Category: Climate science

Third

The National Snow and Ice Data Centre announced today that this year’s Arctic sea ice minimum extent was likely to have been reached on September 12. It’s the third lowest minimum in the record, behind 2007 and 2008. The image at left shows this year in white, compared with 2007 in darker colours. From the report:

On September 12, 2009 sea ice extent dropped to 5.10 million square kilometers (1.97 million square miles). This appears to have been the lowest point of the year, as sea ice has now begun its annual cycle of growth in response to autumn cooling. The 2009 minimum is the third-lowest recorded since 1979, 580,000 square kilometers (220,000 square miles) above 2008 and 970,000 square kilometers (370,000 square miles) above the record low in 2007. The 2009 minimum is 1.61 million square kilometers (620,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average minimum and 1.28 million square kilometers (490,000 square miles) below the thirty-year 1979 to 2008 average minimum.

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This NSIDC graph gives a very good idea of what’s been happening this year. 2009 has never looked much like beating 2007, but until mid-August it was giving 2008 a run for its money. However, a relatively cool summer and winds during August that dispersed the ice held the minimum extent above last year.

[Update 19/9] NASA’s Earth Observatory posts this graphic of the ice distribution on 12/9:

npseaice_ams_2009255.png

The usual suspects will no doubt trumpet this as a “recovery”, but the NSIDC team don’t think so:

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Big wind could wean China off coal

At least some Americans and Chinese are getting together to work on climate change. A team of researchers from Harvard University and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have been conducting a serious investigation into China’s wind power potential. Their work was the cover story for the Sep 11 issue of Science (sub required) and is reported in  the Harvard Gazette.  MIT’s Technology Review also carries a useful report.  

 “The world is struggling with the question of how do you make the switch from carbon-rich fuels to something carbon-free,” said lead author Michael McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies. “The real question for the globe is: What alternatives does China have?”

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Titanic days

Awesome (defined as extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear) time-lapse pictures of the calving face of the great glacier at Ilulisat, Greenland pouring ice into the ocean — the single biggest ice discharge of any northern hemisphere glacier. Greenlanders reckon this is where the iceberg that sank the Titanic originated. The ice face is huge — the helicopter at the beginning of the clip gives some sense of scale — but the ice is actually 1,000 metres thick at that point. This clip is only an appetiser for the Extreme Ice Survey‘s James Balog providing more detail, and showing many more truly awe-inspiring images in a recent TED talk. Well worth 20 minutes of anyone’s time — as Balog says, it’s hard to ignore the evidence of what’s happening up North.

[Hat tip to Riatsala in a comment yesterday]

More than a metre

Sea level will rise by more than a metre by 2100 according to the authors of the third chapter in the World Wide Fund for Nature’s new Arctic report, introduced by Gareth a few days ago. Eric Rignot, one of the two authors of the chapter, is principal scientist for the Radar Science and Engineering Section at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.  The other author, Anny Cazenave, is an internationally renowned research scientist from France’s national centre for space studies.

The value of the chapter is that it draws together, authoritatively and coherently, the evidence that points to considerably more sea-level rise over this century than projected in the 2007 IPCC Fourth Report (AR4). Happily politicians are taking IPCC reports much more seriously than in the past, but they should not rest on them.  Their responsibility is to be up to date with what the science is saying now. The WWF report assesses the most recent science, and finds that the impacts of warming will be more severe than indicated by the IPCC.

What follows is a summary of the main points made by the chapter.

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Pocket calculator

homer.jpgThe National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has bought a shiny new supercomputer. For $12.7m they’re getting a IBM Power 575 that will be the fastest climate machine in the southern hemisphere, 14th fastest in the world — and it will get an upgrade in 2 years which will double its speed. Sounds like a good deal to everyone but NZ’s climate cranks. Bryan Leyland, “chair of the economics panel” of the NZ CSC rushed to issue a press release:

“It is a national scandal that NIWA are squandering $12.7 million of taxpayers’ hard earned money on yet another supercomputer. In spite of buying a Cray T3A supercomputer several years ago, their predictions of the climate have been spectacularly wrong. They failed to predict the 1998 El Nino event, the cooling that has been noticeable since 2002 and the increased cooling that has been recorded over the last two years.”

A NIWA spokesman was quick to point out that they bought the Cray in 1999, so would have been hard-pressed to use to it predict an El Niño in the preceding year, but Leyland’s outburst is mainly interesting for two reasons: it’s an amusing public parade of ignorance (a bit like standing in the middle of Wellington wearing a dunce’s hat shouting “Look at me!”), and because he recommends that NIWA give up climate modelling and instead rely on the work of a British forecaster called Piers Corbyn. Let’s start with Leyland’s take on climate models.

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