I believe we have been a little bit overly stampeded into the idea that there is a terribly alarming melting taking place
Posted on 05/19/2002 2:12:28 PM PDT by ancient_geezer
New data suggest the North Pole got a little thicker in the 90s
By BBC News Online's Jonathan Amos
If ever you needed convincing that climate science was complex stuff, just look at the Arctic. We are told the sea ice in the northern polar region is disappearing fast; some computer models even suggest there could be completely open water there during the summers at the end of this century.
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I believe we have been a little bit overly stampeded into the idea that there is a terribly alarming melting taking place |
| Dr Greg Holloway |
If this really is the case, the implications could be immense - and not just for the polar bears which rely on the ice to go hunting for seals. The cryosphere plays a crucial role it helping to regulate the climate on planet Earth. An ice-free Arctic would likely accelerate any global warming process that was taking place.
But a new, and as yet unpublished, piece of research is challenging the idea that a big melt is underway. Dr Greg Holloway, of the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, Canada, has got tongues wagging with his suggestion that the missing ice is still there, piled up in locations where researchers have not been looking for it.
The evidence for major thinning is supported by submarine data. Upward-looking sonar readings, studied by both US and British scientists, have produced broadly similar results: about a 40% reduction in draught between the 1960s and 1990s - by draught, researchers mean the difference between the surface of the ocean and the bottom of the ice pack.
But the submarine data are not exactly comprehensive: the cruises were not continuous and the data sets only cover certain areas in the Arctic. And this is partly what got Dr Holloway into thinking the ice may simply have been "mislaid".
Satellite methods
He wondered if multi-decadal wind patterns known to operate in the Arctic could have shifted the ice into areas not surveyed by the submarines, giving the illusion that the ice was losing volume over a period of time. And when he matched the timing of the submarine visits with what he knew about wind cycles, his suspicions were confirmed.
"It's a circumstance where the ice tends to leave the central Arctic and then mostly pile up against the Canadian side, before moving back into the central Arctic again," he told BBC News Online. "Because of territorial waters and where US submarines weren't allowed to go in the 1990s - the submarines couldn't enter Canadian waters and that's where the ice was."
Dr Holloway believes the fact that the British research tallied with the American studies was purely coincidental - a "fluke".
"Trying to get a picture of the volume of Arctic ice is pretty sketchy," he said. "It's a question of what other information we can bring to bear so that we get a fuller picture. The great hope for the future is that satellite methods may be able to observe the thickness of the ice as well as the extent."
But Dr Peter Wadhams, of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, UK, and one of the world's leading experts on Arctic ice, is not yet prepared to accept the Canadian's analysis.
Stability returns
"It needs testing obviously, but I think on the whole the evidence is against it," he told BBC News Online. "There are some submarine data sets from these regions that are not yet published and they show no thickening, and data from radar altimetry suggest thinning over the entire Arctic, not just over the regions where the submarine data exist."
Dr Wadhams said he also thought some of the theoretical basis underpinning Holloway's ideas was not supported by what science had learnt about ice dynamics.
"Modellers suspect it is not as simple as Dr Holloway suggests - the ice will not simply pile up in some other place. There will be a change in the distribution of ice thickness around the Arctic but it won't involve any massive build-ups to compensate for overall thinning."
If the submarines have got it right then at least some stability appears to have returned to the Arctic. The latest and most comprehensive analysis yet of the sonar data collected in the 1990s shows little if any thinning - at least towards the end of that decade. Indeed, at the North Pole, there are indications in the data that the ice even got a little thicker.
For Dr Holloway, there is a recognition that he needs to put his research through peer review and get it published. "There are certainly regional changes taking place," he said. "And if you take the western Hudson Bay, it may well be that the Polar bears are being stressed there because of declining ice coverage. But I believe we have been a little bit overly stampeded into the idea that there is a terribly alarming melting taking place."
LOL. Might be a while for any Canadian subs too. I listen to RCI most nights, before Savage, and the
Canadians bought a few used subs from the UK. Not quiet the low nautical mileage that they thought.
Not that they are accusing the Brits of turning back any odometers, but the refits are taking a lot longer
and costing more than they expected.
If any journalists were actually interested in digging up some real research data
They don't even have to work that hard, a quick search on the net provides a stong evidentiary record of what arctic temperatures are actually doing.
Measurements at land sites around the arctic over the last 50 years do not even begin to support the global warming claims that have been tossed around:
What Arctic Station Records Say for graphical representations of Arctic surface temperatures throughout the arctic over the last 50-100 yrs, show no such such trends.
The Bottom Line:
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Globally Averaged Atmospheric Temperatures
This chart shows the monthly temperature changes for the lower troposphere - Earth's atmosphere from the surface to 8 km, or 5 miles up. The temperature in this region is more strongly influenced by oceanic activity, particularly the "El Niño" and "La Niña" phenomena, which originate as changes in oceanic and atmospheric circulations in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The overall trend in the tropospheric data is near zero, being +0.04 C/decade through Feb 2002. Click on the chart to get monthly numerical data through April 2002. |
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Ice Ages & Astronomical Causes
Figure 1-1 Global warming
Figure 1-2 Climate of the last 2400 years Figure 1-3 Climate of the last 12,000 years
Figure 1-4 Climate of the last 100,000 years
Figure 1-5 Climate for the last 420 kyr, from Vostok ice |
Icelandic Weather System Helps Decipher Arctic Ice Puzzle
Greenbelt - Oct 1, 2001
"Largely natural "ups and downs" in a weather system centered near Iceland have contributed to regional variations and an overall decrease in Arctic sea ice cover over the last twenty years, according to new NASA research."
 These maps of the Northern Hemisphere show the nine regions that were studied by Claire Parkinson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for trend changes in the sea ice cover before and after 1990, when the North Atlantic Oscillation reached a peak in its annual index. The white color indicates an expansion in the ice cover in a particular region, while the light blue color depicts a reduction in total ice cover. The first map depicts the period from 1979 to 1990 when the North Atlantic Oscillation annual index was generally increasing. This meant an increasing amount of cold air spilling west and south around the semi-permanent Icelandic Low, leading to increased extent of ice (in white) in Baffin Bay/Labrador Sea, Hudson Bay, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence over those regions. Over the same period, to the east of the Low's center, more and more warm air was swept up from the south, reducing ice over the Kara and Barents Seas, the Arctic Ocean, and, to a lesser extent, the Greenland Sea, as designated by the light blue color over those regions. Conversely, in the second map showing the period from 1990 to 1999, ice cover decreased (depicted in light blue) in Baffin Bay/Labrador Sea, Hudson Bay, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but increased (in white) in the Kara and Barents Seas, the Arctic Ocean, and the Greenland Sea. "This regional pattern of reversals in the ice extent trends is highly suggestive of an Icelandic Low impact, or, more broadly, of an impact from the North Atlantic Oscillation," Parkinson said. "Still, the satellite data reveal an overall decrease in Arctic sea ice extent since 1978." |
Looking at the 450,000 year climate graph, some things become apparent. The Earth is going to be in another long deep ice age soon. The next ice age will begin in the next 5,000 to 10,000 years. The other thing is that the current temperatures aren't nearly as high as past peeks.
Can you imagine the increase snowfall in Northern Canada and Greenland that an ice-free Arctic Ocean would cause?
That coupled with the Gulf Stream shutting down from the influx of fresh water from the melting ice would cause the formation of Continental Glaciers within a human lifetime.
As far as a plunge into another glacial period, this inter-glacial has lasted more than 11,000 years from what I understand, the average is around 10Kyrs. Go figure.
Muller gives us some indicators to watch for:
http://muller.lbl.gov/papers/nature.html
Data on noctilucent clouds (mesospheric clouds strongly associated with the effects of high meteors and high altitude dust) supports the hypothesis that accretion increase significantly when the Earth passes through the invariable plane. As shown in Figure 6, a strong peak in the number of observed noctilucent clouds occurs on about July 9 in the northern hemisphere (ref 41, 42) within about a day of the date when the Earth passes through the invariable plane (indicated with an arrow). In the southern hemisphere the peak is approximately on January 9, also consistent with the invariable plane passage, but the data are sparse. The coincidence of the peaks of the clouds with the passage through the invariable plane had not previously been noticed, and it supports the contention that there is a peak in accretion at these times. On about the same date there is a similarly narrow peak is observed in the number of polar mesospheric clouds (ref43) and there is a broad peak in total meteoric flux (ref 44). It is therefore possible that it is the trail of meteors in the upper atmosphere, rather than dust, that is responsible for the climate effects.
Fig 6. Frequency of noctilucent clouds vs. day of year, in (A) the northern hemisphere, and in (B) the sourthern hemisphere (ref 41, 42). The arrows indicate the dates when the earth passes through the invariable plane. The coincidence of these dates with the maxima in the noctilucent clouds suggests the presence of a thin ring around the sun. Peaks on the same dates are seen in Polar mesospheric clouds (ref 44) and in radar counts of meteors.
Watch for increased noctilucent cloud cover into April & May, along with higher radar meteor counts. High dust incursions seem to be correlated with sporadic steps into glacial cold periods, which would tend to support Muller's hypothesis. Think periods of sporatic period of cometary material crashing into the earths upper atmosphere, acting simularly to volcanic dust spewed into the stratosphere causing sharp maximum cooling events.
The record above from the Greenland ice sheet shows 2 distinct climate patterns over the last 100,000 years. The first pattern is the general decrease in d18O and the increase in dust content in the middle portion of the record. This middle portion represent the last glacial sitting between two interglacials.
Note The lack of dust and decrease in nonlinear stepwise temperature excursions as the record approaches the current era(low coredepth).
It's essentially the disc of the solar system—a plane through the Sun's center (more or less), aligned (more or less) to the planets' orbits. Dust, rocks and other crud tend to congregate at this plane. Since Earth's orbit is tilted slightly (less than 2 degrees) with respect to this plane, the Earth passes through the plane twice a year, once going "up" and once "down," and we get more dust and meteors during those periods.
What is the invariable plane?
The plane that represents the angular momentum of the solar system, approximately the orbital plane of Jupiter. Earth's orbital plane is offset just a little under 2 degrees from the the invariable plane and precesses about the invariable plane axis in such a was as to bring earths orbit into coincidence with it every 100kyrs.
Most of the solarsystem's cometary mass is found in that plane hence the increase in noctilucent clouds & metoric flux when ever the earth passes through that plane every July.
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