Sea ice along Greenland’s coast this year!

From an Article by John Schwartz and Henry Fountain, New York Times, December 11, 2018

Persistent warming in the Arctic is pushing the region into “uncharted territory” and increasingly affecting the continental United States, scientists said Tuesday.

“We’re seeing this continued increase of warmth pervading across the entire Arctic system,” said Emily Osborne, an official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who presented the agency’s annual assessment of the state of the region, the “Arctic Report Card.”

The Arctic has been warmer over the last five years than at any time since records began in 1900, the report found, and the region is warming at twice the rate as the rest of the planet.

Dr. Osborne, the lead editor of the report and manager of NOAA’s Arctic Research Program, said the Arctic was undergoing its “most unprecedented transition in human history.”

In 2018, “warming air and ocean temperatures continued to drive broad long-term change across the polar region, pushing the Arctic into uncharted territory,” she said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington.

The rising air temperatures are having profound effects on sea ice, and on life on land and in the ocean, scientists said. The impacts can be felt far beyond the region, especially since the changing Arctic climate may be influencing extreme weather events around the world.

The new edition of the report does not present a radical break with past installments, but it shows that troublesome trends wrought by climate change are intensifying. Air temperatures in the Arctic in 2018 will be the second-warmest ever recorded, the report said, behind only 2016.

Susan M. Natali, an Arctic scientist at Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts who was not involved in the research, said the report was another warning going unheeded. “Every time you see a report, things get worse, and we’re still not taking any action,” she said. “It adds support that these changes are happening, that they are observable.”

The warmer Arctic air causes the jet stream to become “sluggish and unusually wavy,” the researchers said. That has possible connections to extreme weather events elsewhere on the globe, including last winter’s severe storms in the United States and a bitter cold spell in Europe known as the “Beast From the East.”

The jet stream normally acts as a kind of atmospheric spinning lasso that encircles and contains the cold air near the pole; a weaker, wavering jet stream can allow Arctic blasts to travel south in winter and can stall weather systems in the summer, among other effects.

“On the East Coast of the United States where the other part of the wave comes down,” Dr. Osborne said, “you have these Arctic air temperatures that are surging over into the lower latitudes and causing these crazy winter storms.”

The rapid warming in the upper north, known as Arctic amplification, is tied to many factors, including the simple fact that snow and ice reflect a lot of sunlight, while open water, which is darker, absorbs more heat. As sea ice melts, less ice and more open water create a “feedback loop” of more melting that leads to progressively less ice and more open water.

And as Arctic waters become increasingly ice-free, there are commercial and geopolitical implications: New shipping routes may open, and rivalries with other countries, including Russia, are intensifying.

What on Earth Is Going On? Sea ice is diminishing, quickly.

The federal government has issued the report card since 2006. It has continued to do so under the Trump administration, which has approved other scientific reports about global warming and the human greenhouse gas emissions that cause it, despite President Trump’s rejection of climate science.

Over all, “the effects of persistent Arctic warming continue to mount,” the new report said. “Continued warming of the Arctic atmosphere and ocean are driving broad change in the environmental system in predicted and, also, unexpected ways.”

Some of the findings in the research, provided by 81 scientists in 12 countries, included:

The wintertime maximum extent of sea ice in the region, in March of this year, was the second lowest in 39 years of record keeping.

Ice that persists year after year, forming thick layers, is disappearing from the Arctic. This is important because the very old ice tends to resist melting; without it, melting accelerates. Old ice made up less than 1 percent of the Arctic ice pack this year, a decline of 95 percent over the last 33 years.

Donald K. Perovich, a sea-ice expert at Dartmouth College who contributed to the report, said the “big story” for ice this year was in the Bering Sea, off western Alaska, where the extent of sea ice reached a record low for virtually the entire winter. During two weeks in February, normally a time when sea ice grows, the Bering Sea lost an area of ice the size of Idaho, Dr. Perovich said.

The lack of ice and surge of warmth coincides with rapid expansion of algae species in the Arctic Ocean, associated with harmful blooms that can poison marine life and people who eat the contaminated seafood. The northward shift of the algae “means that the Arctic is now vulnerable to species introductions into local communities and ecosystems that have little to no prior exposure to this phenomenon,” the report said.

Reindeer and caribou populations have declined 56 percent in the past two decades, dropping to 2.1 million from 4.7 million. Scientists monitoring 22 herds found that two of them were at peak numbers without declines, but five populations had declined more than 90 percent “and show no sign of recovery.”

Tiny bits of ocean plastic, which can be ingested by marine life, are proliferating at the top of the planet. “Concentrations in the remote Arctic Ocean are higher than all other ocean basins in the world,” the report said. The microplastics are also showing up in Arctic sea ice. Scientists have found samples of cellulose acetate, used in making cigarette filters, and particles of plastics used in bottle caps and packaging material.

“The report card continues to document a rapid unraveling of the Arctic,” said Rafe Pomerance, chairman of Arctic 21, a network of organizations focused on educating policymakers and others on Arctic climate change. “The signals of decline are so powerful and the consequences so great that they demand far more urgency from all governments to reduce emissions.”

The report was issued as delegates from nearly 200 countries were meeting in Poland for the latest round of climate talks stemming from the Paris Agreement, the landmark climate accord that was designed to reduce planet-warming emissions.

Mr. Trump has vowed to withdraw from the agreement. At the talks, the United States joined with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Russia in refusing to endorse a major report to the conference on the effects of climate change around the world.

At a news conference Tuesday announcing the findings of the Arctic report, Tim Gallaudet, a retired Navy admiral who is the acting NOAA administrator, was asked if he or any other senior NOAA officials had ever briefed Mr. Trump on climate change or the changes in the Arctic.

“The simple answer is no,” he said.

Iceberg the size of Delaware now adrift at sea

From an Article by Nicola Davis, The Guardian, July 12, 2017

Satellite data confirms ‘calving’ of trillion-tonne, 5,800 sq km iceberg from the Larsen C ice shelf, dramatically altering the landscape. This giant iceberg twice the size of Luxembourg has broken off an ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula and is now adrift in the Weddell Sea. (It’s about the area of the State of Delaware.)

Reported to be “hanging by a thread” last month, the trillion-tonne iceberg was found to have split off from the Larsen C segment of the Larsen ice shelf on Wednesday morning after scientists examined the latest satellite data from the area.

The Larsen C ice shelf is more than 12% smaller in area than before the iceberg broke off – or “calved” – an event that researchers say has changed the landscape of the Antarctic peninsula and left the Larsen C ice shelf at its lowest extent ever recorded.

“It is a really major event in terms of the size of the ice tablet that we’ve got now drifting away,” said Anna Hogg, an expert in satellite observations of glaciers from the University of Leeds.

At 5,800 sq km the new iceberg, expected to be dubbed A68, is half as big as the record-holding iceberg B-15 which split off from the Ross ice shelf in the year 2000, but it is nonetheless believed to be among the 10 largest icebergs ever recorded.

The huge crack that spawned the new iceberg grew over a period of years, but between 25 May and 31 May alone, the rift grew by 17km – the largest increase since January. Between the 24 June and 27 June the movement of the ice sped up, reaching a rate of more than 10 metres per day for the already-severed section.

But in the end it wasn’t a simple break – data collected just days before the iceberg calved revealed that the rift had branched multiple times. “We see one large [iceberg] for now. It is likely that this will break into smaller pieces as time goes by,” said Adrian Luckman, professor of glaciology at Swansea University and leader of the UK’s Midas project which is focused on the state of the ice shelf.

Unlike thin layers of sea ice, ice shelves are floating masses of ice, hundreds of metres thick, which are attached to huge, grounded ice sheets. These ice shelves act like buttresses, holding back and slowing down the movement into the sea of the glaciers that feed them.

“There is enough ice in Antarctica that if it all melted, or even just flowed into the ocean, sea levels [would] rise by 60 metres,” said Martin Siegert, professor of geosciences at Imperial College London and co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change & Environment.

But while the birth of the huge iceberg might look dramatic, experts say it will not itself result in sea level rises. “It’s like your ice cube in your gin and tonic – it is already floating and if it melts it doesn’t change the volume of water in the glass by very much at all,” said Hogg.

Following the collapse of the more northerly Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and Larsen B in 2002, all eyes have turned to Larsen C.

But Siegert is quick to point out that the calving of the new iceberg is not a sign that the ice shelf is about to disintegrate, stressing that ice shelves naturally break up as they extend further out into the ocean. “I am not unduly concerned about it – it is not the first mega iceberg ever to have formed,” he said.

Andrew Shepherd, professor of Earth Observation at the University of Leeds, agreed. “Everyone loves a good iceberg, and this one is a corker,” he said. “But despite keeping us waiting for so long, I’m pretty sure that Antarctica won’t be shedding a tear when it’s gone because the continent loses plenty of its ice this way each year, and so it’s really just business as usual!”

Luckman said that while the Larsen C ice shelf might continue to shed icebergs, it might regrow. Nevertheless previous research by the team has suggested that the remaining ice shelf is likely less stable now that the iceberg has calved, although it is unlikely the event would have any short-term effects. “We will have to wait years or decades to know what will happen to the remainder of Larsen C,” he said, pointing out that it took seven years after the release of a large iceberg from Larsen B before the ice shelf became unstable and disintegrated.

What’s more, Luckman stressed that while large melt ponds were seen on Larsen B prior to its collapse – features which are thought to have affected the structure of the ice shelf – those seen on Larsen C are far smaller and are not even present at this time of year.

And while climate change is accepted to have played a role in the wholesale disintegration of the Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves, Luckman emphasised that there is no evidence that the calving of the giant iceberg is linked to such processes.

Twila Moon, a glacier expert at the US National Ice and Snow Data Center agrees but, she said, climate change could have made the situation more likely. “Certainly the changes that we see on ice shelves, such as thinning because of warmer ocean waters, are the sort [of changes] that are going to make it easier for these events to happen,” she said.

Luckman is not convinced. “It is a possibility, but recent data from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography actually show most of the shelf thickening,” he said.

The progress of the rift, and the loss of the iceberg, has been carefully followed by analysis of radar images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 mission, which provides data from the region every six days.

“Before we would have been lucky if we had got one satellite image a year of an event like this, so we would not have been able to watch it unfold,” said Hogg, pointing out that the radar system allows data to be collected whatever the weather and in the dark, while technological advances mean more data that can be downloaded than for previous satellites.

The news of the giant iceberg comes after US president Donald Trump announced that the US will be withdrawing from the 2015 Paris climate accord – an agreement signed by more than 190 countries to tackle global warming. “Truly I am dismayed,” said Moon of the move.

Now at the mercy of the ocean currents, the newly calved iceberg could last for decades, depending on whether it enters warmer waters or bumps into other icebergs or ice shelves.

Arctic Ice Melting Rapidly

‘Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’

From an Article by Robin McKie, The Manchester Guardian, August 21, 2016

Scientist Peter Wadhams believes the summer ice cover at the north pole is about to disappear, triggering even more rapid global warming. Peter Wadhams in the Arctic in 2007: ‘We may able to raise the Thames barrier in Britain but in Bangladesh, people will be drowned.’

Peter Wadhams has spent his career in the Arctic, making more than 50 trips there, some in submarines under the polar ice. He is credited with being one of the first scientists to show that the thick icecap that once covered the Arctic ocean was beginning to thin and shrink. He was director of the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge from 1987 to 1992 and professor of ocean physics at Cambridge since 2001. His book, A Farewell to Ice, tells the story of his unravelling of this alarming trend and describes what the consequences for our planet will be if Arctic ice continues to disappear at its current rate.

You have said on several occasions that summer Arctic sea ice would disappear by the middle of this decade. It hasn’t. Are you being alarmist?
No. There is a clear trend down to zero for summer cover. However, each year chance events can give a boost to ice cover or take some away. The overall trend is a very strong downward one, however. Most people expect this year will see a record low in the Arctic’s summer sea-ice cover. Next year or the year after that, I think it will be free of ice in summer and by that I mean the central Arctic will be ice-free. You will be able to cross over the north pole by ship. There will still be about a million square kilometres of ice in the Arctic in summer but it will be packed into various nooks and crannies along the Northwest Passage and along bits of the Canadian coastline. Ice-free means the central basin of the Arctic will be ice-free and I think that that is going to happen in summer 2017 or 2018.

Why should we be concerned about an Arctic that is free of ice in summer?
People tend to think of an ice-free Arctic in summer in terms of it merely being a symbol of global change. Things happen, they say. In fact, the impact will be profound and will effect the whole planet and its population. One key effect will be albedo feedback. Sea ice reflects about 50% of the solar radiation it receives back into space. By contrast, water reflects less than 10%. So if you replace ice with water, which is darker, much more solar heat will be absorbed by the ocean and the planet will heat up even more rapidly than it is doing at present.

Sea ice also acts as an air-conditioning system. Winds coming over the sea to land masses such as Siberia and Greenland will no longer be cooled as they pass over ice and these places will be heated even further. These effects could add 50% to the impact of global warming that is produced by rising carbon emissions.

 < In the end, the only hope we have is to find a way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere once it has got there >

What will be the effects of this accelerating increase in temperatures?

The air over Greenland will get warmer and more and more of its ice will melt. It is already losing about 300 cubic kilometres of ice a year. Antarctica is adding to the melt as well. Sea-level rises will accelerate as a result. The most recent prediction of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that seas will rise by 60 to 90 centimetres this century. I think a rise of one to two metres is far more likely. Indeed, it is probably the best we can hope for.

That may not sound a lot but it is really very serious. It will increase enormously the frequency of storm surges all over the world. We may be able to raise the Thames barrier in Britain but in Bangladesh, it just means more and more people will be drowned.

Global warming is generally associated with increased fossil-fuel burning and consequent rises in levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But is that the only climate problem we face?
No it is not. We also have the issue of methane. Russian scientists who have investigated waters off their coast have detected more and more plumes of methane bubbling up from the seabed. The reason this is happening is closely connected with the warming of the planet and the shrinking of the Arctic icecaps.

Until around 2005, even in summer, you still had sea ice near the coast. Then it started to disappear, so that for three or four months a year warm water reached the shallow waters around the shores where there had been permafrost ground since the last ice age. It has started to melt with dangerous consequences. Underneath the permafrost there are sediments full of methane hydrates. When the permafrost goes, you release the pressure on top of these hydrates and the methane comes out of solution.

Can we monitor this methane just as we can monitor carbon dioxide?
Yes, we can measure methane over large areas using satellites. These have shown that methane levels that had been fairly flat for most of the last century have started to rise and are accelerating, often with little outliers on the graph. There is a scientist called Jason Box who works in Denmark for the Greenland Survey and he calls these outliers dragon’s breath. They are not some sort of measurement caused by dodgy instruments. They are real pulses of methane coming from offshore flumes.

An image from the NOAA/Nasa Suomi NPP satellite taken on May 30, 2016, highlights the Arctic ice retreat off the north-west coast of Alaska. The average Arctic sea ice extent for May 2016 set a new record low since satellite observations began. 

How intense is methane as a heater of the atmosphere compared with carbon dioxide?
It is 23 times more powerful. However, methane dissipates much more quickly than carbon dioxide. It gets oxidised so that it only lingers in the atmosphere for about seven or eight years. By contrast, carbon dioxide hangs around in the climate system for about 100 years before it ends up in the sea and is absorbed by creatures that die and litter the seabed. At least that is what scientists thought. Today, there are quite a number of researchers who think carbon dioxide could last 1,000 years in the atmosphere.

So in the long run carbon dioxide is still going to be worse than methane in terms of heating the planet because a single methane pulse will have a disastrous effect but if there is nothing to follow it on then it will go away. But with carbon dioxide there is a ratchet effect. All the carbon dioxide we release by burning fossil fuels just builds up in the atmosphere. We are having to live with last century’s carbon dioxide. What that says is simple: there is no such thing as a safe emission rate of carbon dioxide. That is why I am despondent about us ever being able to cut carbon emissions.

If we cannot halt the emissions of carbon dioxide, what can we do?
In the end, the only hope we have is to find a way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere once it has got there. Even the IPCC has admitted that we will have to find a way to extract carbon dioxide from the air. The trouble is that they don’t just how we can do that. The most favoured scheme is known as BECCS: bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. Essentially, you plant trees and bushes over vast swaths of ground. These grow, absorbing carbon dioxide in the process. Then you burn the wood to run power plants while trapping, liquefying and storing the carbon dioxide that is released.

Hottest ever June marks 14th month of record-breaking temperatures

It sounds straightforward. Will it work?
I am a bit suspicious of this technology. BECCS will need so much land to be effective. Calculations suggest it would need 40% to 50% of the arable land of the planet to make it work on the scale we will need and that would not leave enough land to grow crops to feed the world or to provide homes for a viable population of wild animals and plants. Other techniques, such as crushing and spreading olivine rocks, which absorb carbon dioxide, on beaches, will simply not scale up. They won’t work, so we will have to find some other way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere directly.

As far as I can see, it will have to take the form of some sort of device into which you pump air at one end and you get air without carbon dioxide coming out the other end. It can be done, I am sure, but at the moment we do not have such a device. However, without something like that I cannot see how we are going to deal with the carbon dioxide that is getting into the atmosphere. We are going to have to rely on a technology that has not yet been developed. That is a measure of the troubles that lie ahead for us. I think humanity can do it, but I would feel much better if I saw governments investing in such technology.

“Farewell to Ice” is published by Allen Lane (£20) on 1 September.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net