REYKJAVIK,
Iceland -- Get ready to order those beach umbrellas in Barrow.
One of the leading authorities on the physics of northern seas is
predicting an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2020.
"No models here," Peter Wadhams,
professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the
University of Cambridge in England, told the Arctic Circle
Assembly on Sunday. "This is data."
Wadhams has
access to data not only on the extent of ice covering the Arctic, but
on the thickness of that ice. The latter comes from submarines that
have been beneath the ice collecting measurements every year since
1979.
This data shows ice volume "is accelerating
downward," Wadhams said. "There doesn't seem to be anything
to stop it from going down to zero.
"By 2020, one would
expect the summer sea ice to disappear. By summer, we mean September.
... (but) not many years after, the neighboring months would also
become ice-free."
Wadhams later clarified that by
"ice-free" he didn't exactly mean the Arctic was going to
look like the Baltic Sea in summer.
The scientific definition
of "ice-free" is
complicated. It is basically based on the amount of ice
found in a number of grids when looking at the Arctic from space.
An
"ice-free" Arctic, as defined by scientists, would remain
full of floating ice in the summer, but the ice would be broken up
enough that a ship could push through it.
Wadhams'
pronouncement was angrily challenged by one of the scientists
modeling sea ice decline, but the elderly physicist stuck to his
guns. He admitted he is predicting a very early opening of the
Arctic, but this is "not a model.
"I wasn't issuing
any threats to anyone."
The modelers, he told Alaska
Dispatch News later, are very sensitive about their models. But he
added that it's hard to deny the actual data. He had plotted the ice
decline as a graph curving steadily and increasingly downward since
the 1970s and hitting zero in 2020.
Former Alaska North Slope
Borough Mayor Edward Itta, on hand for the conference, liked the
graph.
"It made it easy to understand," he
said.
Wadhams -- who has spent much of his life working in, on
or under the Arctic ice -- said he is not suggesting the Arctic is on
its way to becoming the new Mediterranean. He is only suggesting the
polar ice cap that has locked the region under ice year-round for
centuries is going to go away, at least in summer.
"In
fact, it (the Arctic) could become nastier" because of that, he
added, citing the weather conditions that can develop as rain, wind
and snow whip over vast expanses of broken ice.
Wadhams
has previously made predictions that Arctic melt would occur faster
than most models estimate; in 2012, he said that the Arctic could
be ice-free
by the summer of 2015 or 2016.
That prediction appears unlikely now, but many climate authorities
believe the Arctic may have already reached a tipping point at
which the release of methane gas from thawing permafrost will greatly
accelerate warming. Methane is a greenhouse gas said to be about 30
times more efficient in trapping heat on Earth than the carbon
dioxide pouring into the atmosphere from the homes, motor vehicles
and businesses of the modern industrial world.
Even with the
continued melt, there is no indication the climate of the Arctic will
get all that much friendlier to humans anytime soon, and as
Okalik Eegeesiak, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council
observed Sunday, "the climate is not for everyone."
The
loss of Arctic ice might actually have more of an impact on the
climate than on humans over the short term. Without ice cover to
reflect sunlight back into space, the summer Arctic will begin to
absorb a lot of solar energy.
The effect of that,
Wadhams said, "is like increasing our emissions by a
quarter."
This and Wadhams' other pronouncements came on
the same day the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change issued
a report saying
global warming is real and irreversible.
"The planet
faces a future of extreme weather, rising sea levels and melting
polar ice from soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases,"
the Washington
Post reported. One
of those "other gases" is Arctic methane, about which there
has been a lot of talk here at the Arctic Circle Assembly, a
three-day conference organized by Iceland President Olafur Ragnar
Grimsson and Alaska Dispatch News Publisher Alice Rogoff.
There
is a lot of methane locked in the frozen ground or beneath the
seas in the Arctic, but that is changing.
Along the Russian
coast, Wadhams noted, "offshore permafrost is thawing."
As
it thaws, methane is bubbling to the surface. Russian scientists
report that significant volumes appear to have already escaped into
the atmosphere. A University of Alaska Fairbanks professor at one
forum Saturday showed photos of a student lighting off a
big plume of the gas bubbling out of the ice.
Dan White,
director of the Institute of Northern Engineering at UAF, warned
there is enough gas bubbling up under the ice of some Arctic lakes in
winter that one must be careful not to hurt oneself when lighting the
gas.
The Arctic methane, Wadhams said, "could cause a
large amount of warming in a short time."
Igor Semiletov,
a professor at the International Arctic Research Center at UAF,
estimates there might be 500 times as much methane trapped beneath
the Arctic as there is currently in the atmosphere.
If a lot
of it got loose fast, the planet could really heat up.
The article is from a year go.
The people who excluded Shakhova et al from a recent meeting of the Royal
Society and made sent mocking tweets to each other about Peter
Wadhams ‘doubt it’ because the observations doesn’t conform to
their theoretical models
The
End of the Arctic? Ocean Could be Ice Free by 2015
Say
goodbye to polar bears and a whole lot of ice. New research suggests
the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free by 2015, with devastating
consequences for the world. Can it be stopped?
Someone better tell
Santa Claus. First it was polar bears that were threatened by global
warming. Now it’s reindeer too. As temperatures in the Arctic
skyrocket, reindeer are suffering staggeringly large, rapid
population losses. “Herds of reindeer have declined by one-third
since the 1990s as their access to food sources, breeding grounds and
historic migration routes have been altered,” reports the
environmental audit committee of the British Parliament.
The entire planet is
getting hotter, but the top of the world is warming twice as fast as
the global average. One leading expert, Peter Wadhams, a professor of
ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, says the Arctic Ocean
could be completely free of ice in summer as soon as 2015. An
overheated Arctic in turn threatens catastrophic knock-on effects for
the rest of the globe, including more extreme weather; faster sea
level rise; and a higher chance of accelerating global warming to
where it becomes unstoppable—what scientists refer to as “runaway”
global warming.
Yet even as the number
of reindeer in the Arctic is declining, the number of warships, cargo
vessels and drilling rigs is increasing. In a little-noticed
announcement, the United States Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel, said
on November 22 that the Pentagon is increasing its Arctic presence.
Citing a “potential for tapping what may be as much as a quarter of
the planet’s undiscovered oil and gas,” Hagel declared that the
US “will remain prepared to detect, deter, prevent and defeat
threats.” For his part, Russian president Vladimir Putin has
pledged to turn the Arctic into “an international transport artery”
that could cut one-third of the travel time and costs for trade
between Europe and Asia compared to the traditional route through the
Suez Canal. China, too, is setting its sights upon the Arctic. In
May, it gained “observer” status on the Arctic Council—a high
level intergovernmental group that coordinates international policies
at the top of the world—despite its lack of territorial holdings in
the Arctic. Chinese state-owned firms have also signed deals to
exploit oil, gas and minerals in the Arctic.
Arctic ice cover has
been declining since the 1950s, said professor Wadhams, who has led
forty polar expeditions since first visiting the region in 1969. The
biggest decline occurred in 2007, when the area covered by ice in
summer decreased to roughly half of its usual amount. That left “an
ocean of open water at the top of the planet—an unprecedented
effect,” Wadhams said in an interview.
There was another
large decrease in 2012, but Wadhams and other experts also worry that
the thickness of Arctic ice is plummeting. Since satellites cannot
accurately measure ice thickness, Wadhams has been going on board
British nuclear submarines to map the ice from below with sonar.
Arctic ice thickness has declined by 43 percent between the 1970s and
2000s, Wadhams has calculated, “an enormous loss” that he
attributes to the higher temperatures of both air and sea in the
Arctic.
What happens in the
Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. What humans do to the reindeer,
we do to ourselves. Secretary Hagel
promised in his November 22 announcement that the US military would
also work to “preserve the Arctic environment.” That goal will be
impossible to achieve if temperatures keep rising, say scientists.
The physical momentum of global warming—rooted in the fact that
carbon dioxide [CO2] lingers in the atmosphere for many years after
being emitted—insures that Arctic and global temperatures will rise
for decades to come, even if humanity reduces annual emissions of
greenhouse gases. Thus scientists regard further melting of the
Arctic as inevitable. The only disputes are over how much and how
fast.
“We are going to get
into a ghastly situation for the planet at some point and whether it
is happening next year or it is going to take a few decades is the
only question,” Wadhams testified to Parliament in 2012. Although
Wadhams stands alone in projecting an ice-free Arctic as soon as
2015, other scientists agree that the day is coming fast. Tim Lenton,
a professor of climate change and earth system science at the
University of Exeter who also testified to the parliamentary
committee, said in an interview, “My guesstimate is that the first
complete loss of summer ice in the Arctic could be as early as 2030
or even 2020. That’s soon enough for me to think that it’s a
serious concern.” Julia Slingo, the chief scientist for the Met
Office, the United Kingdom’s weather service, testified that the
Met’s computer models put the earliest date for an ice-free Arctic
between 2025 to 2030, though she added that “further observations
are required” to judge how likely that scenario is.
“There is a glimmer
of possibility” that humanity could still turn this trajectory
around, Lenton told me. Some computer models, he said, indicate that
about half of the global warming in the Arctic is driven by methane
and soot. Because these two pollutants are powerful but short-lived
heat-trapping agents, reducing their emissions could slow the rise of
temperatures relatively quickly.
Reducing the amount of
CO2 in the atmosphere remains the main challenge, and here too there
are more, and more appealing, options than usually recognized. For
example, wind and especially solar power are growing exponentially
around the world as sharply falling prices lead millions of consumers
and businesses to leave fossil fuels behind.
The warmer Arctic has
begun unleashing substances—specifically, permafrost and underwater
methane—that could sharply accelerate global warming.
“Solar is growing so
fast it is going to overtake everything,” Jon Wellinghoff, chair of
the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said in August. In
Germany, which has pledged to forsake both fossil fuels and nuclear
power, solar has grown to supply roughly 40 percent of the nation’s
electricity. In China, renewable energy sources will make up more
than half of the power capacity added through 2030, when renewables’
capacity will equal coal’s, Bloomberg New Energy Finance has
projected. “There is nothing else like these rates of adopting a
new technology,” Danny Kennedy, a founder of the solar company
Sungevity, said in an interview. “They’re faster than the
adoption rates for cell phones.”
Combined with the
other semi-secret weapon in the battle against global
warming—dramatically improved energy efficiency for cars,
buildings, motors and more—renewable energy’s new competitiveness
suggests that emissions could fall much faster than assumed,
especially if governments put a price on carbon to discourage fossil
fuel use.
*********
Nevertheless, present
trends are moving in the opposite direction, with profound
implications for the Arctic and the rest of the planet. World leaders
agreed at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 to limit global
warming to 2 degrees Celsius above the level that pertained prior to
the Industrial Revolution—the level to which agriculture and human
civilization have adapted over the past ten thousand years. But
actions have fallen far short. At the latest international
negotiations, held in Poland last month, Japan announced that it
would not honor its previous commitment to reduce emissions. More
foot-dragging came from traditional laggards China, the US, Canada
and Australia.
Because strong action
has not been taken, emissions have risen to where dangerous global
warming has become unavoidable. Earth is on track to become 4 degrees
hotter than pre-industrial levels before 2100, according to a 2012
report from the World Bank. “This would mean a world of risks
beyond the experience of our civilization—including heat waves,
especially in the tropics, a sea-level rise affecting hundreds of
millions of people, and regional yield failures impacting global food
security,” explained the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts
Research, which prepared the report.
The melting of the
Arctic—which, remember, is warming twice as fast as the global
average—is “a very powerful symbol of what we’re doing to the
planet,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at the NASA
Goddard Space Institute. Some four million people live in the Arctic,
Schmidt noted, and “the expectations they have from the climate are
a much bigger part of their lives than we have in our air-conditioned
and heated buildings…. What [they] eat, how [they] eat, where they
build their houses—all of that is going to change tremendously.”
Because some
indigenous Arctic peoples rely on reindeer for food, clothing and
cultural identity, the precipitous decline in reindeer herds presents
“serious challenges to human health and food security and possibly
the survival of some cultures,” the British parliamentary report
concluded. The Arctic also hosts half of the world’s shorebird
species, and many whales and 15 percent of the planet’s migratory
birds breed there. Long before sea ice completely disappears, these
and many other animals will struggle to survive. Nurturing their
young to maturity will be especially challenging, because “earlier
melting of snow and ice, or flowering of plants, can cause a mismatch
between the timing of reproduction and the supply of food,” a 2013
report by the United Nations Environmental Program explains.
Why should the rest of
us care? Beyond simple fairness—after all, the people and wildlife
of the Arctic did not cause the global warming that is convulsing
their world—there is self-interest. What happens in the Arctic does
not stay in the Arctic. What humans do to the reindeer, we do to
ourselves.
Scientists warn of
three major consequences a warmer Arctic will have on people and
ecosystems across the planet:
(1) Nastier
weather …and more hunger. A warmer Arctic means that temperature
differences with regions to its south are reduced. This shift appears
to be slowing the wind patterns that usually propel weather systems
from west to east throughout the Northern Hemisphere. As UNEP writes,
this slowing may be causing “more intense and longer periods of
rainfall and drought, summer heat waves and cold snaps in winter,”
such as the record heat wave in Russia in 2010 and prolonged drought
in North America in 2011 and 2012.
More volatile weather
translates into more difficulty in feeding humanity. The summer of
2012, the hottest ever recorded in the United States, coincided with
the worst drought in fifty years. Yields of both corn and soybeans
plummeted. Because the US accounts for so much of global food
production, the weather troubles in the US drove up world food
prices. These higher prices increased hunger and triggered protests
in Indonesia and elsewhere that recalled the street riots that
afflicted dozens of nations after the last big food-price jump, in
2007—08.
More than any gradual
increase in temperature, it is the projected increase in extreme heat
and drought that makes the warming of the Arctic such a threat to
agriculture. Corn, which is the major crop (by volume) grown in the
US, does not reproduce at temperatures higher than 35 degrees C. In
the 20th century, the state of Iowa—the center of the US Corn Belt,
experienced three straight days of 35 C only once a decade. By 2040,
if emissions remain on their current trajectory, Iowa will experience
three straight days of 35 C in three years out of four, professors
Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University and Don Weubbles of the
University of Illinois have calculated.
(2) Faster sea
level rise…. and more climate refugees. The warmer Arctic has
dramatically accelerated the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. “We
are now losing 300 cubic kilometer of ice a year in Greenland,”
said Wadhams. “That in itself will double the rate of sea level
rise globally. If the melting of Antarctica continues to accelerate
as well, which it is, we will certainly get more than one meter of
sea level rise by 2100, perhaps as much as two meters.” That will
be a “very, very serious problem,” Wadhams said, especially for
residents of low-lying coastal regions such as eastern China and
Bangladesh.
Unless sea walls and
other barriers are installed, a sea level rise of three feet will
endanger 145 million people and bring catastrophic flooding to many
of the world’s leading cities, including Tokyo, Shanghai, New York
and London and the Asian mega-cities of Manila, Jakarta and Dhaka.
This is especially so because, along with sea level rise, climate
change will also be causing stronger storms. Worldwide, approximately
$3 trillion of assets are located at or below three feet above sea
level, according to the Stern Review, an analysis of the economic
implications of climate change published by the British government.
These assets include infrastructure crucial to modern society: water
treatment facilities, power stations, railroads, highways, buildings,
airports. In theory, it is possible to move or protect these assets,
but doing so will be neither quick nor cheap.
As Wadhams notes, for
people living in the areas of greatest vulnerability—along
low-lying coasts—the most likely response will be to try to
re-locate further inland. Such a surge of “climate refugees” will
raise the likelihood of social conflict and perhaps violence, which
is one reason the US and UK militaries, among others, have identified
climate change as a major security threat in the 21st century.
The same global
warming that is overheating the Arctic is also melting glaciers
around the world, which not only further increases sea level rise but
also causes yet more difficulties for growing food. In Asia, at least
500 million people obtain drinking and irrigation water from the
42,298 glaciers atop the Himalayan mountains, a mass of snow and ice
long known as the “Third Pole” of this planet. As these glaciers
melt—at current rates, scientists expect 40 percent of them to
disappear by 2050—both farmers and urban consumers will encounter a
paradox: there will be more water available in the short term,
raising the odds of costly and destructive flooding, but less water
available in the long term, threatening to parch soils and wither
crops at the very time human population growth will require more
food.
(3) Higher risk of
“runaway” global warming. The warmer Arctic has begun unleashing
substances—specifically, permafrost and underwater methane—that
could sharply accelerate global warming. “[Underwater] methane is
leaking from the East Siberian Arctic shelf … at an alarming rate,”
the US National Science Foundation wrote in 2010, summarizing
research by a team of scientists led by Natalia Shakhova of the
University of Alaska Fairbanks. Once it is released to the
atmosphere, methane is 23 times more powerful at trapping heat than
CO2 is; hence the alarm.
The world’s oceans
contain vast quantities of methane, but colder temperatures have kept
it stable by transforming it into methane hydrates, an ice-like
solid. Warmer Arctic temperatures, however, are freeing more of these
methane hydrates. In research published last month in the
peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience, Shakhova’s team found that
the East Siberian sea floor is releasing 17 million tons of methane a
year—more than twice as much as previously estimated.
Wadhams fears that if
this underwater methane release continues to accelerate, it could
“increase the average global temperature by 0.6 degrees by 2040”
beyond the sizable amount of warming that is already underway. The
mega-question that follows is, could this increase trigger runaway
global warming?
Lenton and Schmidt
doubt it, though they agree methane release is a problem. Shakhova
said in an interview that we “cannot exclude the possibility,”
but more data is needed to calculate the odds. Wadhams, however, puts
the odds at “one in three or four, unless we take very rigorous
action: immediate, very large decreases in carbon emissions and very
active research on how to extract carbon from the atmosphere.”
The warmer Arctic, and
the methane releases it triggers, are what scientists call a
“positive feedback”: higher temperatures release more methane,
that methane raises temperatures again, which releases more methane,
which boosts temperatures further. It is the warmer Arctic’s
potential for turning positive feedbacks into runaway global warming
that most worries scientists, because it would make global warming
impossible to stop, condemning humanity to an impossibly hot future.
“It’s like running a car downhill,” said Wadhams. “You can
turn engine off, but you’ll still be gathering speed. [With the
Arctic melting] we could get to the point with feedbacks where even
if we DO reduce our greenhouse gas emissions substantially, we might
think we’re out of the woods, but in fact we would still keep
accelerating.”
The melting of the
Arctic amounts to a Code Red emergency. The hopeful news is that
humans could still alter current trends and limit the damage, not
only to the people and wildlife in the Arctic but to their own
children and future descendants. One place to start: ban further oil
and gas development in the Arctic itself—when the top of the world
is melting at record speed, does it really make sense to turn up the
heat by burning more carbon? “It’s not completely inevitable that
this must all play out like this,” said Schmidt of NASA. “But it
depends very much on how we think about the problem, pretty much
starting now.”
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