Arctic ice melting more rapidly ...

From an Article by Jon Queally, Common Dreams, April 8, 2019

“Never have so many Arctic indicators been brought together in a single paper.” And the findings spell trouble for the entire planet.

A new research paper by American and European climate scientists focused on Arctic warming published Monday reveals that the “smoking gun” when it comes to changes in the world’s northern polar region is rapidly warming air temperatures that are having—and will continue to have—massive and negative impacts across the globe.

The new paper—titled “Key Indicators of Arctic Climate Change: 1971–2017″—is the work of scientists at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland in Copenhagen (GUES).

“The Arctic system is trending away from its 20th century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but beyond the Arctic,” said Jason Box of the GUES, lead author of the study. “Because the Arctic atmosphere is warming faster than the rest of the world, weather patterns across Europe, North America, and Asia are becoming more persistent, leading to extreme weather conditions. Another example is the disruption of the ocean circulation that can further destabilize climate: for example, cooling across northwestern Europe and strengthening of storms.”

John Walsh, chief scientist at AUF’s research center, was the one who called arctic air tempertures the “smoking gun” discovered during the research—a finding the team did not necessarily anticipate.

“I didn’t expect the tie-in with temperature to be as strong as it was,” Walsh said. “All the variables are connected with temperature. All components of the Arctic system are involved in this change.”

The study, published Monday as the flagship piece in a special issue on Arctic climate change indicators published by the journal Environmental Research Letters, is the first of its kind to combine observations of physical climate indicators—such as snow cover, rainfall, and seasonal measurements of sea ice extent—with biological impacts, such as a mismatch in the timing of flowers blooming and pollinators working. According to Walsh, “Never have so many Arctic indicators been brought together in a single paper.”

This three-and-a-half minute video put together by the research team, explains its methodology and findings in detail:

The new study comes as temperature records in the polar regions continue to break record after record. Last week, climatologists said Alaska experienced the highest March temperatures ever recorded.Statewide temperatures averaged 27°F degrees last month, a full 4 degrees higher than the record set in 1965. Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist with the International Arctic Research Center at University of Alaska Fairbanks, told the Anchorage Daily News, “We’re not just eking past records. This is obliterating records.”

Also last month, as Common Dreams reported, the UN Environment Programme (ENUP) warned in a far-reaching report that winter temperatures in the Arctic are already “locked in” in such a way that significant sea level increases are now inevitable this century.

Rising temperatures, along with ocean acidification, pollution, and thawing permafrost threaten the Arctic and the more than four million people who inhabit it, including 10 percent who are Indigenous. But, as UNEP acting executive director Joyce Msuya noted at the time, “What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.”

That warning was echoed by the researchers behind the new study out Monday. Their hope, they said, is that the findings about air temperatures and the delicate interconnections between the climate and other natural systems in the Artic will “provide a foundation for a more integrated understanding of the Arctic and its role in the dynamics of the Earth’s biogeophysical systems.”

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See also: The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it | Katharine Hayhoe – YouTube

Russian tanker sails through Arctic without icebreaker for first time

From an Article by Patrick Barkham, The Guardian, August 24, 2017

A Russian tanker has travelled through the northern sea route in record speed and without an icebreaker escort for the first time, highlighting how climate change is opening up the high Arctic.

The $300m Christophe de Margerie carried a cargo of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Hammerfest in Norway to Boryeong in South Korea in 19 days, about 30% quicker than the conventional southern shipping route through the Suez Canal.

The tanker was built to take advantage of the diminishing Arctic sea ice and deliver gas from a new $27m facility on the Yamal Peninsula, the biggest Arctic LNG project so far which has been championed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

On its maiden voyage, the innovative tanker used its integral icebreaker to cross ice fields 1.2m thick, passing along the northern sea section of the route in the Russian Arctic in a record six-and-a-half days.

“It’s very quick, particularly as there was no icebreaker escort which previously there had been in journeys,” said Bill Spears, spokesperson for Sovcomflot, the shipping company which owns the tanker. “It’s very exciting that a ship can go along this route all year round.”

Environmentalists have expressed concern over the risks of increased ship traffic in the pristine Arctic but Sovcomflot stressed the tanker’s green credentials. As well as using conventional fuel, the Christophe de Margerie can be powered by the LNG it is transporting, reducing its sulphur oxide emissions by 90% and nitrous oxide emissions by 80% when powered this way. “This is a significant factor in a fragile ecosystem,” said Spears.

The northern sea route between Siberia and the Pacific is still closed to conventional shipping for much of the year. But the Christophe de Margerie, the first of 15 such tankers expected to be built, extends the navigation window for the northern sea route from four months with an expensive icebreaker to all year round in a westerly direction.

In the route’s busiest year so far, 2013, there were only 15 international crossings but the Russian government predicts that cargo along this route will grow tenfold by 2020. This link with the Pacific reduces its need to sell gas through pipelines to Europe.

“There has been a steady increase in traffic in recent years,” said Spears. “There’s always been trade along this route but it’s been restricted a lot by the ice. It’s exciting that this route presents a much shorter alternative than the Suez route. It’s a major saving.”

Simon Boxall, an oceanographer at the University of Southampton, said that shipping companies were making a “safe bet” in building ships in anticipation that the northern sea route will open up. “Even if we stopped greenhouse emissions tomorrow, the acceleration in the loss of Arctic ice is unlikely to be reversed,” he said.

“We’ve been able to sail through the north-west passage for several years now but the northern passage, which goes past Russia, has opened up on and off since 2010. We’re going to see this route being used more and more by 2020.

“The irony is that one advantage of climate change is that we will probably use less fuel going to the Pacific.”

The extent of Arctic ice fell to a new wintertime low in March this year after freakishly high temperatures in the polar regions, and hit its second lowest summer extent last September.

Permafrost Thickness at a Thermokarst Lake

Arctic Ice Melting, Permafrost Degassing, Oil Exploration Interacting with Climate Change

Essay by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Teacher & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

For the world’s people, preoccupied with more immediate problems of politics and war, and for most, preoccupied with making a daily living, the Far North seems remote and unimportant. But various phenomena going on there are exceedingly important for our children and grandchildren. Arctic ice is melting, the permafrost is melting, oil exploration is disruptive, sea-level rise is occurring, plants and animals are impacted, etc.

Something like one-fourth of the earth’s surface has been frozen since the last Ice Age. Over much of this area, there is a brief thaw in summer. Some small plants grow, and then are frozen at the end of the growing season. The cycle is repeated next year, without complete decay of the plants that grew the previous year. This results in storage of carbon in the material growing year after year, and has accumulated since the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago.

As the reader probably knows, the rate of global warming in the Far North is twice the warming of the earth as a whole. As a result vast stretches of Northern Canada, Alaska, Russia, the Scandinavian Countries and Greenland are melting. So the plants decay, soil slumps, getting into streams, and is washed to the ocean. Both decomposition in place and in the ocean result in carbon dioxide being formed where there is oxygen, and in methane being formed below the surfaced and in deep water, where there is little oxygen. These are the two most important global warming gases and they move up into the atmosphere.

The process causes “positive feedback,” giving even more warming due to the greenhouse gases society dumps into the atmosphere as a result of burning hydrocarbons. The danger is that the melting permafrost will reach a rate where release is self- sustaining. That is a situation where global warming gas release from permafrost is enough to keep it going by itself or worse, to balloon the amount going into the atmosphere uncontrollably. It has been calculated that there is about two times as much carbon in the permafrost as in the atmosphere now.

Removing green house gasses from the atmosphere is not feasible. Three factors are responsible: there is no chemical mechanism available, which is often mentioned; the separation of 0.04% of anything from a mixture requires great energy, and thirdly, the separation of carbon from oxygen requires huge amounts of energy, more than is obtained when they are combined. Our burning of fossil fuels is on a huge scale; and,  the energy needed to reverse the process is far more.

Permafrost melting is a new, major area of scientific study. Researchers with the Northwest Territories Geological Survey of Canada have identified an area as large as Alabama which is undergoing extensive thawing. Their objective was to identify and map places in the Northwest Territories where thawing permafrost is going on.

Researchers from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom observe large areas of permafrost change in one area of Russia. One observation was a half mile swath that has collapsed 280 feet. These observations frequently find very uneven terrain, which has been called “thermokarst.” It can be recognized from aerial photography. A single pit can muddy a stream for miles.

Life is difficult for the four million inhabitants of this area, many of whom depend on local resources for survival. Warmer water and sediment loads are harming lake trout, and changes in the land surface are disrupting caribou breeding and migration.

At the shore, two changes combine. The Arctic Ocean now has much less ice cover, particularly in the warm season. This allows winds to build up larger waves. Larger waves combining with melting permafrost allows much greater erosion of the shorelines. The result is rapid retreat of shorelines and huge amounts of carbonaceous material to decompose going directly into the Arctic Ocean.

Shipping routes between Europe and the orient are significantly shorter than through the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal, so as ice disappears, more traffic is expected to cross the top of the earth. Then ice bergs in route, and possible fuel spills will be a problem. Cleaning up spills is much more difficult at the top of the world, where there is 24 hour darkness much of the year, ice to work around and few settlements. A constantly changing shoreline and near freezing and below temperatures don’t help either.

The arctic is estimated to have about one fourth the world’s remaining untouched oil and gas reserves. Only Russia and Norway are making progress toward developing this resource at present. Doubtless, the long Russian shoreline on the arctic (see here) and their experience accounts for ExxonMobile’s interest in Russia and Rex Tillerson’s friendly relations with the Russian oil industry personnel and Vladmir Putin. (Incidentally, Putin wrote his Ph. D. dissertation on making Russia great by exporting oil and gas.) Developing oil and gas in this delicate environment, where spills could be catastrophic, and with even more carbon dioxide being produced should be a no-no.

Disappearance of the ice in the Arctic is a direct problem, too. The ice is an effective reflector of the sunlight that reaches the area. When it reaches the darker land and open ocean it is adsorbed, increasing the temperature of rocks and open water, in turn melting more ice.

The seven nations that border the Arctic Ocean are: Canada and Russia, with the longest shorelines, Denmark (which controls Greenland), Norway and the United States (Alaska), somewhat shorter shorelines, and shorter coastline Finland and Iceland. This spring the U. S. will take over the leadership of the Arctic Council, which includes the previous seven and Sweden. It uses high level negotiations and studies, but can’t make law. Canada holds the post presently.

The nations say they want sustainable development. How much environment and climate concerns will influence them remains to be seen. It is sure the economic and strategic importance of the area will increase.

www.ClimateRealityProject.org

The divorce from reality while understandable, desperately needs correcting

Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Jane Lew, Lewis County, WV 

It is obvious to most well educated people that the world is approaching several kinds of crises at once.  I hardly need mentioning them – exponential population increase,  greater need for energy per person, improvement of war technology, increase in surveillance technology, approach to the carrying capacity of the earth (one half the earth’s primary production is now directed to human needs, such as food, shelter and clothing) and the most obvious one, climate change.

Many of my readers know the Norse colonized Greenland about 950 AD and were successful for about 500 years.  A climate change of about one-centigrade degree (worldwide average) during the Little Ice Age brought the colonies to extinction.  There are numerous examples of fertile lands becoming desert.  It is well known the great Sahara Desert was once fertile grassland that supported human life.  Climate change is not rare.

Society also knows how and why carbon dioxide absorbs energy from light. I took a course in transfer of energy between light and molecules in graduate school myself.  And if you understand the origin of coal, oil and gas, it follows that we humans are using in decades the carbon that went into earth over millions of years.  The atmosphere is large, but we billions of humans are adding to it enough to change its composition in the parts per million range. Assuming it has doubled since the Industrial Revolution for simplicity of calculation, that change is in the neighborhood of 0.02% of the atmosphere.  That change is basically irreversible over a period of a thousand years or more.  For humans to take it out would require more energy than was obtained by burning the hydrocarbons originally. Geoengineering to remove carbon dioxide is not practical.

Unfortunately, many people do not understand the nature of science, why it is so powerful.  It is a method of finding out truth about the physical world beyond the intuitive understandings or guesses of the practical person.  Such a person learns by experience how to manipulate objects and materials in the world to get a helpful result.  Science involves conjecture about the physical world which must be verifiable by experiment and repeatable by any careful experimenter, along with careful application of logic to build a consistent model explaining further observations to be expected, or the use of data from diverse sources to test the model.

Science is highly fraternal but also highly competitive – your experimental details, your observations and your logic are carefully examined by others working in your field and related fields.  Status is conferred by being correct and by new, original work.  It is not forgiving of errors.  Every trained person is free to find your errors.

Most of us live in a cultural world.  Our ideas are determined by people around us that we respect or are forced by circumstances to obey.  What is called truth, adherence to the physical world, is much more casual in the general culture.  Survival, fortunately (should I say obviously) does not require an exact map of reality.  The culture around us provides a map of reality which we can get along with but it is quite variable depending on where we were born, when, and our position in the society of that time and place.  Reality, then, is complex and diverse enough to allow survival with most of the maps one develops influenced by different places, religions, social classes, and all the rest if our differences.

But there is only one science.  In some cases it provides an eye on the future.

The worst case that develops in a culture is when a person becomes so powerful people are forced to take such a person’s will as a map of reality. Let’s call such a person a “potentate.”  That is a problem because people are forced to act on that person’s will for their actions.  Why?  The potentate is not confined by reason or review. Fantasy reigns.  Remember the ancient king who commanded the tide not to come in?  When it did, he had his soldiers to whip the sea!

So we come to the present.  Who are the powers beyond review today?  Obviously they are the people who control the corporations.  It was apparent to Rutherford B. Hays, 19th President of the U. S. (1877-81) when he said, “This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations,” one hundred years ago, something far more obviously today.  They are majority stockowners and, increasingly, CEO’s.  They function entirely as profit makers, and have no social alignment whatsoever.  It is true some corporations exercise social responsibility, but it is not built in.  The results include the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and disavowal of those excluded, disregard for all but the most immediate and intense health effects and disregard for the environment.

The case history is obvious, with the oil and gas corporations leading the way.  They are powerful because they have a toll from almost all motion today – from people going to church and children going to school to big trucks, earthmovers, war machines, airplanes and oceangoing ships.  Everyone pays to move.

So there is great economic power concentrated in the hydrocarbon industry.  They buy the laws they want, and hire support from politicians.  They become “potentates” in the sense it was used above.  They support the kind of politician who brings a snowball into the Senate to disprove global warming.  If their science discovers an inconvenient truth (global warming) it then musters think tanks to deny that reality.  They support politicians like House Republican Rep. David McKinley of West Virginia, who says the military’s efforts (regarding global warming) amount to partisan gimmicks and distractions from fighting terrorism. “Why should Congress divert funds from the mission of our military and national security,” he wrote to colleagues in 2014, “to support a political ideology?”

The disconnect between the reality of global warming as demonstrated by science and counter-claims of the industry is caused for the reason a disconnect from reality always is: potentates don’t want to loose power, and with it status and influence.  Reality is an impediment to their goals and desires. 

As Henry Kissinger said, “control oil and you control nations.”  Including this one.

See also:  Climate Reality Project

400 ppm CO2 is too high

Bill McKibben Says No to Big Oil and Gas Companies

From a Program of Bill Moyers & Company, PBS, February 6, 2014

After the State Department issued a long-awaited environmental impact statement on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline last week, environmentalists and those opposed to the 1,179-mile pipeline have intensified their push for the Obama administration to reject the project.

This week, Bill Moyers talks with Bill McKibben, an activist who has dedicated his life to saving the planet from environmental collapse, about his hopes that Americans will collectively pressure Obama to stand up to big oil.

“Most people understand that we’re in a serious fix,” McKibben tells Moyers, “There’s nothing you can do as individuals that will really slow down this juggernaut … You can say the same thing about the challenges faced by people in the civil rights or the abolition movement, or the gay rights movement or the women’s movement. In each case, a movement arose; if we can build a movement, then we have a chance.”

IMPORTANT: See the 27 minute VIDEO of the McKibben interview here.

Note Unusual Weather Pattern

The Misbehaving Jet Stream has Upset Weather in the East (colder) and West (dry & hot)!

Arctic Ice Melt

George Monbiot of the Guardian (United Kingdom) wrote the following article on August 28th:

The belief that Europe and America will be hit least by climate change is in ruins. Yet all we do is try to profit from disaster.

There are no comparisons to be made. This is not like war or plague or a stock market crash. We are ill-equipped, historically and psychologically, to understand it, which is one of the reasons why so many refuse to accept that it is happening.

What we are seeing, here and now, is the transformation of the atmospheric physics of this planet. Three weeks before the likely minimum, the melting of Arctic sea ice has already broken the record set in 2007. The daily rate of loss is now 50% higher than it was that year. The daily sense of loss – of the world we loved and knew – cannot be quantified so easily.

The Arctic has been warming roughly twice as quickly as the rest of the northern hemisphere. This is partly because climate breakdown there is self-perpetuating. As the ice melts, for example, exposing the darker sea beneath, heat that would previously have been reflected back into space is absorbed.

This great dissolution, of ice and certainties, is happening so much faster than most climate scientists predicted that one of them reports: “It feels as if everything I’ve learned has become obsolete.” In its last assessment, published in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted that “in some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century”. These were the most extreme forecasts in the panel’s range. Some scientists now forecast that the disappearance of Arctic sea-ice in late summer could occur in this decade or the next.

As I’ve warned repeatedly, but to little effect, the IPCC’s assessments tend to be conservative. This is unsurprising when you see how many people have to approve them before they are published. There have been a few occasions – such as its estimate of the speed at which glaciers would be lost in the Himalayas – on which the panel has overstated the case. But it looks as if these will be greatly outnumbered by the occasions on which the panel has understated it.

The melting disperses another belief: that the temperate parts of the world – where most of the rich nations are located – will be hit last and least, while the poorer nations will be hit first and worst. New knowledge of the way in which the destruction of the Arctic sea ice affects northern Europe and North America suggests that this is no longer true. A paper published earlier this year in Geophysical Research Letters shows that Arctic warming is likely to be responsible for the extremes now hammering the once-temperate nations.

The north polar jet stream is an air current several hundred kilometres wide, travelling eastwards around the hemisphere. The current functions as a barrier, separating the cold, wet weather to the north from the warmer, drier weather to the south. Many of the variations in our weather are caused by great travelling meanders – Rossby waves – in the jet stream.

Arctic heating, the paper shows, both slows the Rossby waves and makes them steeper and wider. Instead of moving on rapidly, the weather gets stuck. Regions to the south of the stalled meander wait for weeks or months for rain; regions to the north (or underneath it) wait for weeks or months for a break from the rain. Instead of a benign succession of sunshine and showers, we get droughts or floods. During the winter a slow, steep meander can connect us directly to the polar weather, dragging severe ice and snow far to the south of its usual range. This mechanism goes a long way towards explaining the shift to sustained – and therefore extreme – weather patterns around the northern hemisphere.

I have no idea what is coming to Europe and North America this winter and next summer, in the wake of the record ice melt, but it’s unlikely to be pleasant. Please note that this record represents a loss of about 30% of Arctic sea ice, against the long-term average. When that climbs to 50% or 70% or 90%, the impacts are likely to be worse.

Our governments do nothing. Having abandoned any pretence of responding to the environmental crisis during the Earth summit in June, now they stare stupidly as the ice on which we stand dissolves. Nothing – or worse than nothing. Their one unequivocal response to the melting has been to facilitate the capture of the oil and fish it exposes.

The companies that caused this disaster are scrambling to profit from it. On Sunday Shell requested an extension to its exploratory drilling period in the Chukchi Sea, off the north-west coast of Alaska. This would push its operations hard against the moment when the ice re-forms and any spills they cause are locked in. The Russian oil company Gazprom is using the great melt to try to drill in the Pechora Sea, north-east of Murmansk. After turning its Arctic lands in the Komi republic into the Niger delta of the north (repeated oil spills are left unremediated in the tundra), Russia wants to extend this industry into one of the world’s most fragile ecosystems, where ice, storms and darkness make decontamination almost impossible.

As I write, activists from Greenpeace, whom I regard as heroes, are chained to Gazprom’s supply vessel, preventing the rig from operating. These people are stepping in where all governments have failed. David Cameron, who still claims to lead the greenest government ever, is no longer hugging huskies. In June he struck an agreement with the Norwegian prime minister “to enable sustainable development of Arctic energy”. Sustainable development, of course, means drilling for oil.

Is this how our children will see it: that we destroyed the benign conditions that made our world of wonders possible, and then used the opportunity to amplify the damage? All of us, of course, can claim to have acted with other aims in mind, or not to have acted at all, as the other immediacies of life seemed more important. But – unless we respond at last – the results follow as surely as if we had sought to engineer them.

Stupidity, greed, passivity? Just as comparisons evaporate, so do these words. The ice, that solid platform on which, we now discover, so much rested, melts into air. Our pretensions to peace, prosperity and progress are likely to follow. “And like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve.”

>>> George Monbiot is a prolific author; his latests books are “Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning” and “Bring on the Apocalypse.” <<<