After a week at sea on the sailing schooner the Noorderlicht (which means "northern light" in Norwegian) the 20 artists and scientists of the Cape Farewell 2010 expedition have reached the northerly apex of our journey.
Our original plan would have seen us travel to Victoria Island, one of the northernmost islands of the archipelago that is Svalbard. This northern progress has been hampered by the presence of sea ice, the result of the breakup of the polar ice cap being blown south by wind. According to our resident oceanographer, Dr. Simon Boxall, this is the second worst cap melt in human history, second only to the melting seen in 2007.
Ice conditions affect our captain's daily navigation decisions (particularly the fear of becoming trapped by it), and provides a palpable physical reminder of the climate change that is affecting the High Arctic with accelerated force--the global rise in temperature is about .8 degrees Celsius; here it is considerably higher. Today, we have almost been trapped by the melting ice cap as it fragments into pieces (some of them the size of a football field), and is swept south by the wind and east by the rotation of the earth.
Scientists are observing these changes with a combination of fascination and dread--fascination because changes this fast have never been observed in the history of human civilization. Dread because of the slow havoc the inexorable rise in carbon dioxide levels produces through the earth's rising fever and water levels. And the grim social injustice of climate change is that the vast preponderance of the carbon produced by the developed world will affect those countries and peoples who have contributed least to the problem, and who are already the most vulnerable to poverty, instability, famine and disease.
Today, Cape Farewell founder and director, artist David Buckland, interviews Dr. Simon Boxall at Kinnvika, a remote Swedish encampment around the 80th parallel, talking about the melting arctic ice cap, the changing ocean currents, and the global implications. This is Simon's fourth Cape Farewell expedition to the front line of climate change, conducting research on the health of the ocean currents and illuminating the issues with the artists as we circumnavigate the remarkable treeless landscape of fiords, glaciers and icebergs that is Svalbard.
Beth Kapusta, Cape Farewell Canada
The Noorderlicht
September 17, 2010
Follow Cape Farewell voyage on the 2010 Arctic Expedition blog at http://www.capefarewell.com/2010expedition/
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sola/6A/SpecialEdition/6A_1/_article
Masahiro Ohashi1) and H. L. Tanaka2)
1) Graduate School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba
2) Center for Computational Sciences, University of Tsukuba
.http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sola/6A/SpecialEdition/6A_1/_article
Author’s Commentary
“According to our result, the rapid warming during 1970-1990 contains a large fraction of unpredictable natural variability due to the AO. The subsequent period of 1990-2010 indicates a clear trend of the AO to be negative. The global warming has been stopped by natural variability superimposed on the gentle anthropogenic global warming. The important point is that the IPCC models have been tuned perfectly to fit the rapid warming during 1970-1990 by means of the ice-albedo feedback (anthropogenic forcing) which is not actually observed. IPCC models are justified with this wrong scientific basis and are applied to project the future global warming for 100 years in the future. Hence, we warn that the IPCC models overestimate the warming trend due to the mislead Arctic Oscillation.”
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
?: Can we adapt when natural heating cycle accelerates with additional C02 in the mix. Here I have a bit of a problem, for current pace of warming/sea level rise is not the fastest in history. Are we early in feedback's, hence these numbers accelerate going forward?
Hence we have some time to adapt.
Wind, Solar and advanced batteries are just too inefficient, 35, 32, and 28% respectively. Then add a totally new grid. Changing all our vehicles/ commercial fleet to LNG gets you a 11% US CO2 reduction. Adding 300 Palo Varde sized nukes gets us to 100% fossil fuel free electrical. Geothermal? not proven. Bio-fuels: not proven.
http://www.pluginhighway.ca/PHEV2007/proceedings/PluginHwy_PHEV2007_PaperReviewed_Valoen.pdf
The reality is, at best, only the most radical fossil-fuel eliminating measures have any chance of limiting the damage globally. Such measures are completely disconnected from the behavior of the present Congress, much less the Congress that will exist after November. There is zero chance of Federal action eliminating fossil-fuel combustion to any meaningful degree.
We have entered a positive feedback loop with the melting of the Siberian permafrost, and the subsequent release of methane directly to the atmosphere. This will capture more heat at the Earth's surface, and further accelerate permafrost melting, and further methane release. What we are committing for future generations is far worse than any of the genocides that occurred in the 20th century.