The multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished….

“I would argue that, from a practical perspective, we almost have a seasonally ice-free Arctic now, because multiyear sea ice is the barrier to the use and development of the Arctic,” said Barber [Canada's Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba].

The latest tracking of Arctic sea ice extent from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows that we’ve hit the record low Arctic sea ice extent for this time of year.  In a post last week, “Warm winds slow autumn ice growth,” NSIDC noted “October 2009 had the second-lowest ice extent for the month over the 1979 to 2009 period.”

As Reuters noted in their remarkable piece on Canadian cryosphere scientist David Barber, “Scientists link higher Arctic temperatures and melting sea ice to the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.”

Duh.

Here’s more on what Barber found in a recent expedition:

“We are almost out of multiyear sea ice in the northern hemisphere,” he said in a presentation in Parliament. The little that remains is jammed up against Canada’s Arctic archipelago, far from potential shipping routes….

Barber spoke shortly after returning from an expedition that sought — and largely failed to find — a huge multiyear ice pack that should have been in the Beaufort Sea off the Canadian coastal town of Tuktoyaktuk.

Instead, his ice breaker found hundreds of miles of what he called “rotten ice” — 50-cm (20-inch) thin layers of fresh ice covering small chunks of older ice.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 30 years of working in the high Arctic … it was very dramatic,” he said.

“From a practical perspective, if you want to ship across the pole, you’re concerned about multiyear sea ice. You’re not concerned about this rotten stuff we were doing 13 knots through. It’s easy to navigate through.”

Rotten ice — good term.  That’s what human emissions of greenhouse gases have done to the Arctic, covered it in rotten ice.

Reuters photo caption: “Broken Arctic sea ice as seen from a window in from a U.S. Coast Guard C130 flight over the Arctic Ocean September 30, 2009.”

Scientists have fretted for decades about the pace at which the Arctic ice sheets are shrinking. U.S. data shows the 2009 ice cover was the third-lowest on record, after 2007 and 2008.

An increasing number of experts feel the North Pole will be ice free in summer by 2030 at the latest, for the first time in a million years.

“I would argue that, from a practical perspective, we almost have a seasonally ice-free Arctic now, because multiyear sea ice is the barrier to the use and development of the Arctic,” said Barber.

Fresh first-year ice always forms in the Arctic in the winter, when temperatures plunge far below freezing and the North Pole is not exposed to the sun….

The Arctic is warming up three times more quickly than the rest of the Earth, in part because of the reflectivity, or the albedo feedback effect, of ice.

As more and more ice melts, larger expanses of darker sea water are exposed. These absorb more sunlight than the ice and cause the water to heat up more quickly, thereby melting more ice.

Barber said the ice was now being melted both by rays from the sun as well as from below by the warmer water.

For more on this well known positive feedback (see “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?)

Scientists are also seeing more cyclones, which pick up force as they absorb heat from the warmer water. The cyclones help generate waves that break up ice sheets and also dump large amounts of snow, which has an insulating effect and prevents the ice sheets from thickening.

After a long search, Barber’s ice breaker finally found a 16-km (10-mile) wide floe of multiyear ice that was around 6 to 8 meters (20-26 feet) thick. But as the crew watched, the floe was hit by a series of waves, and disintegrated in five minutes.

“The Arctic is an early indicator of what we can expect at the global scale as we move through the next few decades … So we should be paying attention to this very carefully,” Barber said.

We should be paying close attention, since this positive feedback is linked to another, even more dangerous one (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“).

I asked NSIDC director’s Mark Serreze for a comment on this article, and he wrote me:

Dave Barber’s observations give the sort of on-the-ground confirmation of the situation that lends confidence to predictions that we’re headed towards a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean.  Dave’s been up there looking at sea ice conditions for many years. He knows what he’s talking about.

NSIDC Research Scientist Walt Meier also replied:

This is an interesting article. To some extent Dave’s statement depends on how you define multiyear year. Certainly the older ice (e.g., >5 years) is virtually gone and there’s very little 3-4 year-old ice.  However, the past couple years, each summer has retained a fair amount of first-year ice (which ages into second year, and now third year ice). So there is some build-up of what you would term “young” multiyear ice. In theory, that ice could eventually stabilize or even increase (for a time) the multiyear pack. On the other hand, multiyear is constantly moving out of the Arctic as part of the natural drift. So, much of the “young” multiyear ice may be gone before it can mature into older ice.

The most interesting thing in the article is that the old multiyear ice is so broken up now. Even if there is a considerable amount, it is all in broken (or even rotten) floes of ice and not a largely consolidated pack like it used to be. That is a significant change in the character of the ice cover beyond the basic changes in extent and age distribution.

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When records were being set for loss of summer Arctic sea ice area (2007) and sea ice volume (2008), the deniers spent all their time talking about how quickly the ice refroze in the ensuing months.  Now, they are strangely quiet on the remarkably slow refreezing we’re seeing.

Why the slow refreezing this year?  I’ll post the answer from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the end.  First, some background.

“The recent sea-ice retreat is larger than in any of the (19) IPCC [climate] models,” as Tore Furevik, Vice director at Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, pointed out in a May 2006 talk (big PPT here) on climate system feedbacks.

And that was before another staggering drop in Arctic sea-ice area in 2007 (see “Arctic Ice shrinks by an Alaska plus a Texas“).

And then we hit a record low volume in 2008 (see here), as this remarkable figure shows:

Then we saw some recovery in 2008 to the third lowest area on record, and, I expect, the second lowest volume.  The Arctic ice loss is not monotonic, but reflects an overall warming trend and local weather conditions.

“What drove the dramatic retreat of arctic sea ice during summer 2007” is the title of a GRL analysis published last year.  It found:

A model study has been conducted of the unprecedented retreat of arctic sea ice in the summer of 2007. It is found that preconditioning, anomalous winds, and ice-albedo feedback are mainly responsible for the retreat. Arctic sea ice in 2007 was preconditioned to radical changes after years of shrinking and thinning in a warm climate. During summer 2007 atmospheric changes strengthened the transpolar drift of sea ice, causing more ice to move out of the Pacific sector and the central Arctic Ocean where the reduction in ice thickness due to ice advection is up to 1.5 m more than usual. Some of the ice exited Fram Strait and some piled up in part of the Canada Basin and along the coast of northern Greenland, leaving behind an unusually large area of thin ice and open water. Thin ice and open water allow more surface solar heating because of a much reduced surface albedo, leading to amplified ice melting. The Arctic Ocean lost additional 10% of its total ice mass in which 70% is due directly to the amplified melting and 30% to the unusual ice advection, causing the unprecedented ice retreat. Arctic sea ice has entered a state of being particularly vulnerable to anomalous atmospheric forcing.

And so the warming-driven thinning makes the Arctic much more vulnerable to local weather conditions.

What to make of the recent slow refreezing? I put that question to NSIDC, and Research Scientist Walt Meier replied:

I think the lesson is to not make too much from only a few data points.  There is significant natural variability in the climate system, and particularly the sea ice. It is only by looking at long-term trends, after the short-term variability is averaged out, that you can make any judgments on long-term climate factors. It is particularly unjustified to draw any conclusions about sea ice from only a few days or weeks.

In the short term, winds can play an important role in the sea ice extent. If there are winds pushing the ice edge “inward”, then you either increase the seasonal decline or slow (or even temporarily reverse) the seasonal increase, depending on the season. The slow-down in the increase in October was due to winds blowing the ice northward from the Siberian coast. It looks like there is another slowdown, also likely due to winds.

What about NSIDC director’s Mark Serreze “death spiral” of Arctic ice metaphor?  I noted that the NYT’s Revkin has written recently:

So the “death spiral of the Arctic ice system” could well be more like a series of descending loop the loops.

Meier writes:

Andy Revkin’s comment is quite apt. We don’t expect to see a continual downward trend, there will some fits and starts, but the overall trend will continue to be down.

Serreze wrote me that “I share Walt’s views.”

Finally, we have the Met Office’s recent statement, which the deniers are trumpeting:

Modelling of Arctic sea ice by the Met Office Hadley Centre climate model shows that ice invariably recovers from extreme events, and that the long-term trend of reduction is robust — with the first ice-free summer expected to occur between 2060 and 2080. It is unlikely that the Arctic will experience ice-free summers by 2020.

Analysis of the 2007 summer sea-ice minimum has subsequently shown that this was due, in part, to unusual weather patterns. Arctic weather systems are highly variable year-on-year and the prevailing winds can enhance, or oppose, the southward flow of ice into the Atlantic. Consequently, the sea ice has not declined every year, but has shown considerable variability — both in extent and thickness.

The high variability has made it difficult to attribute the observed trend to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, although there is now enough data to detect a human signal in the 30-year trend. The trend and observed variability, including the minimum extent observed in 2007, is consistent with climate modelling from the Met Office.

About half of the climate models involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment report, show that ice declines in steps — failing to recover from extreme years. The observed temporary recovery from the 2007 minimum in 2008 and 2009 indicates that the Arctic ice has not yet reached a tipping point, if such exists. We expect Arctic ice to continue to decline in line with increasing global temperatures. If the rate of global temperature rise increases then so will the rate of Arctic sea-ice decline.

First, how disappointing that the Met Office appears unaware of the analysis showing that the Arctic did not experience a “recovery” from 2007 to 2008, unless losing 2000 cubic kilometers of sea ice is a recovery.

Serreze responds:

I agree with the Met Office that going seasonally ice free by 2020 is unlikely.  I still think were looking at somewhere around 2030.

He makes one final point:

One thing we need to come to some agreement on is what we call “ice free.”  Do we mean no ice at all in mid September or something like less than 1 million square km?  “Ice free” is one of these terms like “tipping point” that tends to get tossed around without being all that well defined.   I’m guilty of this myself.

I’m also moving towards the view that the bigger issue is not the when we go ice free, for we seem destined to do so, but the ecological and climatic implications of losing the ice.

I’d certainly second that last point, especially since the major climatic implication is accelerated warming of the carbon-rich permafrost (see here).

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Disappearing beaches in Gambia

LONDON -- The Arctic ice cap will vanish completely in summer months within 20-30 years, polar researchers said Thursday, sounding the alarm two months before a critical climate change summit in Copenhagen.

It is likely to be largely ice-free during the warmer months within a decade, according to findings from an arctic expedition led by British adventurer Pen Hadow.

Veteran polar explorer Hadow and two other Britons went out on the Arctic ice cap for 73 days during the northern spring, taking more than 6,000 measurements and observations of the sea ice.

The raw data they collected from March to May has been analyzed, producing some stark predictions about the state of the ice cap.

"The summer ice cover will completely vanish in 20 to 30 years but in less than that it will have considerably retreated," said Professor Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Britain's Cambridge University.

"In about 10 years, the Arctic ice will be considered as open sea."

Starting off from northern Canada, Hadow, Martin Hartley, and Ann Daniels skied over the ice cap to measure the thickness of the remaining ice, assessing its density and the depth of overlying snow, as well as taking weather and sea temperature readings.

Across their 450 kilometer (290 mile) route, the average thickness of the ice floes was 1.8 metres (6 feet), while it was 4.8 metres (16 feet) when incorporating the compressed ridges of ice.

"An average thickness of 1.8 metres is typical of first year ice, which is more vulnerable in the summer. And the multi-year ice is shrinking back more rapidly," said Wadhams.

"It's a concrete example of global change in action.

"With a larger part of the region now in first year ice, it is clearly more vulnerable. The area is now more likely to become open water each summer, bringing forward the potential date when the summer sea ice will be completely gone."

Dr. Martin Sommerkorn, senior climate change adviser for the World Wide Fund for Nature's international Arctic program, said the survey painted a sombre picture of the ice meltdown, which was happening "faster than we thought".

"Remove the Arctic ice cap and we are left with a very different and much warmer world," he said.

Loss of sea ice cover will "set in motion powerful climate feedbacks which will have an impact far beyond the Arctic itself," he added.

"This could lead to flooding affecting one quarter of the world's population, substantial increases in greenhouse gas emission from massive carbon pools, and extreme global weather changes.

"Today's findings provide yet another urgent call for action to world leaders ahead of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in December to rapidly and effectively curb global greenhouse gas emissions."

British energy and climate change minister Ed Miliband said the report "sets out the stark realities of a rapidly changing climate and illustrates the risk of an ice free summer in the Arctic in the not-too-distant future".

"This further strengthens the case for an ambitious global deal in Copenhagen in December which the U.K. is fully committed to achieving," he added.

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Finally, some of the top climate modelers in the world have done a “plausible worst case scenario,” as Dr Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, put it today in a terrific and terrifying talk (audio here, PPT here).

No, I’m not taking about a simple analysis of what happens if the nation and the world just keep on our current emissions path.  We’ve known that end-of-century catastrophe for a while (see “M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F“).  I’m talking about running a high emissions scenario (i.e. business as usual) in one of the few global climate models capable of analyzing strong carbon cycle feedbacks.  This is what you get [temperature in degrees Celsius, multiple by 1.8 for Fahrenheit]:

The key point is that while this warming occurs between 1961-1990 and 2090-2099 for the high-end scenarios without carbon cycle feedbacks, in about 10% of Hadley’s model runs with the feedbacks, it occurs around 2060.  Betts calls that the “plausible worst case scenario.”  It is something the IPCC and the rest of the scientific community should have laid out a long time ago.

As the Met Office notes here, “In some areas warming could be significantly higher (10 degrees [C = 15F] or more)”:

Large parts of the inland United States would warm by 15°F to 18°F, even worse than the NOAA-led 13-agency impacts report found “Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!”

Dr Betts added: “Together these impacts will have very large consequences for food security, water availability and health. However, it is possible to avoid these dangerous levels of temperature rise by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. If global emissions peak within the next decade and then decrease rapidly it may be possible to avoid at least half of the four degrees of warming.”

A DECC spokesman said: “This report illustrates why it is imperative for the world to reach an ambitious climate deal at Copenhagen which keeps the global temperature increase to below two degrees.”

Betts “presented the new findings at a special conference” today.  “4 degrees and beyond at Oxford University, attended by 130 international scientists and policy specialists, is the first to consider the global consequences of climate change beyond 2 °C.”  You can find all the talks here.

The UK Telegraph story is here.  The Guardian story is “Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes:  Study says 4C rise in temperature could happen by 2060, Increase could threaten water supply of half world population”:

When they ran the models for the most extreme IPCC scenario, they found that a 4C rise could come by 2060 or 2070, depending on the feedbacks. Betts said: “It’s important to stress it’s not a doomsday scenario, we do have time to stop it happening if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon.” Soaring emissions must peak and start to fall sharply within the next decade to head off a 2C rise, he said. To avoid the 4C scenario, that peak must come by the 2030s.

Again, this is not the likely impact for 2060 if we fail to act aggressively, but it is a plausible worst-case scenario that should invalidate all economic cost-benefit analysis done to date (see “Harvard economist disses most climate cost-benefit analyses“).

Kudos to Betts and the Met Office for this important, uncharacteristically blunt, and long-overdue analysis.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

"Daily sea ice extent as of July 21. The solid blue line indicates 2009 ... the purple line shows 2008; and the solid gray line indicates average extent from 1979 to 2000."

The blogosphere and scientific community are all abuzz as to whether 2009 will beat 2007 in minimum Arctic sea ice area. See, for instance, RealClimate's "Sea ice minimum forecasts."  But while the Arctic ice's two-dimensional measurements are easier to make, the more important record is the three-dimensional one, which looks to have been set in 2008 (see NSIDC stunner: Arctic ice at "Likely Record-Low Volume" and below).

Now the National Snow and Ice Data Center has a July 22 update, "Arctic sea ice extent tracking below 2008," which notes:

During the first half of July, Arctic sea ice extent declined more quickly than in 2008, but not as fast as in 2007. As in recent years, melt onset was earlier than the 1979 to 2000 average. International sea ice researchers expect another low September minimum ice extent, but they do not yet know if it will fall below the 2007 record.

Arctic sea ice extent declined 37,000 square miles per day during this period, faster than in 2008 (34,000 square miles per day), but slower than in 2007 (43,000 square miles per day).

From the perspective of the death spiral of the Arctic ice system, it is the declining ice volume that is probably more important, since the increasingly thin ice simply has a tougher and tougher time recovering.  The NSIDC put out an analysis of this back in May (see North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: "It's like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely").

Then in July some of the leading cryoscientists at JPL, the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington, and NASA published a major peer-reviewed article, "Thinning and volume loss of the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover: 2003-2008" (subs. req'd).

You can find a basic discussion of their findings here on NASA's website, which points out, "Arctic sea ice thinned dramatically between the winters of 2004 and 2008, with thin seasonal ice replacing thick older ice as the dominant type for the first time on record."  That link has some excellent figures, like this one:

"ICESat measurements of winter multi-year ice cover in the Arctic Ocean between 2004 and 2008, along with the corresponding downward trend in overall winter sea ice volume, and switch in dominant ice type from multi-year ice to first-year ice."

Between 2007 -- the record low ice extent -- and 2008, some 2000 cubic kilometers of Arctic sea ice were lost.  Needless to say, if the recent trend in volume loss continues, the Arctic would be nearly ice free by 2020, which is the bet I've made (see "Another big climate bet - Of Ice and Men").

So, if 2009 has a lower sea ice area than 2008, will that mean we see a record low volume?  Not necessarily.  I put that question to NSIDC today, and Research Scientist Walt Meier replied:

It is too early to say how 2009 will end up and what we might be able to say about the volume. One thing is that last fall a lot of first-year ice remained. Younger ice is thinner ice in general.  That's one reason why we thought 2008 was probably lowest. But that first-year ice thickened over the winter and this summer it is second-year ice, probably a bit thicker than last year. But some of that ice got moved out of the Arctic by the winds, so a lot depends on how much total ice and the proportion of ice of different ages in terms of making an assessment.

The big headline story this September will be the easily observed sea ice extent - and if it doesn't beat the 2007 record, you can be sure the deniers will be jumping up and down (although presumably not on the thin Arctic ice).  But the smart money will be looking at the volume, which will take a bit longer to determine.

In any case, the end -- of a year-round ice-free Arctic -- is nigh.

Stay tuned.

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Arctic sea ice is refreezing quite slowly. Go figure!

The Sermeq Kujalleq glacier (also known as the Jakobshavn Glacier) near where it flows into the sea in western Greeland. The photo was taken in the summer of 2008. Scientists have recorded the glacier's rapid melt over the past decade.Courtesy kriskaer via Flickr

Here's a tip for the ministers who are attending the latest of the long series of meetings preparing for the make-or-break climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.

Go visit the valley of the dogs.

Yes, that's dogs, not dolls. Greenland sled dogs to be precise. For this week's meeting of 30 ministers from key countries is in Ilulissat, the third biggest settlement on the immense, increasingly melting island.

They have been invited there for informal "substantive and open" discussions, far from the media, by Connie Hedegaard the impressive Danish Minister for Climate and Energy. She has been holding such ministerial dialogues in different parts of the world for the past five years, but Ilulissat is her prime location, her secret weapon.

A former journalist, she well understands that "seeing is believing." And in this small coastal town overlooking a sea strewn with icebergs, the evidence of global warming is both unmistakable and overwhelming. She has hosted a whole series of key figures there over the last years, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John McCain, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She wants President Obama to come too.

With her country hosting the next major international talks on climate change, Denmark's Connie Hedegaard has been bringing world leaders to Greenland in hopes that seeing global warming's effects up close will spur them to action.Courtesy Denmark's Ministry for Climate and EnergyI was there almost two years ago with Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Dubbed "the green pope" for his deep environmental concern, he has held a series of shipboard seminars on religion, science and the environment, on seas and rivers around the world, and this one started just off Ilulissat, home to 4,500 people and 2,500 sled dogs.

Ah yes, those dogs. I came across them on a trip ashore, when the whole shipload of us took a walk from the town to an ancient settlement on a nearby shore. In a valley, stretching as far as the eye could see, were countless scratching, sleeping, howling animals, tethered next to makeshift kennels. It must be the strangest settlement of the unemployed on the face of the warming Earth.

Until recently the dogs were busy and treasured, vital engines of transport in a land without roads, where the easiest routes from place to place -- or to the best hunting spots -- are often across the frozen ocean. But for five years before I was there the sea had failed to freeze, giving the hunters and their dogs nowhere to go.

It is much the same story hundreds of miles away at Qaanaak in the island's far northwest. The sea still freezes there, but the ice comes one and a half months later than a few years ago, and melts one and a half months earlier. For the local Inuit, who subsist by hunting over the ice with their sleds, it is -- as explained to me -- "like your boss taking away three months for your pay without giving you notice."

You can hear the howling of the idle dogs, reputedly descended from wolves, all over Ilulissat. But even this is not the most remarkable, or portentous, sound that fills the air. That sound -- loud booms that sometimes rumble like approaching thunder or other times crack sharply like a gunshot -- accompanies the calving of yet another iceberg from the giant Sermeq Kujalleq [see map at bottom of next page] glacier reaching the sea just beyond the canine valley.

The booms are ever more frequent these days, for the glacier is melting ever faster as Greenland warms up three times as fast as the rest of the world. Every day it now sheds enough fresh water, in the form of ice, to supply the whole of London or New York for an entire year.

The glacier, the biggest in Greenland, is racing towards the sea at a rate of nearly ten miles a year, five times as fast as a decade ago. And it can go even faster -- at one point scientists were shocked to find that part of it had surged three miles in just 90 minutes.

You can see the start of the process if you fly over the glacier. Melt water on the surface is finding its way down to the rock beneath, not in gentle trickles but in giant waterfalls that have carved great caverns in the ice; some are said to be as large as the Niagara Falls.

This has created a lake 500 meters deep under the glacier, lifting the ice and lubricating the glacier's passage. And much the same is happening all around Greenland, causing its ice-cap to melt far faster than anyone had expected, contributing to the inevitable rising of the world's seas.

I defy any rational person to see all this and not be struck with the urgency of combatting global warming. The ministers at this week's climate meeting will surely be shown the glacier; they have been promised "excursions to ... view first hand the consequences of climate change."

Rational people that they are, let's hope they get the point and act accordingly ... and fast.

--

Below: Video of the Ilulissat Icefjord from www.100places.com.

This video is from www.icescapes.tv

The Jakobshavn Glacier in western Greenland drains the central ice sheet, and it is retreating inland faster than any other. This image shows the glacier in 2001. The glacier flows from upper right to lower left. The fjord beyond the glacier terminus is packed with seasonal ice and icebergs. Terminus locations before 2001 were determined by surveys; more recent contours were derived from Landsat data. Without measurements of ice thickness, however, the picture of ice loss is incomplete. -- NASA image by Cindy Starr, based on data from Ole Bennike and Anker Weidick (Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland) and Landsat data.Courtesy NASA's Earth Observatory

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I interviewed by email Dr. Mark Serreze, recently named director of The National Snow and Ice Data Center. Partly I wanted him to explain his “death spiral” metaphor for Arctic ice (see NSIDC: Arctic melt passes the point of no return, “We hate to say we told you so, but we did”).

And partly I wanted his reaction to the blog, WattsUpWithThat, the quintessential victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS), who called his appointment “Bad News.”

But first, let’s look at where the Arctic sea ice extent stands as of June 3 [click for update]:

Note: The satellites only measure ice area. Since Arctic ice has been thinning sharply in the past two years, we might be at record low volume for early June — see North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: “It’s like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely.”

NSIDC reported Wednesday, the “Melt season gains momentum“:

After a slow start to the melt season, ice extent declined quickly in May. Scientists are monitoring the ice pack for signs of what will come this summer. The thinness of the ice pack makes it likely that the minimum ice extent will again fall below normal, but how far below normal will depend on atmospheric conditions through the summer….

Because the 2009 melt season started out with a thin ice pack, September ice extent will likely be below average yet again. The thinning ice pack, discussed in our April post, has played a major role in the strong decline of September ice extent. Thinner ice requires less energy to melt. It also tends to be fractured, with more areas of open water. Since water absorbs more solar energy than ice, heat from the sun warms up areas of open ocean and promotes even more melt.

Back to Serreze. I’ve been a fan of his since I attended the American Meteorological Society talk he gave in November 2007. He is an impressive cryosphere scientist, who is also a climate science expert:

He studies Arctic climate, and the causes and global implications of climate change in the Arctic. Serreze is well known for his research on the declining sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean.

Serreze has authored over 90 scientific publications, including an award-winning textbook, The Arctic Climate System, which he co-wrote with former NSIDC director Roger Barry. He has also served on numerous advisory boards and science steering committees. In 2004, he testified before the U.S. Congress on changes in Arctic sea ice cover.

But Anthony Watts is one of the hard-core deniers. Not content to simply dispute the science with disinformation, he attacks climate scientists. Watts said ealier this year that NASA’s James Hansen is “no longer a scientist.” But then Watts routinely smears all climate scientists, approvingly reprinting denier manifestos that claim global warming “is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind” — see here.

So perhaps it isn’t a surprise that he would attack and misrepresent Serreze, writing:

Last year we had the forecast from NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze of an “ice free north pole”. As we know, that didn’t even come close to being true. Summer 2008 had more arctic ice than summer 2007, and summer 2007 was not “ice free” by any measure.

Yes, Serreze said we might have “an ice free north pole,” but had Watts bothered to read the original story, he’d know that Serreze was simply talking about the physical North Pole — and not using “north pole” to refer to the entire Arctic being ice free!

Climate Progress: The global warming denier site WattsUpWithThat has attacked your appointment, in particular criticizing you for your prediction last year that the North Pole could be ice free in 2008. I’m wondering if you have any comments on that prediction.

Serreze: I have yet to lose any sleep over what is talked about in WattsUpWithThat or any other similar blog that insists on arguing from a viewpoint of breathaking ignorance.

To set the record straight, I never made a “prediction”. I said the north pole might melt out and I was not alone in making such speculation. It did not melt out and I got some flack for this. So be it. As for the “great recovery” of ice extent in 2008 heard in some circles, it was a recovery from lowest (2007) to second lowest (2008).

I find little room for optimism here.

Duh!

How anti-scientific is Watts? He puts up this poster of a Serreze talk:

Pretty innocuous stuff, no? Humans are cranking up the Arctic heat by pouring steadily increasing amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which in turn cranks up warming in the Arctic, a very well documented phenomenon (see “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?“).

But for Watts, who is apparently in the tinfoil-hat and black helicopter club, that poster reveals dark purposes:

Does anybody live in Maryland that can attend this talk? I’d just love to see what sort of “heat” he’s talking about “cranking up”.

Seriously.

Back to the interview:

CP: You have used the term “death spiral” to describe the loss of Arctic ice — I’d be interested if you had any further comments or elaboration on what is happening in the Arctic and what you think its implications are for humankind.

Serreze: The downward trend in September sea ice extent seems to be accerating. That reflects the combination of three things:

Serreze is it taking a somewhat conservative line here, I think, since we are probably looking at very close to ice-free summers by 2020 — but then again, just two or three years ago, this prediction that would have been quite alarmist, given that essentially every climate model the IPCC had been predicting the Arctic would not go ice free until about 2100. Such is the rate of change of our understanding of how dire the climate situation is.

CP: I was hoping you might say in a sentence or two what you hope to accomplish as Director.

Serreze: My vision is for NSIDC to become an indispensable asset through providing the U.S. and global research communities, the public and decision makers the data, products and information needed to understand and prepare for the consequences of the earth’s changing cryosphere. My job is to achieve this vision.

The NSIDC is in very good hands.

The cryosphere, however, is not. If we stay on our current emissions path, if we keep listening to the science deniers of WattsUpWithThat, the planet is headed toward an ice free state. Future generations will wonder how there ever could have been such a thing as a “cryosphere scientist” or a National Snow and Ice Data Center.

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Today’s question:  How the heck does the Greenland ice sheet survive accelerated disintegration from projected 20°F warming by the 2090s?

I previously blogged on how the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change has joined the climate realists — the growing group of scientists who understand that the business as usual emissions path leads to unmitigated catastrophe (see “Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path” and below).

Back in January, the Program issued a remarkable report in January, by over a dozen leading experts, doubling their 2095 warming projection to 5.2°C. The media mostly ignored it, which is no surprise, since the media generally ignores the realists in general (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm).

Now, the MIT study has been published in a peer-reviewed journal — The American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate (subs. req’d) — which obviously it makes it much more credible and high-profile.  Reuters has a good story on it, “Global warming could be twice as bad as forecast.”  The study concludes:

The MIT Integrated Global System Model is used to make probabilistic projections of climate change from 1861 to 2100. Since the model’s first projections were published in 2003 substantial improvements have been made to the model and improved estimates of the probability distributions of uncertain input parameters have become available. The new projections are considerably warmer than the 2003 projections, e.g., the median surface warming in 2091 to 2100 is 5.2°C compared to 2.4°C in the earlier study. Many changes contribute to the stronger warming; among the more important ones are taking into account the cooling in the second half of the 20th century due to volcanic eruptions for input parameter estimation and a more sophisticated method for projecting GDP growth which eliminated many low emission scenarios.

[Note:  That rise is compared to 1981-2000 temperature levels.  So you can add at least 0.5 °C and 1.0 °F for comparison with pre-industrial temperatures, which I did in the headline -- see "A (Hopefully) Clarifying Note on Temperature."]

The MIT press release calls for “rapid and massive” action to avoid this.  Study co-author Ronald Prinn, the co-director of the Joint Program and director of MIT’s Center for Global Change Science, says, it is important “to base our opinions and policies on the peer-reviewed science….  There’s no way the world can or should take these risks.”   Duh!

Their median projection for the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in 2095 is a jaw-dropping 866 ppm.

Projected decadal mean concentrations of CO2. Red solid lines are median, 5% and 95% percentiles for present study: dashed blue line the same from their 2003 projection.

As grim as this prediction is, it is still almost certainly an underestimate of what will happen on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions, as Prinn explains:

And the odds indicated by this modeling may actually understate the problem, because the model does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur, for example, if increased temperatures caused a large-scale melting of permafrost in arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. Including that feedback “is just going to make it worse,” Prinn says.

Speaking of feedbacks, the model shows staggering warming near the poles (see “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?“):

Figure 9:  Latitudinal distribution of changes in SAT in the last decade of 21st century relative to 1981-2000. Red solid lines are median, 5% and 95% percentiles for present study: dashed blue line the same from Webster et al., (2003).

Median arctic warming — north of 70° latitude — (from 1981-2000 levels) is 20°F!  How could Greenland’s ice sheet possibly survive that?

Why the change in the 2009 modeling, compared to 2003? The Program’s website explains:

There is no single revision that is responsible for this change. In our more recent global model simulatations, the ocean heat-uptake is slower than previously estimated, the ocean uptake of carbon is weaker, feedbacks from the land system as temperature rises are stronger, cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases over the century are higher, and offsetting cooling from aerosol emissions is lower. No one of these effects is very strong on its own, and even adding each separately together would not fully explain the higher temperatures. Rather than interacting additively, these different affects appear to interact multiplicatively, with feedbacks among the contributing factors, leading to the surprisingly large increase in the chance of much higher temperatures.

The carbon sinks are saturating, and the amplifying feedbacks are worse than previously thought — that, of course, is a central understanding of all climate realists (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius” for links to the various feedbacks that have been ignored by most climate models).

Andrew Freedman at washingtonpost.com had one of the very few stories on this important study back in February and reprints this useful figure from MIT:

He explains:

Results of the studies are depicted online in MIT’s “Greenhouse Gamble” exercise that conveys the “range of probability of potential global warming” via roulette wheel graphics (shown above). The modeling output showed that under both a “no policy” scenario and one in which nations took action beginning in the next few years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the odds have shifted in favor of larger temperature increases.

For the no policy scenario, the researchers concluded that there is now a nine percent chance (about one in 11 odds) that the global average surface temperature would increase by more than 7°C (12.6°F) by the end of this century, compared with only a less than one percent chance (one in 100 odds) that warming would be limited to below 3°C (5.4°F).

To repeat, on our current emissions path, we have a 9% chance of an incomprehensibly catastrophic warming of 7°C by century’s end, but less than a 1% chance of under 3°C warming.

“The take home message from the new greenhouse gamble wheels is that if we do little or nothing about lowering greenhouse gas emissions that the dangers are much greater than we thought three or four years ago,” said Ronald G. Prinn, professor of atmospheric chemistry at MIT. “It is making the impetus for serious policy much more urgent than we previously thought.”

The time to act is now.

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To study the conditions of sea ice, one must walk very carefully across it. Here, two members of the Catlin Arctic Survey team maneuver a supply sled through a rough patch.Courtesy Catlin Arctic Survey

To millions around the world, Pen Hadow -- the first person ever to trek to the North Pole alone without any support -- is simply one of the most extraordinary people alive. To me, however, he is also the man who didn't come to dinner.

Let me explain. One day last year Pen arranged to come to our village for dinner with me and the local Member of Parliament who was also, at the time, the shadow minister of the environment. The MP and his wife, Peter and Claire Ainsworth, got ready to host him in their home, only to receive a message that he was physically unable to get there.

So my wife and I had a convivial evening alone with the Ainsworths, all of us much amused that the man who had unhesitatingly taken to his feet when a ski broke two thirds of the way to the Pole -- and who had frequently swum through freezing waters when they barred his way -- had been unable to make it through England's placid home counties.

To be fair, I seem to remember that there was a reason for his inability to show, and he did turn up for tea with us a few weeks later. Hadow then told us of an expedition he was trying to finance to measure the condition of the Arctic's ice. He was anxious to get the job done this year so that the results could be presented to December's vital climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

It takes quite a lot to deter a man who once banged an attacking polar bear over the head with a saucepan ("The 'boing' on its skull freaked it out and made it run", he recalls.) Inevitably, Hadow pulled off the new expedition, with support from Prince Charles, the World Wildlife Fund and the United Nations Environment Programme.

So, with his mission just completed, I rang him up at the weekend while he was recovering in Ottawa to ask out how it had gone. He described the task he and his equally intrepid companions -- fellow Brits Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley -- had just completed as being "hunter gatherers for information." And, indeed, the data they brought back is badly needed.

Satellite imagery shows that the extent of the polar ice cap is shrinking dramatically -- at a rate of about eleven percent a decade since 1979 (losing an area the size of Alaska in 2007 alone). But the thickness of the ice is also vitally important, and neither satellites nor submarines are very good at measuring it. The only real solution is to get out and do it on the ground, or rather on the ice, and that's a job for someone like Rupert Nigel Pendrill Hadow (to relay his full name).

Pen Hadow works the manual ice drill the team had to resort to after their ice-penetrating radar kit malfunctioned.Courtesy Catlin Arctic SurveyHe and his team set out from northern Canada in early March to walk 1,200 kilometers to the North Pole, dragging behind them an ice-penetrating radar kit that would measure its thickness every ten centimeters of the way. To their "huge frustration," the device failed to work for most of the way and they had to rely instead on boring holes in the ice and using an adapted tape measure.

The results were surprising. Hadow told me that he had been advised by some of the world's leading experts that their route would mainly take them over "multi-year" ice that had long been there, failing to melt in the summer. But as it happens, Hadow went on, only two of the team's 1,500 bore holes found multi-year ice. Virtually all the rest, at an average of 1.774 meters thick, turned out to be "first year ice" that had only frozen this past winter, and -- since the Arctic sea ice moves around -- had presumably drifted onto the line of their trek.

That, in itself, does not reveal a great deal about the thickness of the ice-cap. Indeed, what the measurements did show was slightly reassuring. For example, said Pen, "it was thicker than would be expected for first year ice at this stage of the season," suggesting that "this could be a recovery year" in the Arctic -- at least for the time being.

But it will have revealed valuable scientific data that will now be analyzed by Prof. Wieslaw Maslowski of the U.S. Naval Post Graduate School, one of the more pessimistic authorities on the Arctic ice.

Naturally, there were some narrow escapes for Hadow and team, most notably when they woke at 3:15 a.m. one morning to find the ice floe on which they had camped was beginning to break up. Somehow, with the aid of torches in the pitch dark, they managed to find the single two-foot wide spot where their floe abutted a neighboring one, allowing them to escape in time.

So perhaps it's not too much to hope that Hadow will manage to find his way back to our village to report back in full on his recent adventure After all, he has still to have that dinner.

--

Video: Pen Hadow discusses sea ice conditions during 2009 mission:

Video: NASA animation of sea-ice changes over the past three decades (via WWF YouTube channel):

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