Climate Change Event - North Pole - January 17, 2008

http://visz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/woalert_read.php?cid=14992&lang=eng
RSOE Emergency and Disaster Information Service



Giant fractures have been cracking open the ice in the Beaufort Sea in recent weeks creating extraordinary stretches of open water and giving researchers from around the world a first-hand look at the Arctic meltdown. "It's shocking to see," says David Barber, a climate specialist at the University of Manitoba. He is heading an international project, involving more than 200 researchers from 15 countries, on the Amundsen, a Canadian Coast Guard ship over-wintering in the Beaufort. "The fractures are huge," says Barber, who recently returned from the Amundsen and says some cracks are more than 100 kilometres across. "We drove our ship down of one of them and you couldn't see the sides of it." The Canadian Ice Service has posted a satellite image of one "massive fracture" on its website, along with an animation showing huge fissures opening and giant slabs of ice peeling away west and north of Banks Island over the last five weeks. Stretches of open water, known as leads, normally form in the Beaufort in winter as thick, old ice grinds past much thinner first-year ice. Barber says he has never such large fractures and so much open water in December and January. He says the phenomenon is tied to the loss of Arctic ice last summer, that "stunned" scientists as the ice retreated 40 per cent below normal, to the lowest level since satellite measurements began in 1979.

There is now so little thick, multi-year ice left, that it is being blown around the Beaufort "like Styrofoam in a bathtub," says Barber. As the thick older ice moves it pulls away from the thin new ice creating fractures and large areas of open water. The $40-million research initiative on the Amundsen is part of the International Polar Year. Barber says the researchers could not have picked a more interesting winter to spend in the Beaufort, but says the changes they are documenting are "disturbing." Not only is the ice fracturing, but he says storm tracks are changing as weather systems are drawn in over the open water and fed by heat being released by the seawater. And thick multi-year ice, which the researchers are tracking with beacons, is moving at up to 30 nautical miles a day, much faster than normal. If the trend continues, he and other scientists predict the Arctic could be ice free in the summer months by 2020, plus or minus 10 years. That means Arctic summer ice, which has capped the planet for more than a million years, might be gone by 2010, says Barber.

The implications extend far beyond the Arctic, and the possibility of shipping routes opening in the North. Weather across the Northern Hemisphere is impacted by what happens in the Arctic and the northern ice plays a critical role in controlling Earth's thermostat. Arctic ice reflects close to the 95 per cent of solar radiation that hits it. Once the ice melts away, seawater absorbs the heat instead, later releasing it back to the atmosphere, a process that will speed global warming. The phenomenon is already at play in the Beaufort. Barber saysthe extra heat absorbed by the sea water last summer delayed the formation of new ice last fall by many weeks. And the heat is still being released as storms churn up open water, creating unusually balmy winter weather, he says, noting the temperatures off Banks Island hit -9 C when he was on the Amundsen in December. )
http://visz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/woalert_read.php?cid=14992&lang=eng

to go to zero increase year over year in carbon emissions.

We might not even have 10 to go carbon neutral (0 net new CO2 into the atmosphere, no burning of fossil fuels)

We might need to go carbon negative in 10 years (take CO2 OUT of the atmosphere).

I don't think we can make it. It's going to be bad.

Hillary, Obama, Edwards, or even McCain... it just might not matter. Not when 1 billion or more people (who aren't used to being on the short end of the stick) begin to starve.

A large place in Paraguay with a solar powered hacienda and lots of acres, possibly guarded by well armed and trained BlackWater mercs, with the ability to grow enough food to feed the residents, might be ideal... too bad we don't all have the resources to make that happen.

What good will they do? Did Hitler's personal SS bodyguards stop the Red Army? Did Louis XVI's bodyguards keep his head from falling in a basket? I look forward to the day in the future when the thugs who ride around firing their guns that anything that moves will instead become the targets.

The rest of the world will be at war. There won't be any armies rolling through your location, just ragtag civilians, shell shocked and looking for refuge. Your BlackWater mercs will be able to deal with them.

I totally agree with you (except for the Blackwater part...). We need to get together with our neighbors or friends and create sustainable neighborhoods. That is the bottom line. But so many people are in denial, and they will be until it hits them personally - no food, no gas, no energy, or at least to expensive to use. That is when we will wake up, and by then it will be too late.

Sustainable communities that is...

If the proverbial shit hits the fan, there will be total and absolute chaos. Few people, make that very few people, have any appreciation at all as to either the unsustainable nature of our lifestyles or the even more serious issue which is how near we are to a cliff.

The ship cannot be turned. People simply won't allow it. Few of us as individuals have the ability or where with all to create a truly sustainable lifestyle that would provide support through a massive climate shift.

I've watched for a few decades the world muddle through, hoping at some point there would be a collective coming to our senses. Things have gone in the other direction. Perhaps we muddle on another decade, or two or three. Perhaps we soon hit the proverbial iceberg and sink.

There's no question that we'll simply keep on doing what we're doing until we can't. We can't help ourselves - we're like the scorpion in the fable, who gets a ride across the stream on the back of a frog by promising not to sting him. In the middle of the stream the scorpion stings the frog. As he dies the frog asks the scorpion why he did it, since now they are both doomed. As they sink beneath the water the scorpion replies, "I couldn't help it. It's my nature". Similarly, our nature is to grow and in the process to defeat all obstacles to growth. Reason is our stinger, and we have fatally stung the world on which we were riding.

The thing that will "save us" (for extremely small values of "save" and "us", of course) is our ubiquity. We occupy every possible ecological niche in the world, and have organized ourselves into uncountable different social and living arrangements. Since it is inevitable that some of us will survive it's axiomatic that some of those arrangements will be more survivable than others, at least over the medium term.

Will those surviving communities turn out to be sustainable? There is no way of knowing, of course, but I'm very worried by the implications of my recent insight that humanity lacks an essential internal restraint mechanism. If that is true on some general species-wide level and if, as I suspect, we use our reason primarily to assist our growth, then we may have a very hard time establishing truly sustainable long-term living practices.

Well said! When are we going to start to shut that off, though? When it's way too late? It is me-me-me all the way. It's so sad.

we will multiply and consume until all the resources are gone... and then we will do what the microbes do... die.

But, you say, people are smarter than that! I beg to disagree, look at what happened to the people that populated Easter Island.

If by "smarter" you mean "able to use reason to consistently override our biological imperatives". No, instead we use our reason to support and amplify our biological imperatives, especially by removing impediments to their fulfillment. It's easy to understand why, when you realize that our brains are our primary evolutionary advantage. They inevitably evolved in a form that assisted species survival, they could do nothing else. As a result we have enormous blind spots regarding matters of growth, status and power.

We consistently mistake information for knowledge, knowledge for wisdom, wants for needs and threats for rewards. We're very intelligent, but not so smart.

I read an article a couple months ago that had the reader imagining a world with no cars. What would we have to do? We'd have to revert to a lifestyle from 200 years ago, with the difference being technology like computers and cell phones would be in place. We'd have to be more self-sufficient in the way of growing food or bartering for it with neighbors, making things instead of buying them, riding horses or using bicycles. Communities would be much more centralized with conveniences close by.

Don't you think people should be thinking about these things before chaos is upon us? Mass education is in order for everyone who thinks nothing is wrong.

We eat oil. We heat with oil and fossil fuels. We live in places that require vast amounts of energy to sustain us. Modern society requires the expenditure of a huge per capita amount of energy. Sure, we can conserve and become much more efficient. Probably, given the incentive, 50 percent more efficient, maybe even better than that. Won't matter. Cutting our energy use by 50 percent or even 75 percent will only delay the inevitable crash by a few decades at most, and, depending on the feedback loops already in play, possibly not at all.

And the carbon neutral replacements for oil aren't near ready yet.

Hope I'm wrong.

Energy has given us a lifestyle that is really far-removed from nature. We do whatever we can to tame the natural world instead of live with it. Energy allowed us to do that. When oil is out of reach, we will have to drastically change. We may not be able to live in places with extreme energy needs like Phoenix and northern New England. Changes will be drastic.

I don't have a crystal ball to see what is going to happen, but I feel we all need to be doing something now to figure out a way to live with little or no energy, the stuff we take for granted.

Every time I go into Manhattan, I sit and fantasize about how much better a place it would be without cars and how simple it would be to reach that state.

You can't find many places in the world where a car isn't just about the dumbest transportation mechanism that you could think of than Manhattan (and most of NYC to a lesser degree).

There have been proposals to restrict cars during peak periods and to place a surcharge (as in London) on entry. Both have met loud and angry opposition.

We don't quite need to revert to a lifestyle of 200 years ago. Fifty or seventy-five years in terms of resource consumption would be a big improvement. Many towns in North Jersey functioned quite nicely in the early to mid-twentieth century. People walked, took buses, and there was once light rail throughout the region. It wouldn't take that huge an effort to go back. The sprawl that has metastasized over the past 30 years would have to be addressed, perhaps by reinvigorating some of the urban blight.

I think many of the older areas of the US, particularly in the Northeast could become somewhat sustainable places to live.

Of course, this isn't going to happen because of a combination of social and economic reasons but I believe it would be possible.

until it is too late.

And, even a drastic measure like that might not be enough to stop global warming, only slow it down a little.

We need to be dragged kicking and screaming into a change of lifestyle. We are too self-centered to do it ourselves.

A friend of mine blames a lot of car use on Henry Ford, whose philosophy was to pay his workers enough so that everyone could afford his product. Who knew?!

The Bush family is reportedly setting up just such a compound. Rumor has it that Rev. Moon is going to be their neighbor. There was also a scientific study done that produced a map showing the degree to which areas of the world would suffer from the effects of global warming, a map that showed the reported location of these compounds to be located in a area where the effects would be a minimum.

Kinda makes you think, don't it?

Would it be possible to set up sort of a reverse Nenana Ice Derby?

We could bet on date of minimum and the percentage below the old 2007 record!

from Europe to the Pacific will be open by September. Without the use of ice breakers.

What would be a reasonable guess for the maximum?

30 percent reduction from 2007 minimum ice pack?

That would be really really scary.

Basically, about 3 to 5 years until the Arctic ocean is ice free in the summertime (no more pack ice, still would be a lot of ice bergs).

God I'm being a pessimist. But the positive feedback loops now in play (less pack ice, more sunlight absorption, CO2 in peat bogs and in tundra being released, and, the biggie, the ocean floor methane clathrates). Mankind might stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow and not stop global warming.

To fix what we've broken. I hope the planet can heal itself after we've departed.

Summer ice minimum 2.2 million sq. km +/- 0.1 million km2

Date reached this year: Sept. 23rd

50% loss of the multi year ice pack with October 10th being the date of the minimum. That would be bottoming out at 1.5 million square kilometers. And I'm guessing they're going to repeg the average chart at 4 million down. :)

What do I get when I win? :D

It's not very poetic, but here's my handy-dandy advice for the future:

Abandon surprise: LOTS of really weird shit is going to start happening.

bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. :P

This is absolutely gigantic (though the image below is not!). Red lines denote islands & northern Alaska.

Damn.



On edit: Larger image from Environment Canada's website:



http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/app/WsvPageDsp.cfm?id=11892&Lang=eng

Maybe it's a conspiracy of long-suffering Canadians enraged at their cold winters?

this thread is one of the reasons I LOVE this forum.

Sad, but intelligent discussion, and no one calling someone out for being too PESSIMISTIC....

We're fucked, but there is a certain comfort in realizing that there are some lifeforms who can admit it.

If the areas of open water *do* refreeze in the next, um, 60 days, the ice there is going to be so weak that when the melt comes in um, 61 days, the new ice that hasn't even had the chance to harden for the whole winter is just going to melt like a slushie on the sidewalk in August.

The older ice is going to then be freed from its buffering matrix of younger ice, and the Beaufort Sea is going to be ice free not in late September, as happened last year, but in, say, June.

If you look at the ice record for the Beaufort Sea for the last year, there was a sharp plummet in early June, followed by some ice regeneration. I'm predicting a similar pattern for this year with NO regeneration, just a continuation of the same steep curve.

Yes, it will be faster than expected.