Arctic Crisis
Arctic Climate Change
Where Reality Exceeds Expections
December 6, 2009
These Power Point slides were presented for the Nye Lecture at the American Geophysical Union Conference on December 6, 2007 by Mark C. Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, part of CIRES at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Please click on the September 17, 2008 post in the category “Polar Ice” for the WCCE post, “Downward Trend of Polar Ice Melt Getting Steeper” for the bad news this year.
Click on “Screen Icon” below to view larger images
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THE BIG ARCTIC MELT – A VERY BIG PROBLEM FOR PLANET EARTH
Dorothy Cutting
December 5, 2007
On Sunday, September 16, 2007, people in the Los Angeles and San Diego area, sitting with their families at the breakfast table, were probably talking about the record drought the state was experiencing and the inconvenience of water rationing. In all likelihood, they could not have known that this day was to mark an historical occurrence that would affect their lives forever. For, thousands of kilometers to the north, the Polar Ice Cap was melting at an unprecedented rate, and on September 16, the extent of the ice surface reached its record low.
According to veteran science writer John D. Cox in a special to the Sacramento Bee on November 4, 2007, a U.S. – Arctic link was discovered in 2004 by climate researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Their computer simulations of shrinking sea ice showed that, outside of the Arctic itself, the most striking impact is the formation of a large, stubborn atmospheric feature off the West Coast that, like a boulder in a stream, deflects winter storms northward. Weather changes in winter would leave California’s water supply especially vulnerable. The state receives roughly 75 percent of its precipitation during the season and depends heavily on capturing the winter excess for use during its long, dry summers.” http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/468894.html
That day in September must not have seemed so unusual to the people of California. It was just another hot, dry day. They might have said, “This can’t last forever.” They didn’t know the horrific November wildfires in Southern California were still to come and that the drought they were experiencing could last well into the future. Indeed, throughout the World, more trouble was ahead, in the form of drought, floods, storms and rising sea level beyond anyone’s imagining.
ARKTOS
The word “Arctic” derives from “Arktos, the Greek word for “bear,” and it is easy to imagine a great white bear lying across our polar north, her mantle spread to protect our cold seas from the heat of the sun. For the last ten thousand years of our civilization, the Polar ice cap has helped keep our planet habitable for the living species found on Earth today. But in the middle of the 20th century, this changed. Slowly and erratically, the ice cover began shrinking and thinning. This weakening continued until the summer of 2007, when our “Arcus” was dealt a death blow. Between 1980 and 2005, according to Dr. James Overland of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency’s (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, half of the polar ice melted away. An additional 22% or 1.19 million square kilometres, was lost between 2005 and 2007. On September 16th of this year, the Polar ice cap was reduced to an all-time low, represented on a graph as a long, sharp descending line, almost a 180 degree trajectory. The surface ice lost is the same as the area of Texas and California combined.
Put another way, in the years between 1980 and 2003, the Arctic’s ice cover was reduced by 1.6 million square kilometres. It lost nearly as much in this past year alone. Whereas, between 1979 and 2005, the rate of ice retreat, or shrinkage, averaged 7 percent per decade, in the two years between 2005 and 2007, that rate has increased to more than 20 percent.
Scientists are universally shocked. The use of the word, “catastrophic” to describe the huge Arctic thaw this past summer is not uncommon.
The Arctic ice has begun to refreeze now, but slowly, and there will be much less ice next May when the summer thaw starts than there was in 2006. Thus more of the Arctic Ocean will be exposed to the sun, and the warmer ocean water under the ice will speed its melt, causing a classic example of a positive feedback loop, or “vicious circle. The warming created by this feedback loop will drive another one, the melting of the permafrost and the consequent eventual release of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and methane, now in a frozen state. (Methane, by the way, according to Dr. James Lovelock, is 24 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2.) And, of course, this GHG release will raise global temperatures even more, causing more melting of the world’s glaciers and ice sheets, which will raise the sea level. And so on, tragically. There is new evidence just released of dramatic warming of the Arctic. Speaking at an American Meteorological Society seminar in Washington, DC on November 26, Dr. Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said that the temperature anomaly this October was 12-14C degrees above normal. http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/ESSSarchiveclimatechange.html#112607
This, by itself, is cause for alarm, but more disturbing is the fact scientists don’t have as yet the ability to predict when all the summer ice will be gone. To determine this with any degree of accuracy, one should know how fast it is thinning. We can see how fast it is shrinking from the outside in from satellite images, but we don’t have a truly precise measurement of the thickness of the ice cap. Dr. Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics at the Cambridge University Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, has said in private correspondence, “the real long-term record of thickness (from 1958) comes from submarines.” Satellites do not give a good representation of ice thickness.
This does not mean that efforts have not been made to find an answer. In 2000 the British Royal Navy released its last classified figures for analysis, and on August 23 of that year, in an article in The Guardian, Dr. Wadhams stated, “the average ice thickness in summer has decreased by 40% between the 1970s and now.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2000/aug/23/g2.weather. He was a veteran of Arctic submarine voyages in the Fram Strait area where “upward-looking sonar” was used to measure the thickness of the ice.
Dr. Wadhams was not the only scientist to make these measurements. In 1999, Drew Rothrock, Associate Professor of Oceanography at the University of Washington Polar Science Center in Seattle, published a paper at http://psc.apl.washington.edu/thinning/thinning.html, where he stated that the “volume is down by some 40% (since 1953). The thinning is remarkable in that it has occurred in a major portion of the perennially ice-covered Arctic Ocean.” This information was reported by BBC News Online on December 7, 2000: “Arctic sea ice ‘thins by almost half.’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1058353.stm
Since the year 2000, there has been apparently much more reliance on satellite data than upward looking submarine sonar to measure the Polar ice cap. So we know a great deal about the shrinkage of the ice, but not as much about its thinning. The newer submarines in use by the US Navy do not have the more accurate sonar with which the older ones were equipped. Professor Rothrock says US submarines will have better sonar this coming year, and hopefully this will yield a more accurate picture of the true mass of the ice cap.
CAN WE SAVE THE POLAR ICE CAP?
There has been much debate on this subject, but one thing is now certain. New research shows the Arctic Sea ice to be melting faster than predicted by any of the 18 computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in preparing its 2007 assessments. Many estimates for the year when the summer ice will be gone now range from 2013 to the 2030’s, whereas only a few years ago, the most ominous estimate was for 2050, with the IPCC predicting the Arctic Ice Cap would not melt before the end of this century.
Is there hope the Arctic ice can be restored to its mid-twentieth century state? The answer according to Dr. Overland is “No.” He said a consensus was reached in a meeting of polar scientists he attended in late October that, “it’s never going back.” As the air and water temperatures continue to warm, we can expect a greater rate of ice loss annually, until it’s gone.
The Australian organization Carbon Equity issued a report in October of this year, “The Big Melt: Lessons from the Arctic Summer of 2007” (http://www.carbonequity.info/PDFs/Arctic.pdf) that points to the alarming effect the ice loss will have for the world’s climate:
“The data surveyed suggests strongly that in many key areas the IPCC process has been so deficient as to be an unreliable and indeed a misleading basis for policy-making.. Take just one example: the most fundamental and widely supported tenet – that 2°C represents a reasonable maximum target if we are to avoid dangerous climate change – can no longer be defended. Today at less than a 1°C rise the Arctic sea ice is headed for very rapid disintegration, in all likelihood triggering the irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet and catastrophic sea level increases. Many species are on the precipice, climate change-induced drought or changing monsoon patterns are sweeping every continent, the carbon sinks are losing capacity and the seas are acidifying.. The Arctic began to lose volume at least 20 years ago when the global temperature was about 0.5°C over the pre-industrial level. So we can now see that to protect the Arctic the average global temperature rise should be under 0.5°C.” At 0.8 degrees C we are already beyond that point.
The melting Arctic is almost certainly having an effect on global weather, though those effects are not as yet clearly understood. More weather satellites and data collection are needed; for the whole continent of Africa, for example, there are only 28 satellites. But it is nonetheless clear that extreme weather has plagued the globe this year and has caused some of the highest temperatures on record.
For an astoundingly lengthy list of extreme weather events just from July to December, 2007, please click on The Heat is Online: http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=6517&method=full
CONCLUSION
What should be the response of world leaders to this crisis? Instead of the rational response, which would be alarm for the disastrous summer melt in the Arctic this year, and the effect this will have on our biosphere and our species, they are reacting shamefully in a frenzied scrabble to see which country can extract the most resources from this delicate area in the shortest time. Some pundits are calling this the “new cold war.”
Not only will great damage be caused to fragile ecosystems and endangered species in the process, but the eventual burning of the oil and gas removed from the melting Arctic will contribute greatly to global warming. Another powerful positive feedback loop will be set in motion.
It is now known that extreme weather events, in part caused by the melting Arctic, are being felt all over the Planet and will be experienced long into the future.
World and corporate leaders must no longer view the melting Arctic ice as a business opportunity for oil, gas and mining industries. Instead, they should act as stewards to protect this delicate area from further encroachment. It is vital for the sake of all life on our Planet they do all they can to slow the inevitable process of dissolution of the Polar ice cap. They should make public all data they have concerning the thickness and condition of the ice cover in their areas, and then make it a priority to allocate the necessary funds to discover the true state of the ice cap – both the shrinkage and the thinning. It is imperative we learn this in order to make the political and social decisions we need to save ourselves and our biosphere.
Arctic Nations should immediately negotiate a treaty, similar to that of the Antarctic, to protect the Polar north, for this area is crucial to the stabilization of our climate. They should make it clear to the rest of the world that the people of all nations have been put in jeopardy by the runaway melting in the North, and real and immediate advances on limiting greenhouse gas emissions are absolutely critical to our survival.
There are those who will say, appealing to world leaders to protect the Arctic ignores “political reality.” But there is another reality, the “physical reality” of present scientific data and direct observation of the consequences of the climate crisis. As evidence of the destructive effect of abrupt climate change becomes more widely recognized, the political reality will lose relevance for the people of our World. We should make our leaders understand that they are expendable if they don’t act to protect us. As the second-century-BCE Confucian philosopher Xunzi said, “The people are the water, the ruler is a boat. The water can keep the boat afloat; the water can also capsize it.”
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Note: Omitted are references to the over 100 recent articles I have read concerning the 2007 summer melt. They are filed in chronological order and are available on request. In addition, I have available articles and data collected from various institutions, such as the NSIDC, NOAA, Cryosphere Today, Arcus.org, etc.
