Ice Caps: No Danger of Melting In Next Few Years!

The earth moves through cycles, but not all variation is cyclic. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is what makes this interesting.

Tom

 

Yes, you're oversimplifying. Yes the earth does move through cycles.

To make your position explicit: Because the earth has moved through cycles, this recent melting must be natural, and nothing to worry about.

The analogy that is most commonly given, for that logic is: Because lightning starts some fires, there is therefore no such thing as arson.

Do you really think climatologists aren't aware of ice age cycles? Ever ask yourself, why are they worried about this? How is it that they can be smart enough to understand ice ages, and yet worried about this?

Last four ice ages, warming period was about 10,000 to 20,000 years, total warming was about 6 to 10 degrees C in the Antarctic. (Over the entire earth, the temperature change would have been much less than that.) So, at the outside-outside, that's 1 degree C every thousand years. Starting from a cold earth. At the poles.

Prior century, 1 degree in a hundred years, over the entire earth, prediction for this century, more like 5 degrees in a hundred years. Starting, not from a cold earth, but from an earth that was already at the end of the warm period at the end of the ice age.

Last four ice ages, total change in C02 over the warming period was about 100 PPM (from about 180 to 280), again, over at least 10,000 years.

Last century, 100 PPM in 100 years. On top of the already high level at the end of the ice age. Predicted for this century, perhaps an additional 300 PPM in 100 years.

So: Last century saw C02 increase 100x faster than average over the typical ice-age warming period, temperature increase 10x faster than average over the typical ice-age warming period. Both starting from end-of-ice-age high levels. Both predicted to accelerate this century.


Just Google it and try to find a few reasonably scientific sources. Yes, there are natural cycles. Slow natural cycles. Yes, this recent change is manmade. Yes, this is out of the ordinary. No, this is not just a continuation of a natural cycle.

It's vastly faster than the average change over an ice-age, and it's already in territory for C02 not observed on earth for hundreds of thousands of years (based on ice core data). For C02, using less direct indicators (less direct than the gas trapped in the ice), I think the've pushed that back to about 12 million years. Hasn't been this much free C02 for that long, near as they can tell.

By contrast, Homo Sapiens is about 200,000 years old or so.

We should not be surprised if there are some unpleasant blowbacks from the rapid pace of change.

Put it another way. It took >10,000 years for the earth to warm up from the pit of the ice age to the current productive temperature level. With business-as-usual use of fossil fuels, it'll take maybe 300 years (with some broad uncertainty around that) to raise it a further 10C above current temperatures. Good guess the earth will look at least as different then, compared to now, as it did at the pit of the ice age, compared to now. It will result in a vast expansion of desert areas and an even larger reduction in arable land.

Why does the Arctic matter? Cute lil' polar bear cubs? Nope. Carbon and methane.

What is the Arctic? As in, what is permafrost, exactly? Frozen stuff, sure. Frozen what, exactly? Frozen rock? Nope. Frozen dirt, then? Closer. It's more like frozen peat bog. It's a giant meat locker full of carbon. And that extends to the ocean floor, with large deposits of methane clathrates that are already starting to get unstable and vent in the shallower parts of the Arctic ocean.

As the Arctic warms, it will cease to be a sink for carbon, and begin to be a source of additional carbon in the atmosphere.

To see that the Arctic is a big player in the global carbon cycle, and that the temperature will affect its ability to store carbon, you could read this, from the US Geological Survey:

USGS Release: Arctic Now Traps 25 Percent of World’s Carbon -- But That Could Change (10/14/2009 5:20:08 PM)

Take the summer ice away, and it just heats up that much faster.

If the Arctic warms fast enough, it could release lots of methane. Fresh methane is more than 100x as powerful a greenhouse gas as C02. Over the course of a century or two, it decomposes into C02. But put enough of it in the air, faster than it can decompose, and you risk having the greenhouse effect take off on its own -- from Arctic methane to warmer temperatures to more Arctic methane. The predicted endpoint, if that happens, is a peak global average temp about 15C higher than now -- ah, call it 25F warmer, on average (more on land, less over ocean). At that temperature, there would be essentially no arable land left other than a circum-polar fringe of it.

Current Arctic methane release is a modest fraction of global methane release. How warm would it have to get before that "chain reaction' started? Nobody can say for sure, it's never been observed for sure. Intelligent guesses cluster in the range of 5 to 7 degrees warmer than now. Recent MIT study suggested an expected increase of 5c by 2100.

Doom and gloom? Sure. Bound to happen? No. Likely to happen? No. Unscientific? No. Worth figuring in on a cost/benefit analysis? Maybe, depends on your point of view. How much is a potentially avoidable catastrophe work to you?

For an explanation of the methane issue and an opinion that catastrophic methane release from the Arctic is unlikely to happen, you could read this, from Realclimate.org:

RealClimate: Arctic Methane on the Move?

For a less reassuring take on it, you could read this:
Abrupt Climate Change

The most they were willing to say is "unlikely to happen this century".

 

To expand on what Chogan said above, we can also look through pollen records and find vast changes in vegetation communities and even total biome swaps due to these temperature and precipitation changes. When these climatic conditions change then vegetation and soils change. Normally this is not a big deal if the change is gradual. If the change is fast then some species may not adapt and will die off.

The problem is we humans are intrinsically tied to the natural environment for our food, water, and resources. When a major shift in climate occurs it can drastically change ecosystems that we rely on for these items. Can our infrastructure and social systems keep up with these changes? I can assure you that California, long known for it's diverse agriculture, is scared of severe climate change. This fear is held by environmentalists and farmers alike. Temperature (highs/lows, duration, etc.), precipitation (kind, amount, timing etc.) and nutrient inputs are critical factors in growing the world's food. Small changes in these factors can have large effects on productivity. When people don't have food and the economy tanks civil unrest follows. The idea of climate change being cyclical event and something we shouldn't worry about and prepare for, regardless of the cause, is preposterous. You should care...... These people apparently do.

For more information check out the USDA website on climate change or read the report below.

The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity

 

If I may, at the risk of offending both sides, I'd like to offer a simpler answer.

I'd say 'Yes, Earth's temperature goes up and down by itself. But never this much, and never this fast."

 

I'm going to feel terrible if all this fighting to the death over the cause of melting ice started because I posted the cutesie polar bear/Leaf commercial



.

 

IMO, that's a very reasonable statement.

Hah - the global warming "debate" has been raging for decades...

 

So has the debate about the Earth rotating around the Sun. As you can see, some people still deny THAT, too.

 

Technically speaking, it has gone up this much and more, just as fast or even faster. Temps have also dropped in a similar fashion. The difference here is human civilization and our current infrastructure and economic systems. These systems were not in place during those prehistoric times and due to our reliance on technology we may be setting ourselves up for disaster if those fail. In biology you would call that overspecialization and in certain scenarios can lead a species to extinction. Doubtful this would happen in our case but a collapse of societies and lavish living conditions is very possible.

So when someone says "ohh this is natural and has happened before" I can only shake my head at the ignorance that led to such a statement. I wonder if the people of the Gambier Islands said the same thing as their society collapsed...

 

holy crap we are doomed with that debate actually meriting a website. it's a wonder we get anything done. bang head against rock. repeat. are we so brainwashed with religion that nothing can undo it for the masses? i'm all for having an open mind, but...really? a non-moving earth? how about the whole visions in grilled cheese...where does that stand?

 

Oh. Crap. Nothing against the eloquence or scientific rigour of the previous posts, but I was trying to boil it all down to something the uh...more average person could appreciate. But, if I'm just plain wrong, then I suppose I'd better stop spreading all these pernicious lies about climate change.

 

Oh come on. Even the Catholic Church, upstanding bastion of truth and enlightenment that it is, admitted that Copernicus was right. OK, so it took them until 1992.

 

Gotta nip these things in the bud. Next thing ya know you'll be telling folks that Malorn is prophet or that smoking cigarettes is good for the lungs.

 

Nah, I know better than that.

 

That there is more of a chance for cigarettes to be good for your lungs than there is for Malorn being right?

 

Sorry but that is a ridiculous statement.
Current temperature rise is less than in previous interglacial warming periods.
Im talking about the ones that happen naturally every 110,000 years.
Chogan is saying that Co2 has risen quickly and to a recent historical, relatively high amount.That is true, not temperature level.
Temperature might be affected by this Co2 .
But no one has ever proven that Earths current temperature increase is caused by Co2.
They hypothesize with computer models but its still an unproven hypothesis .
Especially when they dont properly utilize the effect of water vapor or clouds in the computer models.
Co2 by itself wont warm the Earth much.
Its not like a blanket .
As for preparing for climate change I have no argument with that.
Its definitely going to change.
Except if you look at the history of the last million years ,the cycle of warming is about to end and we should prepare for ice age as much as for global warming.
I guarantee you both will occur in the next 5000 years.We are at the end of the current interglacial warming period cycle.
The next inevitable ice age could easily begin tomorrow.

 

@ F8L: Now you're just being mean.

I've seen black lungs in a Body Worlds exhibit, and have known a few people who died from smoking.

Malorn put up with a lot of abuse over the years, and remained civil most of the time. Regardless what I thought of any of his arguments, I had at least some small measure of respect for him as a person. I'd still tell him if I thought he was wrong, though.

 

So, where do you stand on this Earth going around the Sun thing?


(Sorry, mojo. Calling my statement ridiculous, and then coming up with *that*...)

 

It is funny that some are worried about the ice melting when there is a mad man out there with nukes.

 

I feel obliged to point out some problems in the posted graph. Whoever cobbled that together didn't understand what they were looking at.

One, that's an estimate of the temperature at a site in the Antarctic. It's not a measure of estimated global temperature change. I tried to make that clear in my discussion. I think I even said that the global temperature change would have been much less. I just didn't want to get into how much less. So it's not on the same scale as the modern instrumental record for global average temperature change. (Temperature change at the poles, over an ice age, is much larger than at the equator, say.) Properly scaled -- so that both the ice core data and the modern data are talking about global average temperature, it looks like this (reversed, so present is at the left of the scale), black line is temperature.



Second, we've seen a 1c rise in the last century. So the instrumental record section can't be flat, as shown in the previously posted graph. It has to have a near-vertical uptick, as shown above.

What you can't get from the graph -- because the time scale is too compressed -- is the rapidity of the change in temperature. I didn't want to get into this "properly scaled" argument -- trying to infer global temperatures from the Vostok core -- but assuming the analysis above is roughly right, then the comparison is:

Interglacial average, global: 0.03C/century
Now, average, global: 1.00C/century

If temps were rising now at 0.03C/century I don't think people would be worried (or would be able to distinguish that from random variation.)

Now, the proper counter-argument to at least some of this is, sure, the average was 0.03C/century, but look at all those rapid up-and-down spikes in the historical record. But even those up-and-down spikes were far slower than the recent increase.

OK, how about, well those cores are not sensitive enough to capture century-scale temperature spikes, so those might have occurred, just won't show in the record. And for that one, I don't have an answer -- how finely they can resolve the temperature proxy in those Vostok ice cores. I'd have to go look that up.

So I'm not saying there's nothing to talk about. I am saying that there's nothing obvious to take comfort in when comparing the ice-core data to our current situation.

My guess is it'll take another decade or two for the US to wake up to the danger. At some point, it's as Lincoln said. I hope. We'll just need a few events to hit people over the head, in some way that resonates. No place for Santa's workshop. Maybe some dustbowl situations in the Soutwest. Sooner or later, this has to sink in.

My other prediction: Next year, once we get close to implementing the incandescent light bulb ban (that has been on the books for five years or so), everybody's going to get all caught up in their underwear about it, and Our Statesmen in Congress will take the bold, daring step of postponing it. Thus proving to the world that we, as a nation, really have lost our minds. At least temporarily.

But eventually, people will figure this out.

 

What, did we allow Cheney to keep them when he left office?