Tag: NASA

“The Arctic ice is back to normal.” Yeah, right.


This New Scientist video includes some rather spectacular images of a rapidly draining meltwater lake on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. The three kilometre wide lake drained down through 1 km of ice in an hour and a half, at a rate similar to that of the water flowing over the Niagara Falls. Full story here, and more detail from NASA here. Meanwhile, RealClimate covers the factors driving the acceleration of Greenland’s outlet glaciers, the principle mechanism for getting large volumes of ice into the ocean. There’s some interesting stuff in the comments, too, particularly from a scientist (Tad Pfeiffer) working on establishing an upper limit to the contribution to global sea level rise likely from Greenland’s glaciers. Nature also has a very nice overview article on the state of research on the GIS, but unfortunately it’s hidden away behind a paywall.

Offshore in the high Canadian Arctic, Canadian Rangers have discovered large cracks are appearing in the Ward Hunt ice shelf, a large chunk of very old and thick ice on the northern coast of Ellesmere Island. The Arctic sea ice has now begun its spring melt back, and the National Snow & Ice Data Centre has posted a page to monitor this summer’s events. The time series graph of ice extent (here) compares current ice to last year’s record and the 79-2000 average. You can monitor ice area (a slightly different metric) at Cryosphere Today (here).

Down South, more results from the Andrill Project were presented at last week’s European Geophysical Union conference. Researchers now have a climate history for the continent stretching back 17 million years, and there are plans to drill a new core (starting in 2012) to take that back to 40 million years, when the continent started iceing up. Grab the Nature article before it disappears behind a paywall.

Tasman.jpgThis is the Tasman Glacier, near Mt Cook, from the lookout on the lateral moraine a couple of months ago (click for a larger version: pic ©GR). New fieldwork shows that the lake is now 7 km long, 2 km wide and – amazingly – 245 m deep. The results confirm that the presence of the lake effectively dooms the glacier to disappear – within 20 years, according to the research team from Massey University. Herald story here.

Winter wonderland

205188main_2007ice_anomaly.jpg Climate cranks are keen to paint the last northern hemisphere (boreal) winter as unusually cold – a clear sign, they say, that “global warming is over”, and that global cooling has begun. Every crank’s at it: Bob Carter at Muriel’s place, Gerrit van der Lingen in an article in a Christchurch magazine and Vincent Gray in a submission to the select committee looking into the Emissions Trading Bill. It’s nonsense. The winter was cooler than many recent ones – but still 16th warmest, according to NOAA. A strong La Niña is cooling the tropical Pacific, and dragging the global average down, the precise converse of the strong El Niño that made 1998 so hot. In other words it’s weather noise, not long term change, as Stu Ostro explains at the Weather Channel. However, the cranks are right about one thing: last winter was unusual, but not for the reasons they think. In this post, I want to explore some of the reasons why this winter was out of the ordinary, and why I think it may demonstrate that rapid climate change is happening now. It’s an expanded version of how I began my last two talks…

Continue reading “Winter wonderland”

Another Hot Topic, skiing’s future, batteries, kites, u.s.w.

There’s another Hot Topic on the bookshelves – not in NZ, but in the UK. Sir David King, the sometimes controversial scientific adviser to Tony Blair has (with Gabrielle Walker) penned The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On. Reviews in The Times and The Guardian. It will no doubt make its way over here eventually.

[Much more below the fold]

Continue reading “Another Hot Topic, skiing’s future, batteries, kites, u.s.w.”

The Herald sends good sense on holiday

The silly season is obviously taking a toll on editorial judgement at the Herald. Yesterday they ran an astonishing column by Malcolm McPhee – Climate of fear starting to make my temperature rise – which is breathtakingly nonsensical, and also provided space for Jim Hopkins to take a (ritual for him, tired and boring for the rest of us) swipe at climate science in his column. Today, Fran O’Sullivan includes amongst her top ten stories for 2008 – at number three, no less – climate change science consensus breaks – basing her judgement on a list of 400 “scientists” issued by a Republican Senator and his team of tame climate deniers. McPhee and O’Sullivan deserve debunking (see below), but Hopkins’ taste in eyewear is so atrocious ( 😉 ) that I’ll take pity on him and leave him alone (for now).

Continue reading “The Herald sends good sense on holiday”

The canary croaked

From AP (via CNN): “The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming,” said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. “Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.” The annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco is bringing bad news about the Arctic – most of it listed in the foregoing linked article. One paragraph is particularly shocking:

Still to be released is NASA data showing the remaining Arctic sea ice to be unusually thin, another record. That makes it more likely to melt in future summers. Combining the shrinking area covered by sea ice with the new thinness of the remaining ice, scientists calculate that the overall volume of ice is half of 2004’s total.

In three years, half of the summer ice has gone. In Hot Topic I suggest that it might all be gone in my lifetime – and I thought I was being pretty daring, given that the IPCC talks about the end of the century. One ice modeller who has been predicting an early demise for the summer sea ice is the US Navy’s Wieslaw Maslowski. From the BBC:

“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. “So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”

RealClimate is providing coverage of AGU highlights (here, here, here and (update – sea ice specific) here. The Herald runs with a very US-angled Reuters story. As I’ve pointed out before, the consequences of the loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic for northern hemisphere climate is not known, but I would expect that there’s some urgent work being done to find out. We’re into the land of the unknown unknowns, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.