Arctic sea ice loss is effectively doubling mankind's contribution to global warming

Loss of Arctic sea ice is effectively doubling mankind's contribution to global warming. Increased absorption of the sun's rays is "the equivalent of about 20 years of additional CO2 being added by man", Professor Peter Wadhams said in the BBC article: Arctic ice melt 'like adding 20 years of CO2 emissions', by Susan Watts, September 5, 2012.

For more details on Professor Wadhams' calculations, see the earlier post Albedo change in the Arctic.

Arctic sea ice area fell by 11.33629 million square km from March 28, 2012, to September 1, 2012, as shown on the image below, edited from The Cryosphere Today. That's an 82.7 percent fall in 157 days. 

The image below shows Arctic sea ice extent (total area of at least 15% ice concentration) for the last 7 years, compared to the average 1972-2011, as calculated by the Polar View team at the University of Bremen, Germany.

There still are quite a few days to go in the melting season, so the fall could be even more dramatic.

Peter Wadhams adds:  “The point about summer conditions is that as long as there is SOME ice present on the sea surface, however thin the layer, then the ocean temperature below it is held to 0 degrees Celsius because the absorbed solar radiation melts the ice rather than warming the water. Also the atmospheric temperature is held to close to 0 degrees Celsius because warmer air melts the surface snow layer on top of the ice and is thereby cooled. The sea ice, even when thinned, continues to act with 100% efficiency as an air conditioning system for ocean and atmosphere alike.”

“BUT”, Prof Wadhams continues, “as soon as the sea ice layer goes, this process ceases and the sea can warm up rapidly (to typically 7 degrees Celsius by the end of summer - which is not much colder than the North Sea), as can the atmosphere (which speeds up Greenland ice sheet melt when that warmed air passes over Greenland). Latent heat is an enormously powerful buffer - the amount of heat that you have to pump in to melt 1 kg of ice will subsequently heat that same amount of melted water to 80 degrees Celsius. So once the ice goes away entirely there is a big jump in temperatures in the upper ocean and atmosphere (with dire consequences for permafrost), and it is very difficult to see how one can ever go back to an ice-covered summer ocean once this has happened.”

In the August 27, 2012, BBC article Arctic sea ice reaches record low, Nasa says, by Roger Harrabin, Professor Peter Wadhams said: “Implications are serious: the increased open water lowers the average albedo [reflectivity] of the planet, accelerating global warming; and we are also finding the open water causing seabed permafrost to melt, releasing large amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere.”

Indeed, there is a danger that loss of the sea ice will weaken the currents that currently cool the bottom of the sea, where huge amounts of methane may be present in the form of free gas or hydrates in sediments. This danger is illustrated by the image below by Reg Morrison.

The image below, from a study by Polyakov et al., shows temperature differences in the vertical water column at selected stretches of water in the Arctic over the years.

[click images to enlarge]

Arctic cyclone warning for September 7

By Paul Beckwith, 
edited by Sam Carana

Paul Beckwith, B.Eng, M.Sc. (Physics),
Ph. D. student (Climatology) and
Part-time Professor, University of Ottawa 

Paul Beckwith warns that another cyclone is forecast to develop in the Arctic by September 7th, 2012, pointing at the image below, from the Naval Research Laboratory.

“This will cause lots of sea ice breakup in the Arctic if it develops and persists”, Paul says.  “The sea ice now is thinner than in August, so the potential for severe damage to ice exists. On the other hand, however, the August cyclone lasted for a week, while this one looks like a 2 to 3 day event.”

Paul also points at the image further below, from weather.unisys.com/gfsx, showing a 9 day GFSx model for Arctic region; on the website you can select single day panels.

“Most scientists think that the massacre of Arctic sea ice will stop on/or around September 15th which is the 'normal' date at which ice formation is due, as the decrease of solar insolation at the pole will cause the area of the sea ice to start increasing", Paul says, adding however that “a minority of us think that the melt will continue beyond this date by several weeks, due to the warmness of the sea water both beside and below the very thin sea ice.”

Paul continues: “In fact, I predicted on August 10th that at the end of the melt season there would be virtually no sea ice left; this was predicated on there being a few more cyclones of equal intensity to that of the August 2nd to August 10th cyclone that eliminated around 0.8 million square kilometers of sea ice area (equivalent to about 20% of the ice remaining in 2007, the previous worst year in terms of ice melt). Thankfully, my prediction looks to be wrong, but we are not out of the woods yet. It appears that a strong cyclone will be attacking the sea ice in a few days, with the peak churning occurring on September 7th.”

The 500mb/SLP chart shows the 500 mb height (in color contours), and the sea level pressure in mb (black lines).

The image below, also from the Naval Research Laboratory, is an animation showing sea ice speed and drift over 30 days, from early August up to September 9, and including the forecast cyclone event.

PIOMAS data confirm exponential trend

The Applied Physics Laboratory/Polar Science Center at the University of Washington has issued an extra release of Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) data.

Sea ice volume on August 25th, 2012, was 3500 km³, or about 500 km³ less than the prior minimum, reached on September 10th, 2011.

The image below shows that recent data for 2012 appear to match almost perfectly the expected values based on exponential trends added by Wipneus.

The image below, again based on PIOMAS data, shows trends added by Wipneus for each month of the year. The black line shows the average for the month September, pointing at zero a bit into the year 2015, while the average for August and October (the overlapping red and dark blue lines, appearing as a single purple line) point at zero before the start of the year 2016.

In conclusion, it looks like there will be no sea ice from August 2015 through to October 2015, while a further three months look set to reach zero in 2017, 2018 and 2019 (respectively July, November and June). Before the start of the year 2020, in other words, there will be zero sea ice for the six months from June through to November.

And, events may unfold even more rapidly, as discussed earlier at Getting the picture.

The image below, from the Naval Research Laboratory, shows the dramatic decline of sea ice thickness over the last 30 days.

Further Confirmation of a Probable Arctic Sea Ice Loss by Late 2015

By Malcolm P.R. Light
1st September, 2012


Executive Summary

The Arctic sea ice maintains the cold of the polar region and acting like the Earth's air conditioner it helps moderate climate with the oceans and the atmosphere rebalancing the heat on the planet (Rice 2012; Speer 2012). Each year the Arctic sea ice melts in the summer reaching its smallest extent in September and reaches it largest extent in March (Rice 2012). At the end of August 2012, the Arctic sea ice reached it lowest extent that has ever been recorded (Vizcarra, 2012) due to the increasing input of globally warmed Gulf Stream waters into the Arctic generating what is now termed a death spiral for the floating Arctic sea ice (Romm 2012; Morison 2012). In the IPCC fourth assessment report in 2007 it was predicted that the Arctic would become ice free at the end of this Century, while more recent estimates suggested that the ice would melt by 2030 or in this decade (Romm 2012). Piomas ice volume melt data indicates that by 2015 the Arctic sea ice cap will be gone (Carana 2012d; Masters, 2009) and this paper confirms the accuracy of the Piomas estimate.

The intersection point of the converging envelopes of the varying amplitude of the monthly 11 year moving average of the Giss maximum surface temperature anomaly represents a time after which the variable effect caused by the latent heat of melting and freezing of the worlds Polar sea ice caps will be eliminated, i.e. the time when the Arctic floating sea ice cap will be completely melted away (Figure 10). The best estimate of the time when we will lose the the Arctic floating sea ice cap is 2015.757 (October 2) which is the mean yearly intersection point calculated from the 12 convergent monthly data sets (Figure 10. anomaly temperature 6.8762 degrees C). The 2015.757 best estimate for the complete loss of Arctic floating sea is almost identical to the 2015 date suggested by Piomass ice volume reduction data (Carana 2012d) and is within its 90% confidence interval error limit. The date range for the intersection points of the converging data set runs from 2011.363 (Figure 4. July anomaly temperature 6.7079 degrees C) to 2022.989 (Figure 9. June anomaly temperature 7.1414 degrees C).

The normal high July temperatures of the Arctic ocean region including the major heated rivers feeding the surrounding Siberian shelf regions are an important factor in destabilization of the shallower methane hydrate accumulations and the eruption of methane into the Arctic atmosphere and stratosphere at that time (Shakova et al. 2008, 2010; Light 2012). In the normal July summer hot period the Gulf Stream is heated to some 26.5 degrees C in the Atlantic (Figure 22a,b). This has been found to be followed by a subsequent anomalous hot period in late October - November caused by the high global warming potential of methane clouds which have been erupted into the Arctic atmosphere and make their way up into the global stratosphere (Figure 23). The stratospheric build up of methane between about 30 km and 47 km altitude forms a continuous methane global warming veil which is then spread by stratospheric vortices ESE across Russia, Europe the Atlantic and the Americas into the Pacific and Southern Hemisphere where it enhances both the pollution heated Gulf Stream on the east coast of the United States/Canada and the El-Nino in the Pacific (Figure 23). This secondary thermal anomaly caused by the extreme methane eruptions in late October - November is termed a False Indian Summer (FIS) and it will grow in strength, depth and duration as the methane eruptions escalate exponentially in the Arctic emission centres because of the increased heating of the subsea methane hydrates by the summer warmed Gulf Stream (Intermediate Depth) current (Figures 19, 20a,b and 22a,b).

The stratospheric methane global warming veil completes a complex convection cycle in the earths atmosphere and oceans in exactly the same way that a giant forest fire will draw in cooler winds which will amplify the flames with the heated air rising, cooling and increasing in density aloft so that it sinks back to the ground away from the fire site to be drawn back again to re-enhance the flames further. In the case of the Gulf Stream where global warming induced by the pollution clouds blowing off the east coast of the United States/Canada warms the Atlantic waters in the summer to 26.5 degrees C (Figure 22b), the heat is then trapped in the Gulf Stream which migrates north east to the Arctic in October November where it destabilizes the subsea methane hydrates along the south east slope of the Eurasian basin/Laptev Sea transition and forms an extreme atmospheric methane eruption centre (Figure 20a,b).

The US/Canada pollution clouds which globally overheat the Gulf Stream also show a second complete complex energy convection cycle caused by a southern offshoot
of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic that swings SE toward the warm waters of the western coast of Africa, the spawning grounds of Hurricane systems in the Eastern Atlantic (Wales, 2012). These hurricanes then make their way to the NW towards the Gulf Coast/Florida, the source of the warmed Gulf Stream, causing increasing devastation on their way across the Caribbean islands and the US/Canada coastline. Both the stratospheric methane global warming veil and the Hurricane tracks are simply the closing stages of complex heat convection cycles returning back to the original energy source (the pollution clouds blowing off the east coast of the US/Canada) increased volumes of heat energy. The global warming effects of these pollution clouds will be enhanced even further by methane being injected into the Arctic atmospheric convection cycles producing an escalating exponential growth in the heat input into atmosphere and ocean, intensifying the resulting climatic devastation and giving us an early warming of our impending extinction within the next 50 years.