Gray-Wolf

Whenever I used to try and fix/improve on things it just ended up a running battle of tweaking to bring it back to where I wanted it to be. A little like "I know an old Lady who swallowed a fly......"? I think we are stuck with it and our best hope is to try and capture, over an extended period of time, about 50% of what we have put out in terms of extra GHG's. We should then see how much this has an impact over the next half a century? If necessary, due to nature adding her contributions, we should go again and remove the next 50% and again wait until we see the impacts. Any fast attempts will just lead to more issues in my opinion. We did not realise what we were doing as we did it and still remain unsure as to how fast things will pan out as our forcing takes full impact on our planet. Costs in manageing change will skyrocket if we do not act before 2020 and we all know we will not make any real effort to stop our polluting with coal set to match oil use by 2017. My only hope is climate dissaster so dire as to place the planet on a 'war' footing and we are forced to act sooner than later. Sadly I think this is a real possibility over the coming years with either East Antarctica letting go a sudden surge of collapse as the planets warmth crashes in or Weather extremes, far greater than we have seen so far, over the next few years (or a combination of both?).

I cannot see how we can escape the sea level rises that goes with the planets ability to hold onto the near fixed energy we get from the sun? I've said throughout the threads that we look to at least 5m rises for the 400ppm level (over time) but then we get the 'natural kickback' from the suspended carbon cycle potion that this ice reduction re-animates. I cannot see how that , over time, we won't de -ice the whole planet as we have added 'extra' carbon into the carbon cycle on top of that available once the ice has gone. Unless we claw back the carbon we have placed into the carbon cycle (from carbon long removed from the active carbon cycle) then how will this not lead to an eventual melt out of the all the planets ice? The problem with this is how quickly will this melt occur? We look likely to continue at adding 2ppm for at least the next 10 years pushing us beyond 210ppm even before we look at natural additions. If we have sudden releases of the suspended carbon cycle (methane and Carbon Dioxide) then we may raqpidly approach the 450ppm level which instigated the initial freeze up of Antarctica. If we still have not begun to claw back our emmisions at this time then we are looking at a total melt out and at least two precessional cycles without a cooldown. Not good for anything on the planet.

Do I get the feeling that some folk are getting desperate to see a Squirrel?

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/01/02/1383901/shell-runs-its-arctic-drilling-rig-aground-coast-guard-prepares-for-possible-spill-response/ Well who'd a thunk it? An oil company of all things..........

http://www.newscient...rd-weather.html I think it is becoming an ever safer bet to include ice loss as a major driver in the extremes we have , and will continue to see. Some of the greatest impacts are seen seasonally but , I bet, behind the scenes there is an ongoing driver that is growing in size and that it is this which will 'suddenly appear' (to some minds) over the coming few years. I'm always likening it to the collapse of the dam and firmly believe we have been seeing the cracks for a few years now. How long before there is no denying that the dam is collapsing?

We all must begin to wonder at what is chaging , throughout the northern hemisphere, the old 'average' surface pressures? We know of the natural drivers that augment cold/warm (like ENSO ,PDO,AMO,AO etc) but we appear to be seeing impacts far beyond the past scope of such influences and sychronously across all the N.Hemisphere? North slope, Alaska has to be the worry though? removed from the PDO-ve influence, and once greatly impacted by sea ice dominated temps, we see the rapid warm up that the loss of ice brings. The majority of the permafrost is along this slope has warmed down to 80m in places and this does not bode well for both coastal erosion and natural GHG emmisions? In the same way we do not think our run of appalling summers is a sign of an 'impending ice age' then neither should Alaska!!!

So the extremes there are becoming ever wider then? I've been noting just how many warm incursions the early winter has brough to the south and west of Greenland so I think we'll see an interesting set of data from the winter. The H.P. anom, and the cold dry it facilitates over winter, is balanced by the heat it allows over summer. We seem to be seeing the same across sections of Russia and China a.t.m. but both those places have also been hammered , over summer, by similar anom. H.P. systems and the dry and extreme heat they bring with them. Odd that across the water from N.Greenland Svalbard has once again had rain in late December and was challenging last years record high temp for December?

Well, here we are again! Lower volume than ever before and two previous years showing us that average weather challenges 07's low. Surely with volume even less than last year we face a more extensive melt this time around? Some folks were saying , last June, that the NW Passage would not open due to the ice there being 3m thick at winters end. If that were true then 3m of ice was melted out before Aug. Do we have much 3m ice in the basin? ICEBridge showed us thin ice in Beaufort last spring, will we see similar this year? The same with the overflies of East Siberian (less than 1m thick last spring!!!) ,will we see similar in 3 months?. Winter season (re-freeze) is half over and we have seen a lot of warm temps over this time throughout the basin. Cold temps appear fleeting at best. With Svalbard again having rain in late Dec and tying with last years record high temps it looks like Barrentsz and Kara will again be poor come spring , as will Baffin and maybe even Hudson? All in all I'm beginning to think that another record year is more likely than not? We know 'Average years will take us beyond 07' as we've been seeing this occur already but we are ever closer to another 'perfect storm year (every 10 to 20yrs with the two before 07' having ten year spacings) so what would a melt favourable year bring us??? We also have this 'New' 'Laptev Bite' where a bite is taken from the remaining central ice in late Aug (on the Laptev side of things). I am with the folk who see this as an extension of the N.A.D. late in the season. As the ocean warms less heat is sapped from the current so it penetrates further. Each year since it first arrived it has grown larger and , should this trend continue, it will make the pole soon enough or split the remaining ice in two. If a split occurs then the inertia of the ice to movement is also lessened so we could see our side drift into the mouth of Fram and be lost over winter. That may prove to be the way the ice will go to seasonal in the following years with only a small central pool of older ice, at risk from Fram, and the rest new ice across the whole basin. Remember C.A. may have melted 3m of 'new ice' before Aug last year.

Hi J'! I'd imagine if we were getting full Arctic cold (minus 30's and 40's) then we would need to wonder but those 'normal' temps are now increasingly rare across most of the Arctic. Any northerly outbreaks for us come down from open water areas which do not seem to see temps beyond -15 these days? Add in the transport time over water and the temp modification this brings to the lower levels and we end up with even less potent northerly blasts. The current 'cold-waves' over Russia and China are home grown events with Dry High's radiating heat out of the area over the long nights. Both the impacted areas appear to be having lower temps than most of the Arctic basin!!!

I believe we have a Turkish site that could be over 10,000yrs old so we are already pushing 'settled' living back to the end of the ice age? Of course Turkey has a Black sea coast so would have had folk who witnessed the innundation from the Med. 8,000yrs ago?

Agreed J' What will apportioning the blame profit us? Understanding the drivers will, however, enable us to possibly mitigate impacts by reducing the forcings. A stitch in time and all that?

The guys still waving the DMI 80N plots will have a hell of a shock once the central ice moves or is lost at summers end? Last years reluctance to cool at summers end was a start to this process, If we see the Laptev Bite again this year we may well see the remnant pack split into two? Add a storm thereafter and you can clear the central pack and see what 2m temps do there then? As for a cooling Arctic where is the thicker ice? how else would this cooling manifest? year on year thicker ice beyond 80n would be a sure sign of this but we has seen the dead opposite.

I think it best to stick to the 'core' of the myth and not the 'validation' others sought to put in place later. We have been out of Africa (2nd wave) for 40 thousand years so we saw the last ice age and obviously thrived and survived in the less blighted areas. The odds are that many of these areas were coastal (as we moved out of Africa we followed coasts and up rivers to points where we could cross them) and so impacted by the collapse of the ice sheets and sea level rises this drove. Some places will have seen rapid inundations as key sections of the ice sheets underwent catastrophic collapse (ten year periods of rapid sea level change?) as we see from reconstructions of sea levels at the end of the last ice age. Sections of every population on the planet will have lived through these changes and, being far removed from the ice, would have had no explaination for the rises and loss of good habitat. Loss of ways of life and forced change would have you wondering what you have done to deserve it?

Sorry LG but there were a number of polls and there had been a marked jump in folk accepting climate change was tied to man's pollutions? Yup! the U.S. had a pretty bad year so what happens if next year trumps it? I'm sure the christmas tornado's had a few folk again wonder when this year would end? Drought regions had been ongoing for a number of years now if if soil dryness helps the H.P. position over the region then why will the anomalous S.Greenland H.P. not extend into that region once the sun again warms the land in March? I think they are in for another bad one due to the 'new' climate shift influenced synoptics. With high solar and ENSO neutral will it not turn into a warmer year globaly in 2013?(as MetO suggests) and won't all that energy just go into fueling more Extremes across our planet? And Russia and Asia? Both gripped with cold H.P. systems fueled by dry air? Come summer we will see the return of Hot H.P.'s filled with dry air (record fire year again in Russia esp. tundra redions?) We have changed. Expect changes. EDIT; have your chips gone up yet?

Agreed P.P. but some folk just do not get 'remote sensing' or trust 'proxies' when creating past environments leaving only invasive techniques to bring forward the data.

C'mon Four! Open water is the worse case scenario but as you have just read we end up placing energy into the ocean once the ice is thin enough to let the energy through. With key areas now not even coming out of winter with thick enough ice to block the energy we have to accept that we have the potential to absorb lots of energy when the Arctic sun is highest. Not only is this energy 'absorbed' but it negates the need for any energy from the south to be used up over the cold wastes. Eventually, courtesy of the 24hr heat source, certain polar shelf seas will be warmer than the north sea after mid summer. We all wondered at the McKensie river anom this past summer? What if we see it again this summer? Will it still be faulty sensors? The Arctic used to be 'The Cooler' for the N.Hemisphere. How many times over the past few years has Northern Canada/Greenland/Siberia enjoyed higher temps than here in the UK? I saw a snippet from Greenland the other day. In 1970 there were some of the population there who had never experienced rain. Now every child on Greenland has had first hand experience of rain. That is not just a state change but also a flooding of moisture into a once barren landscape (open water and warm air masses boosting the relative Humidity). I don't know Pete? Post the 07' event we still had large ,old ice across the basin. Some of the 'recovery' was the loss of this massive ice. Since 2010 we have had just young ice (under 5yrs) and it is thin. Post the 2012 event will we see a state where we never go above the 07'event min? (post 07' years never went above the previous low record) no matter the weather? Imagine that? a min that took a perfect storm to arrive at when we still had some thick ice becomes an unreachable max now we have thin ,salty ice??? We know that all of the NW Passage deep channel was first year ice last summer, some folk say the ice was 3m thick? (from the models they used) but it was gone by Aug. what of a basin full of sub 2m ice? what of a basin that spawned GAC12 because of the temp difference between early Aug ocean and ice edge temps? I really wonder if we will indeed see a faux recovery next melt Pete, I'm beginning to doubt that we will. It may well be Ball park 2012 or much,much less. Average weather across the basin brought us last summer, what of a warm summer? an above average? With the surrounding land masses ever more thawed and albedo dropping away year on year will continental warmth add into the melt even more this year?

I've tended to wonder as to whether we could have had pockets of highly organised societies that were lost during the last inundations? We worry today at the impacts of global warming and sea level rise on some of our major cities. We traditionaly sited these at the lowest bridging point of major rivers. When we look at ice age Europe all the major rivers drained into one mega river that entered the Atlantic off Portugal. Could there have been major settlement on the flood plain of this drainage basin? What of Asia and it's continental shelf/drainage basins? Is 'Atlantis' another collective memory of a pre flood society that did not survive the inundation? Was there some kind of 'Eden' with long settled Hunter gatherer societies following the prehistoric herds on the old coastal plains? Could they have had a structure in their society that allowed for 'holy men' that had great natural wisdom/spirituality? Do the first ritual centres we find reflect a fragmented knowledge of this past 'religion'? We seemed to live quite well in the tribal groups of the united states and conditions on our own 'great plains' would have been similar to the pre-settler great plains so why not as sophisticated as those tribes before 'the flood' took land and animals?

This is the worry for me Pete, so many folk here seem to feel we have the liesure of time to decide if , or if not, the changes are already with us. Content, it would appear, to look at the extremes we are seeing and place them in the class of 'ordinary weather extremes' which we have always had to deal with without taking the context of their frequency, repeat occrunce over short time spans, and record breaking nature into consideration? If we look at each event in isolation we may find a historical 'match' but all together and across continents? Even if we did not know of low arctic ice, and the threats climate shift promises, would we not look at the scale of recent events and extremes in climate and wonder what was going on? If we see Arctic ice fall to the low levels of 2012 again in 2013 what kind of a summer are we wise to expect? Will we see a flip back to 'normal' patterns or are the growing extremes to become even worse? Two floods and a massive funnel cloud for me (from my back door) so what will I witness this time around?

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-12/28/content_16066515.htm Seems China think the sea ice is impacting their weather?

I think ,P.P., if you want to be outraged about the rape of the last pristine continent look to the U.S. and it's EPA directives that do not allow much of the rubbish from McMurdo to be 're-patriated' How many bulldozers lie in McMurdo sound? How many barrels of waste? Most of their trash is not a by product of any scientific quest but merely the by product of their wishes for 'home comforts'. We all agreed not to pollute this continent and yet when you look at some of the junk that is left to rot their (or shoved into the ocean) you have to wonder? Words are easy, it is our actions that define us.

I believe we've known that ice , below 1m thick, lets a lot of energy through . Some folk have been hammering on about some kind of balancing act that the pole has with all the energy saved over summer is spent (back harmlessly into space) before the onset of the Arctic winter. I've always confronted such nonsense but still it appears. The inclusion of energy harvested before the ice has melted is just 'more' energy that those folk now need to account for. Remember the IceBridge ,and associated fly overs, discovered the Beaufort and East Siberian were at the 1m thickness level (or below) at winters end last year so once snow cover has gone the rising suns energy is able to have an influence from the get go come Arctic sun up. Open water late into autumn means a lot of snow cover is lost to the ocean (as we all saw from the Healy Cam whilst waiting for signs of re-freeze?) so snow coverage goes away quite fast ,come spring, these days. We all know the 'blue/green ice' that shows us melt water on the ice surface and I believe we've all noted how much earlier it appears each year?

I believe that the ice loss dominated alterations in the jet (and positioning of the southern Greenland H.P.) will again dominated in 2013 extending the drought and bringing a similar sweep to the extremes across the U.S. With so many on the East Coast now accepting the scale of AGW's impacts another year of the same or worse will only consolidate this awareness across the nation. Will we face more of the same? I think the deepening of the downstream positioning might favour us over time extending the european drought to our shores (esp. the SE/SW) leaving the far north to take the brubt of stuck rainfall patterns? (I WANT A SUNNY SUMMER!!!)

Tell you what LG, losses less than the 2010 mega melt next year and I'll stay quiet on Greenland's mass loss for 5 years. Losses greater than this years exceptional melt and you accept that the changes are well beyond what nature is able to conjure up alone? Deal?

This is why it is foolish for folk to think that the massive changes occuring do not impact our climate? With an ever thicker 'blanket' around our planet to trap re-emitted wavelengths this move to ever thinner ice just increases the speed and depth of the changes.

As a point of order. What are we to call the folk who masquerade as true 'scepticss' to try and gain some credence when deliberately filibustering, falsifying and twisting data to try and bring about confusion? These folk are aware of what they do and no doubt have an agenda and policy on how best to complete their task. We are all 'sceptic' in that we do not trough out on every paper we come across but use our own knowledge and questioning to see if we find papers acceptable and the data interpreted in a clear way. Faux Sceptics is not 'name calling' but the name of a body of people bent on disinformation for self aggrandizement or pay....in time this body of disinformation will be fully revealed for what it truly is and might even have apportioned the costs (in both lives and money) that such dalliance brought us?