Tag Archives: Climate Change

Is Annual Arctic Sea Ice On Decent Track For A Change?

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Andrew Revkin thinks so:

Revkin_Claims_Sea_Ice_Back_On_Track

It is hard to interpret this as meaning anything other than the crisis of Arctic Sea ice melting too much and too fast is over. This is an important thing, because the rapid and widespread melting of sea ice in the Arctic seems to be causing a thing called Arctic Amplification, which means in normal human terms that the Arctic is warmer (amplified) than normal. This causes a decrease in the differential between equatorial heat and polar heat in the Northern Hemisphere which seems to change the way the Jet Streams operate which in turn causes Weather Whiplash, where we have days and days of warm air being drawn north into “ridges” under the Jet Stream or colder air being drawn south into “troughs” in the Jet Stream. Our Minnesota Snowy April, the current midwest Heat Wave, severe cold in Siberia a while back, flooding in Central Europe, etc. etc. all are effects of the warped and slow moving waves in the Jet Stream. Climate math seams to explain the warping and stalling of the Jet Stream as a function of Arctic Amplification, and Arctic Amplification is clearly the result of a warmer northern sea which is caused by exposure of the sea to more energy from the sun because the ice is reduced. The ice is reduced because of global warming, and this is positive feedback effect.

If the Arctic Sea ice melt is “on a decent track” than this might mean a) global warming isn’t really happening and/or b) the Arctic Sea ice to amplification to jet stream warping and stalling to weather whiplash connection isn’t valid. So, that would be important. So let’s see if Andy is Revkin the Right or Revkin the Wrong on this one.

Here is a graph of the track of Arctic Sea ice melt for a period of ten years for the first years in which good measurements are available, from the National Snow & Ice Date Center. Since the recent changes in the Arctic post date this time period, we can take this to be more or less “normal.”

Sea_Ice_Graph_Old_Pattern

The black, thicker line along the bottom of these other lines is the average ice track from 1981-2010. Note that the sea ice for this ten year baseline period is almost never below that line. The baseline for “on track” is the average of these ten years, and I’ll leave it to you to imagine a line running along the midpoint of the observed ice tracks from 1979 to 1988.

Now, here is the same graph but for the ten year period prior to 2012:

Sea_Ice_Graph_New_Pattern

For this later time period, the nature of Arctic Sea ice is fundamentally different than before. This is the period of time that the Arctic Sea has been warming. This is the period of time that Arctic Amplification has becoming more severe. This is the period of time that the weather has been changing. This is the period of time that has been affected by anthropogenic global warming. Sea ice tracks that are within this range are not “on track.” They are probably better characterized as “messed up.”

The following is the same data showing the ice track from 2012 and the present year to date.
Sea_Ice_Graph_2012_and_2013

The year 2012 was exceptional. It was the most melty of the measured years. This year, is in fact, “on track” but not “on track” to be normal. It is “on track” to be one of the years in which the melting is excessive, and it is “on track” to contribute to Arctic Amplification. It could be worse. It could look like 2012, or even worse, I suppose. But it is not good.

I know it is hard to see all the lines in these graphs when many are selected for display on the Charctic Interactive Sea Ice Graphing Tool, but the years that are not as melty as the present year are all the years prior to the shift documented above, and 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006 from after the shift. So, one way of looking at this year is that it is more or less average for the “new normal.” It is “on track” for more weather whiplash.

It is actually good news that the Arctic Sea Ice melting is not worse this year than last year, or even as bad this year as some previous years. But it takes a bit of imagination, or perhaps serves some intent that I find difficult to fathom, to suggest that this year things in the Arctic are on a decent track. Arctic Sea ice melt this year is not decent.

And, all this is about sea ice coverage. There is a more severe problem happening that these graphs don’t show; the melting of old ice, ice that is thicker, with multiple years all jammed up into thicker ice, has been severe over recent years. This ice is important because it forms the foundation on which new sea ice forms every year. Even if the climate went back to “normal” because some technology was invented that sucked all the extra Carbon Dioxide out of the atmosphere to return us to pre-industrial levels was implemented, the lack of old ice would mean that regeneration of sea ice in the Arctic each year would be difficult, and it would probably take several year get the Arctic Sea back to a decent track. For a change.

Here’s Mike Mann’s tweet response to Revkin’s tweet, which says the same thing I say in this blog post but in fewer than 140 characters:

Mann_Questioning_Revkin_On_Sea_Ice_Back_On_Track

(Professor Mann’s link is to the same data source I use above.)

Climate Threats, Climate Future

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A few items of interest from the intertubes:

Mann: Reality and threats of climate change are clear

This is a guest column in the Times Dispatch by climate scientist Michael Mann discussing ongoing legal issues.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli certainly has some odd characters coming to his defense in this paper for his attempts to go after climate scientists like myself.

First came Charlie Battig, who sought to defend Cuccinelli’s 2009 attempt to subpoena my personal U.Va. emails …

Most recently the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley of Edinburgh, Scotland, used offensive personal attacks and completely false statements in another attempt to defend Cuccinelli’s use of state funds to engage in a politically motivated attack on both me and Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia. …

The reality and threat of human-caused climate change are clear. Those such as Cuccinelli, who would silence scientists, and those like Monckton who are misleading the public about this critical issue, are doing a grave injustice not just to us, but to our children and grandchildren who will inherit the legacy of the energy choices we are making today….


AccuClimate: The Future of Climate Change Forecasting

Although personal experience may sometimes suggest otherwise, the accuracy of weather forecasting improved drastically along with the introduction of computer-based modeling some 40 years ago. According to Jones, the seven-day forecast now is probably as reliable as the one-day forecast was then.

“If climate science becomes more in-tune with societal impacts and decisions that people have to make then the probability of better outcomes is increased,” Jones said. “Tying science to decision-making will improve the science.”

The Wild Weather of the Future

In this talk, meteorologist and America’s “Science Idol” contest winner Tom DiLiberto gives a forecast of the weather of the future—the weather that will be produced by climate change.

Atlantic Tropical Weather Update (Updated)

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So, how has the Atlantic hurricane season shaping up so far?

According to data accumulated by the National Weather Service, as shown (with added items) here …
cum-average_Atl_1966-2009_modified
… we should have had about four or five named storms at this point in the season. Since numbers for this time of year are small, variation is large, so this is not too meaningful but it can give us an idea.

So far, we have had these storms in the Atlantic:

Tropical Storm ANDREA
Tropical Storm BARRY
Tropical Storm CHANTAL
Tropical Storm DORIAN
Tropical Storm ERIN

The next storm will be named Fernand, and it may be forming as we speak:

Screen Shot 2013-08-25 at 11.27.20 AM

There is a 60% chance that this stormy blob will turn into a named tropical storm over the next few days. Also there are several interesting looking proto-stormy-blobs between the west coast of Africa and the Caribbean that have promise.

This possible named tropical storm, which would be Fernand, is aimed at Mexico.

UPDATE: The stormy blob is now officially a tropical depression, and there is a hurricane hunter heading for it right now. Expect this to become a named storm later today. Then, it will cross the coast in Mexico and turn back into a stormy blog. But for just a short while, very likely (but maybe not), Fernad will exist.

UPDATE: Yup, Fernand formed, is now over land in Mexico, and will dissipate.

So, we have had five named storms. By the end of the month, we’ll probably have six. And that is about right.

From Intellicast, we have a picture of the immediate and near future jet stream:

Screen Shot 2013-08-25 at 11.31.43 AM

The arrows-bearing white lines curving up over the rockies, across the upper midwest, and down along the east coast indicate a highly convoluted wave in the jet stream. This convoluted pattern is most likely the result of the Arctic being warmed (via global warming). This reduces the gradient of heat from the equator to the pole. A steeper gradient would result in a straighter jet stream. When you get a bunch of convolutions (waves) in the jet stream, owing to complicated meteorological math stuff, the waves tend to stall in place. Areas “under the curve” (like, right now, the middle of the US) get big high pressure systems that move warm air to the north, for several days at a time. A result of this would be a big giant heat bubble as shown in the following GIF I copied from Paul Douglas’s blog:

animation_7

Which, in turn, is likely to seriously exacerbate drought conditions in the region, as shown on this map from US Drought Monitor:

Screen Shot 2013-08-25 at 11.41.30 AM

So, really, “Tropical Weather” isn’t just Atlantic Hurricanes, but heat waves at places such as the Minnesota State Fair:

fairMPX_1

Climate Change, Cat 6 Hurricanes, Al Gore

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These things are all connected.

A couple of days ago a good ally in the climate change fight … the fight to make people realize that climate change is not some librul conspiracy to raise taxes on the rich … goofed. It was a minor goof, barely a goof at all. We do not yet know the nature of the goof but it was somewhere between saying something in a slightly clumsy manner and a bit of misremembering something that happened in 2005 during an interview. That’s it. Nothing else to see here.

But that goof has been wrenched form its context and turned into a senseless and embarrassingly stupid attack on science by the likes of Anthony Watts, who really is one of the more despicable people I know of on the internet outside the MRA community (even he’s not that bad, and I’ve even noticed a sense of humor now and then).

It all started when Ezra Klein published an interview with Al Gore on Wonkblog. It was good interview and it was nicely written up. They talked about crossing the 400 ppm mark, electricity prices from alternative energy sources, the nature of technological change vis-a-vis green energy, international climate treaty making and cap and trade strategies, the politics of climate denial and the shift from being concerned about climate to denying the science in the Republican party, what’s going on in the current administration, geoengineering, storms, and all sorts of other things.

But then Jason Samenow, of the Captial Weather Gang, noticed something in the interview that seemed wrong. He wrote a blog post about “Al Gore’s Science Fiction” to make sure that every body knew about this apparent error. Then, the Union of Concerned Scientists, in an apparent paroxysm of well meant, but really, totally bone-headed, intent to demonstrate that people who are on board with climate science can criticize each other so we must all be for real, restated that something Vice President Gore had said to make him look like he was some sort of dummy, which he is not. The Union of Concerned Scientists, realizing their error, issued a pretty standard notpology. The notpology was disappointing. I know that people there understand that they got it all wrong … apparently at the institutional level they can’t just say “oops, sorry” but rather something more like “oh yes, things were misunderstood, but still, our point is valid.” We are reminded once again that institutions do have their limits.

Anyway, Ezra, for his part, dug back into memory and consulted with Vice President Gore and his staff and clarified what he said Al Gore said. But, that was not before lame, mean spirited, ill intentioned, ignorant, and embarrassingly giddy offal started to spew from the denialists. Anthony Watts got into it because that is how Anthony Watts masterbates. He draws cartoon glasses and piles of dog poo on pictures of Al Gore and that gets him off. The Hill jumped in with a piece by Ben Geman about how Al Gore goofed. The Free Republic came in its pants too. Almost nobody made mention of a single other thing in the interview, nobody checked their facts, nobody understood the original meaning of Vice President Gore’s remarks which were, in fact, dead on. But everybody got dirty. Shame on all of them (to varying degrees).

Here’s what actually happened (never mind the interview, the Union of Concerned Scientists concern trolling, or the circle jerk of denialism with Anthony Watts in the middle).

First, storms got worse. Yes, yes, you will hear climate science denialists insisting that they have not gotten worse, but they have. Hurricanes are worse now than they were decades ago, and global warming is implicated in that.

Then, some people, including some scientists and science communicators, discussed the idea of adding a Category 6 to the Saffir-Simpson scale. This conversation happened in and after 2005. The Cat Six storms would be those greater than 151 or 160 knots. Not many storms have ever been this strong, but there are a few. Robert Simpson, of the Saffir-Simpson Scale, suggested that this would not be necessary because the whole idea of the scale was to represent storms in terms of human and property impacts, and a Cat Six storm would not really be worse than a Cat Five storm because a Cat Five storm is bad enough . He said “…when you get up into winds in excess of 155 mph (249 km/h) you have enough damage if that extreme wind sustains itself for as much as six seconds on a building it’s going to cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it’s engineered.” (I disagree strongly with that statement, by the way.)

There are indeed reasons to revisit the Saffir-Simpson scale. There is a lot of information lost by just looking at wind speeds. Paul Douglas turned me on to this graphic demonstrating that when it comes to hurricanes, size matters:

image001

Look closely. There are TWO Pacific Cyclones (aka Hurricanes) represented in that picture. Reminds me of the drawings designed to demonstrate the vast range of body size in primates, like this one:

f2.1

But I digress. The point is, Saffir-Simpson is inadequate for what we need. We should be able to take a metric used for hurricanes and add the metric up at the end of the season and say something pretty accurate about how much energy was packaged in those beasts that year and in that ocean basin. Indeed, people who study hurricanes do this … they measure hurricanes in various ways. But the Saffir-Simpson scale is the most well known, and it only measures maximum sustained winds and nothing else, and the scale is not open ended so the biggest storms look like the second biggest storms.

So, given that storms are getting worse and the scale is inadequate, the discussion of at least adding a Cat Six happened, and this is what Gore mentioned.

But the Union of Concerned Scientists, or should I call them for now the Onion of Concerned Scientists, said this of Gore’s statement (and I quote mine):

Al Gore, Climate Science, and the Responsibility for Careful Communication…

When I was in fourth grade, I wrote Vice President Al Gore a letter … I believed then, as I do now, that he is a strong voice for issues with an environmental component such as climate change. And, importantly, he has become, to many people, the public face of climate science….But unfortunately he recently got it wrong about the science of climate change…Gore inaccurately suggested that the hurricane scale will now include a category 6… this is untrue. There are no plans by the National Hurricane Center—the federal office responsible for categorizing storms—to create a new category….Since writing that letter as a ten-year-old, I’ve earned a degree in atmospheric science and learned to value to the role that science plays in informing public policy. Science—and climate change especially—needs effective communicators…

and so on and so forth. How annoying of Al Gore to be so annoying. What a disappointment. I WAS A CHILD AND I WROTE HIM A LETTER AND NOW HE DOES THIS TO ME!!!

OK, take it down a notch.

Al Gore was referring to the discussion I mention above. Perhaps he made this reference clumsily. Ezra may have quoted him wrong, and he now states that is likely (he’s not been able to check his tape yet) so them message got further garbled. Then, some bloggers including one at Union of concerned Scientists decided to make a case of it. And now we have a nice science denialist orgy going with Head Orgy Master Debater Anthony Watts running the show. Joe Romm has more on the interview and what Vice President Gore said here.

There are three things you need to take away from this:

1) Al Gore is an effective communicator and knows a lot about climate science. If you hear that he said something that is wrong, before you get all “concerned” consider the possibility that he didn’t.

2) We really do need to look at how we characterize hurricanes.

3) The science denialists really have nothing, if this is what gets them so excited. They should get out more.

Climate Change = Extreme Weather = More Climate Change

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The last several decades of climate change, and climate change research, have indicated and repeatedly confirmed a rather depressing reality. When something changes in the earth’s climate system, it is possible that a negative feedback will result, in which climate change is attenuated. I.e., more CO2 could cause more plant growth, the plants “eat” the CO2, so a negative feedback reduces atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas bringing everything back to normal. Or, when something changes in the earth’s climate system, we could get a positive feedback, where change in one direction (warming) causes more change in that direction. A developing and alarming example of this would be warming in the arctic causing less summer sea ice in the arctic which warms the arctic which causes less sea ice, etc. etc., with numerous widespread and dramatic effects on climate and weather.

ResearchBlogging.orgOver these decades of observation and research, we’ve discovered that negative feedbacks are rare, and when they occur, the are feeble. Yes, some plants do eat some of that extra CO2, bur hardly any. This makes sense. Adding antelopes to the savanna might cause there to be more lions to some extent, but the cap on lion density is not antelopes … it is other lions, staking out territories. After the first few dozen antelopes all you get is a lot of antelopes. Biological systems tend to optimize within some range. Plants can’t really be expected to use more water, more CO2, more other nutrients, just because they are there, beyond some range that they typically use in nature.

Well, we have a new positive feedback: Weather Weirding caused by climate change causes more climate change. Here’s how it works.

First, we warm the arctic. This causes the gradient of warm tropical air to cooler temperate and arctic air to reduce. The gradient causes atmospheric systems that include jet streams to form, but with a reduced gradient, the jet streams change their behavior. When the gradient is low enough (as it is now most of the time) the polar jet stream shifts from being a more or less simple circle around the earth to a very wavy circle, and the jet stream itself moves more slowly. For reasons that have to do with the math of the atmosphere, when the waviness reaches a certain point the waves themselves tend to stop moving, or move only slowly. So the jet stream is moving through these waves, but the position of the waves remains stable for days and days on end.

Where the wave dips towards the equator, an low pressure system forms in the “elbow” of the wave and sits there for days on end, causing cool conditions and a lot of precipitation. Flooding ensues. Where the wave dips up towards the pole, a high pressure system forms in the inverted elbow of the jet stream. This brings warm air north and that air tends to be dry (depending on where it is). This results in heat waves and drought conditions. The reality is more complex that I’ve indicated here, but you get the picture. Weather extremes of both cold and heat occur, and weather extremes of both wet and dry occur.

(For more information on these phenomena see: Why are we having such bad weather?, Linking Weather Extremes to Global Warming, and The Ice Cap is Melting and You Can Help.)

And now comes the newly identified “positive” feedback.

The research by scientists at Max Plank is published in nature (see citation below) but summarized on a web page from that institute:

When the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere rises, the Earth not only heats up, but extreme weather events, such as lengthy droughts, heat waves, heavy rain and violent storms, may become more frequent. Whether these extreme climate events result in the release of more CO2 from terrestrial ecosystems and thus reinforce climate change has been one of the major unanswered questions in climate research. It has now been addressed by an international team of researchers working with Markus Reichstein, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena. They have discovered that terrestrial ecosystems absorb approximately 11 billion tons less carbon dioxide every year as the result of the extreme climate events than they could if the events did not occur. That is equivalent to approximately a third of global CO2 emissions per year….that the consequences of weather extremes can be far-reaching. “As extreme climate events reduce the amount of carbon that the terrestrial ecosystems absorb and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere therefore continues to increase, more extreme weather could result,” explains Markus Reichstein. “It would be a self-reinforcing effect.”

In particular drought (caused by extremes of heat long term, and lack of rainfall) cause plants to absorb less CO2. Heavy precipitation increases the flow of water containing carbonate holding materials into bodies of water where the CO2 out-gasses.

I would add to this the relationship between drought, fire, and dark snow in Greenland.

Climate change causes extreme weather which causes more of the same sort of climate change.

Bobby Magill also discusses this here: Can Extreme Weather Make Climate Change Worse?

Reichstein, Markus, Bahn, Michael, Ciais, Phillipe, & Et Al (2013). Climate extremes and the carbon cycle Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature12350

The Recovery of Arctic Sea Ice

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Every northern summer Arctic Sea ice melts away and reforms for winter, but how much melts away seems to be increasing on average, at a rate that surprises climate scientists.

But there are some who see variation from year to year, and there is variation, in a rather unrealistic way. Here is a graph comparing how climate science denialists view arctic sea ice over time, compare to how “climate realists” (i.e., smart people who can read graphs and such) see it:

ArcticEscalator2012_med

Go HERE to see the source and learn more about what is behind this graph.

At All Scales, Global Warming Is Real

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Large ponderous entities like the IPCC or government agencies like NOAA take forever to make basic statements about climate change, for a variety of reasons. They are going to have to speed up their process or risk losing some relevance. Among the coming problems we anticipate with global warming will be events that have huge, widespread effects and that happen in time scales of weeks or months, or a season, and having a nice governmental report about it two years later isn’t going to do anybody any good. So let’s see to that problem, please (looking sternly at IPCC and NOAA).

But that’s not really what I want to talk about here. Rather, I want to give a wether/climate report that operates at several scales because the information comes to us on several scales and is about stuff that happens at several scales.

First, expect excessive heat in 2012! Or, rather, expect that when the data are finished being analyzed, 2012 will be one of the top ten hottest years on record, despite the fact that the whiny-pants climate science denialists keep saying that global warming has stopped. This is from an annual report from NOAA that looks at the year as a whole, the previous year, many months after the year is over. Also, the Arctic is melting much faster than anyone expected over the last decade or so:

Worldwide, 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record according to the 2012 State of the Climate report released online today by the American Meteorological Society (AMS). The peer-reviewed report, with scientists from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., serving as lead editors, was compiled by 384 scientists from 52 countries (highlights, full report). It provides a detailed update on global climate indicators, notable weather events, and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments on land, sea, ice, and sky.

“Many of the events that made 2012 such an interesting year are part of the long-term trends we see in a changing and varying climate — carbon levels are climbing, sea levels are rising, Arctic sea ice is melting, and our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place,” said Acting NOAA Administrator Kathryn D. Sullivan, Ph.D. “This annual report is well-researched, well-respected, and well-used; it is a superb example of the timely, actionable climate information that people need from NOAA to help prepare for extremes in our ever-changing environment.”

Conditions in the Arctic were a major story of 2012, with the region experiencing unprecedented change and breaking several records. Sea ice shrank to its smallest “summer minimum” extent since satellite records began 34 years ago. In addition, more than 97 percent of the Greenland ice sheet showed some form of melt during the summer, four times greater than the 1981–2010 average melt extent.

So, here we have two scales of events being reported at one large scale of reporting and study. How does one year stand among more than a century of years, we learn after a year of data collection and 8 months of study and report preparation? What gives in the Arctic over one year in relation to about two or three decades of years, again looked at with months of digestion of a year of data? And, the same report verifies that extreme, often killer, weather (which generally happens over scale of minutes through days) is now normal. So get used to it.

At a somewhat different scale of time, we hear this news from Alaska: The village of Newtok, on the Bering Sea, is being inundated by rising sea levels and they want to move, but political snags seem to be halting the process. This village is probably going to be entirely gone in four years and hardly anybody lives there. This gives us great hope that we will be able to move Boston and New York over the next few decades! (Not)

While we’re still in the Arctic, there is a new study that shows that the Arctic Sea ice as a whole has lost about 15% of its albedo. Here we have a decadal time scale of climate change and a week-long cycle of memic change. First, we had “OMG Santa” with puddles at the North Pole. Then we had “Oh those silly puddles” at the north pole. Now we have the puddles at the north pole being a key factor in the rapid melting of the Arctic Sea ice, which is one of the most significant things going on the Global Warming front now.

And now we are about to experience, it seems, at the scale of a few days an event that may push the current year into infamy among three decades of Arctic Ice melting; a storm is brewing in the Arctic, which together with a wind-generating high pressure system, may blast the ice off much of the Arctic Sea. This is normal … the storms being part of the ice melt. What happens is this: Every time there is a storm or set of storms, the rate of melt goes up and in between stormy periods it slows. You can see this in the minor wiggly-wobbly-ness happening within a given year of Arctic Sea ice melt like in this graph:

Wiggly Wobbly Icy Wisey Stuff
Wiggly Wobbly Icy Wisey Stuff

We are about to hit a new wobbly. A big one, I think.

North Pole Puddles Are Important After All

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Remember those puddles at the North Pole that at first everyone said were not important, then when someone realized that they were only puddles so a new meme formed and everyone said they are not important? They’re important. From the abstract of a new study, just out:

The surface albedo of the Arctic sea-ice zone is a crucial component in the energy budget of the Arctic region. The treatment of sea-ice albedo has been identified as an important source of variability in the future sea-ice mass loss forecasts in coupled climate models. … Here we present an analysis of observed changes in the mean albedo of the Arctic sea-ice zone using a data set consisting of 28 years of homogenized satellite data. Along with the albedo reduction resulting from the well-known loss of late-summer sea-ice cover, we show that the mean albedo of the remaining Arctic sea-ice zone is decreasing.

New Scientist reports that the darkening is a result of the ice getting thinner and “… the formation of open water fissures, and partly because in the warmer air, ponds of liquid water form on the surface of the ice. The shallow ponds on the ice can dramatically reduce reflectivity and increase the amount of solar radiation that the ice absorbs.”

So now let’s get a new meme going. Maybe something with a polar bear and a puddle and …. a shark, because this is shark month after all!

The Lake That Ate Santa Claus (and some bad reporting?)

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OK, so supposedly a fresh water lake has appeared at the North Pole and it is ENORMOUS and Santa Claus has been missing since and is presumed dead. OK, not really. The Giant Lake is really just a “pond” of meltwater on top of the polar sea ice, on the North Pole. But wait, actually, it is not really at the North Pole, it was photographed by some scientists who hang around the North Pole but this pond, which is small but was photographed with a wide angle lens, isn’t really exactly at the North Pole anyway, and these ponds form there all the time in the summer.

But really, even though they form all the time in the summer you can bet that fresh water ponding on the surface of the ice in the Arctic is way more common these days on average, than it was in the past because, in fact, arctic ice is melting a lot more than it was in the past. But the fresh water on the surface is not the point; the point is ice free sea surface in the Arctic, which has been at an all time high over the last few years. And this has caused serious concern that gas escape pathways will be opened up in the Arctic sea. This would mean that methane currently trapped in the form of methane hydrates on and beneath the surface of the world’s oceans, where they are near the surface in the Arctic, will be more easily released in abundance. Methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas and could cause very rapid warming that would in turn increase the release of methane. Also, as methane is “oxidized” (i.e., chemically undergoes a similar process to burning but without the fire part) it turns into CO2 and water. This in turn uses up the area’s oxygen. If enough methane hydrate oxidizes in the Arctic sea that region could become anoxic (the oxygen to make the CO2 and Water from Methane Hydrate is taken out of the water or air where it happens) and lots of species could go extinct instantly. And it could even remove enough Oxygen from the air that …. OMG, that sounds pretty bad.

We can not say that “ponding” on the arctic ice is not related to global warming. Melting ice in the Arctic … every drop of it, or should I say every ice cube of it, melts because of heat and this heat is greater because of global warming. Some of that water in those ponds would not be there were it not for global warming. It is not like “nature” does some things (like, melt stuff) and “global warming” does some things and they are separated. Long gone are the days when we can, or should, say “you can’t attribute a specific weather event to global warming.” Rather, we need to say “you can’t remove global warming as a factor in any weather event.” Seriously. The former is an absolutely out and out lie. The latter is 99% true, something you should bet on if you don’t want to be wrong most of the time.

Still, the water on the surface of the ice is not of any great interest. I’m not sure, though, which is worse: Pointing out that the water is ponding on the surface of the ice and causing people to think this is important because it was mentioned in the Christian Science Monitor or some place, or spending a lot of effort explaining that this one thing some reporters said (but that no scientists have said) is not important and therefore (to some) GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX AIEEEEEEE!!!!1!!

(How likely that is to happen and how bad it would be is currently very much a matter of debate. But trust me, keep an eye on the methane hydrates. Even a low level of conversion into gas could be pretty serious stuff.)

Speaking of the Christian Science Monitor … this is the possible bad reporting part … I have a vague memory of a couple years back when somebody quoted themselves in some sort of science news story or blog or whatever. Is that what this is?

New_lake_at_North_Pole__More_of_a_pond__really_-_CSMonitor.com

The part circled in red is simply the text of a previously posted item on the CSM web site. This story quotes this.

The photograph above, from the North Pole Observatory web cam, is of the pond, except since this photograph was taken just a few minutes ago it shows it as all frozen over again because these things come and go. Compare the photo to this one posted by Maggie Koerth Baker.