As this year's sea ice extent bottoms out, it's high time that more people recognize we're in a global crisis -- the arctic crisis. I'm sorry if this sounds "alarmist," but the arctic, fundamental to the stability of our weather patterns, climate and agriculture, is rapidly coming apart. In the end, of course, this will just be a sub-plot to the bigger drama, the climate crisis, but by naming this the arctic crisis, I am suggesting that it needs to be treated independently, right away. It is the heart of the near-term climate issue, and its outcome could greatly alter the outcome of the larger story, which will be the saga of the century no matter what we do.
A crisis above all means this: a compression of time. In a medical crisis, for example, we expect that there will initially be the need to regain stability through some immediate means, and then other courses of treatment will be added subsequently to address the underlying problems. If the initial steps are not taken quickly enough, the whole trajectory can be different, rendering something quite manageable more dire, potentially even fatal. Because the arctic, which has received the brunt of warming, seems poised to pass a profound state shift in the very near future (in fact it's already underway), and because it offers such vital 'services' to the planet, one could say that the urgency of the larger climate crisis is for the time being mostly contained within this arctic crisis.
But before looking at what to do, or even describing what's at stake, there's another order of business to turn to. An accounting is now due. Today I want to look back at the most authoritative recent opinions suggesting that this isn't a crisis, and see how they've been holding up. In our pre-election season of fact-checking, let's call this the 'arctic crisis debate' fact-checking 101. But since no one else has really been referring to an arctic crisis, what we'll be looking at are some prominent statements from 2012 concerning the two great interrelated features of arctic stability: the state of its cryosphere, and the state of its carbon stocks. In particular, the sea ice and methane.
When I last wrote, it was after a flurry of methane articles, including the front page New York Times article last December on the danger of increasing arctic methane emissions, followed by David Archer's curious Much Ado about Methane piece in RealClimate, the leading climate science blog. That article put strangeness into high gear by essentially discounting the value of near-term climate altogether. But Much Ado about Methane was valuable, too, in that Archer unwittingly demonstrated, with all his authority, just how far from 'Nothing' reasonably likely arctic methane releases could be. He provided a graph in his follow-up showing the radiative impact of a 10Gt release, only about 20% of what leading researchers of the Eastern Siberian Shelf (ESAS) think could potentially come from that region alone in the relatively near future. [Very little methane hydrate need be involved, incidentally: imagine some seismic event there, where a little shallow hydrate, a mere .05% of the hydrate there, gets released, destabilizing just .5% of the permafrost cap along with it, which gets metabolized to methane, and all this creates increased gas migration pathways for just 1% of the free gas from below -- that's 10Gt.] Radiative forcing, the measure scientists use to describe global warming, would jump globally to about 300% of its current level of increase since industrialization, and this would begin to express itself in the climate system almost right away. Much ado, indeed: that methane wouldn't be nothing.
In my last piece, I said I would quickly follow up with another one discussing what should be done to avoid such dangers, but have since remained silent. That's for a variety of reasons, one of them being a growing involvement with a group based in the UK called the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG), focused on just this question. And almost as soon as this began, RealClimate published a piece on arctic sea ice predictions, in which AMEG -- which has projected that summer sea ice could approach an ice-free minimum just a few years from now -- seemed a primary target.
Called Arctic Sea Ice Volume: PIOMAS, Prediction and the Perils of Extrapolation, it was written by a guest, Axel Schweiger (with Ron Lindsay and Cecilia Bitz), part of the team that runs the PIOMAS sea ice model at the Polar Science Center. The 'perils' it discussed were those of AMEG's use (or misuse) of their PIOMAS model, and some of us were actually flattered that our ragtag army of citizen scientists, along with a few major climate figures willing to brave academic censure for taking positions outside the status quo, like renowned sea ice expert Peter Wadhams, were receiving cannonballs lobbed from the heart of the climate establishment.
Now, it's almost a half year later, the sea ice minimum is upon us, and the ice has been doing just what AMEG predicted. As Neven Acropolis, who runs the Sea Ice Blog, wrote last week, he's particularly at a loss for words because the 2007 record has been shattered without this summer's arctic temperatures being particularly conducive to such large ice loss, which perhaps suggests something about the extraordinary underlying nature of what is taking place.
Meanwhile, AMEG had already presented its case, both in writing and orally, before a panel of the UK Parliament, on both sea ice and methane release, back at the beginning of the year. AMEG's testimony was rebutted by Julia Slingo, Chief Scientist for the UK Met Office. Now, how has this Met Office testimony held up since?
Unlike RealClimate, the Met Office chief scientist dismissed PIOMAS modeling altogether, saying that she expected better data, fitting their Hadley Center climate models, to come in soon. That data hasn't come. Far from it. Instead, just last month, the media was filled with news pieces about how the European Space Agency's new CyoSat-2, a satellite designed to read ice volume, showed far greater volume losses than expected -- much in line with PIOMAS modeling, and supportive of AMEG's position. Near the opening of her testimony, Prof. Slingo said that the 2007 melting event was really an "advecting" of ice, coming from extreme weather over the arctic, and not really a melting event per se. Of course, we have just noted how that 2007 record has now been widely surpassed, without such weather (nor with losses coming primarily from advection).
And when it came to methane, and the danger of releases from the arctic seabed, The UK Met Office's chief scientist said, "I think there is a lack of clarity in thinking about how that heating at the upper level of the ocean can get down, and how rapidly it can get down into the layers of the ocean."
The Great Arctic Cyclone of 2012 has perhaps provided her with a little more clarity. Beyond that, the Chief Scientist's statement was embarrassing: after all, even those most convinced that there is little danger of large immediate methane releases do not doubt the well established and drastic warming of the sea bottom precisely in the most methane-rich areas (see this paper), and Lena river discharge also greatly impacts the seabed in some of this same region, providing yet another mechanism for seabed warming. Slingo said,
"At the moment, our estimates are that the increases in sea floor temperatures that have been observed have at the most been about one-tenth of a degree, except in one or two regions, like the West Spitsbergen Current."Clearly, she doesn't seem to have studied the ESAS, where anomolies of 5ºC at the seabed have been recorded, where almost all of it has warmed some 20 times more than she says (and is still currently warming, ten times more than she suggests per decade), where significant areas of permafrost cap are thawing or already thawed, and where methane is starting to be released (see my own last post on all these points). Unlike the phony "Climategate" scandal, this is a true embarrassment for climate science. And if such "expert" testimony helps the arctic climate to pass through some invisible gate without our society lifting a finger to stop it, it will also turn out to have been one of the greatest tragedies of modern times.
So, how now, for the ice and methane? Schweiger's Perils of Extrapolation piece clearly stated how PIOMAS shows September sea ice volumes having dropped by a breathtaking 75% over just the last few decades (1979-2011). It might even seem simple to deduce that ice-free minima would be arriving quite soon, given this. But it is, I would agree, a vastly complex situation. Fully coupled models - those that do not, like PIOMAS, leave out the atmosphere, the weather, etc., but that try to create a realistic world that can be run into the future -- almost all suggest an eventual dampening effect on the underlying feedbacks leading to ice loss once it is mostly gone, thus leading to a long 'tail' of one or more decades in which a small amount of thinner summer ice remains, rather than an imminent disappearance, as both AMEG's Peter Wadhams and Wieslaw Maslowski, whose work Gore cited in his 2007 Nobel speech, have suggested.
That dampening, however, isn't happening. One almost feels sorry for Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate these days. After their latest sea ice update, he repeated in its comment thread how there is no reason to extrapolate PIOMAS into the future using an exponential curve (which shows a collapse just a few years from now). RealClimate wants to deal with the real underlying physical mechanisms involved, not just take some simple line that best fits the ice's past behavior and then extrapolate that line into the future. But, darn! The newest PIOMAS data have just been released last week, and, again, that exponential curve is being eerily followed by the real world's sea ice! In fact, Wieslaw Maslowski has also developed a new model recently, a fully coupled model free from 'perilous extrapolations,' which shows much the same thing as his prior research -- that a summer sea ice collapse is likely in the coming years, not decades.
As you can see, the reasons for thinking that there isn't an arctic crisis are about as firm as cotton candy. Next you'll need to learn the more solid reasons for suspecting that there is one. Then, after that, the big questions -- What real climate perils could this entail? What should we be doing about it right now? -- are what one needs to turn to next.
I was sitting there watching the ice melt and I noticed all the frogs started jumping out. It was the darnedest thing. Like they were late for the jumping contest over in Calaveras County or something.
I had no idea what was going on.
I started feeling woozy. My head was spinning.
I'll have to tell you how I got out of the pickle some other time. You won't believe it.
Hijole!
There is no limit to how bad this can get if we do nothing. the alarmists are necessary to give us a grip on how fast we must act.
For years scientists have been describing how the loss of the summer sea ice is a powerful feedback adding more warming to global warming.
Scientists call the Arctic summer sea ice the air conditioner of the Northern hemisphere. Global and Northern hemisphere drought are on an established trend of steady increase. The loss of the summer air conditioner is projected to increase N hemisphere drought further and climate variability.
So far as I can tell only AMEG is the only source warning of these inevitable effects of the sea ice meltdown, and only AMEG is calling for emergency intervention.
All of the big influential climate change organizations are apparently dumbfounded paralysed like a deer stunned by headlights, because they had assumed this could not possibly happen till the end of the century. We can only hope they will come to their senses and also call for emergency action.
Thanks for the excellent article.
I felt the arguments for urgent action at least to develop options always made sense if one considered the precautionary principle, but it seems to me the cause for genuine alarm is increasingly supported by events - which are starting to happen thick and fast. It necessarily takes time to research and publish scientific papers and increasingly recent papers agree with the AMEG position - despite not having had time to take into account the events of this year.
How can it be "alarmist" to try to draw attention to an immediate threat? If I run around outside a burning building shouting fire - is that alarmist? I suppose it is - but with good reason!
The bottom line is that once significant open water occurred, it appears that Nature ‘pulled out all the stops’ to accelerate the ice decline as rapidly as possible. If this ‘pulling out all the stops’ is the precedent for how Nature implements climate change, it means that the past will be a poor and very conservative indicator of the future. My vote is for ice disappearance much sooner than later, and a rapid acceleration of the other climate change feedback mechanisms as well.
Thanks for the many interesting comments. In terms of the last part, the localized forcing of chronic arctic methane sources is thus far small compared to the ice loss itself. That could change radically, of course. And certainly GHG forcing is the root of the problem, but it's not yet methane from the arctic driving the changes, whereas what you say about H2O, on the other hand, is both true and, I think, important and somewhat under-appreciated.
As for Maslowski, he said in 2007 that it could be 7 years before an ice-free minimum (+/- 3 yrs). That'd be in just 2 years from now - that should be pessimistic enough for you! He has more recently pushed his predicted "most likely" arrival date back several years, though.
I agree with your use of an addiction metaphor: Gore also used that at the core of Earth in the Balance two decades ago now. But whether the addiction proves "intractable" or not is, I hope, still an open question.
I wouldn't say that I really agree that the ice is, functionally, "already gone". This would be at least partly true, if it were certain that the fate of the ice was sealed by accumulated energy content in the arctic ocean alone. That hasn't been shown, though. Anyhow, thin ice is still different from no ice, and so is "rotten ice," too. And some models suggest that if atmospheric conditions returned to their previous state, the ice could reform.
"the localized forcing of chronic arctic methane sources is thus far small compared to the ice loss itself."
Correct, but the issue is not today. The issue is what we can expect for methane release in the next few years, and how it will contribute to climate change. A Russian expedition to the Arctic about three years ago observed methane plumes released on the order of tens of meters. A similar expedition two years later observed plumes two to three orders of magnitude larger. If this trend is real, the implications for the future are ominous.
"And some models suggest that if atmospheric conditions returned to their previous state, the ice could reform."
Undoubtedly. Given the numbers I presented on this site, which showed we can expect a temperature increase (in two or three decades) of at least 3 C from CO2 already placed in the atmosphere, how in the world could atmospheric conditions return to their previous state?
I think loss of the ice would effectively be irreversible as while we could (with very great difficulty, and only in theory) attempt global albedo modification sufficient to theoretically balance the loss, I don't see how we could achieve regional albedo modification sufficient to restore the ice (and nor would we replace the critical functions the ice provides in the current earth system, which require actual sea ice).
This also touches on one of the key difficulties of geoengineering - namely that many approaches effectively would use blunt (global) instruments to try to target specific regions.
The energy companies are like the drug ‘pushers’; they are ready, willing, and able to exploit our addiction to the fullest. The fossil energy workers are dependent on maximal fossil energy production to support a comfortable lifestyle, and they have no desire to alter the status quo.
The politicians recognize 1) the electorate has no interest in giving up their addiction, 2) many of their largest donors represent the fossil fuel producers, and 3) their fossil fuel workers like the status quo. Therefore, the politicians have no incentives to change the status quo, and we are seeing this with Republicans and Democrats alike.
So, you can go after the energy companies and politicians all you want, but that is like the old parable of looking for the keys under the lamp-post (that’s where the light is) rather than looking for the keys where they were dropped. That’s also why I believe the problem is intractable. People who are heavy drug users or heavy smokers or who have other heavy addictions many times will die rather than surrendering their addictions. That’s what we have today with fossil energy.
Expecting individuals and companies to all respond in the right way without legislative guidance seems a bit like expecting to herd cats to me. I can agree it will be hard as people don't universally understand the situation, and we may well have squandered the opportunity for a long gentle gradual transition away from dependency on fossil fuels - but our lives and those of our descendants are on the block. This is a very serious matter indeed (and as a younger person I quite frankly feel betrayed by my ancestors and my society).
Both space exploration and the nuclear arms race are expensive examples I would hold up and say "look at what governments can do when they want".
Given that their large donors are satisfied with the status quo, at best the politicians will take action only if a large majority of the electorate demands it. Presently, most of the electorate is comfortable with the status quo, and has no interest in doing the serious energy belt-tightening that is required to minimize the extent of climate change. The electorate today is analogous to a chain smoker who has stage 4 lung cancer, and refuses to stop smoking.
The government reps and government-supported researchers are underestimating the seriousness of the problem.
The first step in solving a problem is identifying the problem. The second step is developing the motivation and will to solve the problem. The third step is identifying the cause of the problem. The fourth step is removing the cause of the problem, and the fifth step is solving the problem.
Unfortunately, I don’t see any of the posters on this blog addressing the total problem in full. It has two components. We all recognize the technical component, but in reality it is subservient to the sociopolitical component. The fundamental problem is that we the energy consumers have become addicted to a lifestyle that only the intensive use of fossil energy can fulfill (at least at present). We want our huge SUVs (even with one occupant usually), we want our huge McMansions, we want our long commutes to a pastoral home in the country, we want to travel to as many destinations as we can afford, we want our highly processed toys, etc. We are so addicted to this intensive use of energy that we are willing to trade the survival of our progeny to satisfy our addiction.
The only thing constnat in the Universe is change.
No one is claiming that the Arctic will be ice-free year round. The fact that there is less ice now than in the past sateliite record does not imply that it will always be this way or that this trend will continue unbroken. Trends in teperature and sea ice change all the time. Why consider this change as linear constant?
Yes, changing Arctic ice conditions affect North American weather. Twas ever thus.
In the summer the arctic is indeed coming apart.
In the winter, it will likely be business as usual climactically.
The only thing constant in your Universe seems to be gullibility and credulity.
"Coming apart" is meaningless alarmist hyperbole. Nothing is coming apart. Conditions are changing, as they have always changed.
I agree with that gullibility and credulity are responsible for the current global warming scare tactics.
By the way, I'm new at this. Could somebody please throw me the instruction manual?
English version!
Nothing.
No worry. Peak oil will take care of CO2 emissions, even though they are not responsible for Arctic ice melt. What then can be done?
What can I do? Well, I try to minimise my own impact on the environment as much as reasonably possible reason and try to educate people as to the current state of the science. I have a website at www.helpsurviveclimatechange.com to this end and am busy preparing a small scale contingency plan for the event of what looks like probable failure by our species to avoid abrupt climate change.
You could do some or all of the same, or different things, if you cared to.
I'm not sure why you think carbon dioxide emissions aren't responsible for Arctic ice melt - I take it you're aware the link between carbon dioxide and warming has been identified for over 100 years (by a gentleman called Svante Arrhenius, whose formula has stood the test of time well enough to still be used today)?
That is a very different question, and I will deal with this in subsequent posts. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to mitigate the problem. That said, if we do precisely the right things, in the right order, and start right away, there is reasonable likelihood of success in blunting the problem very significantly. If you look at CCG'sWebmaster's comment below, I agree, but grappling with the loaded word "geoengineering" will be the subject of a whole post on its own that I'll make soon. In addition, the way that non-CO2 and CO2 reductions are tied together (or separated) in any climate program is highly significant to the rate at which their effects will be felt, especially in the arctic. If you see my post from last year, Methane and the Fierce Urgency of Now, I described some of that then, and I will talk more about this in future posts, too.
Sea-ice free arctic summers, and consequent increased melting from the Greenland ice sheet, are going to happen. There will be consequences for Northern hemisphere summer weather, and potentially for ocean circulation on decade timescales. That's life.
Now that I've passed through the proper altitude for pulling the cord, should I just wait until I reach the ground?
Nobody else around here seems to be able to answer the question.
Thank you in advance for your assistance.
The effects of losing the ice shouldn't be understated. Difference in total forcing from the lost albedo for part of the year is substantial. Melting ice holds temperature around zero, absorbing energy that would otherwise cause rapid temperature rise. The energy required to melt 1kg of ice raises the temperature of the same kg by almost 80C (though of course once the ice has melted the energy spreads into more mass). Oceanic and atmospheric circulation are both driven by the presence of large amounts of sea ice - and drive the weather patterns we rely upon for agriculture.
If I thought that we'd succeed I wouldn't have a contingency plan for a world that collapses into famine and violence - but that's not the future I want.
Some changes in the system can occur in months: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091130112421.htm
For many instances of abrupt climate change we don't have a lower bound for duration and the timescale is more a statement of measuring resolution.