch variations and the feedback mechanisms that cause the cycle of ice ages was a very large part of what brought climate science to its present level.
Neither one should be considered constant,
To the contrary, both of them can be considered constant on the time scale of interest here. One because we measure it to be constant, and the second because actually, orbits are well understood.
and the former is certainly not easily modeled.
Although the second one certainly can be.
Alas, there's much more than just two variables that affects the climate.
And climate scientists have been working for over a century at the effects of these variables. So far, other than greenhouse warming (which is a well substantiated theory), the alternate hypothesis to explain the data is... nothing. There are no alternate hypotheses that fit the known data.
The goal should not be to predict or control climate, but to adapt to it as Nature does.
Uh, why shouldn't we understand (you use the word "predict") climate, exactly?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The sun has been monitored pretty well for about 400 years. Recently it's been monitored rigorously since the 1950s and continuously from satellites since 1979. In all that time it's never shown enough variation to account for the current warming. You may want it to be the sun but the evidence shows that it isn't.