Common Thread At The 2015 AGU Conference - The Arctic's Big Melt - Wunderground

[hatrack]

The weather story of this month is the record warmth swaddling much of eastern North America and Europe. We’ll have much more to say about that next week, but keeping with the warm theme for today, I’ll share a couple of melt-related tidbits that drew my attention at this year’s Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which Jeff Masters and I attended this week. This is the world’s largest gathering of Earth-related scientists, with more than 20,000 researchers, journalists, and others in attendance. Thousands of posters and talks cover the whole spectrum of Earth sciences--at any one moment, there can be 50 or more presentations going on. Various science journalists and WunderBlog commentors have done a great job of capturing the broad array of science presented this week. You can browse the enormous number of abstracts at the meeting website. Many of the presentations were recorded and are now available through AGU On Demand (free registration is required). Here's a full list of those recorded sessions. (Thanks for WU member spbloom for the tip.] If the drip-drip-drip of climate change news starts getting to you, there’s a handy remedy: Jeff’s AGU post from Wednesday, “The Top Ten Reasons to be Hopeful on Climate Change”.

Lots of red on the Arctic Report Card
NOAA introduced its 2015 Arctic Report Card with a press conference on Tuesday, viewable in archive form (as are all of the press conferences). The Arctic’s grades were not good. Our northern polar regions are failing--that is, failing to shield themselves from the relentless build-up of greenhouse gases. The polar year running from October 2014 to September 2015 was the warmest in more than a century of recordkeeping, with the region now 3°C (5.4°F) warmer than it was at the start of the 20th century. The minimum summer extent of Arctic sea ice, which occurred on September 11, was not a record--it ranked fourth lowest in the satellite era (starting in 1979). However, the maximum winter extent did set a record low, and that occurred on February 25, two weeks ahead of average and the second earliest max in the satellite era.

One of the lesser-known but still profound changes to the Arctic is the decline in June snow cover, which is decreasing at around 18% per decade. Because the northern sun is at its strongest in June, this decline means that a good deal less sunlight is being reflected from polar regions, thus allowing more absorption of heat at the surface.


Figure 1. Top: Average temperature for October 2014-September 2015 compared to the 1981-2010 average. All around the Arctic, temperatures were much warmer than average, with only Greenland and a small part of northeastern Canada near or below average. Bottom: Annual temperatures for the Arctic (blue line, representing 60°N - 90°N) and the globe (black line) since 1900. Arctic temperatures are more variable from year to year than global temperatures (bigger swings above and below average). But despite the variability, a trend is clear: the Arctic has warmed more than the globe as a whole. Image credit: climate.gov.


Figure 2. Permafrost is thawing across the Arctic, causing northern lands to sink or change shape. In Gates of the Arctic National Park, a bank of this lake thawed in the summer of 2014, allowing the Okokmilaga River to cut through and drain it to sea. Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Colorado presented new work at the AGU Fall Meeting on the speeded-up pace of permafrost melt across northern Alaska. Image credit: Howcheng/US National Park Service/Wikimedia Commons.

More Than Polar Bears At Risk

Polar bears are the poster creatures of climate change, which makes it easy to overlook how warming temperatures might affect other Arctic creatures. These impacts can be difficult to pin down, because there are complicated intersections between human-driven warming and other anthropogenic factors, such as variations in hunting rates over time and the build-up of oil and gas infrastructure. An increase in rain-on-snow events over the Arctic is already having noteworthy impacts on reindeer, which forage for vegetation beneath snow cover during winter. A record number of reindeer (about 20% of a herd of 300,000) died in the winter of 2013-14 on the Yamal Peninsula of Western Siberia. A team led by Bruce Forbes (University of Lapland) described its post-event research in an AGU poster. “More than a year later, participatory fieldwork with nomadic herders during spring-summer 2015 revealed that the ecological and socio-economic impacts from this extreme event will unfold for years to come,” the group reported. They’re now investigating whether the loss of sea ice in the Barents and Kara Sea is playing a role in the growing prevalence of rain-on-snow events. “There is an urgent need to understand whether and how ongoing Barents and Kara Sea ice retreat may affect the region’s ancient and unique social-ecological systems.”

EDIT

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/common-thread-at-2015-agu-conference--the-big-melt

[yeoman6987]

1. I try to tell friends how dangerous the melting of the polar caps are

They come back with, "well you are walking on what used to be ice right now". I look at them like their nuts because we're talking Greenland and North Pole. But until everyone stops saying it's ok that there is melting because half of America melted is going to make our cause so much harder. I actually think we're losing. Yes the president did agree with other countries to help climate control but I don't think average Americans themselves find this a priority. Are we doomed no matter what?

[klyon]

2. yes

I believe so. The right has brainwashed the American people. No one believed Al Gore ten years ago and still don't have a clue today.

[Bill USA]

3. It's not just the ice. More permafrost is thawing each yr. This emits CO2 and Methane

methane has 75 times the heat trapping capacity of CO2 (calculated for 30 interval). This, along with melting ice sliding off Antarctica and Greenland will raise sea levels and take the rate of temperature increase up to a point such that even if we stopped ALL our CO2 emissions we would not be able to slow AGW down. Many who consider themselves environmentalists, who think they realize the threat of AGW, think we have an abundance of time to reduce GHG emissions. We don't. IF we don't reduce GHG emissions sooner rather than later we are doomed.

Personally, I think the best we can hope for now is to slow GW down to buy time to develop and deploy greener technologies and oh yeah, we will still have to do something about the GHGs already in the atmosphere. We will have to develop technologies to take GHGs OUT of the atmosphere.