Dr. Ricky Rood's Climate Change Blog |
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| Posted by: Dr. Ricky Rood, 5:56 PM GMT en Julio 30, 2012 | +12 |
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I'm a professor at U Michigan and lead a course on climate change problem solving. These articles include ideas from the course. And no tuition!
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Subtitled:
"And I Don't Give a Damn, I Got Mine"
Watching the ice melt this year, I'm pretty firmly believing that we'll see an Arctic sea ice meltout in 2015 +/- 2 years. I would not be amazed to see it happen next year in 2013.
When that happens, along with all the glacier calving and Greenland melting that will come along with it, there will be an extremely large piece of evidence which cannot be ignored. A satellite shot of the Arctic Ocean free of ice is likely to be a prime motivating event.
Santa's Home is Gone!
Every time one of these fools makes a ridiculous statement about climate change not happening all that should be necessary is to wave a nice big print of that picture and shout "How do you 'splain that Lucy?"
They won't get it, but the other 99% will. And more than half of the 99% is, IMHO, going to start making major noise about "doing something".
That's all we need. A majority of voters adequately alarmed to knock down a few barriers.
Meters
Two meter stuff is roughly second year ice. You can see how little of the really old stuff, >4 year old, is left. A few years back 50% of the Arctic sea ice was 4+ years old, last year it was down to about 10%. It's now dropping lower.
No...never hurts to try.
And, you're welcome.
Added: Out for the night...Good night.
There's a fair amount of 9C/48F sea surface temps inside the Arctic Circle right now. Some 11C/52F creeping in.
Looks like there might be some 16C/62F in the Baltic Sea, north tip, which might officially be in the Circle. It's coming....
The animation almost looks alive, no?
It is quite interesting how pooling water (on ice) absorbs sensing equipment signals.
Do your own homework and see for yourself :)
The impact of global warming is getting clearer, and will soon be obvious even to the hard-core deniers. Arctic sea ice continues its death spiral. Sea level continues to rise. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets continue to lose mass at an alarming pace, and glaciers worldwide keep shrinking. Species continue to migrate to higher latitudes and altitudes. We’re also seeing more and more signs that the “man in the street” can’t ignore. Since the amazing heat wave in Europe in 2003, we’ve seen amazing heat waves in Australia, Russia, the USA (twice). We’ve seen enhanced drought and record-breaking floods. And to the statisticians at re-insurance giant Munich Re, the increase in weather-related disasters is both huge and certain. This is not normal — and it’s not natural.
In other words, we’re rapidly approaching the moment when denial is no longer possible for the sane. Those who want it not to be so are getting annoyed at nature’s recurrent reminders, so they’re getting more shrill and more desperate. Furthermore, the press is starting to realize that all those times that fake claims from fake skeptics were proved fake, is no accident. It’s a pattern, one they should have heeded all along.
I’ve said before that by the end of this decade global warming will be so f***ing obvious that deniers will be laughed at — at best. Perhaps I should revise the time scale for that prediction, because the obvious is knocking at the door. Who knows, depending on what happens weather-wise over the next few months, maybe Mitt Romney will decide to flip-flop on the issue — again.
Link
NBCNews.com
No out-of-state help - Oklahoma has contacted neighboring states for help, but they are contending with their own wildfire threats and no out-of-state help is on its way, Fallin said.
"There's fires in Arkansas. There's fires in Kansas and Texas. Everybody else is on high heat alert," she said.
Someone might want to look for a graph on how much we spend per year fighting wildfires. Or the number of acres burned per year. That could be another indicator of how much our rear ends are getting chewed.
I would think our right-of-center friends would be concerned about having to spend a lot of tax money fighting fires....
Desmog Blog maintains a good list of the primary denialists.
Also, even though it deals with just one corporation, it has a lot of good information: http://www.exxonsecrets.org/maps.php.
PIOMAS Arctic sea ice volume animation
I find it endlessly fascinating that more than 75% of the Arctic's minimum sea ice has disappeared just since 1979. Incredible...
Oh.....my.....god!
Nice site. You should put a blog on there, or at least comments.
5:10 PM GMT en Agosto 04, 2012
Nice.
Climate Wars: Beware the Trojan Horse – Refuting claims of a ‘converted’ skeptic
Link
Note, it's long and their are several links.
What about food prices?
Counting all types of food, prices could rise an average of 4 percent. Cereals and bakery products will cost more because corn prices already are up 40 percent, and milk commodity prices are up 17 percent. (Heat stress reduces milk production.)
Supermarket prices for beef and pork are falling as farmers sell off herds rather than buy expensive grain for feed or rely on dried-up pastures. The glut of animals headed for slaughter has cut prices paid for cattle by 12 percent.
Because of sustained high temperatures, consumers are buying less meat to cook outdoors, pushing down prices for beef and pork and cutting meatpackers' profits.
Next year, however, meat prices likely will climb by 8 percent or more because there will be fewer cattle and hogs.
Q&A Format
Feel free to take a look and comment.
Link
Locked and loaded waiting for Ernesto.....
Death spiral continues is correct..........
4th day in a row below record level low since 1979....
IIRC in the southern part of the region, yes. A few days ago I saw a graph showing IL as having a climate similar to LA later this century, probably in a Climate Progress post if you want to look. But bear in mind that day length differences (=> greater seasonal extremes) will give a higher-lat subtropical climate somewhat different characteristics.
Yeah, I've seen that graphic. I've even used it on my blog here a couple weeks ago. I'm not sure how length of day would affect things. Other places at the same latitude, such as Rome, have a subtropical climate owing to warm oceanic effects. I was reading an article the other day regarding evidence that palm trees and other (sub)tropical fauna were present in coastal Antarctica 55 mya during the Eocene warm period. This is consistent with other evidence showing palm trees in Wyoming & Montana during the same time frame. CO2 levels were at or above 1000 ppm during that time. Solar luminosity was actually a little below today's level.
James E. Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind%u2019s use of fossil fuels.
But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.
My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.
In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday (8/6/12), my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.
Washington Post Editorial (8/3/2012)
New study links current events to climate change
Austin Statesman
Off the top of my head, I would say the difference is that high-lat has somewhat cooler winters and warmer summers, all else equal. Remember Rome isn't in a very continental location.
Re the Eocene Antartic vegetation, I believe the finding was for the coastal areas. Farther inland had too much of a dark period for such vegetation to manage. At the pole itself, I would expect to have seen tundra featuring lots of mosses and ferns, plus some annuals that could manage the sharp seasonal changes. All of that said, given enough time perhaps palms and similar could adapt somewhat to the cycle. Current such species wouldn't be able to manage at all.
You shatter me
Your grip on me
A hold on me
So dull it kills
You stifle me
Infectious sense
Of hopelessness and
Prayers for rain
I suffocate
I breathe in dirt
And nowhere shines
But desolate
And drab the hours all spent
On killing time again
All waiting for
The rain
You fracture me
Your hands on me
A touch so plain
So stale it kills
You strangle me
Entangle me
In hopelessness and
Prayers for rain
I deteriorate
I live in dirt
And nowhere glows
But drearily and tired
The hours all spent
On killing time again
All waiting for
The rain
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arct icictn_nowcast_anim30d.gif
Has anyone else noticed that on about the 2nd or so a huge crack began to form in the thick ice just west of the Lincoln Sea? (Just off the coast of Ward Hunt Island.)
Isn't it a rather gross failure of the model that the crack is ignored? In fact the crack is magically "healed" by the model.
Which of the two chunks of ice is moving? Is the big chunk of ice west of the crack moving to the west (against the current), or is the ice east of the crack moving east?
Does the model consider that the water being swept under the ice by the Arctic Gyre is 8 degrees warmer than the freezing point of seawater?
This is what is currenlty forecast for portions of the arctic for the next 4 days. Much of the arctic ocean will not be much more than a Bowl of Crushed Ice. With another 46 days left before the Fall Equinox and anomalously high SSTs I can conceive of a great deal (record levels) of ice being melted and/or flushed out of the arctic ocean in the next 6/7 weeks.
Someone asked a few days ago about when we would see a tropical cyclone in the Arctic. Of course, by definition we won't see a "tropical" one because the Arctic is defined outside the tropics. But what looks to be happening fits the rest of the criteria.
This storm promises to stir a lot of remaining ice chunks and warm water together. The action of the wind and waves will break existing ice into smaller, easier to melt pieces. Odds are greater than 50:50 that we'll see some big drops in ice statistics this week....
--
eta: A phrase from someone on Neven's site "a storm driven by the temperature differential between the sea ice and the surrounding environment".
What are your thoughts on whether this year's melt season will last longer than other years due to the elevated SSTs?
Physics would tell us to expect the melt season to last longer and the refreeze to start later. But the "noise of weather" can mess things up.
This may be a most interesting week for the Arctic ice. If the big storm materializes then the ice could be greatly degraded. Someone has pointed out that 10 foot storm waves will mix water from 30 feet down from the surface with the ice.
The surface water is colder than water deeper down due to melting ice. The up-welling of warmer water would melt a lot of ice, so it's more than just ice getting shoved into warmer parts of the ocean.
The idea that we've added a tremendous amount of energy into the Arctic region and that the energy is not evenly distributed makes one think there are large storms in our future.
The only slight hope I have is the opposite: that once the air is cold enough to form seaice, it will create a calm layer of ice that is insulated by cold water. Thin ice to be sure but the more ice the better, the more to reflect in the spring.
I think we are on thin ice though.
Not exactly the ideal maritime environment for pleasure craft and/or oil rigs!!
The Observer
When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation – a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons.
Scientific evidence – including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe – shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past 10,000 years.
Such was the size of the eruption that its sulphurous gases would have released a stratospheric aerosol veil or dry fog that blocked out sunlight, altered atmospheric circulation patterns and cooled the Earth's surface. It caused crops to wither, bringing famine, pestilence and death.
What you are describing, I think, is thin seasonal ice. Ice which will melt out the following year.
Arctic ice is doomed unless something happens that lets more ice live for more than a year or two. It's the 3, 4, 5 year old ice that has enough thickness to last out melting phases.
The fish pond outside my window freezes over 100% several times each winter but it never builds enough thickness to withstand the next warmer weather.
We're not building more multi-year ice. We're seeing some of the leftovers melt in place, some moved to warmer parts of the Arctic, and some transported out through the Fram Straight into warm Atlantic water.
Put another way, we're spending our capital and our winter income isn't going to be enough to carry us through. Pretty soon we're likely to go broke by the end of summer. And then we'll start going broke earlier and earlier in the year.
--Big Oil and Big Coal would be able to declare an end to warming, and the fickle public would demand the instant drilling and mining of massive fossil fuel reserves to cope with the suddenly cooler winters and summers to come. Imagine how many more billions of tons of unregulated, unimpeded CO2 could be belched into the environment where it would, of course, still be once the volcanic particulates had settled down and stopped having an effect? Why, we could probably jump to 600ppm in a matter of five years--and with those pesky climate change Cassandras effectively silenced, to boot!
--Millions of people currently living on a borderline subsistence would be forgotten about, as food resources would be redirected inward; the U.S, for example, wouldn't be able to justify sending wheat overseas when we'd need every grain of it to feed our own people. The starvation deaths of probably millions--perhaps tens or even hundreds of millions--would lead to calls for rapid development of franken-foods; you can be sure such stalwarts as Monsanto would be right at the head of the pack forcing people to eat unregulated but highly profitable GMOs and the like.
--There would be massive competition for limited and dwindling resources. And that means only one thing: war! The war machine, currently idling along during this relatively peaceful time, would be able to ramp up to an unprecedented level; why, there'd be trillions to be made in outfitting all the new and expanded armies!
--The anti-science hysteria at home and abroad would mount to a fever pitch; after all, scientists who had been warning of warming "lied" to them, or so we'd be told. Goaded by Fox, et al, this would give profit-over-people forces carte blanche do pretty much whatever they wanted with little to no regulation or oversight. When people are starving--as we'd constantly be reminded--no one should have to be bothered with clean air or water standards, or fuel efficieny standards, or oil spill prevention measures.
And so on. Depending how severe and longlasting the eruption, the event could in effect be the death knell for mankind as we know it. Though there'd doubtless be many new billionaires, and maybe the world's first trillionaires, which would, sadly, make some incredibly and sickly happy.
Yeah, those hoping for a volcanic megaeruption to save us from our GW/CC mess are clearly suffering from a terminal case of shortsightedness...
Yes, that is what I was talking about. I am hoping that there is some mitigating effect. I really stopped trying to think deeply on this blog a few months ago, personal habit kept me here (which I am trying to break but it is hard to work constantly on-line and not check in). So I comment casually as in a conversation.
The reason is that I don't think there is anything to say. "Were doom" to quote Taz' famous line. I think all the serious conversation is like keeping a diary while the plane crashes. Maybe the next civilization will find our black box and understand what we did wrong.
1. Technology will not put the genie back in the bottle.
2. Drought, famine, disease, heat, lack of oxygen --> total breakdown of ecosystem.
3. If we are not killed right away, we will kill each other fighting for survival. There are good, amazingly courageous acts by humans. But those are acts, like the battle of Britain, they won't save us from fighting and destroying ourselves.
4. Maybe we don't have the moral right to succeed anyway. We slaughter our fellow animals by the billions, watch the Olympics while millions die in Africa, we put the military-industrial complex ahead of morality (e.g. Russia and China in Syria, but everyone is guilty of that), we torture, rape, scorn, hurt, etc each other.
5. We hide behind our idea of god either to justify what we do to each other or because after we are done treating each other that way, we are just bullies that cry in the night and ask god to save us.
the only way I can think of to justify our continuing existence is that the universe doesn't seem much better, and maybe we are evolving to something better, a la Star Trek.
I will try, like millions of other people, to find a solution. Bike aren't enough. However, i'm not going to take dissecting the death throes of the world ecology seriously unless I can learn how to stop it.
I'm pretty sure we all realized what you were asking. But I thought that bringing back the "tropic" part would help some people better understand that there is a great, big nasty storm appearing to form north of the 60 degree latitude. One caused by the same factors which cause the hurricanes that get our weather-weenies so excited.
Another thing to consider, if violent storms in the arctic increase in frequency and intensity it will accelerate the erosion along the arctic shorelines, which I believe is losing about 0.5 meters/year. This of course releases more Carbon into the atmosphere. YEAH TEAM!!
That's a lot of the oldest, thickest Central Arctic Basin (CAB) ice being slung into melt areas. The remaining multi-year ice (MYI).
Now we know that it's hard to forecast the weather very far in advance but it is pretty clear that a large storm is forming and should be impressive by tomorrow.
If this happens it not only will speed the melting of thinner ice but also attack the thicker MYI of the CAB.
As we lose the Arctic coldness we experience slower jet stream waves/shifts which, in turn, means longer droughts?
We also put more moisture into the atmosphere which means more floods and massive snowfalls.
It's not a question of whether climate change is occuring or not, or whether humans are contributing, it is a question of how much humans are contributing.
Frankly, I can make a solid case that most of the warming over the last 150 years is natural, and this claim is backed up by an enormous amount of scientific literature.
One of the negative feedbacks that arises from an albedo and Sea Ice decline in the Arctic, is that in the early fall, since there is more open water exposed than before in the Arctic, the Arctic radiates more heat to space than if it were to be fully ice covered, and therefore the ice in the Wintertime makes a approach to more normal levels than during the summer, therefore slowing the decline to an ice free summer, and providing a strong negative feedback. As for the ice this year? I am making a prediction that it falls in between 2008/2010. There will be an extremely cold pattern in the Arctic over the next 10 or so days, that will help to preserve ice in the Arctic, the large daily melts we are seeing should slow down significantly, because of an anomalous-DA forming in the Arctic.
The SLP forming in the Arctic is highly unusual, and is over 24 dm below normal at 500 mb.
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