Well worth watching: http://hot-topic.co.nz/the-climate-show-7-box-and-boxsters-the-cryosphere-special/

 

Figure 1: Greenland ice mass anomaly – deviation from the average ice mass over the 2002 to 2010 period. Black line shows monthly values. Orange line shows long-term trend.

As we get into strife everytime I display this graph, I will stress that this graph shows “Ice Mass Anomaly” -  the deviation from the average value over the 9 years. So when values are positive from 2002 to 2006, this doesn’t mean the ice sheet is gaining ice – quite the contrary as the curve is headed downwards. It means the ice mass is above the average value over 2002 through 2010.

It’s interesting to compare this data to previous blog posts in May 2010 and November 2010. The ice loss in 2010 is the greatest in the satellite record – around 600 billion tonnes of ice mass loss over the 2010 summer. More importantly, the rate of ice loss continues to increase, more than doubling since 2002.

Continue Reading: Latest GRACE data: record ice loss in 2010.

 

It may be too late to stop the seas from eventually rising and flooding Earth’s coastlines. Even if humans manage to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions completely by the year 2100, ocean warming set in motion by the end of this millennium could trigger the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and flood New York City, Hong Kong, and other coastal cities, a new study suggests.

Sea level rises when meltwater from land-based masses of ice, such as glaciers, flows into the ocean. But sea level also increases when heat from the atmosphere gets mixed into the upper layers of the ocean, causing that water to expand. In recent decades, this thermal expansion has provided, on average, only about one-quarter of the 1.8 millimeters of sea level rise seen each year, but its contribution is increasing, studies suggest.

Now researchers point to an even bigger threat from warm ocean waters. The floating ice shelves that ring Antarctica could melt. So could the seaward end of land-based ice streams. That would lead to a long-term, catastrophic rise in sea level.

The new analysis, conducted by Nathan Gillett, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada and his colleagues, considers a rosy scenario. The team assumes that carbon dioxide emissions will rise at moderate rates from now until 2100, when people will switch to renewable energy sources and stop producing carbon dioxide. In this scenario, atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas peak at about 770 parts per million (approximately twice today’s level of approximately 390 ppm), Gillett says. Even though no new humanmade carbon dioxide emissions are produced after 2100 and terrestrial and marine ecosystems continue soaking it up, carbon dioxide levels remain above 550 ppm for the next 9 centuries. Oceans will be slow to soak up the atmospheric carbon dioxide, and terrestrial ecosystems—many of which have been storing carbon gradually for centuries—will begin to release some of that carbon after the year 2200, the model suggests. As a result, ocean warming persists throughout the millennium, the researchers reported online yesterday in Nature Geoscience.

Much of that warmth is mixed directly into surface seas by wave action. But some is injected into deeper ocean layers by the thermohaline circulation, a pattern of ocean currents that carries warm, salty water from the North Atlantic southward to the Antarctic. Overall, the team’s model suggests that the temperature of waters surrounding the icy continent at depths between 500 and 1500 meters will rise approximately 3?C between the years 2105 and 2995. Add that to an Antarctic surface warming of as much as 9?C since the mid-1800s, and that’s a recipe for melting ice. At particular risk is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a 2.2-million-cubic-kilometer, potentially unstable ice mass that sits on the sea floor at depths where Antarctic waters are warming the most.

Ocean warming alone will result in 25 centimeters of sea-level rise by 2100 and 1 meter by 3000, the researchers estimate. But if warming waters melt the major ice shelves of western Antarctica, which act like dams to hold immense quantities of ice on shore, the entire western portion of the Antarctic ice sheet could melt away. Previous studies hint that such a collapse could boost sea level as much as 4 meters, swamping coasts worldwide.

The team’s analysis “looks like a solid study, and the most interesting new result is the tie to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet,” says Richard Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Human-caused warming, he says, could influence Antarctica’s land ice many centuries after we stop burning fossil fuels.

 

Skeptical Science has just released this superb and easy to understand PDF document on the evidence for AGW and the poor arguments presented by the so-called “climate skeptics”.

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The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism

Scientific skepticism is healthy. In fact, science by its very nature is skeptical. Genuine skepticism means considering the full body of evidence before coming to a conclusion. However, when you take a close look at arguments expressing climate ‘skepticism’, what you often observe is cherry picking of pieces of evidence while rejecting any data that don’t fit the desired picture. This isn’t skepticism. It is ignoring facts and the science.

The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism looks at both the evidence that human activity is causing global warming and the ways that climate ‘skeptic’ arguments can mislead by presenting only small pieces of the puzzle rather than the full picture.

Continue reading and check the forums at: The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism.

 

November 15, 2010

This week marks the one-year anniversary of what the anti-science crowd successfully labeled ‘Climategate’.  The media will be doing countless retrospectives, most of which will be wasted ink, like the Guardian’s piece — focusing on climate scientists at the expense of climate science, which is precisely the kind of miscoverage that has been going on for the whole year!

I’ll save that my media critiques for Part 2, since I think that Climategate’s biggest impact was probably on the media, continuing their downward trend of focusing on style over substance, of missing the story of the century, if not the millennia.

Continue reading here “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice « Climate Progress.”

 

The amount of warming we are going to subject our children and countless future generations to depends primarily on three factors:

1. The sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks like sea ice and water vapor (how much warming you get if we only double CO2 emissions to 560 ppm and there are no major “slow” feedbacks). We know the fast feedbacks are strong by themselves (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius” and detailed analysis below).

2. The real-world slower (decadal) feedbacks, such as tundra melt (see Science: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting and links at the end).

3. The actual CO2 concentration level we are likely to hit, which is far beyond 550 ppm (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised” — 1000 ppm).

Given that the anti-science, pro-pollution forces seem to be succeeding in their fight to keep us on our current emissions path, it’s no surprise that multiple recent analyses conclude that we face a temperature rise that is far, far beyond dangerous:

* Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path

* M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F

* Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!”

* “The Copenhagen Diagnosis” warns “Without significant mitigation, the report says global mean warming could reach as high as 7 degrees Celsius by 2100.”

And this is all consistent with the best recent analyses of paleoclimate data (see Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm”).

There is a small group of self-proclaimed “lukewarmers” who don’t know the scientific literature well or are just outright anti-science disinformers. They assert, despite all the science to the contrary, that the sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks is very low. They then blindly ignore factors #2 and #3 above in order to claim total warming this century will be maybe 1°C — or 2°C at most — no big deal, according to this dangerously confused and/or misguided group.

Skeptical Science has a good post on this, “A detailed look at climate sensitivity,” that I am reprinting in its entirety below.

Continue reading at A detailed look at climate sensitivity « Climate Progress.

 

Many of Asia’s glaciers are retreating as a result of climate change.

This retreat impacts water supplies to millions of people, increases the likelihood of outburst floods that threaten life and property in nearby areas, and contributes to sea-level rise.

Talk about your well-timed studies — see “One-fifth of Pakistan is under water.”

The U.S. Geological Survey collaborated with 39 international scientists — “the most knowledgeable glaciologists for each geographic region covered” — on “The Glaciers of Asia,” which reports on “the status of glaciers throughout all of Asia, including Russia, China, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.”

Here’s more of their release:

“Of particular interest are the Himalaya, where glacier behavior impacts the quality of life of tens of millions of people,” said USGS scientist Jane Ferrigno. “Glaciers in the Himalaya are a major source of fresh water and supply meltwater to all of the rivers in northern India.”

As glaciers become smaller, water runoff decreases, which is especially important during the dry season when other water sources are limited. Climate change also brings warmer temperatures and earlier water runoff from glaciers, and this combined with spring and summer rains can result in flood conditions. The overall glacier retreat and additional melt can increase the amount of water dammed in the vicinity of a glacier, and the added pressure enhances the likelihood of disastrous outburst flooding.

Significantly, an August 8 news article, “Officials point to Russian drought and Asian deluge as consistent with climate change,” reports:

Pakistani glaciologist, Prof M. Iqbal Khan, told the Associated Press of Pakistan that the flooding was linked to melting glaciers in upper Pakistan.

“I have warned everyone about the floods in Peshawar, Charsadda and Nowshera due to the global warming in my previous interviews but nobody took notice and the result is before us,” he said, adding that “it is the glaciers which are adding fuel to the fire and due to the melting of glaciers the flood situation is aggravated.”

Experts say a warming world increases the likelihood and severity of flooding in some regions since warmer temperatures causes increases the volume of water vapor in the air leading to heavier precipitation events.

More water vapor also feeds severe storms, boosting their strength and severity. Asia has not been alone in experiencing unusually severe flooding. A number of record floods also hit the United States over the last six months.

And so we have a double climate whammy — glacial melt plus more atmospheric water vapor (and possibly a triple climate whammy, if changing air circulation patterns also contributed, as somemeteorologists believe).

The USGS release continues:

While most glaciers in Asia are in recession, some glaciers have been found to advance. Some of the advancing glaciers are surge-type glaciers, which move forward more rapidly than average in a short period of time. The reason for this is being studied by glaciologists, and is likely due to unique and local condition

Glacier studies in each area started at different times depending on accessibility of glaciers and scientific interest. For example, the earliest description of glaciers in China was in 630 A.D., while studies in the Caucasus area of Russia began in the mid 1800s and modern studies in Nepal started in the 1950s.

The time period for retreat also differs among each glacier. In Bhutan, 66 glaciers have decreased 8.1 percent over the last 30 years.  Rapid changes in the Himalaya is shown in India by the 12 percent retreat of Chhota Shigri Glacier during the last 13 years, as well as retreat of the Gangotri Glacier since 1780, with 12 percent shrinkage of the main stem in the last 16 years.

Glaciers in Russia and in the four republics once part of the Former Soviet Union have the largest area of glaciers in Asia, covering 30,478 square miles, which is about the size of South Carolina. The glaciers of China have the second largest area of glaciers in Asia, covering 22,944 square miles, which is about twice the size of Massachusetts. In Afghanistan, the more than 3,000 small mountain glaciers that occur in the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountains provide vital water resources to the region.

“This report was a collaboration between U.S. and foreign authors, the most knowledgeable glaciologists for each geographic region covered,” said USGS scientist Richard S. Williams, Jr. “The USGS published historical and modern data authored by local experts. Some analyses of past climate conditions were conducted by studying ice cores from high-mountain areas of Asia.”

The bottom line is that ice is melting pretty much everywhere you look these days, with dangerous implications for human health and well-being:

• Satellite data stunner: “Our data suggest that EAST Antarctica is losing mass…. Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise.”
• Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized.”
• Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”
• De-Icer: USGS report details “recent dramatic shrinkage” in U.S. glaciers, matching global decline
• USGS reports dramatic retreat of ice shelves in southern Antarctic Peninsula
• North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: “It’s like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely”
• Another one bites the dust, literally: Bolivia’s 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya glacier is gone
• Another climate impact coming faster than predicted: Glacier National Park to go glacier-free a decade early
• World’s Glaciers Shrink for 18th Year

 

Last month tied May 1998 as the hottest on record in the NASA dataset.  More significantly, following fast on the heels of easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-May on record [click on figure to enlarge].Also, the combined land-surface air and sea-surface water temperature anomaly for March-April-May was 0.73°C above the 1951-1980 mean, blowing out the old record of 0.65°C set in 2002.The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.”  It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.Most significantly, the 12-month global temperature grew to 0.66°C — easily the highest on record.Software engineer and former machinist mate in the US Navy Timothy Chase put together a spreadsheet using the data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies click here.  In NASA’s dataset, the 12-month running average temperature record was actually just barely set in March — and then easily set in April.Of course, there never was any global cooling — see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”In fact, the new 12-month record far outpaced the pre-2010 record of 0.62°C that was set in … 2007NASA’s recent draft paper reported:  “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”For the record, it was the second hottest April in both satellite records UAH and RSS, which are more sensitive to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation ENSO than the land records and have biases of their own as Hansen discusses here.

Continue reading via NASA: Easily the hottest spring — and Jan-May — in temperature record « Climate Progress.

 

John Abraham, an engineering professor at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, MN., is certainly not someone who has a vested interest in climatology funding, but someone who knows how to search scientific papers and how to contact their authors. He thought that many of Monckton’s claims were rather outlandish so he took the time to deconstruct Monckton’s presentation slide by slide and verify the sources cited in them. This turned out to be a rather enlightening exercise that utterly discredits Monckton. He created an 84 minute long presentation of his findings showing Monckton’s slides and then the actual papers cited and/or communications he had with the paper’s authors. You can see this presentation here.

First of all, a large number of Monckton’s slides show graphs and data sets without attribution to the source, a dubious practice at best. Second, he makes many errors of math and consistency, often contradicting himself. But more importantly, in the many cases where he does cite the papers or authors he uses as the source of data to backup his claims, he is either misrepresenting, distorting, or outright lying about the papers and their conclusions and the paper’s authors have confirmed these misrepresentations.

It is really a stunning and undeniable point-by-point evisceration of Monckton’s presentation and it shows the whole thing is just a load of bull.

 

(NCAR) calculated how much heat should have been measured on Earth as a result of incoming solar energy and heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Reporting in the journal Science, the researchers said that increases in ocean and air temperatures account for only half of the heat that should have built up on Earth since 2003. The extra heat may be accumulating deep in the oceans, below 3,000 feet, where few measurements are taken. It may also be manifesting itself in the rapid onset of the El Nino weather pattern last year, or the swift melting of glaciers worldwide. In any case, NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, lead author of the paper, said it’s imperative that scientists devise methods to better measure the flow of energy through the Earth’s climate system. “That heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,” said Trenberth. “It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.”

via Yale Environment 360: The Earth’s ‘Missing Heat’.

 

Mar 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

FOR anyone who thinks that climate science must be unimpeachable to be useful, the past few months have been a depressing time. A large stash of e-mails from and to investigators at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia provided more than enough evidence for concern about the way some climate science is done. That the picture they painted, when seen in the round—or as much of the round as the incomplete selection available allows—was not as alarming as the most damning quotes taken out of context is little comfort. They offered plenty of grounds for both shame and blame.

At about the same time, glaciologists pointed out that a statement concerning Himalayan glaciers in the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was wrong. This led to the discovery of other poorly worded or poorly sourced claims made by the IPCC, which seeks to create a scientific consensus for the world’s politicians, and to more general worries about the panel’s partiality, transparency and leadership. Taken together, and buttressed by previous criticisms, these two revelations have raised levels of scepticism about the consensus on climate change to new heights.

Increased antsiness about action on climate change can also be traced to the recession, the unedifying spectacle of last December’s climate-change summit in Copenhagen, the political realities of the American Senate and an abnormally cold winter in much of the northern hemisphere. The new doubts about the science, though, are clearly also a part of that story. Should they be?

In any complex scientific picture of the world there will be gaps, misperceptions and mistakes. Whether your impression is dominated by the whole or the holes will depend on your attitude to the project at hand. You might say that some see a jigsaw where others see a house of cards. Jigsaw types have in mind an overall picture and are open to bits being taken out, moved around or abandoned should they not fit. Those who see houses of cards think that if any piece is removed, the whole lot falls down. When it comes to climate, academic scientists are jigsaw types, dissenters from their view house-of-cards-ists.

The defenders of the consensus tend to stress the general consilience of their efforts—the way that data, theory and modelling back each other up. Doubters see this as a thoroughgoing version of “confirmation bias”, the tendency people have to select the evidence that agrees with their original outlook. But although there is undoubtedly some degree of that (the errors in the IPCC, such as they are, all make the problem look worse, not better) there is still genuine power to the way different arguments and datasets in climate science tend to reinforce each other.

The doubters tend to focus on specific bits of empirical evidence, not on the whole picture. This is worthwhile—facts do need to be well grounded—but it can make the doubts seem more fundamental than they are. People often assume that data are simple, graspable and trustworthy, whereas theory is complex, recondite and slippery, and so give the former priority. In the case of climate change, as in much of science, the reverse is at least as fair a picture. Data are vexatious; theory is quite straightforward. Constructing a set of data that tells you about the temperature of the Earth over time is much harder than putting together the basic theoretical story of how the temperature should be changing, given what else is known about the universe in general.

via The science of climate change: The clouds of unknowing | The Economist.

 

April 14, 2010

According to the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (2007):

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.

At continental, regional, and ocean basin scales, numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed. These include changes in Arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones.

Paleoclimate information supports the interpretation that the warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1300 years. The last time the polar regions were significantly warmer than present for an extended period (about 125,000 years ago), reductions in polar ice volume led to 4 to 6 metres of sea level rise.

Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. This is an advance since the [Third Assessment Report's 2001] conclusion that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”. Discernible human influences now extend to other aspects of climate, including ocean warming, continental-average temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns.

Let us take a look at some of the evidence:

via The complete guide to modern day climate change « Climate Progress.

 

The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It now appears to be over. It’s just hard to stop the march of anthropogenic global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.

via Bye-bye, global cooling myth: Hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record « Climate Progress.

 

A new popular sport in some media these days is “climate scientist bashing”. Instead of dealing soberly with the climate problem they prefer to attack climate scientists, i.e. the bearers of bad news. The German magazine DER SPIEGEL has played this game last week under the suggestive heading “Die Wolkenschieber” – which literally translated can mean both “the cloud movers” and “the cloud traffickers” (available in English here ). The article continues on this level, alleging “sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations”. By doing so DER SPIEGEL digs deeply into the old relic box of “climate skeptics” and freely helps itself on their websites instead of critically researching the issues at hand.

Read the whole article…

 

More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA’s GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.

(From The Globe and Mail)