Sorry, the air conditioner is broken

Subtitle: And, the vandals drill more

This blog relayed a warning before from Dr. Eban Goodstein: “The Arctic acts as the planet’s air conditioner, and that function is already breaking down.” There were indications all over the Arctic this year — warmer air, less sea ice, melting glaciers.

Da, iz like shoot fish in oil barrel, Sarah, just breathe in and hold it.

A team of 69 international scientists warn about this tipping point… they do not expect this critical, weather-making region to return to its former, colder state. The melt means extra heat, and tipping points, Virginia, are non-linear.* Those affected include those living in the most populated parts of the Northern Hemisphere.

Dr. Goodstein estimates “an annual rate of 3 billion tons of CO2 — the equivalent of 500 coal-powered plants, or more than 40% of all U.S. fossil fuel emissions.” He expects this to more than double by the end of the century.

Editor’s note: The NSF (National Science Foundation) has warned that release of even a small fraction of the methane stored in the vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf “could trigger abrupt climate warming.”

This entry was written by jcwinnie, posted on 2010-10-23 at 10:46 am, filed under chaos, climate, thermodynamics and tagged emissions, petroleum, thermodynamics. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

8 Comments

jcwinnie

Posted 2010-10-23 at 11:06 am | Permalink

And, The Plumber says it will be an epoch before it is fixed.

Have a Nice Day!
jcwinnie

Posted 2010-10-23 at 11:53 am | Permalink

Climate Wire’s Lauren Morello has more about the New Normal.
jcwinnie

Posted 2010-11-7 at 8:16 am | Permalink

There is evidence (Polyak et. al 2010) that current conditions of an extensively glaciated Arctic were established at the beginning of the Pleistocene, about 3 million years ago. The quaternary glacial-interglacial cycles, governed by orbital cycles, are reflected in the Arctic sea ice extension. At times, average temperature has been 3-5 °C higher than present and totally or almost totally ice-free conditions during summer occured.

It is thought that the main driver of these ice retreats is summer insolation at high latitudes, though regional effects (e.g. the presence of large ice sheets) produce geographically non uniform or delayed retreats. The last occurrence of a maximum in northern high latitude summer insolation was about 10 thousand years ago. It was a generally warmer than present period, but not uniformly so, and the temperature north of 60° was a couple of degrees centigrade above present (Kaufmann 2004).

A recent review on arctic ice variability suggests that “the seasonal Arctic sea ice cover was strongly reduced during most of the early Holocene and there appear to have been periods of ice-free summers in the central Arctic Ocean”. This finding lowers the “threshold” for an ice-free summer to a few degrees centigrade of warming.

John Cook
jcwinnie

Posted 2010-11-7 at 12:03 pm | Permalink

Eager to win approval for its stalled plan to drill for oil in the Alaskan Arctic, Royal Dutch Shell is beginning a public lobbying campaign, including national advertising, on Monday. As part of the effort, the giant oil company is promising to make unprecedented preparations to prevent the kind of disaster that polluted the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year.
Shell’s plan to drill in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas has been snarled in regulatory delays and lawsuits for four years. The company has already invested $3.5 billion in the projects, and it was close to overcoming the final regulatory hurdles to begin drilling when BP’s Macondo well blew out April 20, killing 11 rig workers and spilling millions of barrels of oil into the gulf.

NY Times

What could possibly go wrong?
jcwinnie

Posted 2010-12-2 at 8:06 pm | Permalink

Since methane is 23 times worse than carbon dioxide, large quantities of methane will make global warming much worse.

And, if there’s a place that contains a lot of sequestered methane, it’s the permanfrost in Northern Russia. That’s why it’s such bad news to learn that this permafrost is melting and releasing methane rapidly. The video below from the BBC shows a scientific expedition in Western Siberia, and it’s obvious that the “perma” part of “permafrost” can’t stand for “permanent” anymore.

“If we lose the tundra, we lose a livable planet.” Joe Romm
jcwinnie

Posted 2010-12-2 at 8:50 pm | Permalink

And, speaking of GHGs and tipping points, here’s a meme for you — the “compost bomb” — a rapid release of carbon from peat lands also could accelerate global warming.
jcwinnie

Posted 2010-12-7 at 8:34 am | Permalink

Professor Joe reports that “the death spiral of Arctic sea ice continued this year, according to both observations and modeling.”

The figure above comes from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

“Researchers often look at ice age as a way to estimate ice thickness. Older ice tends to be thicker than younger, one- or two-year-old ice.”

In September, NSIDC’s director Mark Serreze said, “The volume of ice left in the Arctic likely reached the lowest ever level this month” and “I stand by my previous statements that the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It’s not going to recover.”

Also in September, a first-of-its-kind analysis by an international team of 18 top scientists found “less ice covers the Arctic today than at any time in recent geologic history” and this ice loss is “unexplainable by any of the known natural variabilities.”

In November, Rear Admiral David Titley, the Oceanographer of the Navy and the Director of Navy’s Task Force Climate Change, testified that “the volume of ice as of last September has never been lower” — and that it is headed to zero in the summer. You can read his testimony here.
jcwinnie

Posted 2010-12-8 at 6:37 pm | Permalink

HuffPoz Kassidy Brown echoes the concern in her post, “As goes the Arctic, so goes the Planet.”

After Gutenberg