Arctic Meltdown : A Very Big Deal

Found at : Green Man

It continues to astonish me that environmental reporters cannot pick up the Arctic meltdown ball and run with it.

The trend in meltdown in the northernmost latitudes is a very big deal – and it’s ongoing, it hasn’t stopped, gone into remission or gone away.

The nature of the ice is changing – so much so that scientific monitoring equipment was confused.

It is now clear that Arctic summer sea ice is in a “death spiral”, a phrase first used very recently, in an attempt to properly describe what is happening :-

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/death-spiral/

The Rate of Change

I well remember the huffing and puffing over the release of James Hansen’s paper “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” :-

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf

“…Decreasing CO2 was the main cause of a cooling trend that began 50 million years ago, large scale glaciation occurring when CO2 fell to 425 +/- 75 ppm…”

The sceptic-deniers laughed and scoffed and said things to the effect that clearly there’s nothing to worry about that the current concentration of Carbon Dioxide in the air is over 390 parts per million – it won’t melt the polar ice caps.

What the sceptic-deniers haven’t understood, or pretend not to have understood, is that it is a combination of factors that caused major lasting glaciation on Earth. Yes, the level of Carbon Dioxide in the air is important. But the rate of change of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere is a significant component.

If the levels of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere change rapidly, the heating or cooling effect is amplified, in effect. You have to take account of the relative change in levels of Carbon Dioxide, not just its level at any particular point in time.

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Wake Up ! Greenland’s Melting !

Greenland’s ice sheet probably first formed something like three million years ago, and drilling ice cores there has produced reliable data on changes in the Climate since then :-

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Sea Ice Not In Recovery

Watch it while it all melts away…this isn’t modelling, it’s data :-

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/21/arctic-sea-ice-area-extent-volume-record-low/

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/IceVolume.php

http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=73&&n=182

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/05/three-views-on-sea-ice.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/IDAO/rothrock_zhang_2004JC002282.pdf

Greenland Melts Down : Greens Up

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Greenland-ice-mass-loss-spread-to-northwest.html

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010GL042460.shtml

http://news.discovery.com/earth/more-greenland-ice-melting-faster.html

http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-CO2-level-would-cause-Greenland-ice-sheet-collapse.html

http://www.the-cryosphere-discuss.net/4/233/2010/tcd-4-233-2010.html

“…Collapse of the ice-sheet was found to occur between 400 and 560 ppmv…”

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