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TechnoratiArctic Summer Ice Could Vanish by 2013: Expert
OTTAWA - The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on Thursday.
![[The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E), a high-resolution passive microwave Instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite shows the state of Arctic sea ice on September 10 in this image released September 16, 2008. (REUTERS/NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio/Handout/Files)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/arcticice.jpg "arcticice.jpg")
Warwick Vincent, director of the Center for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", which call for an ice free summer in 2013.
The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong -- each year we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected," he told Reuters.
The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and the sea ice cover shrank to a record low in 2007 before growing slightly in 2008.
In 2004 a major international panel forecast the cover could vanish by 2100. Last December, some experts said the summer ice could go in the next 10 or 20 years.
If the ice cover disappears, it could have major consequences. Shipping companies are already musing about short cuts through the Arctic, which also contains enormous reserves of oil and natural gas.
Vincent's scientific team has spent the last 10 summers on Ward Hunt Island, a remote spot some 2,500 miles northwest of Ottawa.
"I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The extent of open water is something that we haven't experienced in the 10 years that I've been working up there," he said after making a presentation in the Canadian Parliament.
"We're losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much closer to reality."
In 2008 the maximum summer temperature on Ward Hunt hit 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to the usual 5 degrees. Last summer alone the five ice shelves along Ellesmere Island in Canada's Far North, which are more than 4,000 years old, shrunk by 23 percent.
Vincent told Reuters last September that it was clear some of the damage would be permanent and that the warming in the Arctic was a sign of what the rest of the world could expect. He struck a similarly gloomy note in his presentation.
"Some of this is unstoppable. We're in a train of events at the moment where there are changes taking place that we are unable to reverse, the loss of these ice shelves, for example," he said.
"But what we can do is slow down this process and we have to slow down this process because we need to buy more time. We simply don't have the technologies as a civilization to deal with this level of instability that is ahead of us."
(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Frank McGurty)
22 Comments so far
Show AllThe year 2008 is officially the coolest year of this century, World temperatures have dropped to levels not seen since 2000, the World Meteorological Organization reports. But Commondreams still insists the sky is falling. Ha ha ha
Check out this well balanced article from the Boston Globe (owned by the NY Times)
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/08/wheres_global_warming/
"None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.
But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn't the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn't it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?....
But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren't the tools we need."
Keep laughing, fools, dupes, and deniers. Wow! World temps not seen so low in 8 years! That is SO reassuring on a geologic time scale.
The earth may have seen more drastic climate changes, but complex life forms haven't - at least not and survived. Keep laughing, morons.
The article here on sea ice extent is hardly related to geological time scales, is it.
Did you know the Antarctic once had sub-tropical weather and that the Arctic was likely ice free in the MWP. Climate changes, as does weather.
Although humans are contributing to global climate change through deforestation, strip mining, cattle ranching, asphalt & pavement, airplane, boat, car and factory emissions, and weather experiments...
It would be wise for individuals, families, and communities to prepare for these predictable changes, whether or not there is any national or international concerted effort to stop or reverse this trend...
If you live within 200 ft of sea level, or in a flood plain, as most people do, it would be wise to move to higher elevation...
Same goes If you live in hurricane row in the southeast, or in a trailer park in the Midwest...
Learn how to grow, prepare, and preserve your own food and save organic seed...
Learn a skill that can be bartered and will be in demand if the powergrid goes down for a while (carpentry, making clothes, etc)...
Stock up on essentials that you can't make your own, like first aid kits, candles, lighters, canned goods, guns & ammo, etc...
Teach your kids and relatives what to do in an emergency, survival skills, and self defense...
Get to know your neighbors, and know what assets and resources they have and what they would need in a crisis...
If you dont want to be landlocked or sedentary during the earth changes, Get a boat, large enough to live on (32 ft min) and stock up
Some good will come out of this... Waterfront property in Arizona, longer growing season in temperate climates, and in the summer you can sail from the west coast over the north pole to the east coast or Europe instead of having to go thru panama or around Argentina...!
Here we go again. Mr. Ljunggren says "We simply don't have the technologies as a civilization to deal with this level of instability that is ahead of us."
Nevertheless, whether there is any factual basis for such a statement, we are being told that we absolutely must take steps to slow down the 'process'. What if solar activity was absolutely proven to be the cause? Should all 6 billion of us be providing ourselves with pocket mirrors to reflect the 'excess' light back at the solar disc?
Of course we would need our rulers' organizations of violent coercion to force us to buy the mirrors and point them in concert, coincidentally providing large salaries, paid by our taxes, to these so-called scientists to coordinate the effort.
Here is a better web site to consult.
http://disney.go.com/disneyvideos/animatedfilms/chickenlittle/main.html
The earth has been here for a very long time and seen climate change greater than these modelers can imagine. It will see equally great changes in the future and men will not have any real effect upon them. Please forgive me for sounding so cynical, but I think a little perspective is in order.
"The earth has been here for a very long time and seen climate change greater than these modelers can imagine."
i.e. catastrophic climate change has happened in the past so it's nothing to worry about.
You hit the nail on the head, Hanrahan. There's no need to worry about the earth. It will be here. Will it be able to support life? That's an entirely different question.
For the sake of discussion, let's say we stop burning fossil fuel, stop releasing CO2 and 50 years from now the scientists will discover something they never suspected - CO2 doesn't drive climate change. We end up with cleaner environment, cleaner air, less disease caused by pollution, etc.
But let's say we do nothing about CO2 emissions and it turns out that the scientists were right, and we do have a catastrophic climate change. The earth becomes like Mars.
My question is, even if we were not sure - is the risk worth taking?
This scenario is purely hypothetical, by the way. The scientists can't explain the current climate change if we factor out the CO2 increase.
There will be wars over those resources. The ice was the only thing keeping the peace. Hopefully when the melting starts the blackflies and no-see-ums will move north. No force can withstand them.
I am a graduate student at the Univ. of Alaska Fairbanks, and have lived in AK for 10 years. I have also been an operational meteorologist for 22 years, throughout the western U.S. The changes we are seeing are global in scope, recession of alpine glaciers, longer-term droughts in subtropical areas (Australia, SW U.S., Southern Europe, etc...), amongst others. Here in AK, our weather patterns are becoming much more dynamic, especially in winter, with increasing frequency of low pressure system passages, as the jet stream stays further north. This helps transport more heat northward, of course. This as a result, helps prevents the formation of very deep, cold arctic airmasses, which are eventually transported south to the lower 48. And, that is why there are fewer, and less severe, outbreaks of cold weather in the northern tier of states, and that trend will continue.
I have also been providing on-site weather forecasting support to wildfire suppression teams since 1990. Many "old-timers" in the fire suppression business are telling me that fire behavior is not like it used to be 30 years ago. Long-term droughts, and drier air-masses, are producing more severe wildfires, which burn more often through the night, and are harder to control. The Australian tragedy is a WARNING SIGNAL for the rest of the planet for future conditions. This will be the subject of my next post in the Alaska Progressive Review, http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/, my web-site where I try and provide useful and interesting information. Cheers.
I am waiting to see what our regular deniers, oops, sorry, armchair scientists, oops again, secondhand parrots... No, what I really mean to say is, I am waiting to see what our resident experts have to say on this.
Anyone with a bit of sense can see that the white ice surface is a heat reflector and the dark ocean surface is a heat absorber. So, the Arctic ice melting is bad news in other ways - as we lose heat reflecting surface, leading to possible acceleration of the melting. The real danger - some have called it a catastrophe waiting to happen - is when the permafrost starts releasing the methane buried under - and methane's effect on warming is over 20 times that of carbon dioxide.
For the pseudo-scientists who think they are somehow smarter than the thousands of full-time scientists who have contributed to the various IPCC reports, I want to say this:
Go check out a youtube video series called "How It All Ends" - it will convince you of the need to act EVEN IN THE FACE OF UNCERTAINTY. If you are going to gamble with the future, there is a way to do that WITHOUT LOSING and taking everyone else down with you. I urge you to watch this series - it's produced by a science teacher in Oregon, not so professional, but I found it more informative than Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". Here are the some of the links where you can watch it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCXg
http://tinyurl.com/how-it-all-ends
http://www.highintel.com/content/how-it-all-ends
Please at least watch the preview (10 minutes - actually 9:59) and if possible leave a comment here about what you think.
"Anyone with a bit of sense can see that the white ice surface is a heat reflector and the dark ocean surface is a heat absorber"
Well yes, but of course, there really is not a whole lot of heat from the sun reaching the Arctic compared to the lower latitudes, is there, so the albedo affect from less summer ice on the global heat balance is not so great. Also, the polar winter quickly removes any accumulated heat. The oceans have a heat capacity over 1000 times that of the atmosphere, and warming of the surface waters is easily absorbed by the massive volume of the deep oceans which are quite cold at the bottom.
As for the thousands of IPCC scientists, I believe 52 signed off on the last IPCC report. The majority of thos in the IPCC are economists and government bureaucrats.
As for the consensus, there is a consensus that man contributed to CO2's increase, that CO2 contributes to warming we have seen to some extent, that we have been warming since the end of the last ice age, that doubling CO2 will cause up to 1 deg warming w/o feedbacks. Where there is no consensus is on the extent of warming due to feedbacks. The models predicting drastic sea level increases assume mostly positive feedbacks. This assumption given the current level of understanding of climate science and large uncertainty in historical data is very suspect, and the majority of scientists are skeptics in this regard.
Methane in the permafrost. The region was warmer in the Medieval Warming Period, and the permafrost stayed locked up. Methane levels rose in 2007 for the first time since 1998, and the rate at which methane levels have been rising has been decreasing since 1990.
I don't get my science from videos, but thanks for the link.
"The majority of thos in the IPCC are economists and government bureaucrats."
Well - der! Of course they are! You would prefer shills for commercial interests? There is only one agency whose entire purpose is to secure the general good of the American people, and that agency is the Unites States government. Ditto the Australian Government and so on. I know who's paying for the expertise of government scientists: a government that I voted for, and I'd trust them far sooner than scientists hired by an oil company.
http://www.users.bigpond.com/pmurray
http://www.paulmurray.id.au/ageofworms
So you are saying government scientists are permitted to speak the truth to the public, in opposition to government policy, despite being paid by government while scientists paid by Big Oil are not. And let's say it behooves the government that you voted for (actually, you voted for the candidates that were preselected by corporate interests) to purse the AGW agenda to give it more power, wouldn't you question it's scientists motives, like wanting to keep their jobs.
Besides, it's not necessarily government scientists that are controlled, it is all scientists who rely on government funding of research, which is most of them. This does not mean these scientists are corrupt or falsify findings, it just means, if the government does not like their project, if it might weaken the AGW theory, it does not get funded. So scientists develop projects based on what is likely to be funded.
David Rockefeller and Big Oil have already stopped funding skeptic science. They have a big stake in the wind farm project which was led by a Texas oil tycoon, T. Boone Pickens. Wind farms would never threaten oil sales to any significant extent as oil generates little electricity, coal, gas and nuclear produce most of the electrity. And gas power plants would need to provide backup for the wind farms.
Most people do not know it but Big Oil is a big funder of environmental projects, as is David Rockefeller, as Rockefeller was one of the founders of the green movement.
Top UN scientists have been forced to admit that natural weather occurrences are having a far greater effect on climate change than CO2 emissions as a continued cooling trend means there has been no global warming since 1998.
But despite overwhelming signs of global cooling - China's coldest winter for 100 years and record snow levels across Northeast America - allied with temperature records showing a decline - global warming advocates still cling to the notion that the world is cooling because of global warming.
I wonder how everyone will feel when the ice caps don't melt. Will the people that have been pushing this movement appologize for fear mongering? Does CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions on Earth, affect weather patterns on Jupiter, or shrinking ice caps on Mars?
So, call me a troll, an idiot, conspiracy theorist or whatever, but atmosphereic CO2 lasts about 5-10 years, and a single volcanic eruption emits more GHG and does more than humans ever could.
I wonder how you will feel when the ice caps do melt.
I couldn't resist. Here is a nice article that puts this claim of "no global warming since 1998" to rest rather nicely:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/climate-data-ugliness-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder.ars - (I don't know why it's impossible to post the full link here, but click on the first link that comes up.)
And a shorter answer to the same question: "Global warming is responsible for the overall upward temperature trend, and any snow outside our window shouldn’t convince us that Earth has stopped heating up, says Richard Heim, an NCDC meteorologist. "Most of the top 10 warmest years have happened in the last decade and a half," Heim tells ScientificAmerican.com. "Global warming does not mean every year will be warmer than the previous year. Global warming means there's an increasing frequency of warmer temperatures and a decreasing frequency of cooler temperatures, and that’s definitely what we're seeing."
So how to explain the relatively colder winters we've had in the latter half of this decade? Goddard attributes them to La Niña, a cyclical pattern of cold sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. La Niña in the first half of 2008, followed by a neutral period in the latter half, likely had something to do with it, Heim says, but adds that global warming is about long-term, rising temperature trends over time. "It's kind of like a drunk driver," Heim says. "The car is weaving back and forth, but it's still progressing forward."
Oh, and this is what NASA predicts: "Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance." If that's the case, will you say, Gilgamesh, that global warming is back? Just curious.
Ok long time common dreams reader here, forced to register an account so I could respond to this nonsense spouted by Gilgamesh. A big hello to the community here at commondreams.
Gilgamesh, can you provide links to back up what you are saying? Do you have any links that prove your point that are independent, not funded by industry, and have scientific credibility? My guess is that you can not, but if you can please share them. I have an open enough mind to look at what you are saying if you can back it up. Until then, my guess is that your line of argument will not hold up under closer inspection. Really it sounds to me like you are parroting Rush Limbaugh or some other propaganda source, without critically thinking about what you are saying.
I guess government funded research, which is the biggest funder in climate research, is entirely trustworthy? And most scientific papers are locked behind a subscription paywall.
But I believe his comments were related to this report.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29469287/
"Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.
This is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. "Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn't have one."
The article does not say where Kyle gets his money, but he is a scientist, and he qualifies his remarks to not offend the high priests of the movement too much.
Sigh... another person who doesn't know the difference between climate and weather.
troll? yes. too much hyperbole. 4/10
Best regards.
Yes, but then this article seems not to know the difference either, as do so many articles here.