Arctic Sea Ice

Shock news!

There is no shocking news, really. I'm just emulating a way of news reporting as seen in recent months by folks trying to play down the long-term shocking news of Arctic sea ice loss. You know, paid climate science disinformers like Benny Peiser who claimed that the poles aren't melting, twisting the words and work of a respected oceanographer and putting up a bunch of strawmen along the way, because global sea ice area is at a record high.

It's a neat trick, even though it's like saying that one billion people starving globally is not a problem, because there are one billion obese persons. We all know that Antarctic sea ice has been increasing in winter, most likely because of winds that push the ice further out, with the open water left behind freezing up again. So if you compare Antarctic winter anomalies with those of Arctic summer anomalies - especially during rebound years such as 2013 and 2014 - it looks as if not much is happening.

However, if you compare the numbers as they are, during the same season, the picture is, well, shocking:

That graph (found here, updated at the end of this blog post) shows the minimum in both Arctic and Antarctic, which never occur at the same time, of course. In the end it's all about the minimum and the period leading to it, because that's the time when most of the sunlight reaches either one of the poles. And there is hardly a trend in the Antarctic minimum, despite the spectacular winter increases, because most of it melts out anyway in summer. As can be seen on the small image at the top of this blog post, showing that the only Antarctic place with a substantial amount of sea ice left right now, is the Weddell Sea.

And it's like that every year, contrary to the entirely different Arctic. Not everyone knows this, and so this is what climate science disinformers use to fool people and thus delay meaningful climate mitigation policies that threaten either their wallets or their beliefs, and most of the time both.

The day the ice cap died

The title of this blog post is actually the title of a piece of science fiction, a short story written by Paul Briggs. Just like a couple of weeks ago when I was asked for advice on an idea for a novel, Paul asked me for some feedback on his short story. I figured posting it here, will generate a lot more feedback than I can offer. And most of you will probably find it an interesting read.

Paul writes on his website:

I started writing this story because, well, nobody else was doing it. Like a lot of people, I had read the projections of the Arctic Ocean having its first ice-free moment in human history some time in the 2020s.

Nobody seems to know what happens after that. The consensus seems to be that seasonal patterns of temperature and rainfall in the northern hemisphere will be altered in ways that will make many heavily populated parts of it much harder to survive in and seriously inconvenience anyone trying to grow crops, but no one can say exactly what this will look like.

So I decided to take a guess. I'm not a climatologist or anything, I'm just winging it.

I wrote this for AlternateHistory.com, in the "Future History" section where only registered members could read it. Since it won the 2013 Turtledove Award for Best New Future, I thought I'd give it a little editing and share it with a wider audience.

It goes without saying that I find Arctic sea ice loss an excellent subject for this kind of fiction. As with most science fiction and predictions, it's all about timing. Maybe the sequence of events is a bit too soon and too fast (my only 'gripe'), but it portrays the potential risks of Arctic sea ice loss in a gripping way. Like a fist gripping your stomach. The narrative style, a description of what happens after the Arctic becomes ice-free, followed by a collection of future news stories covering the consequences, makes the story exciting and easy to read. The open ending leaves some room for optimism, in the sense that not all is lost. At least, that's how I (want to) read it.

Here's the first part of the story:

And the wind cries methane

We return with some more info from the land of unknown, the land that is very important for our own land, but of which we do not seem to want to know more, as we are strangely comfortable with the unknown. I'm talking about methane, of course, the potent greenhouse gas of which enormous quantities lie stored under the frozen cap of Arctic soil and sea bed.

We regularly return to this topic, the last time being 4 months ago when this so-called Arctic time bomb was the centre of media and blogosphere attention for a couple of days. This time we hear again from East Siberian Arctic Shelf experts Natalia Shakhova (that image on the top right belongs to her) and Igor Semiletov who have a new paper out called Ebullition and storm-induced methane release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, published yesterday in Nature Geoscience.

Some excellent summaries have started to pop up here, here, here and here, so I'll just sit back and quote from Brian Kahn's article over at Climate Central:

Shakhova has spent the past decade compiling data on the East Siberia Arctic Shelf through research cruises and flyovers of the region. She published initial results in 2010, which showed that methane has been escaping at hot spots where vents have formed from a combination of geothermal heat as well as warmer river water flowing into the region. Those results showed that 7 teragrams of methane is bubbling to the surface annually. That's roughly the equivalent of 10 percent of the methane emissions from U.S. oil and natural gas production and transmission in 2012.

The new research refined those results, showing the amount of methane reaching the surface is more than double those previous estimates. In all, Shakhova and her colleagues estimate that 17 teragrams are escaping each year, though the new study says the estimates are likely on the conservative end. Shakhova said those totals are on par with emissions from the Arctic tundra.

One of the reasons for the revised estimates was more rigorous measurements using an unmanned underwater vehicle with advanced sonar technology. It provided a clearer image of the seafloor and the amount of methane escaping from vents.

Shakhova's research also shows that annual bottom water temperatures have increased 0.9°F over the past 14 years while summer temperatures have increased 1.8°F over the same period. That’s due in large part to increased runoff from rivers, which generally have warmer water than the Siberian Sea. Other research has pegged that increase at 7 percent from 1936 to 1999.

A sonar image showing the location of methane vents in a portion
of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: Shakhova et al., 2013

That the estimate of annual release is now twice as big than previously thought, is very interesting in itself, but personally I'm more intrigued by the claim that Arctic storms cause more methane to make it to the atmosphere, instead of dissolving in the water column.

In my survey of the literature on (persistent) Arctic cyclones back in June I noted how a lot of models predict that a combination of Arctic sea ice and land masses that become snow-free earlier and earlier in spring, could lead to more cyclonic activity in the Arctic. As we saw this melting season, it could be a negative feedback preserving more sea ice, but we learn now that it could also cause more methane from clathrates to reach the atmosphere. Every advantage has its disadvantage, it seems.

Stephanie Paige Oghbrun at Scientific American has this on storms:

Perception of the Arctic 2

Like I've written in the previous blog post with the same title, I'm not just interested in the science/ observation of Arctic sea ice and the consequences of its loss, but also in the question how and how far these events are finding their way to the collective consciousness. Are people becoming more aware of what's going on up North? Does the realization start to kick in that it might have consequences for them, their loved ones and their communities? And not some time far off in the future, but perhaps
in the decades to come?

That's what I have to think of every time the Arctic makes it into the mainstream news, or even better, popular culture. Take for instance last week's Colbert Report (hat-tip to Lennartvdl):

Arctic time bombs

While keeping an eye on day-to-day data and speculating about whether 2013 is going to overcome the odds and break last year's records, one tends to forget about the wider implications and what this actually is all about. A tree is incredibly interesting, but in the end it's all about the forest.

It's important to remember that the situation isn't looking good in the Arctic. Not good at all. We're witnessing things that were supposed to happen decades from now. Instead we're looking at a change that is hard to fathom, but takes place during our lifetimes, not on a geological timescale.

Last year Kevin McKinney and I wrote a piece about the potential consequences of all this, and I'll be sure to get back to it at the end of this melting season (and the next, and the...), but in the meantime here's what Gareth Renowden of the Hot Topic blog, one of the first bloggers to pay attention to the Arctic situation, has to say about it:

This should be headline news. It should be plastered all over the front pages of newspapers and web sites around the world. TV pundits should be demanding action from the politicians who have put action on emissions reductions in the “too hard” basket. The evidence is beginning to suggest that Wally Broecker’s angry beast, fed up with being prodded with ever bigger sticks, is going to bite back hard — and bite back soon. Is there time to stop all this happening? Perhaps — but it will take a huge effort, a wartime response when the world is being led by billionaires, ideologues and their appeasers intent on denying reality. We’re sleepwalking to disaster. By the time we wake up, it will be too late.

This was Gareth's conclusion. Here's what led him to it:

Everything you want to know about the jet stream

...but are afraid to ask.

Skeptical Science contributor John Mason has outdone himself this time - which says a lot after his great pieces on Arctic methane and other subjects - by writing a comprehensive article about the jet stream, what it is, what it does and why that is important. Here's the introduction and table of contents, but I'd advise everyone to go read the whole thing over at Skeptical Science:

A Rough Guide to the Jet Stream:
what it is, how it works and how it is responding to enhanced Arctic warming

Posted on 22 May 2013 by John Mason

Barely a week goes by these days in the Northern Hemisphere without the jet stream being mentioned in the news, but rarely do such news items explain in detail what it is and why it is important. As a severe weather photographer this past 10+ years, an activity which requires successful DIY forecasting, I've had to develop an appreciation into what makes it tick. This post, then, is a start-from-scratch primer based on that knowledge plus some valuable assistance from academia into where the current research is heading. Because of its length and breadth of coverage, I've broken it up into bookmarked sections for easy reference: to come back here click on 'back to contents' in each instance.

Contents:

Earth's Troposphere - an introduction

Weather systems aloft - the Polar Front and the jet stream

Waves on the jet stream - upper ridges and troughs

Positive vorticity - a driver of severe weather - and the jet stream

Wind-shear - a driver of severe weather - and the jet stream

Jetstreak development along the jet stream - a driver of severe weather

Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation patterns: the Arctic and North Atlantic Oscillations

Climate change and the future: how will the jet steam and pressure-patterns respond?

Conclusion

Perception of the Arctic

There was a time, not too long ago, when I didn't know the Arctic existed. Sure, I knew there was a North Pole and that it was cold there, but somehow I always thought that the Arctic and the Antarctic were the same thing, that someone had forgotten to add the Ant-. And of course, polar bears were hunting penguins. Or vice versa. Whatever.

It was around 2006 when I started to get interested in global warming and the changes in climate it could cause, just before An Inconvenient Truth would shift the Climate PR war to higher gears. I vaguely noticed there is a place called 'the Arctic' - where the ocean is covered by a floating layer of ice of a few metres thick - when the perfect storm of 2007 annihilated the 2005 sea ice area and extent records. I remember reading about it on RealClimate and the comments there were the spark that would eventually fire my intention to start this blog.

In the meantime the 2012 melting season - not a perfect storm, even though it hosted a big one towards the end - annihilated all of the 2007 records. It's quite clear now that sea ice is melting much, much faster than anticipated, and the jaw-dropping sight of an ice-free Arctic that was projected to occur somewhere towards the end of this century, could be witnessed towards the end of this decade (if not earlier). The melting itself as well as potential consequences are getting more and more media attention, and lately I have been wondering how much of this news is actually seeping into the collective consciousness.

Looking for winter weirdness 6

I wasn't expecting another instalment in this year's series of blog posts on Winter Weirdness, extreme weather events that could be linked to the decline in Arctic sea ice. It's not even winter anymore officially. But as spring has been revoked in large parts of Europe, and the atmospheric blocking that is causing it is being linked to Arctic sea ice as a potential cause, I figure it's a fitting end for the series.

One of the first articles alluding to the link, appeared on the Guardian's website on Monday: Scientists link frozen spring to dramatic Arctic sea ice loss. Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University, went further, writing a blog post showing the similarities between the current event and modeled projections in recent research that investigated the influence of Arctic sea ice loss on atmospheric patterns. Lepus Universalis Eli Rabett was so kind as to translate Rahmstorf's blog post to English:

Melting Ice and Cold Weather

The media are debating if the decrease in  Arctic ice  is related to this winter's cold weather in Germany. This post discusses the most recent current research about this including the most important figures from relevant studies.

First, what does the unusual temperature distribution observed this March actually look like? Here is a map showing the data (up to and including March 25, NCEP / NCAR data plotted with KNMI Climate Explorer):

Freezing cold in Siberia, reaching across northwestern Europe, unusually mild temperatures over the Labrador Sea and parts of Greenland and a cold band diagonally across North America, from Alaska to Florida. Averaged over the northern hemisphere the anomaly disappears - the average is close to the long-term average. Of course, the distribution of hot and cold is related to atmospheric circulation, and thus the air pressure distribution. The air pressure anomaly looks like this:

There was unusually high air pressure between Scandinavia and Greenland. Since circulation around a high is clockwise [anticyclone], this explains the influx of arctic cold air in Europe and the warm Labrador Sea. 

Arctic sea ice

Let us now discuss the Arctic sea ice.  The summer minimum in September set a new record low, but also at the recent winter maximum there was unusually little ice (ranking 6th lowest - the ten years with the lowest ice extent were all in the last decade). The ice cover in the Barents sea was particularly low this winter.  All in all until March the deficit was  about the size of Germany compared  to the long-term average.

Is there a connection with the winter weather?  Does the shrinking ice cover influence the atmospheric circulation, because the open ocean strongly heats the Arctic atmosphere from below?  (The water is much warmer than the overlying cold polar air.) Did the resulting evaporation of sea water moisten the air and thus lead to more snow? These questions have been investigated by several studies in recent years.

Read the rest over at Eli's, or in German at KlimaLounge.

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Update: Commenter R. Gates has a firm meteorological grasp of current events, which not only could be influenced by the state of the sea ice, but also have to do with the early breaking down of the Polar Vortex I alluded to in my latest blog post on the cracking event (Arctic freezing season ends with a loud crack). Here's his explanation in a comment below:

Melting of the Arctic sea ice

Below is a guest blog by Jos Hagelaars who regularly posts on Bart Verheggens Dutch-English climate blog. Jos has been a hot streak lately, looking back at how the Klotzbach 2009 Hot Spot paper is holding up, producing a new iconic graph called the Wheelchair (TM: Rabett inc.) and with his latest blog post discusses the result of the first Climate Dialogue that had Arctic sea ice as its first subject.

I wrote about this Dutch initiative when it was first presented, and even though I thought there wasn't enough talk about potential consequences/risks that disappearing Arctic sea ice poses, I found it actually exciting to have the representative of (fake) skeptics admit that the decrease is largely caused by Anthropogenic, or human-caused global warming. That ought to be a game changer. Some day. Hopefully soon.

Below is Jos Hagelaars' take on the discussion, starting with an excellent summary of everything regarding Arctic sea ice.

Melting of the Arctic sea ice

by Jos Hagelaars

This was the title of a discussion that was held on the recently launched website ClimateDialogue regarding the possible causes of the decline in Arctic sea ice over the past decades. Three experts participated in this discussion: Walt Meier, Research Scientist at the NSIDC, Judith Curry, professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and Ron Lindsay, Senior Principal Physicist at the Polar Science Center of the University of Washington.

In this blog post I will start off with a description of the observations of the Arctic region, followed by a short overview of the potential causes of the decline in Arctic sea ice, incorporating the views of the three experts as they were expressed on ClimateDialogue. The final parts concern the uniqueness of this decline in a historical perspective and the possibility of having an ice-free Arctic in the summer in the not too distant future.

Observations of the Arctic region since 1979

Since 1979 the Arctic region has been extensively monitored by satellites. They detect e.g. the ice surface area, the extent of the area covered with ice and also the total amount or volume of ice. The results of these observations are startling. For example, sea ice area and the amount of perennial (multi-year) ice has decreased dramatically over the past 3 decades, as is visualized by the images in figure 1 and 2, generated by NASA (see here and here).

Fig. 1. Minimum ice extent.
The yellow line indicates the average minimum ice extent of the past 30 years
compared to the minimum ice extent on September 16th 2012.

Fig. 2. Perennial ice.
The bright white central mass shows the perennial sea ice. The larger light blue area shows the full extent of the winter sea ice including the average annual sea ice during the months of November, December and January.

Read the rest over at Our Changing Climate.

The Climate Consequences of Arctic Ocean Drilling

This is a re-post of a piece on Climate Progress that explains the whole matter from A to Z. Thanks go out to authors Kiley Korh and Howard Marano for saving me heaps of time (image shows Royal Dutch Shell drilling rig Kulluk aground off Alaska 1/2/13. Credits: U.S. Coast Guard). 

Adding Fuel to the Fire: The Climate Consequences of Arctic Ocean Drilling

Kiley Kroh and Howard Marano via CAP

In order to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change, enormous fossil-fuel reserves will need to remain in the ground untouched.

2012 was supposed to be a banner year for Royal Dutch Shell, as the company planned to embark on the first Arctic offshore exploratory drilling activity in decades and set itself up to make billions of dollars prospecting for oil in the far-flung region off Alaska’s North Slope. But that’s not how things turned out.

Instead, beginning with efforts to prepare for operations, the company experienced one setback after another. Shell struggled to meet the government’s safety requirements for its oil spill response equipment, experiencing multiple technical failures and permit violations. Mother Nature weighed in and kept the drilling sites choked with sea ice. Yet despite these setbacks and others, Shell received permits from the federal government in August to begin preparatory drilling, albeit not deep enough to actually strike oil in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

The coup de grace came on New Year’s Eve when Shell’s Kulluk rig ran aground near Kodiak, Alaska — a fiasco that required a 500-plus person response effort, led by the Coast Guard, working for more than a week in dangerous conditions to secure the rig. This final calamity prompted the Obama administration to launch a high-level 60-day review of Shell’s entire Arctic drilling program, and after assessing its equipment and determining that both Arctic drilling rigs were too damaged to operate in 2012, caused Shell to announce on February 27 that it would not seek to drill in the remote and challenging region in 2013.

In presenting the results of the Department of the Interior’s review on March 14, outgoing Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar admitted, “The government still has a lot to learn. The Arctic is a very difficult environment to operate in. … Shell is one of the most resource-capable companies in the world (and) they encountered a whole host of problems in trying to operate up there.” The review concluded that Shell would have to develop a “comprehensive plan” for its operations before it would be allowed to move forward. This begs the question: What exactly did the permit process consist of before all these mishaps?

Shell spent seven years and an estimated $5 billion getting ready for its chance to tap the reserves of fossil fuels thought to be stashed beneath the Arctic seabed, and the result was irrefutably a failure. Neither the oil and gas industry nor its regulators are adequately prepared for Arctic offshore drilling operations.

Furthermore, climate change is already wreaking havoc in the region, melting it at an alarming rate and setting off a domino effect that will ripple through the entire global system. The trends so plainly on display in the Arctic are merely a preview of what awaits the rest of the planet if serious action isn’t taken soon to aggressively curb our carbon emissions. If we allow corporate interests to tap the reserves of additional fossil fuels that have been exposed by the rapid onset of global climate change, we’re missing the clear message about the future of our environment on a planetary scale. Slowing the devastating steamroll of climate change requires slashing the amount of greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere, not opening up vast new sources of carbon.

There's more, much more. Read it all at Climate Progress.