Arctic Ice May Melt By 2040

Dekortage writes in with a new study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research suggesting that the North Pole may be clear of ice in summer as soon as 2040, decades earlier than previously thought. From the article: "'As the ice retreats, the ocean transports more heat to the Arctic and the open water absorbs more sunlight, further accelerating the rate of warming and leading to the loss of more ice,' Holland said in the statement. 'This is a positive feedback loop with dramatic implications for the entire Arctic.'"

Like the Tundra Methane Story before this

[Marxist Hacker 42]

This is a tipping point. It doesn't matter if global warming is manmade or a natural cycle. Cutting your carbon emmissions will not stop this feedback loop. Once reached, this feedback loop will continue until all the ice is melted during the summer, and there is NOTHING we can do about it with current technology.

Re:Sea Level?

[AusIV]

No. Arctic ice is floating. When it freezes it expands, when it melts it contracts. These have no effect on sea level. Antarctic ice is what could raise sea level, because it's land based.

Before we die

[Cygnus78]

If this turns out to be true then those guys with comments like "I will be dead anyway before the environment changes significantly" do really have something to worry about.

Also it's estimated that two-thirds of the coral reefs will be gone in 30 years which is about the same timescale as the melting of the ice in the article.

Re:Skeptical.

[HappySqurriel]

Even if cows are responsible for the production of more greenhouse gases than "industrialization" and automobiles (doubtful, but I'll argue with it anyway), the fact remains that animal agriculture *is* a man-made industry - thousands of years ago, people did not have mass-production farms that we have today. Regardless whether it's industrialization, cars, or mass-production agribusiness that's causing the problem, the real source is the same: human activity.

Well ... Methane is about 23.5 times as potent of a Greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide is and the ammount of Methane produced through digestion and from the rotting of their "leavings" is significant when you consider that the average person in North America eats about 15KG of Beef (of which is usually slaughtered at 2 years old, meaning there is about 30KG of Beef per person alive at any given time); when you include dairy products into the equation there (in theory) could be enough methane produced by cows to have a greater impact than Transportation.

Wouldn't it be funny if..

[TigerPlish]

...while all that ice melts, it lowers the salinity of the oceans, thus displacing warm currents from where they are to somewhere else, thusly altering the global train of weather systems, thusly contributing to a "little ice age", reinforced by CO2 in the stratosphere?

Sounds paradoxical, but that could be one outcome of losing the polar ice cap... an ice age.

http://www.discover.com/issues/sep-02/cover/ [discover.com]

Personally, I think we'll see just that -- a little ice age lasting a century or two. The scary part is, according to some, we could see this in our own lifetimes.

Oh well. I used to live in North Dakota. Bring it on.

Re:Skeptical.

[terrymr]

Both sources were quoting a UN study ... is the entire "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" biased against science too ?

Re:Oh please

[LargeWu]

From parent post: The critical point for Greenland is whether the increased rate of glacier motion more than compensates for the greater accumulation on the surface. While the broad picture of what is happening is consistent between these papers, the bottom-line value for Greenland's mass balance is different in all three cases. Looking just at the dynamical changes observed by Rignot & Kanagaratnam, there is an increased discharge of about 0.28 mm/year SLE from 1996 to 2005, well outside the range of error bars. This is substantially more than the opposing changes in accumulation estimated by Johannessen et al and Zwally et al, and is unlikely to have been included in their assessments. Thus, the probability is that Greenland has been losing ice in the last decade. We should be careful to point out though that this is only for one decade, and doesn't prove anything about the longer term. As many of the studies make clear, there is a significant degree of interannual variability (related to the North Atlantic Oscillation, or the response to the cooling associated with Mt. Pinatubo) such that discerning longer term trends is hard.

Emphasis added by me.

I don't know if anybody caught this, but in the article it said the temperature in the Candaian Arctic this past October were 9.3 degrees C warmer than the October average between 1951-1980. Interesting. Why use those years? Why not 1981-2005? Or 1921-1950? It should be noted that the earth was actually COOLING from 1940-1970. I have a suspicion the author of the study is picking a baseline favorable to his conclusions.

Re:Skeptical - sorry, thats not allowed.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you haven't noticed dissent is not allowed unless you cannot be refuted. Since this is climate science you can easily be refuted.

similar to stories earlier about the suppresion of science and ideas that refute global warming is what happens to discussions here.

Take a look at Wikipedia. You can find scads of global warming information, all of it leans the same way. Glaciers melting, only the melting ones get expanded story and facts shown. The glaciers that are expanding are totally glossed over. When trying to keep to their agenda anything that would show that their doom and gloom scenario has holes is conviently left out. Then the drive is simply to pile on one more doom and gloom scenario after another effectively smothering the public under so much information that they just accept it. Repeat it enough and it bores the public into accepting it.

Yes global warming is real but not everything that happens rightfully is caused by it nor is it the result of man made activities. Look at the speed of which glaciers suddenly retreated in some areas. A few were stable until the late 80s when suddenly they went into retreat, and not slow retreats. Yet where is the discussion that this is not all the work of man?

We love to delude ourselves that we know all that we need to know on a subject. Everyone likes to look like an expert.

We dismissed ideas in the 80s that were considered near fact. Why cannot we question what is given to us a facts now without being attacked for doing so?

Re:No change in sea level.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

If what you said was true large portions of the earth should be underwater every summer.

When it is summer in the North, it is winter in the South- so it stays relatively in balance up until now.

The difference is, the South has a rather big landlocked continent- as it's ice melts, it freshens the ocean, but doesn't change the heat absorption. The North is an ocean under the ice- when it melts, it absorbs more heat, thus creating TFA's feedback loop. So what YOU say might be true within the next 34 years or so.

Iceless Arctic

[Hoskald]

Let's see, the Arctic starts to melt freshwater into the North Atlantic adding to the fresh water close to the Greenland Icesheets which are already pouring into the North Atlantic. The fresh water, which is less dense than salt water fails to sink, breaking the conveyor currents, which results in less warm water into the North. Less warm water mean less warm air moving north resulting in colder weather in the North which will, in time, freeze leading to new ice on the polar cap.

Not that we will enjoy it too much....

Re:Sea Level?

[smellsofbikes]

I haven't done the calculations, but I've read from a reasonably reputable source, New Scientist, that the Antarctic contains enough water to raise the world's oceans 75 meters. I suspect at some temperature, thermal expansion of the ocean would be greater than 75 meters, but I'm guessing, from other stuff I've read, that it'd take more heat to do that, than to melt the Antarctic. In other words, for a small worldwide increase in temp, I think the melting Antarctic would be the dominant effect.
Of course, it's trickier than that, because the ice of the Antarctic itself would expand as it heated. (Well, first it shrinks a little, to 4C, but after THAT...)

However, nobody seems to anticipate the Antarctic melting, or at least not the much larger Eastern portion.

Re:If it also means Greenland... THEN YES!

[ivan256]

That doesn't seem obvious.

Heat can be transfered away much more quickly by the flow of water around the floating ice than it can by just the air around the landlocked ice. I would think that the floating ice would melt much sooner.

Re:Just the sun going through a hot cycle.

[anubi]

Interesting.

I have no doubt we are going to face warmer and warmer weather. Like you point out, Siberia may well become the world's new bread basket.

Sometimes I feel as if I am standing on a highway, and off in the distance, there is this big truck heading right for me. In about three minutes, its gonna be right on me! What do I do????

Well, realizing what it is, and what rules it will follow, I am gonna get my ass off the highway, and watch it pass.

As we deplete our oil resources ( which is a far greater concern to me right now ) we may find the increased insolation a blessing - if we can figure out how to use it.

And there's the key as far as I am concerned.

In all of our history, we - as a people, have thrived by using our intelligence to direct natural laws to produce a desired outcome. This is one helluva time to stop doing that.

A few thoughts...

[deuterium]

The melting ``very definitely is caused in the climate model by increased greenhouse gas levels.''

So it's established that the current rate of greenhouse gas buildup will wreak havok in the computer model.

One of the things that confuses me about tidy feedback loops is that there is no mechanism for their reversal. If the factors that cause increased heat amplify themselves, why hasn't the planet died out from such a runaway loop? Because there are important variables and inputs outside the simplified scope of consideration.

I freely admit I have no idea how well validated their model is. It may be the shit, but it's tackling a formidible set of dynamics. There's nothing wrong with this (that's just science), but it is a bit less than quiet objectivity telling the mass media that X is going to happen. Epidemiologists seem more valid to argue that the H5N1 virus will wipe out a third of the globe (which some have done). Both are suggested by the evidence, but neither are as well documented outcomes as smoking or eating salmonella.

The media loves to seize on scare stories, however, because the public respond to it, so anyone who wants to have their study reported has to punch it up. As other posters have mentioned, each subsequent "boo!" headline desensitizes them to the message.

Part of the message, as I understand it, is that things are already bad, and getting worse. This state of affairs should lead people to activism without reminder. If people were suffering, they would react. Absent current intensity of the problem, one is left convincing people that things will get worse, and relatively soon, because most people aren't motivated by hazy, future problems. Much like it took rising gas prices for people to reconsider their fuel usage, it will take some tangible pain before people do anything about CO2 emissions.

I'll be curious to see what the world is really like in 30 years. I imagine that there will be some warming, with minimal, local effects on overall populations. People will adapt. There will continue to be wars and starvation in various places, and fingers will point in varied directions about it.

Now, if the avian flu people are right, egh...

Re:Question about personalities in this discussion

[AaronLawrence]

Because admitting we need to be careful is the first step to admitting there is a real problem, and if there's a real problem we all have to face some very uncomfortable changes. Much easier just to ignore it and carry on.

Re:No change in sea level.

[Serious Callers Only]

You are so utterly mentally retarded that it hurts my teeth to read your drivel. NEVER in the history of the earth has anything happened that was even a tiny fraction of what we are seeing today. Not only were the ice ages NOT "more extreme", they were peanuts compared to what we see today. We have a pretty decent record of global temperatures for several hundred thousand years and there is no indication anywhere of global temperatures changing on the time-scales of decades or even centuries. Nothing like what we're seeing right now can be found anywhere in the earth's climate record.

While the speed of global climate change is staggering and not comparable to previous changes, the range of temperatures and habitats in the past is indeed far more extreme than those we have experienced over the last 10000 years. Much of the earth was probably covered in ice at several points in the distant past, and much of it was tropical at other times - far more extreme changes than we have yet experienced do occur over geological time periods, and there has been far more CO2 than there is now in the past. When the present interglacial ends things will change again. So we should be preparing for massive global climate changes regardless of whether we believe in global warming, as they're going to happen on the longer scale.

Re:No change in sea level.

[Vitriol+Angst]

Most of the ice volume is on land.

It doesn't all have to melt to raise sea levels as they found out in antarctica. An Ice damn broke away, and a huge land-locked ice field moved into the water (ice can flow under pressure -- it just flows very slowly). Thus before 2040, the could be a lot of sea level rise before all the ice melt -- depends upon geography.

From what I'm reading, the Greenland ice sheets are only a few degrees above freezing at ground level due to geothermal heating. So -- it's going to make the Slide--not melt occur sooner.

And I'll agree with hal2814 -- iceburgs take up the same volume frozen or melted -- the excess volume of expanded ice floats.

About 12% of the earth is covered in ice; http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/03/ice-caps -will-melt-into-aquifers.html [blogspot.com]
The aforementioned link dismisses the ideas that the water will be absorbed into aquifers, in case anyone brings it up.

97% of the world's water is ocean, let's ignore it. 68.7% of the remaining fresh water is locked up in glaciers and ice caps, the vast majority in ice caps. 30% is currently groundwater.

If the greenland icesheet melts completely it will add ~7 metres, WAIS will add about 8 (it is already mostly below sealevel) the EAIS would add around 65m (http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/)

Good Old Wikipedia has more; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise [wikipedia.org]
The sea level has risen more than 120 metres since the peak of the last ice age about 18,000 years ago.
The bulk of that occurred before 6,000 years ago [note; think Noah's arc]
From 3,000 years ago to the start of the 19th century sea level was almost constant, rising at 0.1 to 0.2 mm/yr; since 1900 the level has risen at 1 to 3 mm/yr.
Since 1992 satellite altimetry from TOPEX/Poseidon indicates a rate of about 3 mm/yr.

Various factors affect the volume or mass of the ocean, leading to long-term changes in eustatic sea level. The two primary influences are temperature (because the volume of water depends on temperature), and the mass of water locked up on land and sea as fresh water in rivers, lakes, glaciers, polar ice caps, and sea ice. Over much longer (geological) timescales, changes in the shape of the ocean basins and in land/sea distribution will affect sea level. ...
Ice Shelves float on the surface of the sea and, if they melt, to first order they do not change sea level. Likewise, the melting of the northern polar ice cap which is composed of floating pack ice would not significantly contribute to rising sea levels.

Though the computations are complex, and land shape changes a lot of the factors -- throughout geological history, sea level has been much higher than today -- about 300 meters at it's peak. So you can imagine if ALL the water ice were to melt. And at the last great ice age, it was 100 meters lower than now.

The problem is, the rate of change is going to be hard to estimate. If it is not a slow geological process -- but a manmade process. Certain things that we cannot predict might accelerate the change. Case in point, the Earth Scientists thought the ice had to melt, before a huge ice flow moved out of Antarctica (the size of manhattan island). Also, the Siberian tundra, a huge area of permafrost looks to be melting. The color is going from hazy white to a black wet mud -- absorbing more heat. It's potential is that it could increase the natural release of Carbon Dioxide as much as 50% per year in the coming years.

So these trigger events complicate predictions. Even if global warming is alarmist and looking at extremes -- it is not a reasonable position to look at the "best case scenario" because we are not allowing for unknown effects. There is no downside to reducing Carbon emissions, as far as I can tell -- except if you are an oil company. Only, with peak oil arrived