One-Degree Rise In Temperature Causes Ripple Effect In World's Largest High Arctic Lake (folio.ca) 211
An anonymous reader quotes a report from FOLIO Magazine: A 1 C increase in temperature has set off a chain of events disrupting the entire ecology of the world's largest High Arctic lake. "The amount of glacial meltwater going into the lake has dramatically increased," said Martin Sharp, a University of Alberta glaciologist who was part of a team of scientists that documented the rapid changes in Lake Hazen on Ellesmere Island over a series of warm summers in the last decade. "Because it's glacial meltwater, the amount of fine sediment going into the lake has dramatically increased as well. That in turn affects how much light can get into the water column, which may affect biological productivity in the lake." The changes resulted in algal blooms and detrimental changes to the Arctic char fish population, and point to a near certain future of summer ice-free conditions. The findings document an unprecedented shift from the previous three centuries, challenging scientists' expectations of how such a large system could respond so rapidly to a one-degree rise. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
meh. ppl really do not care (Score:2)
And yet, the ONLY ones dropping are the majority of western nations.
Until we accept that ALL nations have to drop their emissions down to similar levels of Sweden and iceland, AND remove the soot out of their coal plants (IOW, if your skies a
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I think you haven't been paying any attention to what China has been doing. They sure aren't perfect, but they've been working hard to clean up their act.
Additionally, this is a global problem. But actions are required at the nation level and below. And it's often advantageous for a smaller player to not do their fair share. This doesn't imply that the problem isn't real and isn't severe, it implies that some folk are greedy and don't want to do their fair share. The traditional name of this problem is
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Lets not pretend anything is going to happen. The corporations will continue to lie and pay propagandist to serve this quarters profits margins and their bonuses, ie their funding, funding, funding. They don't care how many die, in fact they get a thrill from causing mass deaths, turns them on.
Right now the climate models are hugely underestimating the outcomes, why, because they were climate models and not weather models. The problem is climate models tend to reflect stable change and not the reality of l
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amazing! (Score:2)
If the temperature of a glacier rises from -0.5C to 0.5C, glacial lakes can disappear within weeks! Who would have thought!
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If the temperature of a glacier rises from -0.5C to 0.5C, glacial lakes can disappear within weeks! Who would have thought!
Do you know at what temperature ice melts? There's your answer!!!
Denial (Score:2)
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I would hardly refer to some pundit on youtube who talks about "fake news" as a purveyor of "actual facts". "Alternative facts" (lies) perhaps.
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I would hardly refer to some pundit on youtube who talks about "fake news" as a purveyor of "actual facts". "Alternative facts" (lies) perhaps.
Right. We refer to The President on Twitter for that ...
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Or, just perhaps, you could actually look at someone who is presenting INFORMATION, then think about it.
I know that is revolutionary, but if you would prefer to live on throwaway one liners in article summaries, then who am I to suggest otherwise.
This guy doesnt TELL you what to think, he is just giving you information, you know, stuff, YOU can think about.
And yes, the information he gives you DOES come from peer reviewed data sources, FWIW, just not the ones the media like to make headlines from.
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Or, just perhaps, you could actually look at someone who is presenting INFORMATION, then think about it.
You know, if he's lying to you, it's not information, it's disinformation and when you repeat it to people who know better, you look stupid.
This guy doesnt TELL you what to think, he is just giving you information, you know, stuff, YOU can think about.
How can you be so totally wrong? He's telling you exactly what to think and here you are repeating it,
And yes, the information he gives you DOES come from peer reviewed data sources, FWIW, just not the ones the media like to make headlines from.
Sure, he's giving you some of the facts, although more than likely a few strategically placed lies in there to help convince you that up is down and left is right. However, you won't understand the full story with only half of the facts and he's not going to tell you
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For extend, play with this interactive viewer [nsidc.org]. The decrease is, of course, not monotonous year over year, but t
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It's well known that Nature has a liberal bias. The journal, too.
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Which is precisely why they see so little immediate effect from the policies they support.
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I was left with my mouth hanging open in complete wonderment of what the point was. Sky is blue, another day on earth happened. Anyone who watches decent documentaries on earth processes is educated enough to know that this is just run of the mill shit. Is this supposed to be some type of revelation or call to action?
Re:The world is not a static system (Score:5, Interesting)
1. What happened to the warming that should have occurred (and was predicted to occur) due to increases in greenhouse gases?
2. Where is the observational data to evidence your theory?
Re:The world is not a static system (Score:4, Funny)
Imagine if the Sun's output is also not static or constant...
So your theory is that changes in the Sun's output are causing the recent rise in temperature?
1. What happened to the warming that should have occurred (and was predicted to occur) due to increases in greenhouse gases?
2. Where is the observational data to evidence your theory?
I think he did daily measurements at Noon and Midnight for quite some time... The Sun was "hot" at Noon and "cold" at Midnight - so not static.
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1. What happened to the warming that should have occurred (and was predicted to occur) due to increases in greenhouse gases?
It was actually compensated for by a decrease in greenhouse gases, when the increased temperature increased the rate of chemical weathering of volcanic rocks. Of course, that's if by "recent" you mean "geologically recent", considering that these changes took hundreds of millions of years...
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It was actually compensated for by a decrease in greenhouse gases, when the increased temperature increased the rate of chemical weathering of volcanic rocks. Of course, that's if by "recent" you mean "geologically recent", considering that these changes took hundreds of millions of years...
So to be clear, I'm referring to the recent increases in CO2 (from 280 ppm to 400ppm) due to human activity (and I say that in the absence of a demonstrable alternative explanation, since the 'human caused' part is easily estimable because we know how much coal we've burnt).
The effect (increase in stored energy in the atmosphere and ocean) was predict by Arrhenius. He used a black body radiation model to predict a rise in temperature as a result.
OP says that this increase in CO2 (and other greenhouse
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It's not necessary to deny greenhouse warming to point out that any cause of a one-degree temperature change, and there have been numerous causes in pre-industrial times, would have the same "devastating effect" if a change in the balance of one lake is in fact a devastating effect.
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It's one degree of temperature rise globally but because of Arctic amplification [wikipedia.org] the temperatures around this lake have probably risen several degrees already.
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Apparently we never had major weather events before the last 10 years. How about you learn some natural Earth history. Look at recent studies of ice cores. They show RAPID (as in over a 100 or less year period) cooling and heating trends that dwarf what people are freaking out about now.
Well, if you have evidence to support your theory (that the earths climate changed because of the beating of magical fairies wings or unicorn farts, or whatever is the latest impossible to observe phenomena) rather than the processes detailed by science, then feel free to provide that evidence.
Our planet has had a violent past and our modern climate priests have no more control over what will happen than the average person. But, call forth the virgins anyway. The great volcano awaits.
So you say. But not all of us spend our days reminiscing fondly about the times when we weren't confronted by science and all it's nasty and scary facts. If the scientific worldview is inimical to you, I suggest that
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Look at recent studies of ice cores. They show RAPID (as in over a 100 or less year period) cooling and heating trends that dwarf what people are freaking out about now.
Ice cores show evidence of local changes in temperature. None that I'm aware of show such a fast change in global temperature. You probably have been lied to - and as always, the best lies contain a small if irrelevant bit of truth.
Re:The world is not a static system (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Is rise in greenhouse gases the cause or effect?
Your theory requires that increasing concentrations of ghg's from 280ppm to 400pm will have no effect on climate. It's up to you to explain how this can happen and not violate the laws of thermodynamics.
2) The Earth's climate is mathematically coupled to the output of the Sun. You should be asking for models that accurately predict the output of the Sun.
Very well. I might do that later. In the meantime, you haven't addressed either of the first 2 questions
1. What happened to the warming that should have occurred (and was predicted to occur) due to increases in greenhouse gases?
2. Where is the observational data to evidence your theory?
Re: The world is not a static system (Score:2)
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Re: The world is not a static system (Score:5, Informative)
Climate model projections compare well with observations. Here's the latest comparisons:
Climate model projections compared to observations [realclimate.org]
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why did you post your theory if you didn't want us to believe it?
The solar output is measured (Re:The world is ...] (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably should not believe and predictive models of climate that doesn't also have an accurate, predictive model of the Sun. Coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled.
You do know that we measure the sun's output, right? And have been doing so for many decades?
We know that the observed warming is not due to changes in the solar output because we measure the solar output.
Coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled.
Which is why climate models account for many things.
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Which model of the sun do you mean? ... and very very slowly dimming? Or do you know about another secret model no one else knows about?
The model that shows you that the temperature of the sun is more or less constant
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The model that shows you that the temperature of the sun is more or less constant ... and very very slowly dimming?
It's actually very very slowly brightening, with an increase of about 1% of solar flux per ninety million years. Now of course that's meaningless on human time scale, but main sequence stars get brighter - not dimmer - over time.
Re:The world is not a static system (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would you compare the 2.5TW change in solar output with our energy production, which is a totally unrelated variable ?
You should compare it to the average solar output, which is about 1360 W/m^2. So we're talking about 0.7% variation.
Now compare your solar graph to the global temperature graph, and you'll see they don't match. Especially after about 1980, when solar output starts to go back down, and global temperature goes through fastest rise.
Re:The world is not a static system (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The world is not a static system (Score:4, Interesting)
The energy in the system comes from the Sun. There's about 170000 TW of solar energy hitting the atmosphere. The 20 TW of human-generated energy is nothing compared to that.
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Do you seriously think the amount of energy generated by human sources has any significant effect on anything?
Yes, if we have CO2 output and no energy output (from human sources) we would still heat just about as much. The energy comes from the sun and the CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) slows down it's exit from the Earth system.
Re: The world is not a static system (Score:2)
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there are about 5.1*10^12 square meters
Surface area of the Earth, as seen from the Sun, is 127*10^12 square meters.
Re:The world is not a static system (Score:5, Informative)
The sun has been monitored pretty well for about 400 years. Recently it's been monitored rigorously since the 1950s and continuously from satellites since 1979. In all that time it's never shown enough variation to account for the current warming. You may want it to be the sun but the evidence shows that it isn't.
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Probably should not believe and predictive models of climate that doesn't also have an accurate, predictive model of the Sun. Coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled.
This is a very good point. Climate models are really nothing more than projections that assume "all else being equal". That's something that folks generally don't appreciate when comparing actual temperature rise to model projections.
The fact of the matter is that solar output has not been static. It's been falling for the last several decades [woodfortrees.org]. That's been driving global temperatures lower than they would otherwise be. It won't stay down forever though, so we should realize that warming in the next sev
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Re: The world is not a static system (Score:2)
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No, if you walked into a room where the concentration of hydrogen cyanide gas was 280 ppm you would die in a matter of minutes. Cyanide#Toxicity [wikipedia.org]
Re:The world is not a static system (Score:5, Interesting)
The output of the Sun has been observed for quite a while, including using satellites over the last 50 years and there hasn't been a big change in the output that would have the affects we're seeing. If you have evidence of a large change in the output, please post a link.
It's true that the models of solar induced warming aren't the best, with some saying a degree every 10 million years and some say less, but the basics are pretty simple. The Sun gets hotter as it converts hydrogen into helium and since a helium, atom is 4 times heavier then a hydrogen atom, the Sun gets denser and fusion speeds up and over billions of years there's quite an affect. Not over centuries.
Re: The world is not a static system (Score:4, Insightful)
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So your theory is that changes in the Sun's output are causing the recent rise in temperature?
1) Is rise in greenhouse gases the cause or effect?
Solar output has been falling over the last several decades [woodfortrees.org]. There is no coloration between solar output and rise in greenhouse gasses. Dwindling solar output has been driving global temperatures down. That means something else is responsible not only for driving temperatures up, but also for compensating for the drop in solar output. [woodfortrees.org]
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CO2 is a variable, but so is literally everything else.
I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.
The effect of paving on temperature is probably larger than that of CO2.
Probably? Is the pavement effect larger or smaller that the effect of CO2?
Any observational evidence for your theory?
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Calm the fuck down. We have a probe on the way to the Sun which should put a lot of our ignorance to bed.
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Calm the fuck down.
If you would like us to stop laughing at your clownish antics, stop acting like a clown.
We have a probe on the way to the Sun which should put a lot of our ignorance to bed.
Okay. So this probe will travel back in time to observe the event(s) that you say occurred but can't provide evidence for, or even explain what they were?
Re: The world is not a static system (Score:2)
Re: The world is not a static system (Score:3)
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If there is only one variable that affects the Earth's climate, it would be the output of the Sun.
And you are saying that the output of the Sun has varied, and even thought we've been observing the sun (and it's effects) for many years, we didn't notice this variance. How does something unobservable cause an observable change? Is it magic?
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It's only strange for you if you ignore large amounts of climate science and instead troll a we debunked bit of science denial.
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What part is science denial?
"a decade of missing temp rises".
We measure and model (Score:5, Insightful)
If there is only one variable that affects the Earth's climate, it would be the output of the Sun.
True enough. But we measure the output of the sun, and have been measuring it for many decades. We know that in fact that it is not changing. So we can discard that as a source of the current warming.
If there was a second variable, it would be the kinematics of the Earth about the Sun.
Indeed; this is the Milankovitch cycles, which are currently believed to account for ice ages. The main orbital perturbations have a cycle time on the order of 100,000 years. So they are definitely not responsible for changes in temperature on time scales of less than millennia.
It's worth noting, however, that the effort involved in understanding Milankovitch variations and the feedback mechanisms that cause the cycle of ice ages was a very large part of what brought climate science to its present level.
Neither one should be considered constant,
To the contrary, both of them can be considered constant on the time scale of interest here. One because we measure it to be constant, and the second because actually, orbits are well understood.
and the former is certainly not easily modeled.
Although the second one certainly can be.
Alas, there's much more than just two variables that affects the climate.
And climate scientists have been working for over a century at the effects of these variables. So far, other than greenhouse warming (which is a well substantiated theory), the alternate hypothesis to explain the data is... nothing. There are no alternate hypotheses that fit the known data.
The goal should not be to predict or control climate, but to adapt to it as Nature does.
Uh, why shouldn't we understand (you use the word "predict") climate, exactly?
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"Ecology... Nature is only model we have that has survived climate change with sheer, total, utter neglect..."
"The planet is fine, the people are fucked" ~ George Carlin.
Re: The world is not a static system (Score:2)
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If there is only one variable that affects the Earth's climate, it would be the output of the Sun. If there was a second variable, it would be the kinematics of the Earth about the Sun. Neither one should be considered constant, and the former is certainly not easily modeled. Alas, there's much more than just two variables that affects the climate.
The goal should not be to predict or control climate, but to adapt to it as Nature does.
Mark Shepard on Restoration Agriculture - "Ecology... Nature is only model we have that has survived climate change with sheer, total, utter neglect..." @RestorationAgD http://bit.ly/1ohVqpE [bit.ly]
Did you know that without any greenhouse gases in the atmosphere the average surface temperature would be about 0 degrees F? Instead, even before we started adding CO2 there were enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to make the average surface temperature about 58 degrees F. Ignoring long term slowly changing things like Milankovitch cycles that's probably the 2nd biggest factor in the temperature on the Earth after the sun. And the sun's not changing enough to have the effects we're seeing.
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Yes,
and the difference between a solar maximum and minimum is exactly how much?
What is the over all trend of the solar activity/radiation?
Oh ... you don't know? Guessed so ...
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If it were the sun getting warmer, then we'd expect the days and summers to be getting warmer. But that's not what we're seeing, it's the nights and winters that are getting warmer while the days and summer barely change. That pretty much rules out the sun.
Next.
That's actually an important point. If it was the sun causing the warming we would expect the times and places where it has the most effect to be warming but as the AC said it's actually the nights and winters (and also the stratosphere) that are warming more. And that does pretty much rule out the sun.
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I know, I know, it is a waste to reply to a coward.
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That's not really the point. Although from the conservationist side of things, you can be forgiven if you missed it.
The only salient issue is - when you have rapidly expanding human populations that are crowding out huge swaths of the ecological / environmental base that we depend on - and you add another forcing factor that has a timeline in decades - then you make run on sentences and create ever more stressful conditions for said human populations.
That really don't need any more stressors and strains. I
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We're doomed.
Malthusian Fallacy.
Predictions of doom from overpopulation have been around for a long time. They've been around for a long time because they keep being proven wrong. Mankind keeps inventing, discovering, and engineering it's way past and beyond old sustainability limits.
And we have barely even begun to tap the resources of space and the possibilities relatively cheap lift vehicles will offer.
Mankind is on the cusp of the richest and most universally prosperous age he has ever known as we tap into the nearl
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The Earth's climate has changed far more radically and far quicker to more extreme states many times in the past and yet here we and all other life are going about living, the silly humans
This XKCD comic makes it quite clear why "silly humans" are right to be concerned about the current warming trend, even if it has "changed far more radically... many times in the past".
https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
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The Earth's climate has changed far more radically and far quicker to more extreme states many times in the past ...
Please point out when that has been true, other than when a giant meteor impacts the Earth. I doubt you can find such an instance in the last billion years.
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Ah I see you're using the "I don't understand it therefore it's wrong" line of reasoning. I like how you've been modded up for that. Way to go slashdot.
Re:Why does onw degreee makes such a difference? (Score:4, Informative)
In my country the temperature varies from -30 C in winter, and +30 C in summer. If the themperatures chang in the future to -29 C in winter, and +31 C in summer. Why should this change the climate so much as it is claimed, when there is already a 60 C change year around?? I call BS on the climatechange.
This lake is almost always covered in ice year round and, from 2007 to 2012 had a mean summer temperatures of -4.9C. The increase in temperature is warming and melting the surrounding permafrost, which drains into the lake, raising both its level and temperature ... This affects the algae and fish in the lake, which affects the people that fish the lake -- as well as everything downstream.
From: Lake Hazen [uoguelph.ca]
Although air temperatures in this area often rise above 10C in July and August, Lake Hazen remains ice covered in most years.
From the actual study in Nature The world’s largest High Arctic lake responds rapidly to climate warming. [nature.com] (linked in the TFA):
A decrease in seasonal ice cover resulted in warming of surface waters and, more importantly, allowed planktonic algae to fill a niche which was previously climatically inaccessible, re-organizing the ecology of the lake at the base of the foodweb.
Collectively, rising air temperatures, increasing glacial melt and runoff, decreasing summer lake ice cover, shifts in primary producer communities and declining fish condition demonstrate the coupling between watershed changes and in-lake conditions and processes.
This vast, deep lake, the High Arctic’s largest freshwater ecosystem, has experienced drastic changes in the last decade, despite its volume, thermal inertia and hypothesized resilience to climate change.
Such changes, and their consequences, are certain to increase further as warming of northern latitudes continues into the future, undoubtedly jeopardizing the security of traditional freshwater foods and other ecosystem services for northern Indigenous peoples throughout the Arctic.
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This lake is almost always covered in ice year round and, from 2007 to 2012 had a mean summer temperatures of -4.9C.
The "watershed" had a mean summer temperatures of -4.9C. Sorry for the cut/paste error.
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1 degree C can be the difference between just being cold and getting frostbite that causes permanent damage. It's huge.
Re: Earth's climate always changes (Score:2)
Re:You do realize it was going to change anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah we all know that the climate has changed before. This is not news to anyone. But when people say the temperature has changed before, this is what they mean:
https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
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Oh, I think he means that webcomic that plays so fast and loose with the facts that it includes literature citations...
Which I notice you don't have.
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It took blowing the graph out to a pixel level but by my measure, about half of the graphed 61-90 line is below (to the left of) the line showing the average. It isn't a very precise graph but in general XKCD is very effective in using the data that is available to him and he see
Re: You do realize it was going to change anyway? (Score:3)
Re: You do realize it was going to change anyway? (Score:2)
Re:You do realize it was going to change anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, we do realize that. It's not the magnitude of change per se that's the problem, it's the rate of change.
Hitting +2C above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century represents warming 10x more rapid than anything we see geological record since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. You are absolutely correct that local ecological disruptions are constantly wiping out individual populations, but with globally distributed rapid changes we'll see (indeed are seeing) widespread extinctions of entire species and shifts toward weedier species.
Now people adapt more rapidly than plants and animals, so climate change is not anything like an extinction event for our species. But at that rate we're going to see differential effects depending between populations. People whose income comes primarily from financial investments will actually do well out of that level of climate change; all they need to do is rebalance their portfolios annually. People whose livelihood is tied to a specific geographic area will find adaptation difficult or impossible, producing refugees and political crises.
And that's with just a 2C increase, which presumes vigorous action on our part. Without action, a +4C scenario is increasingly plausible. Again, that's not an extinction event for our species, but it won't be nice for most of us.
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Re: You do realize it was going to change anyway? (Score:3)
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True. But we're accelerating the end of an ice age and humans are an ice age species. Our own ability to survive may go rapidly downhill on a relatively short timescale.
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Re: You do realize it was going to change anyway? (Score:2)
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NASA shows [nasa.gov] that the change from ~1920 to ~1940 is about the same as we've seen from ~1980 to current. About 1 deg C in both cases. So we have a rather recent, pre-big-CO2 release record of the same kind of quick rise in temperature.
Nonsense. Assuming you are referring to Figure 4, first, why do you use a 20 year old study? Secondly, 20 years is too short a period for climate - just for one data point you usually need a 30 year average. And thirdly, have you done a statistical analysis of the rate of increase? If so, do you have the data sets? If not, and your just eyeballing the graph, or, equally bad, just compare two isolated points, your statement has no substantial basis.
Also, there is a massive dissonance between your signatur
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There is enough methane in the Arctic to destroy life on Earth many times over.
This is not clear. A very few scientists have suggested that there's enough methane in clathrates to cause much larger temperature excursions than we've yet seen, but this is by no means well established. And I have never heard a suggestion that there's enough "to destroy life on Earth many times over."
In other words: stick to the real facts, they're scary enough.
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I *think* the clathrates are actually pretty well established.
OTOH, the deeper ones when they release slowly tend to get eaten by bacteria and get converted to CO2 on their way to the surface.
The problem is the buried organic waste in the permafrost, which I don't believe there's any good measure of. Some of that has already been converted into methane while the permafrost was frozen, and much of the rest will "quickly" be converted into methane as the permafrost thaws.
Now methane in the air has a half-lif
Re:The scariest bit isn't mentioned-amend (Score:2)
Sorry, that got posted to quickly.
OTOH, it wasn't methane or warming that killed off everything the end-Permian extinction, it was the release of H2S into the atmosphere at the same time. It's not clear that a simple warming would do that. I don't remember the mechanism that was supposed to have caused the H2S release, but I think it has happened more than once.
Still, please note that it didn't kill off all life in the previous occurrences. There's no reason to believe it would kill off all life this time
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I *think* the clathrates are actually pretty well established.
The fact that methane clathrates exist in deep arctic regions is indeed well known. The total amount of trapped methane, and the amount of methane release as a function of atmospheric heating, on the other hand, is not well established. And, again, I have never heard a credible suggestion that there's enough "to destroy life on Earth many times over."
You are right, indeed, about the buried organics in permafrost. The amount of greenhouse gasses that are released due to melting of permafrost is not well est
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Then you're listening to the wrong people. The problems from climate change aren't an all-or-nothing deal. The more we do today, the fewer and/or smaller problems we'll have in the future. We just gotta stop listening to shills from the fossil fuel industry, get off our butts, and do what is in our individual power today. Some people can afford EVs. Some people can afford solar panels. Some can only practice conservation at this point. Any of those options are good if it's the most you can do and if they ma
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Nope, that's false. Every dollar we spend today on preventing climate change is a dollar we aren't spending on innovation and economic growth. The long term effect of that is far worse than any effect climate change is realistically going to have.
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"Residential and personal energy usage in the US and Western Europe are meaningless contributors to climate change." possibly but its encouraging change with power generati
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Because the market already spends the maximum that can be efficiently spent on that; any additional dollar that is spent based on new laws or policies is a dollar that isn't spent efficiently.
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Nope, that's false. Every dollar we spend today on preventing climate change is a dollar we aren't spending on innovation and economic growth. The long term effect of that is far worse than any effect climate change is realistically going to have.
As others have pointed out, we can do both at the same time. But there is another problem: We are not measuring the true economy - we only measure the part of it that is largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper (ok, Adams is a bit outdated, but the basic principle holds), and ignore externalities, like the state of the oceans and atmosphere, the services provided by the ecosystem, and so on. As an example, if we pollute natural springs to a degree that we need massive water treatme