Arctic ice

Here's a good video that covers a lot of the basics.

The Northwest Passage was an illusory dream that had killed a lot of men. There was no such thing, there never could be such a thing.

Except, thanks to AGW, it's a thing now. A European shipping company is going to turn Portland Maine into a major shipping hub. The permafrost is no longer perma. Hurricanes are getting nastier, and we are seeing super fires. Sure glad it's a hoax.

There is a lot of variation in predictions, which is not unusual in science. Over time, you get better numbers, and research provides a better understanding of the factors driving that change.

 

There is no reason for alarm concerning the ice at either pole.
2 More Studies Affirm Nothing Unusual Or Unprecedented Is Occurring In Polar Climates Today
By Kenneth Richard on 9. November 2020

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Only a few thousand years ago, when CO2 levels were both stable and low (~265 ppm), the (1) Arctic had far less ice and more vegetation than it does now and (2) the massive rate of ice melt in Antarctica rendered modern melt rates negligible by comparison.
A new study (Cherezova et al., 2020) reveals that until about 6,500 years ago Bolshevik Island in the Russian High Arctic brimmed with grass, birch and willow trees, and large herbivores grazing on grass year-round. At that time sea levels were rising at rates of 7.9 mm/yr, which is more than 5 times faster than the global sea level rise trend since 1958 (~1.4 mm/yr, Frederikse et al., 2018).

Today this same High Arctic island is treeless with “very scarce vegetation.” It is locked in sea ice and mean annual temperatures only reach -13°C, which is a “similar climate to the Lateglacial.” Modern climate warming “is not observed” in either the meteorological or ice core data (Tvyordoe Lake) for this region. The ice caps are today about the same size as they were during the peak of the last ice age (~20,000 years ago). . . .

Another new study (Jones et al., 2020) reveals that from about 7,500 to 4,500 years ago, when CO2 was about 150 ppm lower than today, Antarctica’s Ross Sea glaciers abruptly lost 220 meters (!) of ice surface height. This ice loss – at times reaching >400 cm per year – occurred throughout the region regardless of the topography. This strongly implies the “overarching external driver” of the glacier retreat was an ocean warming trend.

The authors point out that the ice surface lowering may have “continued below the present-day glacier surface,” only to advance again during the last few hundred years. . . .

 

No, it is actually just more hysterical anti-fossil-fuel nonscience.

No, that's false. Arctic sea ice was much lower for most of the Holocene, and the Northwest Passage was open in the summer for much of the time before the Little Ice Age:

https://notrickszone.com/2020/10/29...than-nearly-any-time-in-the-last-10000-years/

No, that's false. The first one-season transit of the Northwest Passage was achieved in 1944, long before increased CO2 could have had any significant effect. There is no credible empirical evidence -- none -- that the route is any more ice-free now than it was in 1944.

We'll see.

It wasn't before the LIA, either.

There is no credible empirical evidence that hurricanes are becoming more powerful (though of course they are doing more damage because there is more stuff to be damaged) or that fires are larger. The hoax continues to be proved a hoax by actual physical events.

 

Trash.

"NTZ employs three main strategies: straw man arguments that falsely change the evidence for global warming into something that is easier to refute; the inclusion of papers wholly irrelevant to the reality of anthropogenic climate change; and the inclusion of papers (or conference abstracts) that almost certainly underwent little or no peer review process.

Richard misrepresents and misinterprets these papers in many instances. For example, NTZ misrepresented a graph from a 2017 paper that intentionally removed the long term global warming trend so researchers could investigate other trends in the record — a fact that went unmentioned in his post.

Ernesto Tejedor Vargas, whose study “Temperature Variability in the Iberian Range Since 1602 Inferred from Tree-ring Records” was featured in both the June Breitbart article and in the current iteration, told Climate Feedback in June that he “would like the author of the No Tricks Zone post to remove my name from the blog since it is not reflecting our research conclusion”. His request went unheeded..."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/400-papers-published-in-2017-prove-that-global-warming-is-myth/

NTZ is a sick joke..

 

Climate change will be so good for the Danes, Canadians and Russians.

 

Same way it's been great for California. Permafrost can burn.

 

Peer-reviewed empirical science. It is your snopes bull$#!+ that is trash, as I will now prove:

No, snopes is lying about that. Identifying logical implications of a claim that render that claim absurd is a recognized valid argument: reductio ad absurdum.

That is a bald fallacy: begging the question. It ASSUMES there is no valid climate science -- no "reality" -- other than hysterical anti-fossil-fuel hate propaganda.

"Almost certainly"?? Conference presentations undergo peer review, and the fact that valid empirical research that disproves the hysterical anti-fossil-fuel hate propaganda that infests the peer-reviewed climate journals is kept out of those journals does not mean they have not passed peer review. IOW, that is just another lie from snopes.

False.

The graph is no longer there, but snopes's interpretation is incorrect. The paper itself showed the shorter-term trends were associated with solar variation.

So snopes is makin' $#!+ up again.

I.e., he rightly feared for his career if his results became known.

snopes is the sick joke here, as proved above.

 

I sometimes wonder why guys like you make sh*t up.

More to the point, I wonder why anyone would believe sh*t that lame.

 

The bears like it.
Shorefast ice formation and the fall feeding season for polar bears
Posted on November 11, 2020 | Comments Offon Shorefast ice formation and the fall feeding season for polar bears


What may seem like a silly question is actually fundamental to polar bear survival: in the fall, why do Western Hudson Bay bears correctly expect to find seals in the new ice that forms offshore? Why are seals attracted to that new ice – called ‘shorefast ice’ or ‘fast ice’ – when they would clearly be safer out in the open water where there is no ice and no bears?

As the picture below attests, polar bears can and do kill ringed seals in the new ice that forms off the coast of Western Hudson Bay even when it is but a narrow strip of thin ice – and so close to shore their successes can be caught on camera.


Three adult male polar bears share a seal kill on the newly-formed ice off Wapusk National Park, Western Hudson Bay. 5 November 2020. Buggy cam, Explore.org

A different bear was also filmed killing another seal on 31 October. And these are only the kills we know about along a very short stretch of coast – the killing is almost certainly going on up and down the entire coast, into James Bay (see below), where there is just as much ice but no cameras.



As far as I am aware, this seal killing by polar bears goes on in newly-formed shorefast ice everywhere across the Arctic in early fall, not just in Hudson Bay. Although the timing varies, virtually everywhere in the peripheral seas of the Arctic Ocean (Barents, Kara, Laptev, Chukchi, Beaufort, as well as Baffin Bay and Davis Strait), shorefast ice forms before the mobile ice pack expands to meet the ice developing from shore.



This shorefast ice formation in fall provides a predictable but short-lived source of prey for polar bears as they strive to regain some of the weight lost over the summer.

Continue reading

 

I didn't make anything up. I explained why snopes's -- and Wikipedia's, and Google's, etc. -- marriage to hysterical anti-fossil-fuel hate propaganda compelled it to falsely and dishonestly derogate one of the few credible sources of peer-reviewed climate research that isn't all anti-CO2 all the time.

The lamest $#!+ I see is the constant, self-evidently false claims that there is some kind of climate "crisis" or "emergency," when anyone can look out their window and see that there isn't.

 

There isn't a climate crisis now. If a climate crisis occurs it will be some time into the future and it will take something on the order of 30 years to gradually make the transitions away
from fossil fuels to clean energy and energy conservation. So, we need to know ahead of time if a future climate crisis is likely in order to prepare for it.
.
"Looking out the window" is not a good way to determine if a future crisis will occur.

You seem to be claiming that there is a broad conspiracy by climate scientists, scientific journals, and much of the media to perpetrate the idea of a climate crisis If that is true then
what is the motive?
.

 

OTOH, there are those moments of pure comedy..

 

And there will never be one caused by human use of fossil fuels.

You ASSUME that whatever climate crisis happens will be resolvable by reducing fossil fuel use. But as the next climate crisis (whatever it is) will not be caused by fossil fuel use, it will not be resolvable by transitioning away from fossil fuels.

A future climate crisis is effectively certain. We just don't know what it will be or what will cause it. Likely candidates are volcanoes and solar variation causing global cooling. Fossil fuel use is not a candidate. The best way to prepare for a future climate crisis is to be prepared to mitigate it and adapt to it, whatever it is and whatever causes it.

But it is a good way to determine that those who claim there is NOW a climate crisis are liars.

No. They are just responding to incentives.

Someone is behind it. The most likely candidate is the US government, with the Chinese and Indian governments second and third. As for their motive, ask yourself who benefits from other people giving up fossil fuels, and how.

 

I will continue to be proved right by actual physical events.

 

Why is fossil fuel use not a candidate? Aren't humans responsible for the
atmospheric carbon dioxide increase since 1750? If so, why shouldn't a
50% or more increase in the atmospheric carbon dioxide level result in planetary warming? Humans have also increased the atmospheric levels of other greenhouse
gases and introduced new greenhouse gases.

 

Because CO2 has little effect on climate, and the modest effect it does have is beneficial.

Most of it, yes. Some has been caused by the natural return to more normal Holocene temperatures following the coldest 500-year period in the last 10,000 years.

It will. Just not enough warming to reasonably be considered a problem, let alone a crisis.

None of which have any plausible prospect of causing any kind of climate crisis.

 

Thank-you for the reply, bringiton.
My question is why does CO2 have little effect on the climate?

A doubling of carbon dioxide produces a change in radiative forcing of 3.8 watts per square meter or a decrease of that amount of energy emitted to space because the carbon dioxide is
emitting long wave radiation at a higher altitude and cooler temperature on the average. That causes the Earth's surface to warm in order to restore the radiation balance at the top of the atmosphere
and at the Earth's surface. One has to also take into account climate feedbacks that amplify this change in radiative forcing causing the earth's surface to warm even more by a factor equal to
the equilibrium climate sensitivity.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019RG000678

"An assessment of the Earth's Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence"

3.2.1 CO2 Radiative Forcing
Increases in CO2 lead, all other things unchanged, to a decrease in LW emission to space (i.e., the CO2 “greenhouse effect”). This instantaneous radiative forcing for a doubling of CO2 can be obtained from very accurate line‐by‐line radiative transfer models (W. D. Collins et al., 2006; Etminan et al., 2016; Pincus et al., 2015); these are in very good agreement and provide a global mean estimate of 2.9 W m−2 at the TOA (Figure 3). The instantaneous CO2 radiative forcing varies with location due to variations in temperature, water vapor, clouds, and tropopause position (Huang, Tan, & Xia, 2016). The traditionally defined forcing also includes a contribution from the perturbed stratosphere because the stratosphere is dynamically isolated from the surface (Hansen et al., 1981). Within a few months, the stratosphere cools in response to increased CO2 causing an additional reduction in the emission to space of LW radiation. This “stratospheric adjustment” is well understood and is estimated to add 0.9 W m−2 at the TOA (Figure 3).

 

I forgot to hit the reply button for my previous post. I was responding to your statements: why there will never be a climate crisis caused by human use of fossil fuels and why CO2 has little effect on climate.

CO2 has had a very significant effect on past changes in the climate.

 

No it hasn't. It is a dependent variable. Temperature changes cause CO2 changes (because of its temperature-dependent solubility in sea water), not the other way around. There is 50 times as much CO2 in the oceans as in the atmosphere.

 

Because its effect on surface temperature is already saturated by water vapor and the existing level of CO2.

Nope. Flat wrong. The relevant effect all takes place in the upper troposphere where there is no water vapor because the air is so cold it all condenses out. Any downward IR radiation caused by increased CO2 in the upper troposphere is blocked long before it reaches the surface, as soon as it encounters significant water vapor.

You are ASSUMING positive feedback. The feedback could be -- and probably is -- negative.

So all that happens is that the temperature gradient in the upper troposphere and stratosphere adjusts to restore the radiative equilibrium. There is little effect on surface temperature, except where super-dry sub-zero air reaches all the way to the ground: on high mountains, and in winter at high latitudes. And that is exactly where almost all the warming in the surface temperature data has occurred.

 

It is true that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere does not affect the amount of infrared radiation that is absorbed by water vapor or CO2 in the lower atmosphere, since close to 100%
of the Earth's infrared radiation in that portion of the spectrum is already absorbed. There might be some exceptions like desert areas. However, the carbon dioxide molecules at the top
of the atmosphere are the ones that can radiate energy out to space. As the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide molecules increases, the radiation out to space takes place at
higher distances from the Earth's surface. I know that the downward IR from CO2 at the upper troposphere is blocked, but I am not talking about that. It is the upward IR (50% of it is upward
and 50% of it is downward) that matters. Outward radiation at a greater height and lower temperature removes less energy from the earth-atmosphere system. The earth's surface temperature must increase in order to restore thermal equilibrium at the Earth's surface because the earth-atmosphere system cannot remove heat as efficiently with the added CO2.

I am not assuming positive feedback because it is a fact. The only question is what that value is. The best estimates are by a factor of between 1.5 and 4.5.

This is from a climate scientist at realclimate.org

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/a-simple-recipe-for-ghe/

Infra-red light is absorbed by molecules, which in turn get more energetic, and the excited molecules will eventually re-emit more infra-red light in any random direction or transfer excess energy to other molecules through collisions. In a optically thick (opaque) atmosphere, there will be a cascade of absorption and re-emission.

Hence, whereas the planet is heated at the surface, it’s main heat loss takes place from a height about 5.5 km above the ground, where most of the radiation is free to escape out to space. The optical depth dictates how deep into the planet’s atmosphere the origin is for most of the planet’s infra-red light (the main planetary heat loss) that can be seen from space. Furthermore, it is the temperature at this level that dictates the magnitude of the heat loss (Planck’s law), and the vertical temperature change (lapse rate) is of course necessary for a GHE. The temperature at this level is the emission temperature, not to be confused by the surface temperature.

We know that the optical depth is affected by CO2 – in fact, this fact is the basis for measuring CO2 concentrations with infra-red gas analysers. Molecules composed of three or more atoms tend to act as greenhouse gases because they can possess energy in terms of rotation and vibrations which can be associated with the energy of photons at the infra-red range. This can be explained by theory and be demonstrated in lab experiments. Other effects are present too, such as pressure and Doppler broadening, however, these are secondary effects in this story.

(iv) The relationship between temperature and altitude
There is a well-known relationship between temperature and height in the troposphere, known as the ‘lapse rate‘ (the temperature decreases with height at a rate -6K/km). The relationship between temperature and altitude can also be seen in the standard atmosphere. The lapse rate can be derived from theory for any atmosphere that is the hydrostatically stable condition with maximum vertical temperature gradient, but it is also well-known within meteorology. Thus, given the height and value of the emission temperature, we can get a simple estimate for the surface temperature: 255K + 5.5km * 6K/km = 288K (=15oC; close to the global mean estimated from observations given by NCDC of ~14oC).

 

Isn't that a good thing?

 

I am not entirely satisfied with my previous post on the greenhoue effect so I am trying to better explain the physical mechanism for the Earth's surface temperature increase due to a perturbation
in atmospheric CO2.

If all layers of the Earth's atmosphere and Earth's surface started out in a state of thermal equilibrium, and if we could add a large amount of carbon dioxide uniformly to the lower troposphere, then
the amount of back-radiation would increase and warm the surface of the earth. The reason for that is the concentration of CO2 near the Earth's surface would increase and with time those CO2 molecules would be a little warmer. The Earth's surface would gradually warm until thermal equilibrium was restored (the additional energy flux from the back radiation would be balanced by additional flux coming from the Earth's surface). The lower portion of the atmosphere would warm
but the higher levels of the atmosphere would cool. That is what has been observed. The increase in back-radiation with an increase in atmospheric CO2 has also been measured.

 

These are 10-year averages of energy fluxes ending in 2009. The earth-atmosphere system is out of equilibrium with 340.4 W/m (watts/square meter) entering the system and 77.0+22.9+239.9=339.8 W/m
leaving the system. The net difference, 0.6 W/m, is absorbed by the earth. If all climate forcings remain constant, the Earth's surface temperature will gradually increase, slowed by the high heat capacity
of the upper ocean layer, until the net difference is zero.

If we start out in a thermal equilibrium state and perturb the system by adding CO2 to the atmosphere, the energy flux emitted by the atmosphere will decrease, causing an energy imbalance
at the top of the atmosphere. The back radiation will increase - with that increase arising from CO2 molecules not closest to the Earth's surface, since the CO2 absorption bands are saturated
at very low altitudes. The only way for the energy balance at the top of the atmosphere to be restored is through an increase in the Earth's surface temperature .




Earth's energy budget, with incoming and outgoing radiation (Values are shown in W/m2). Satellite instruments (CERES) measure the reflected solar and emitted infrared radiation fluxes. The energy balance determines Earth's climate.
NASA - https://web.archive.org/web/20140421050855/http://science-edu.larc.nasa.gov/energy_budget/ quoting Loeb et al., J. Clim 2009 & Trenberth et al, BAMS 2009


E

 

Nope. The energy emitted is exactly the same. It's just emitted, on average, by CO2 molecules at a slightly different altitude.

Nope. The earth's surface is unaffected. All the relevant changes occur in the upper troposphere and stratosphere, where there is no water vapor to saturate the IR absorption spectrum.

No it isn't. It is an assumption of the GCMs, and a highly dubious one.

No, those are estimates that ignore the relevant facts.

There are no climate scientists at realclimate.org, only anti-fossil-fuel scaremongers.

Bingo. It doesn't matter if the final IR emission to space is from an altitude of 5.5km on average, or 5km, or 6km: in any case, it's far above the surface, and the effect is negligible at the surface.

Wrong. Flat, outright wrong as a matter of objective physical fact. The heat loss is the same in any case. It is just lost from molecules at a different average altitude; and as long as that altitude is far above the surface, surface temperature will be unaffected.

Yes, but the level (altitude) is not a fixed number, and neither is the emission temperature. The balance just moves to wherever the emission temperature is high enough to get the bulk of the IR radiation out past all the air above that altitude: the higher the emission temperature, the lower the average emission altitude.

Sure, but the height and emission temperature will both change given increased CO2, and in opposite directions, as explained above, leaving surface temperature unchanged!