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Earth Science

Missing Arctic Ice Fueled the 'Beast of the East' Winter Storm (arstechnica.com) 94

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Extreme weather has become the new normal -- whether it's precipitation, drought, wind, heat, or cold. The question of how the ever-shrinking layer of Arctic sea ice has contributed to any of these changes has prompted some lively discussion over the past few years. Researchers have proposed that a weakened jet stream driven by vanishing Arctic sea ice might play a large role in extreme winter events like the descending polar vortex that struck North America earlier this year. But the idea hasn't held up well in light of more recent evidence.

But now, researchers have identified a direct link between extreme winter weather and sea ice loss. The 2018 "Beast of the East" winter storm hit Europe with record-breaking snowfall and low temperatures. And potentially as much as 88 percent of that snowfall originated from increased evaporation of the Barents Sea.

The working hypothesis is that Arctic sea ice acts as a cap for Arctic waters, limiting evaporation. Less sea ice and warmer Arctic temperatures mean more evaporation, potentially explaining the increased severity of winter storms like the Beast of the East. Until now, it's been tough to measure direct evidence linking sea ice loss to extreme European winters, but recent advances in technology are making this a little less challenging.

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Missing Arctic Ice Fueled the 'Beast of the East' Winter Storm

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  • LOL (Score:2, Insightful)

    Is there anything that does not prove AGW?
    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by MacMann ( 7518492 )

      Is there anything that does not prove AGW?

      No. In the past it was people would joke about how they'd like some global warming after every winter storm. The response then was "climate is not weather". Now the claim is that global warming will not be equally distributed and therefore a warmer planet can indeed have extreme winter storms, and cause the UK to freeze over.

      If there is something that would disprove AGW then I'd like to hear it.

      What is also important is to prove global warming is bad. We can have global warming, and have it bad for us,

      • by Potor ( 658520 )

        Is there anything that does not prove AGW?

        No.

        If there is something that would disprove AGW then I'd like to hear it.

        If there is nothing that would disprove AGW, it' not scientific. Read Popper on psychoanalysis.

        • Is there anything that does not prove AGW?

          No.

          If there is something that would disprove AGW then I'd like to hear it.

          If there is nothing that would disprove AGW, it' not scientific. Read Popper on psychoanalysis.

          Are you really quoting a made up comment?

        • If there is nothing that would disprove AGW, it' not scientific. Read Popper on psychoanalysis.

          Your missing the point. The point is theres actually plenty of things that would "disprove it". The problem is, we haven't seen any of those things in the wild.

          Keep in mind, the physics of CO2 climate forcing have been known since the late 1800s when the scientific community first started raising the warning that the coal burning of the industrial revolution could have untowards effects on the climate. 150 years o

          • by Potor ( 658520 )

            I get all that, and thought about qualifying my post. But I did not since (i) the GP makes no mention of "nothing yet," and further, (ii) is strongly interested only in having the hypothesis proven correct, such that (iii) all evidence is pre-interpreted.

            Although I am certainly guilty of some sins, I intentionally live my life as if AGW is a fact (grow my own food as much as possible, never owned a car, etc.). Still, I am open to treating it as a scientific fact, i.e., only today's truth.

      • If global warming is bad, and our CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, then can we have some nuclear power plants now?

        Nope. We can't do anything until 100% of uneducated people agree with scientists. Basically unless it's beach weather in the winter people are going to keep making excuses.

        Also no to nuclear power. Not In My Back Yard. Nobody wants their property values hurt by a bunch of windmills visible in the distance either.

        • by I75BJC ( 4590021 )
          "We can't do anything until 100% of uneducated people agree with scientists."

          Does this mean that you have given up hope for change?
          Does this mean that your judgementalism and "high standards" indicate that you are a Narcissist?

          It does appear that you are greatly frustrated and want everyone else to agree with you.
          Is this what you're trying to convey?
          It would interesting to know for sure.
      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        Hmmmm, let's ask the fish in the Mid-Atlantic. They are headed toward colder water up north. Where's the proof, you ask? Since you won't accept any science, talk to the fishermen on the East Coast. They are complaining that they must go much further north to catch the fish.

        The farmers in Michigan used to be able to keep their taters over winter for shipping them to tater plants in the spring. Now they must install essentially refrigerators to keep the spuds cool enough because, get this, it's warmer now.

        You

    • by I75BJC ( 4590021 )
      No. Anything a human being does causes AGW.

      Haven't you seen that Pattern already?
  • Project Veritas has CNN's producer Charles Chester on record saying that climate change will be their next big focus. Cue pundits disasturbating enthusiastically. Who's interested?

  • Nope (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Retron ( 577778 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @12:20AM (#61292748)

    It was "The Beast *from* the East" btw, not "of the East". I live in the SE of the UK and the term was actually invented on a weather forum nearly 20 years ago.

    While the article is interesting, it doesn't explain how during the 80s we had several much stronger and more persistent easterly spells brought about by a Scandinavian High - including January 1987, which led to 20+ ft drifts in my area, temperatures of -7C by daytime (the coldest here for hundreds of years) and a week off school!

    In other words, it's just one piece in a very big jigsaw. It was nice, though, as a reminder of how things used to be. Growing up in the 80s I assumed every winter had snow on the ground, inches of the stuff... how naive I was.

    • The headline is cut n paste from ars....

      https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Retron ( 577778 )

        Ars have it wrong too in that case!

        The name was invented, as I said, on TheWeatherOutlook forum around 2001. It then spread to the other weather forums (NetWeather, UKWW, even uk.sci.weather) in the UK.

        The media, then, picked up on it in 2018 and ran with it - it's catchy, after all. You then get places like Ars bastardising the name as they don't know where it came from in the first place.

        FWIW, the primary driver of the Beast in 2018 was actually SSW which occurred a few weeks earlier.... much as was the c

        • With the ice gone, the water is still very cold. Hard to see that much evaporation would result.

          I would have thought that the current from the Caribbean would produce the most moisture, with storms coming from the east.

          But certainly sea water absorbs much more heat than reflective ice and snow.

          • With the ice gone, the water is still very cold. Hard to see that much evaporation would result.

            I would have thought that the current from the Caribbean would produce the most moisture, with storms coming from the east.

            But certainly sea water absorbs much more heat than reflective ice and snow.

            There is a functioning model of the low ice, higher snowfall issue.

            Lake Erie, and the lake effect snows https://spectrumnews1.com/oh/c... [spectrumnews1.com]

            Lake Erie doesn't freeze over very often - the last time was in 1996. But when it does, there is less snow. I was there in 1996 visiting my sister, and it seemed just like any PA winter. In another warmer winter that I went up, it was inundated with snow. It would be a great Ski resort if they had any decent mountains.

          • With the ice gone, the water is still very cold. Hard to see that much evaporation would result.

            ice reflects most light. water absorbs a significant amount of light. Absorbing light heats you, reflecting it does not.

            And the sublimation of solid ice happens just as quickly as the evaporation of liquid water.

        • by mccalli ( 323026 )
          Quick qualification - The Beast from the East was invented for *boxing*, not weather. It's Nikolai Valuev [wikipedia.org].
    • by JASegler ( 2913 )

      The best way I have heard it explained is that the direction we are going there is more energy available which makes weather worse in either direction.

      More energy into a hot system means more evaporation, more droughts, more water in the atmosphere for large storms.

      You also get larger gradients in weather systems which makes wind stronger. Having more hurricanes in a season is just one symptom of that.

      More energy into a cold system means more water in the atmosphere to turn into snow/ice.

      Ice reflects more

  • To the media (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @12:47AM (#61292782)

    Quit naming storms, it's annoying. And it downplays real storms like hurricanes.

    • Quit naming storms, it's annoying. And it downplays real storms like hurricanes.

      I'm sorry you think that only American lives matter, and that somehow a storm which directly caused the death of 100 Europeans doesn't qualify as "real" for you.

      • by skam240 ( 789197 )

        Now I'm not trying to weigh in on whether storms should be named but you're not doing yourself or your point any favors by apparently making the ridiculous claim that hurricanes only happen to the US.

      • The media still named the storm, it's annoying and they shouldn't do that.

  • I'm pretty sure that describes Baylor this year.

  • by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @02:33AM (#61292926)

    Another article on Slashdot to express just how doomed we all are because people are burning fossil fuels. I prefer articles telling us how we could solve this problem. It would also be preferable to see some articles recognizing just how far we've come to solve the problem of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, or CAGW.

    There's a part of me that doesn't much care about the problem of CAGW because it doesn't matter if CAGW is a problem or not as what needs to be done is not changed by CAGW being a problem. What needs to be done is building more nuclear power plants. CAGW being a problem only brings additional urgency. Here's an article written by a respected expert on energy policy making a case for building more nuclear fission power plants: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]

    Dr. Malhotra put in this article some graphs he obtained from respected sources. One graph shows that nuclear fission power has the lowest CO2 emissions of any energy source we have available to us. That alone is enough to make the case for more nuclear fission power plants.

    Another graph from Dr. Malhotra shows nuclear fission power has the lowest environmental footprint of any other energy source. The material needed for nuclear power is the smallest of anything else when measured against the energy produced. And this is not by a small margin. Solar power looks to be absolutely devastating to the environment by comparison.

    The last chart Dr. Malhotra shows is how safe nuclear power is as an energy source compared to the other options. This shows we need to build nuclear power plants right now, and in large numbers. Not doing so is costing us lives.

    I'll see the solar power shills claim that when some new solar power technology comes along that it will be safer, take less material, and have lower CO2 emissions than current solar technology. That's them comparing solar power technology from 50 years in the future to nuclear power technology from 50 years in the past and still losing to nuclear fission power.

    I'll have people claim nuclear power is "too expensive". One such claim made mention of a study from MIT. I don't recall if the specific paper was linked to, I only recall not reading it. The claim was that most of this cost was from "soft" expenses like engineering and regulation. This was supposed to demonstrate how difficult it would be to lower costs from nuclear power. Is that what I'm supposed to take away from that? It seems to tell me that it would be quite trivial to lower the costs of nuclear power. We only need to stop building nuclear power plants as "first of a kind" to avoid these costs. Pick a design, stop fiddling with it, and build a hundred of them. That would lower the engineering and regulatory costs.

    I say that we don't need the threat of CAGW to make the case for nuclear fission power. That's because nuclear power is safe, reliable, plentiful, domestically sourced, and with the least environmental impact of any other energy source we have.

    That article from Dr. Malhotra is just one of many making the case for nuclear fission power, there are many more like it. It's because of articles like this one that we will be building more nuclear power plants in the USA and around the world. Opposition to nuclear power has been quite strong in the USA for the last 40 years but that's disappearing fast. This is because all those nuclear power plants built 50 years ago are reaching their end of life. They will need to be replaced, and at a rapid pace because 50 years ago the USA was breaking ground on a new nuclear power reactor at an average of one per month. Each new reactor was then capable of producing a gigawatt of power, at a capacity factor over 90%, for decades. As they close federal regulators will be faced with a question that has only one answer, what do we replace these nuclear power reactors with?

    Federal regulators will have to look at data li

    • Ah, nuclear power, I remember that! It was the 20th century's hot non-carbon emitting energy source.

      Let me be the first to welcome you to the 21st century though! We have cheap and efficient renewables and batteries now and they are rapidly getting even cheaper and more efficient.

      We also still haven't implement an actual, viable, real world solution to nuclear waste yet and in real world practical examples nuclear power is still just as expensive as ever so there's that too.

      • What, like Thorium (much cleaner) or "Traveling Wave" (waste-burning) reactors? And let's face it, the only reason nuclear plants are so expensive is because we build them in the least efficient way. Each is a one-off custom job instead of a standard build. They could be much cheaper and safer, especially now that we don't need them to produce weapons-grade material.

        Almost all renewables face the same shortcoming - they don't run 24/7. Batteries need several orders of magnitude more storage capacity

        • by skam240 ( 789197 )

          What, like Thorium (much cleaner) or "Traveling Wave" (waste-burning) reactors?

          Just a few of the wonderful hypotheticals that nuclear power provides. Meanwhile renewables are actually solving problems in the real world.

          Don't get me wrong though, the nuclear hypotheticals do sound great and kept me a fan of nuclear well into the 21st century, the problem is they are never built. There are some truly amazing sounding reactor designs that have been around for decades that certainly sound like they could revolutionize power generation but they are never built. Meanwhile every year that go

    • You're not going to see another nuclear plant built in your lifetime as the initial cost is too prohibitive. The price of solar is falling incrementally every year so why not take advantage of all that free energy? I'm sure the government could kick some subsidies into nuke plants but wouldn't that be evil socialism?

      • The price of solar is falling incrementally every year so why not take advantage of all that free energy?

        Excellent. Every time I hear someone panicking about climate change I always reassure myself that there's nothing to worry about because every mention of nuclear power on Slashdot is always followed up by posts talking about how cheap solar (and often wind) are. People only pollute because it's cheaper than not polluting. If solar is so cheap that it isn't worth fixing all the political obstructions that have blocked progress on nuclear power plant design for decades then climate change doesn't stand a chan

      • You are right about the subsidies for energy being "evil socialism". Let's end all energy subsidies. Solar power exists only because of subsidies, and if they dry up then so does the solar power industry. Nuclear power isn't asking for subsidies, they are asking for permission. Give nuclear power permission and solar power will not be able to compete.

        Oh, and solar power is no more "free" than nuclear power. To get solar power requires facilities to collect, convert, and distribute that energy. If buil

    • by FriendlyPrimate ( 461389 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @09:00AM (#61293568)
      I used to thing Nuclear power was the way to go. I'm no longer convinced. Nuclear power is the communism of power generation....great in theory but won't ever work because of human nature.

      Nuclear power can absolutely be a safe power supply. But that does not mean it WILL be safe. If humans are making decisions, eventually something will go wrong. And when things go wrong, they REALLY go wrong. All you can really do is pile on regulations which spike the costs and don't guarantee that humans won't mess up by simply ignoring them anyway.

      You can chalk up Chernobyl to gross mismanagement due to a dystopian political environment. Surely something that bad would never happen in the West, right? But Fukushima opened my eyes....if Japan couldn't safely run a nuclear power plant, who could? I'd trust the US even less than Japan due to constant pressures to increase the bottom line through penny pinching.

      And then there's the issue of what to do with the waste. In the US, we can't even get agreement to permanent storage in the middle of an uninhabited desert. This may not be a problem in totalitarian societies, but good luck trying to get agreement in a democracy. So instead we're stuck with permanent temporary "dry cask storage".

      Nuclear power will be feasible once you've solved the following issues:
      1. Human fallibility
      2. Human greed
      3. NIMBYism
      • by gillbates ( 106458 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @11:21AM (#61294078) Homepage Journal

        And... this is why we can't have nice things.

        I agree, that the problem of human greed and NIMBY are real. But these same forces are also at work in the fossil fuel industry, which is why it's a bit pointless to talk about AGW when there's no politically correct solution. If you're going to talk about AGW, you're well beyond the realistic solution stage and are instead talking about hypotheticals. Which isn't bad in itself, but a bit naive if you're doing something other than virtue signalling.

        From that perspective, nuclear is perhaps our best hope against AGW. There's a big difference between something that could be a problem, and something that is a problem. Nuclear could be problematic if those nations which use don't also build in the regulatory framework to ensure its safety - but that's true of anything dangerous. While most people are familiar with Chernobyl and Fukushima, not so many are familiar with the environmental devastation done by the regular business practices of the fossil fuel industries. There are entire mountains denuded of trees, and thousands of toxic wastewater ponds created by normal coal mining operations. It seems like every decade or so there's a monumental oil spill which requires a Chernobyl-scale cleanup effort, and yet, apart from the posturing of politicians and pundits, there's no serious effort to end our dependence on oil.

        The issue with nuclear isn't that there are no problems with older designs, but that newer designs address those issues. It boggles the mind that of all things, nuclear reactors were not initially designed in a fail-safe manner. Yet today we have fail-safe nuclear designs, and it is those designs which would be used in new construction. Fukushima was not a fail-safe design. Complaining about the safety of nuclear energy today is like stating that cars without seatbelts are dangerous. Yes, there will always be a human factor, but the issue with nuclear is political, not technological. With enough regulation, nuclear can be made safe. The same is not true, however, for fossil fuels - the AGW impact will always be there, regardless of regulation - and any regulation of fossil fuels only serves to increase inequality.

      • Those problems will be solved as old nuclear power plants are shut down and federal regulators have to choose between more coal, more natural gas, more this, more that, or more nuclear power.

        The federal government has been kicking this can down the road for over 40 years. They have not yet found a way to replace nuclear power so they will soon solve those problems and issue permits for new nuclear power plants.

  • We had more or less six months of rain from last september until march, now its barely rained at all for 4 weeks which in England in April is just bizarre. And this is just the most recent wierdness whether its record breaking heatwaves or record breaking low temperatures in scotland with moorland fires or floods.

    Blame AGW or blame something else, but what can't be denied is weather patterns are changing fast around the world and its not good news for agriculture or ecosystems.

  • by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @08:29AM (#61293498)
    Would it be that it didn't support the "climate change is responsible for every bad thing ever!" narrative? You know the one I mean, it's linked in this post.
  • by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @09:43AM (#61293702)

    I first heard about this in roughly 1960. Ewing and Donn's proposal was that each of the four cyclic ice ages we have had in recent geologic times started with evaporation from an ice-free Arctic Ocean feeding a lot of excess snowfall in the high northern latitudes (where so much land is), giving rise to continental icecap glaciation. The winter lock-in effect of large amounts of ice raising the Earth's albedo would make it still colder.

    This process continues until glaciation draws down the ocean level so far that the Arctic Ocean becomes landlocked and, deprived of its warm-water circulation from the south, freezes over. The precipitation plummets, and the icecaps melt. This continues until the ocean level rises enough for Arctic waters to again receive warm-water circulation from the Atlantic and Pacific to start melting the sea ice again.

    So why, in their view, did this cycle start only in geologically recent times? It would have started when plate tectonics brought the north pole into the Arctic Ocean.

  • extreme weather (Score:3, Insightful)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @11:11AM (#61294036)

    Extreme weather has always been the new normal. And, also, the old normal. Just because YOU haven't experienced it previously doesn't mean it didn't happen.

  • A theory is not a fact, but they are often reported as if they were. "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."--Albert Einstein

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis

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