Disturbing Arctic Sea Ice News

Before my concentration on Penn. Marcellus news and the summer blogging doldrums, I was frequently posting on climate change and suggesting is it should be a big issue in the election - "It's the climate stupid."  During my slowdown, weather and climate have become big news with the record heat and drought.  Jeff Master's Weather Underground blog has become a drumbeat of a destabilized climate. Here are just a few entries from July:
   Record warmth at the top of the Greenland Ice Sheet
   Historic 2012 U.S. drought continues to expand and intensify
   June 2012: Earth's 4th warmest June; heavy rains in Beijing kill 37
   Greenland experiences melting over 97% of its area in mid-July
   Oil industry-funded "BEST" study finds global warming is real, manmade
   July 2012: hottest month in U.S. history
You get the picture. Now one thing I used to post quite regularly were Arctic sea ice coverage images from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.  We've seen some high amounts of melting this year, but I found the data posted yesterday unsettling. First, look at the trend and see how the rate of melting had recently increased:

Then look at the ice coverage, notice the the big break-up near the Bering Sea along the Siberian coast:

The reason I find this image disturbing is because it reminds me of ice on a frozen puddle just before it completely melts, when it's soft, fragile, thin and full of holes.

The accelerated melting and break-up is due in part to an unusually strong summer storm in the Arctic. In and of itself this is not earth-shattering. Though uncommon, strong summer storms are not unknown, but this one comes as part of a package deal with more heat and moisture in the Arctic and more melting.  Recent data suggests that the sea ice is melting faster than expected, maybe as much as 50% more, and the volume is decreasing as well. The volume is a crucial element here.  The Arctic will continue to freeze over in the winter, but much of that will now melt in the summer. Thus the we will see more and more thin (low-volume) single-year ice instead of thicker multi-year ice. This ice is more susceptible to melting, which leads to more melting in the summer, less high-albedo ice to reflect sunlight, more exposed water to absorb and retain heat, delayed onset of winter freezing and thinner ice. Rinse and repeat.

The rapid decrease in Arctic sea ice is what caused me to change my thinking that climate change was a long-term problem that would incrementally affect us to a short-term unpredictable crisis. A change in the Arctic climate affects storm generation and jet-stream patterns, more convoluted jet stream paths means greater and more unpredictable shifts in weather at lower latitudes and we could see wide swings in winter from intense snow and rain storms to record warmth, maybe in a single season.

Incredibly Warm Weather in the Eastern U.S.

Yes, any place in the eastern continental U.S. will have an unseasonably warm day or two during the cold seasons, but not the entire eastern half at once and not more than a day or two.  What is happening now is unprecedented in over a century of record keeping:

First, consider the sheer number of daily record highs either tied or broken over the past 7-10 days. The counts below are courtesy of the National Climatic Data Center. This speaks to the widespread nature and longevity of this warm spell. The records from March 16 to March 19 have not been fully compiled at this time and will be added when they become available.

Day	# of Records
Fri. Mar. 9	101
Sat. Mar. 10	105
Sun. Mar. 11	189
Mon. Mar. 12	138
Tue. Mar. 13	218
Wed. Mar. 14	457
Thu. Mar. 15	593

In a typical March, particularly in the nation's northern tier, you may see, perhaps, one or perhaps two days of record warmth before a sharp cold front bring that spring tease to a screeching halt. Not so in March 2012. 

Through March 19, International Falls, Minn., self-promoted as the "Icebox of the Nation", has set daily record highs 9 of the past 10 days! This includes Sunday's 79 degree high, which is the warmest day ever recorded during March in International Falls.

Jeff Masters at Weather Underground notes:

International Falls, Minnesota hit 78°F yesterday, 42° above average, and the 2nd hottest March temperature on record in the Nation's Icebox. The record of 79°F was set the previous day. Remarkably, the low temperature for International Falls bottomed out at 60°F yesterday, tying the previous record high for the date. I've never seen a station with a century-long data record have its low temperature for the date match the previous record high for the date. Yesterday was the seventh consecutive day that International Falls broke or tied a daily record. That is spectacularly hard to do for a station with a century-long weather record. The longest string of consecutive records being broken I'm aware of is nine days in a row, set June 2 - 10, 1911 in Tulsa, Oklahoma (with weather records going back to 1905.) International Falls has a good chance of surpassing nine consecutive records this week. (emphasis added)

Now this all is related to an extreme configuration of the jetstream brought on by an atypically strong La Nina and a strong positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (which immediately followed a strong negative NAO that gave us excessively snowy winters in SE PA in in 2010 and 2011). But those are simply the proximate causes. Any large amplitude swings in oscillators in a complex require additional energy to be added or kept in the system.

I've only been in the SE Penn Piedmont region since '05, but I've noted an instability in the weather patterns since '08.  True that is only a unrepresentative anecdotal sample, but it jibes with the wild swings in weather and departure from normals that is well documented. This year we have forsythias blooming on St. Patrick's day, two years ago  the fireflies were out weeks earlier than usual.

But no, all of the above can't have anything to do with the data presented below, can it?

 131 years of global warming  in 26 seconds, NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies

"It's the climate stupid" Continued

After two unusually snowy winters, the season has been AWOL this year in SE Penn.  My crocuses started to come up around Feb. 10 and we have daffodils blooming.  Meanwhile Europe has been freezing.  These extremes have been tied to excessive (to largest recorded) of the Arctic and North Atlantic Oscillations, which may be due to the ever decreasing Arctic Sea icepack.   The GISTEMP plots for December and January tell the tale (note how warm the Arctic is):

As I would expect and have predicted, the public is taking notice:

Americans' belief in global warming is on the rise, along with temperatures and surprising weather changes, according to a new university poll.

The survey by the University of Michigan and Muhlenberg College says 62 percent of those asked last December think the Earth is getting warmer. That's up from 55 percent in the spring of that year and 58 percent in December 2010. It is the highest proportion in two years.

Nearly half the people who say they believe in global warming base that on personal observations of the weather. Climate researchers say that's reaching the correct conclusion for reasons that aren't quite right.

 No, the basis is not quite right, but in a world of excessive politicized and unvetted information sometimes people with busy day-to-day lives will rely on the own immediate observations.  If this is bad (i.e. stormy and hot) summer I expect the denialists will take a big hot in public opinion.

More crazy weather

Well despite the record-breaking October Northeast snow, the month overall was warmer than average in the U. S. 

But in terms of ongoing crazy we have Oklahoma tornadoes being followed by snow in the Plains region. 

And for real crazy we have an unusually powerful Bering Sea storm packing 85 mph winds about to slam into western Alaska, possibly producing 4 to 10 foot storm surges.

Climate Drumbeat Continues

Here in SE Penn, we had a bit of snow on Saturday October 29.

This of course is the same record-setting storm that dumped over 30 inches of the white stuff in western Mass.  Once again, any single extreme event cannot be attributed to climate change, but we have been having quite a few around the globe the past few years.  Western Massachusetts has had tornado producing storms and flooding from Hurricane Irene this year as well.  I imagine a destabilized climate regime to be like the change of seasons in New England, greatly contrasting air masses leading to unstable moisture laden air and storms, but on a global scale. And for those who cannot connect heavy snow with global warming I would point out that in the spring in New England we have had some our heaviest snowfalls as the seasons change.

Let's not forget the ingoing flooding in Thailand and ongoing drought in Texas.  By themselves they mean little on a global scale and there is always drought and flooding at any given time - but record breakers all over?

What we do know is that it is warming, and a Koch brothers financed dissection of the data has confirmed it.  The spin has already started to discount this research, in some cases it is verging on hysteria.

Update:
Climate experts: Expect more extreme weather

Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press. The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be issued in a few weeks, after a meeting in Uganda. It says there is at least a 2-in-3 probability that climate extremes have already worsened because of man-made greenhouse gases.

Harsh Realities Set in

Wall St. tanked today, with the Dow falling more than 500 points, in what is called a "correction".  Some believe, in short, Kudlow's wonderful investing class realized that nothing was worth as much as they thought.

Fareed Zakaria thinks that the Democrats will now mirror the obstinacy of the Teabaggers and the so-called super committee will deadlock and accomplish nothing.  So we have unbridgeable divide in Congress, thae aggravating part about that is that is the partisan claim that it represents the electorate.  In truth, the partisans make up less than half the voters in many states and their Archie and Meathead bases are an even smaller slice of the population.  Yet due to a rigged electoral system the minorities and their war control the government. I think Obama honestly tried to be post-partisan , but the system is fixed to prevent it from happening.

Texans were told to conserve electricity or run the risk of power outages. Now they are occurring sporadically and rolling blackouts may begins as electricity use skyrockets in the face of unprecedented heat:

"I can't remember any year with the magnitude and length of this heat wave," Jack Hayes, director of the National Weather Service, told msnbc.com on Thursday.

And it's not just Dallas, or even Texas, for that matter. On Thursday, 14 states from Texas to Virginia were under heat alerts. Several dozen deaths have been tied to the heat since early July.

Burnt to a crisp

Record temperatures were recorded in July in all fifty states, including Alaska:

The temperature at the Northway weather station in Southeast Fairbanks County hit a record 97 F (36.1 C) on July 11.

Hawaii is not influenced by North American continental weather and is usually remarkably constant, but even there record highs were recorded.

Furthermore, almost half the states are drier than normal and record drought continues int the South-central region:

Officials at the National Drought Mitigation Center said the July percentage is the highest recorded level of drought since the monitor began documenting conditions 12 years ago.

So not a long record, but still indicates the severity of the situation.

A Friday Round-Up for a Thin Week

Little time to blog this week, so I'll just do a round-up of things I wanted to talk about but didn't have time to. I have a lot to say on the News Corp phone hacking scandal, but that deserves its own post.  On thing that has just happened is that the former head of News International and current CEO of Dow Jones has resigned.

Speaking of News Corp, a blog in that tree-hugging, anti-business rag The Wall Street Journal tells us that oil production can't keep with demand.  Some interesting points from James Herron's Oil Production: Running to Stand Still:

In June, Saudi Arabia responded to rising oil demand, against the protests of fellow OPEC members, by pumping an extra 700,000 barrels a day of oil...So what effect did this major effort have on the crucial balance between oil supply and demand? Very little.

Oil supply from countries outside OPEC for 2011 was revised down by 0.2 million barrels a day because of “prolonged production outages” in a number of important oil producing regions, the IEA said.

More oil is increasingly being consumed at source. The Saudis pumped an extra 0.7 million barrels a day in June, but half of this was consumed domestically.

The Crowell & Moring law firm said birth defects in W. Va are the fault of inbreeding, not mountain-top mining.  Nice strategy, blame a stereotype, not the effects of your client's operations: massive exposure of coal seams (which can include sulfur and heavy metals) to oxygen and water, creating acid mine drainage, as well as radical alteration of surface and groundwater flow.

In their festering Randian-Calvinists minds, the Teabaggers believe themselves to be disciples of fictitious Founding Fathers who were all evangelical protestants who never would think of taxation and fees as a way to pay for the operation of the Federal government.  One of many things they ignore is that the first government under the Constitution solved a massive debt problem by RAISING REVENUE.  When Western Pennsylvania farmers rebelled against an excise tax on corn whiskey, President Washington even raised troops to enforce collection.  The birth of the Coast Guard in the form of the revenue marine came about as a result of revenue collection as well. Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton obtained approval from Congress to build the first ten cutters for the purpose of collecting tariffs and stopping smuggling.

Conor Freidersdorf in The Atlantic watched the Palin documentary in empty Orange County theater.The turnout  shows how overrated she is by the pundits.

It's pretty pleasant here in SE PA, but our fifth heat wave is expected next week.  The drought and heat continue in the south and Plains, leading the Governor of Oklahoma to call for prayer.  Blame it on God eh, not our abuse of the planet eh? When you look at the comments in the linked article notice all the Texas-Okie denialsts claiming it's always hot there.  That begs the question, why pray for it to end then?  But don't worry Southern farmers, that evil federal government will bail you out from the effects of extreme weather.  Too bad most of you vote for people who deny climate change and believe the federal budget should be balanced immediately by only cutting spending.

...and the drumbeat rolls on.

I didn't have the chance to post the May GISTEMP anonaly map when it was published earlier in June, but here it is:

You can see that the warm anomaly in the arctic continues unabated, which is reflected in the latest Arctic Sea ice data from the NSIDC:

Continuing in this theme, NOAA's latest climate briefing was reported and among the unmistakable signs of warming is that Greenland has melted the most in a half-century of record keeping.

What other effects could climate change have? Well if you live in area that will get hotter and drier on average and you consume a lot juice to keep your excessively large buildings cool, you could experience power plants tripping off-line, like they are in Texas. Rick Perry will solve it with fasting and prayer.  Don't these idiots ever consider that the Big Man may not like humans blaming their own stupidity on Him?

Fire and Flood Continue

Regardless of whether or not the extreme weather this particular year is the result of climate instability, it is what we should eventually expect. The NASA Earth Observatory page has some great images of the ongoing events, n particular, the record-breaking floods on the Missouri River and the drought-related fires in the SW. These two events are also happen to be ongoing examples of the far-reaching effects of these extreme weather.

Flooded Missouri River, (click for larger image).

The Missouri floods are threatening vital infrastructure, including nuclear power plants. The berm surrounding the Fort Calhoun plant has collapsed, though the reactors were fortunately shutdown. Nevertheless this will have an impact on when the plants can start generating again.

Fires in New Mexico (click for larger image).

Meanwhile the Las Conchas fire (above) threatens the national lab in Los Alamos, forcing it to close and 100 nearby residents to be evacuated.  Any natural disasters can have unexpected and far-reaching consequences, as they become more common the impacts will pile up.

It's the climate stupid.

The idea that all the extreme weather is due to climate change has seeped in the public and media subconscious. From today alone we have a commentary in The Guardian (not too surprising), a Reuters story on the impact on the insurance industry, worries about risk to investors on Pensions and Investments, WCVB-TV (Boston) coverage, some links on Highly Allocthonous and even a story in the Tehran Times.

So even while the denialists scream and the climate activists fret and wring their hands, I think the idea that the extreme weather is the result of climate change is taking root in the public mind, even if you can't connect single weather events to a climate shift.

I have a hunch that climate change and extreme weather will be a dominant issue in the 2012 U.S. elections. I;m talking about a hunch here, a flash of intuition, not a forecast based on careful analysis of polls, blah, blah, blah.  I could very well be wrong, but I'm throwing that out there, Joe Morgan style.

Friday Wrap-up, June 10

Some quick takeson the converging challenges before the week ends :

Over at Highly Allocthonous, Anne Jefferson reminds us that there is still significant flooding on-going around the world.

And if it's too wet in many places, that means it may be too dry in others, as seen with the dessicated American Southwest and record-breaking wildfires.

AZ fires from space, June 9, 2011

Still on climate, ever earlier springs in the Arctic will have many consequences, including on migratory songbirds that breed in the tundra.

Oil production cannot keep up with demand, but despite my earlier guess, the failure of  OPEC members to agree to a producion increase was not the fault of Saudi Arabia.

What present-day country would a future America with low taxes and regulation, enforced social conservatism, high income disparity and heavy defense spending resemble?   Pakistan, says Nicholas Kristof .

Wild Weather: The Beat Goes On

Major tornadoes strike Massachusetts, including TWO in Springfield (pics and video).

Record high temperatures across the southern US.
Record flooding in Montana.

"Nuthin to see here folks, move along" say the denialists.
Update: Half of Texas now in severe drought.

Snapshots of Current Extreme Weather in the American Heartland

The ongoing drought in West Texas is the worst on record and dust storm conditions have developed.

 At the same time to the east, the Mississippi River has been experiencing record flooding, including at places like Vicksburg, MS:

USGS stream gauge record for Vicksburg, MS (click for larger image)

 Historic RR station in Vicksburg, MS -CNN (click for a larger image).

And in between drought and flood, we are in the midst of a multi-day tornado outbreak which produced the deadly EF5 that tore the heart out of Joplin, MO and is now producing hail, heavy rains, hail and of course more tornadoes in Texas and Oklahoma:

Wedge tornado near Piedmont, OK, 5/24/11 - MSNBC (click for a larger image).

Again, any single extreme weather event cannot be attributed to climate change alone, but since climate is the expected weather based on avergaes, if extreme weather becomes the norm by definition the climate has changed.  Get that Inhofe?

Spring Weather

This has been a tough spring for gardening 'round these parts. We have a plot out front of house, around 10 x 25 feet, and share a larger garden on SB's father's farm.  I've been able to till our home plot, but since it has rained on average every three days and the temperature swings from near 80 down to 60 degrees F it has been hard to do much else. Plants started inside have done well, but the only seeds I.ve been able to sow outside have been peas, and they have yet to sprout.

In the U.S. as a whole the spring weather continues to be wild, with convoluted jets streams and numerous systems continuing to march across the land. As of today, they are still picking up the pieces from a massive tornado outbreak in North Carolina, awaiting another in the midwest, historic fires rage across a parched Texas, snow is occurring on the back side of the system and record warmth is expected here tomorrow.

There'll be more on the garden as the spring and summer progress, showing that having nothing but a huge lawn around your suburban property is a waste of your land.

Weather Woes and Climate Change Denial

Snow and ice in Dallas means that climate change is a fraud...or so some desperately believe.

But of course the key (in terms of temperature) to looking at the global climatic system is the avenge global temperature and temperature anomalies (departures from long term averages). This NASA animation shows the change in the five-year average anomalies from 1880 to 2010:
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003800/a003817/2010updatewithdates_30fps.m4v

One consequence of over all warming is a change in the pattern of heat redistribution, which affects the way that air masses typically move and interact, in other words weather. Once again, climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. In a stable climate you can still get unusually cold, hot, wet, dry etc weather patterns, but overall those will not change what you expect over the long-term. But if these unusual events become more frequent, then what you would expect long-term would also shift, and you have climate change. As Chris Rowan at Highly Allocthonous pointed out recently, these unexpected events are the ones that have the greatest consequences, because we don't plan for them. Paul Krugman touched on a similar theme in a good synopsis of the current global weather situation, and what if may portend if it is indeed the result of growing climate instability. Not that a Keynesian economist will convince sociopathic denialists.  The extreme weather is partly responsible for the rise of food prices globally (oil prices figure in as well), and ongoing drought in China is threatening their vital wheat crop. 

Business as Usual cannot continue, changes will come in the way things are done, of that I am certain. What I do not know and what no one can know is how is will occur.  Part of the American mythology is the idea that we can as individuals and a country re-invent ourselves. Many who tells us that this happened in the past ("people got things done")believe that all the argument, foot-dragging and denialsim means we can longer do so. What they never learned is that past past challenges and change were accompanied by much wailing and gnashing of the teeth similar to what occurs today. The past then is both sobering and reassuring.

Wild Weather and Warming Climate

Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.  Lately there has been some more "extreme: weather in North America, extreme because it is not what we expect based on long-term averages. There is a strong differential in temperatures in the continental US, with record warmth in the southeast and cold and snow in the central west and Pacific NW.

From the Weather Channel, Tuesday Nov. 2

Along with advancing cold air there were severe thunderstorms and rare November tornadoes in Illinois. The wild weather year continues.

That's the weather, but what to expect? The world continues to warm. NASA scientists using satellite data for 104 large inland lakes found that on average they have warmed two-and-a-half times the increase in atmospheric temps in the same time period. This past summer's Arctic sea ice melt was not as much as in 2007, but it was still well below the baseline. Amazingly, it is lagging in reforming and the ice extent is below 2007 for this time of the year:

Arctic sea ice extent as 11/21, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center,(click for larger image).

Not surprisingly, a record level of greenhouse gases was reached in 2009, and the threat of methane release from bogs and permafrost made the mainstream news with a report this week of methane bubbling up from Siberian lakes.

We label the weather patterns this year as "extreme" or "wild" or simply unusual because they are outside the expected climactic norms (this does not require them to be record breaking BTW). Of course if these weather patterns continue, they would soon constitute new norms and a new climate. This is what we could expect with continued global warming, extreme years punctuated with "normal" years (see this older post).

But what about the possibility of abrupt climate change? The next IPCC report could be dramatically worse, and reports of methane release are indeed alarming because methane is a very potent greenhouse gas and would accelerate warming. We just had a very snowy and/or cold winter in 2010, which could be due to warming in the arctic as sea ice loss in the arctic would shift atmospheric circulation.

Unfortunately, we can not answer the question with confidence and probably will not know it until we are several years or more into an abrupt shift. If it is the case, I expect to see denialism ramp up, not be defeated because denial is not just economic driven propaganda, but a human reaction to threatening news.