Pachauri - "record northern summer Arctic ice growth"

The Australian interviews "The UN's climate change chief" Rajendra Pachauri.

Rajendra Pachauri has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain's Met Office, but said it would need to last "30 to 40 years at least" to break the long-term global warming trend.

The "long-term global warming trend" is only just around 40 years long now. (My bold in any quotes following.)

In a wide-ranging interview on topics that included this year's record northern summer Arctic ice growth, the US shale-gas revolution, the collapse of renewable energy subsidies across Europe and the faltering European carbon market, Dr Pachauri said no issues should be off-limits for public discussion.

What? Say that again! Okay - "this year's record northern summer Arctic ice growth". I thought that was it. The northern hemisphere hasn't had a summer yet (or did I miss it? - I slept late last Sunday). Any more gems of climate insight from the world's leading retired railway engineer (I'm in the mood for a good laugh).

"People have to question these things and science only thrives on the basis of questioning," Dr Pachauri said.

He said there was "no doubt about it" that it was good for controversial issues to be "thrashed out in the public arena".

Aaah - that's why the review process takes place in total secrecy, with reviewers and authors sworn never to divulge one word? That's the "public arena", admission by ticket only, public need not apply? All is now clear (I think).

Dr Pachauri said the record accumulation of Arctic ice this northern summer - following a record melt last winter - was consistent with the current understanding of climate change.

He said the IPCC had "clearly specified there are going to be extreme precipitation events".

"If in the Arctic, for example, we get a huge amount of snowfall this year, you will get ice formation," Dr Pachauri said.

"That again is something that doesn't deviate from the trend, which time and again has shown that ice cover in the Arctic is shrinking."

My goodness gracious, this man clearly has all the knowledge to make him a "top man" in climate science. Arctic ice melts in the winter and accumulates in the summer. Winters are clearly so warm the ice melts, and the summers so cold it freezes in a record accumulation. This is weather on steroids - weather so extreme it's reversed itself. Kneel at the feet of the great man and learn, minions, learn. Snow causes ice formation in the Arctic - you read it here first remember. It's all becoming clear now - huge amounts of snowfall were caused by global warming - ya know, warm air holds more moisture, more moisture forms more clouds, which will of course result in more snowfall in the balmy Arctic air. If that results in more ice why doesn't that ice melt in the balmy Arctic air?

I withdraw that question, it's one I'm not qualified to ask. Quite obviously, only climate experts who've never turned up for a single IPCC working party meeting, yet still get their names on the author list are so qualified. Only the great climate expert is qualified to answer it, the great climate expert whose name I'm not worthy to utter.

Remember - ice forms in the summer, melts in the winter. Pachauri knows his stuff alright.

h/t Tom Nelson

Alaska Climate "Fix-it" Group - what?

"Rapid-response taskforce – set up by Sarah Palin to protect state from effects of global warming – last met in March 2011" wails Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent of the UK Guardian. Question - why does the Guardian need a "US environment correspondent"? Haven't we got a UK climate of our own for neurotic correspondents to worry about? Just how exactly does the Immediate Action Work Group plan to "protect" Alaska - install large air-conditioners perhaps, or install a huge chain of wind-turbines driven by electricity to push all the superheated Arctic air back northwards, or erect a huge refrigerated plastic bubble over the entire state? Not exactly, they're gonna develop "alternative plans for comparison"

Immediate Action Workgroup’s Recipe for Success

Step 1: Begin by developing a collaborative organizational structure that can focus the combined capabilities of local, regional, state, and federal stakeholders on the problems at hand.

Step 2: Discuss the nature and extent of the potential climate change impacts and create an applied approach to addressing significant impacts, as described in Step 3.

Step 3: Identify the communities at risk, timeframe, and the true needs to address climate change impacts.

Step 4: Develop measures that meet the stated needs and combine those measures into alternative plans for comparison.

That'll sort it. They haven't included any plans for mitigating the increasing cold up there though - they think, as Goldenberg does, it's still warming:

Alaska, like other Arctic regions, is warming at a much faster rate than the global average. Last summer saw record loss of Arctic sea ice.

I refer the reader, Goldenberg, the Guardian, the Immediate Action Workgroup, and anyone else who needs a stiff dose of up-to-date reality to my post of 11th December last - Do "warmists" inhabit a different planet, or just blind and deaf? which shows GISS temperature charts for seven Alaskan stations, all of which show rapid cooling since 2000. The answer to the question posed in the title should be obvious.

The Inconvenient Truth About Polar Bears

WANTED - more people like this man

Source: NPR

Who he? He's Zac Unger, author of Never Look A Polar Bear In The Eye, who set out to document the demise of ursus maritimus, more commonly own as the polar bear. NPR relates an interview with him - The Inconvenient Truth About Polar Bears .

In 2008, reports of polar bears' inevitable march toward extinction gripped headlines. Stories of thinning Arctic ice and even polar bear cannibalism combined to make these predators into a powerful symbol in the debate about climate change.

The headlines caught Zac Unger's attention, and he decided to write a book about the bears.

Unger made a plan to move to Churchill, Manitoba, a flat, gray place on the Hudson Bay in northern Canada accessible only by train or plane. For a few months out of the year, as the bay starts to freeze, tiny Churchill boasts as many polar bears as it does people.

Unger packed up his wife and three small kids, and set out with a big bold idea. He wanted to write the quintessential requiem of how human-caused climate change was killing off these magnificent beasts.

In the end, he came away with something totally different, Unger tells NPR's Laura Sullivan. 

"My humble plan was to become a hero of the environmental movement. I was going to go up to the Canadian Arctic, I was going to write this mournful elegy for the polar bears, at which point I'd be hailed as the next coming of John Muir and borne aloft on the shoulders of my environmental compatriots ...

"So when I got up there, I started realizing polar bears were not in as bad a shape as the conventional wisdom had led me to believe, which was actually very heartening, but didn't fit well with the book I'd been planning to write.

"... There are far more polar bears alive today than there were 40 years ago. ... In 1973, there was a global hunting ban. So once hunting was dramatically reduced, the population exploded. This is not to say that global warming is not real or is not a problem for the polar bears. But polar bear populations are large, and the truth is that we can't look at it as a monolithic population that is all going one way or another."

Ursus maritimus becomes ursus bogus becomes ursus fecundus. What goes around comes around.

Permafrost - the bottom line

In a recent post UNEP Report - Policy Implications of Warming Permafrost I identified a major contradiction therein, and debunked claimed "increases" in CO2 and methane over permafrost areas. I've been digesting parts of the leaked IPCC AR5 draft report, and found this in WG1 chapter 6:

6.3.3.2 Emissions 

.................. 

Over the past decades, however, there is no evidence for significant emission of CH4 from permafrost and hydrates (Dlugokencky et al., 2009). 

.... from the horse's mouth.

And a little further on this section:

6.4.3.4 Permafrost Carbon

Current estimates of permafrost soil carbon stocks are 1670 PgC (Tarnocai et al., 2009), the single largest component of the terrestrial carbon pool and higher than previously thought. Terrestrial carbon models show a land CO2 sink with warming at high northern latitudes, however none of the models participating in C4MIP or CMIP5 included explicit representation of permafrost soil carbon decomposition, which at a minimum requires sufficient vertical resolution in modelled soil carbon distribution and processes to separate surface pools from very old (Pleistocene) permafrost carbon pools. Including permafrost carbon processes into an ESM can change the sign of this C response to warming from a sink to a source in northern high latitudes (Koven et al., 2011). The magnitude of this source of CO2 to the atmosphere from decomposition of permafrost carbon varies widely by 2100 according to different model estimates: process-model estimates include 7–17 Pg (Zhuang et al., 2006), 55–69 Pg (Koven et al., 2011), and 126–254 Pg (Schaefer et al., 2011); estimates of uncertainty ranges suggest the source could range from 33 to 114 Pg C (68% range) under RCP8.5 warming (von Deimling et al., 2012), or 50–270 PgC (5th–95th percentile range; Burke et al., subm.). Combining observed vertical soil C profiles with modelled thaw rates estimate that the total quantity of newly-thawed soil C by 2100 will be 246 Pg for RCP4.5 and 436 Pg for RCP8.5 (Harden et al., 2012 in press). Sources of uncertainty for the permafrost C feedback include the physical thawing rates, the fraction of C that is release after being thawed and the timescales of release, possible mitigating nutrient feedbacks, and the role of fine-scale processes in determining the terrestrial response. 

Note the model results for emissions from permafrost to 2100: 7–17 Pg (petagrams), 55–69 Pg, 126–254 Pg, and the consequent estimated uncertainty range of 33 to 114 Pg C or 50–270 Pg C at the 5th–95th percentile range. What does this all mean?

They don't know.

Permafrost - when does bullshit become lies?

It's easy to answer that question - when it's published by the Los Angeles Times, as in "Thawing permafrost may amplify global warming, U.N. reports". At least the title of the article is entirely truthful, but crap soon emerges from the frozen wastes of the author's mind. That mind is engaging itself with the just-released UNEP report Policy Implications of Warming Permafrost. The journalist Kenneth R. Weiss doesn't mess about - he's straight on the bullshit bandwagon with his first paragraph.

Think of broccoli that you’ve got in the freezer. As long as it’s frozen, it will remain stable for years. As soon as you pull it out, it’ll go mushy and soon begin to unleash the stench of decay.

That’s one way Kevin Schaefer likes to describe what’s happening to all the leaves and roots and other plant material locked in the frozen soils of the arctic tundra and forests since the last Ice Age.

"All the leaves and roots and other plant material"? No, just some of it, possibly - even probably.

As the planet warms, this permafrost is thawing, releasing huge amounts of carbon and methane, Schaefer explains in a new report. The United Nations Environment Program released the report Thursday to prod negotiators gathered in Doha, Qatar, to come up with a new international treaty to rein in rising greenhouse gases warming the planet.

"This permafrost is thawing, releasing huge amounts of carbon and methane"? No it isn't, as the report details and concludes. As "Schaefer explains in a new report"? No, he doesn't - the report's first conclusion states:

Permafrost around the world has begun to change, with TSP network observations indicating that permafrost temperatures have risen over the past few decades. CALM network observations are less conclusive, but show increases in active layer thickness at many sites. Overall, these observations indicate that large-scale thawing of permafrost may already have started.

"May already have started", and the report says nothing about the relatively small amount of existing thaw "releasing huge amounts of carbon and methane". Mr. Weiss is just making it up as he goes along. I'm not even going to display my bullshit button - this is waay beyond bullshit.

All this fuss is of course due to the assumption (which has merit, don't get me wrong) that the greenhouse gases released by decomposing organic matter in thawed permafrost would accelerate global warming, or whatever the fashionable term is nowadays.

I'm currently microbially digesting the organic matter of the UNEP report and will post on it ASAP, sans bullshit and lies of course. I'll end on a lighter note with a priceless quote from the report's lead author Kevin Schaefer.

“Once the organic matter thaws and decays away, there is no way to put it back into the permafrost,” said Schaefer, a scientist at the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.

That's like saying that once you've spent your money there's no way to get it back. D'you mean the permafrost that's melted Kev? Gerraway.

Disconnects in Logic (6) - 34 "Is not nearly as much" as 502

Earthsky blogger Daniel Tennant relays some good news and some not-so-good news (but which does he think is "good"?)

Most sea level rise due to melting polar ice, study confirms   

Researchers report that Earth’s polar regions are losing 502 billion tons of water annually out of the total amount 536 billion tons lost annually worldwide.

Scientists published results in a February 2012 issue of Nature that reveal a detailed picture of how Earth’s glacier regions have changed over the last eight years. In previous publications, GRACE satellite data confirmed that Earth’s polar regions are the major contributors to rising sea levels. The recent publication focuses on the high mountain areas, such as the Himalayas and Andes, and shows that these ecosystems are remarkably robust: they are not losing nearly as much water to the ocean as the polar regions.

That's good news, I'd say, and an E grade for all the glaciologists and others who've been predicting the imminent demise of glaciers in "high mountain areas" for years. A little later, we're shown this graphic

Map showing the September ice extent in the Arctic in 1980, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. The magenta line indicates the median September ice extent for the period 1979-2000. Image Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center Sea Ice Index:

From simple visual evidence, if nothing else, it is clear that our polar glacier regions are depleting due to melting ice. 

Arctic report card for 2011

The "polar glacier regions", aren't shown, just the Arctic, and this is graphic data for sea ice, and has nothing to do with sea level. Sea ice has no net effect on sea level, freezing or melting. No glaciers are shown. It's certainly not clear from that graphic that "our polar glacier regions are depleting due to melting ice". Why were we given this irrelevant information and erroneous conclusion?

After this slip, band some details of how the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellites work, we get the "bottom line" (my bold)

Bottom line: A publication in Nature in February 2012 presents the results of an analysis of GRACE satellite data, showing that high mountain areas, such as the Himalayas and Andes, are not losing nearly as much water to the ocean as Earth's polar regions.

Shhuurely he means ice not water? If "the polar regions are losing 502 billion tons of water annually out of the total amount 536 billion tons lost annually worldwide" then how can the 32 billion tons from mountain glaciers be termed "not nearly as much" as 502 billion tons? The 32 is 6.8% of 502, or about one-fifteenth. Did he write this piece before he saw the figures? Was he disappointed when he saw them? Does his brain work logarithmically? Why did he spoil a perfectly good article with a superfluous add-on, an unsubstantiated claim, and a flawed sense of proportion (in the true sense)? Why do I get worked up about this kind of thing?

If you have any of the answers, please let him know, I'm past caring.

Disconnects in Logic (3) - We don't do Climate

More geo-engineering, I'm afraid, and the inevitable intrusion of the Law of Unintended Consequences (also known as the Law of Human Stupidity and Ignorance, appendix 1). Before it's filed in the "We don't do Climate" garbage bin of history, from the pages of the Toronto Star yesterday (21st Feb):

Global warming: Researchers develop technology to reduce methane gas emissions from oceans

For Stephen Salter and John Latham, there is nothing more deadly than the creation and emission of methane gas.

“It’s 200 times worse than CO2 (carbon dioxide),” Salter, who is emeritus professor of engineering at the University of Edinburgh, said in an interview with the Star.

“It has a quick and serious effect,” Salter said, likening methane to a kind of “crack cocaine” for the atmosphere.

Salter, who works out of the Engineering Design Institute for Energy Systems at the university, was recently in front of a British House of Commons committee on climate change, pleading his case against methane gas. He described its highly destructive impact as it is released from the ocean into the atmosphere, significantly contributing to global warming and the melting of Arctic ice.

"200 times worse than CO2" - just where did he get that from? And their ingenious (if costly) solution?

Salter and his colleague, Latham, who is an atmospheric sciences researcher at University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Co., have come up with what they believe is a solution to the impact of methane on the earth’s environment. They envisage a kind of vessel or land station that sprays salt water into the atmosphere, ultimately affecting the makeup of clouds. The idea is that the clouds could reflect back into space more of the sunlight hitting the ocean.

“We would cool down (the planet),” Salter said.

“We would cool down (the planet)” - indeed? By spraying water vapour, the most powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere? Despite the low temperatures there, a large proportion of the drops would evaporate. A strong dose of reality for messrs. (or is it messers?) Salter and Latham, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.

A case of the vapors 

When it comes to climate change in the Arctic, melting sea ice and warming oceans often get the most attention. Yet in the atmosphere, another watery component is changing as well: water vapor. As sea ice extent and duration decrease and air temperatures rise, the increasingly open Arctic Ocean is subject to even more evaporation, pumping more water vapor into the atmosphere, making it more humid. In addition, warmer air is capable of holding more water, so increasing humidity over the Arctic may be yet another signal that air temperatures in the region are rising, producing yet another feedback mechanism throwing the Arctic climate off-kilter.

More from the article:

Latham worked out that if you increase the number of water drops in a cloud by increasing the condensation nuclei, the cloud will reflect more of the sun’s incoming energy back into the atmosphere, Salter explained. The ocean won’t heat up and won’t release more methane.

There's a very fine balance between "whitening" cloud and triggering precipitation, which not surprisingly reduces cloud, transferring the water to the surface as rain or snow. "Increasing the condensation nuclei" is employed in cloud seeding to induce precipitation. They also have utterly missed the point that increasing snow precipitation would "whiten" the Arctic far better than (possibly) increased cloud would. It might turn out all right in the end, but for the wrong reasons. They've even included a rather bold prediction (make a note in your 10-year diary - it's already in mine)

Without any action on the global warming front, it is predicted that there is a 50 per cent chance that Arctic sea ice will be non-existent in September 2014. If the forecasts are correct, the oceans will heat up even more and the already high levels of methane in the Arctic Ocean will rise even more, Salter said.

If the methane is "in the ocean" how could it possibly increase greenhouse gas warming? Warmer water will hold less methane in solution, not more. Oh - sorry, that quote is from the "loose terminology" department, employed when talking to reporters and dumb amateurs like me. Based on their woolly thinking and focussing on a tiny part of the Arctic climate system, I'd say there's a 100 per cent chance they're off-target by 180 degrees. These "spraying vessels" would be unmanned apparently, and sailing in Arctic waters for months. I can recommend a film for them to view. It's not "An Inconvenient Truth" but "Titanic".

Salter is emeritus professor of engineering at the University of Edinburgh, also known as the "We don't do Climate" department. Latham however, is an "atmospheric sciences" researcher at University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Co. That must be the "CO2 is the most powerful greenhouse gas" department. I was going to add "You couldn't make it up", but they've done all the work for me.

Pole Position

They made it! The intrepid 5-man "Old Pulteney Row To The Pole" team managed to drag their boat "Old Pulteney" the final few miles over the ice to the.... To the what? To the North Pole, stupid! Or is where they ended up the north Pole? Since that spot is on an island, and since the North Pole is not, then what was their objective? Aaaah - it was to the magnetic north pole - that's all right then. But wait, on their website, they say

The Magnetic North Pole is continually moving. It was originally reached by James Clark Ross in 1831. At the time it was located on the Boothia Peninsula, Canada.

More recently the Canadian government made attempts to measure it and show its movement northwestward.

This was eventually successfully achieved in 1996 when an expedition certified its location by magnetometer and theodolite. This was the first time it has been accurately measured. The expedition was led by David Hempelman-Adams and included Jock Wishart.

The measurements were accepted by the Canadian government and it became a recognised and certified position at;

The position is 78°35.7N 104°11.9W / 78.595°N 104.1983°W.

So it was at that position in 1996, and as they say, "The Magnetic North Pole is continually moving". so where is it now?

The speed of movement of the Pole began to increase significantly in a northwesterly direction about 1998, and now averages about 37 miles each year and so It is currently projected to be in a position in Siberia by the end of the century. 

Let's get this straight, they weren't rowing to the North Pole, as many newspapers and TV news reports stated. They weren't even rowing to the Magnetic North Pole, they were rowing to where the Magnetic North Pole was in 1996! So where is it now? Google maps knows:

Using the scale at bottom left, and using Mark One eyeball, that position would seem to be about 500km NW of their finishing point, marked by the red arrow. That red arrow is pointing at a spot only 78°N - some 12° south of the North Pole, and a long way away. What does this expedition prove? That the Arctic ice is in a bad way, and will be gone soon, and this proved by an exhausting row to nowhere-in-particular, with days spent marooned on land because of that "vanished" ice, and a final 3-day drag-your-boat over the "vanished ice". Or something

A Warm(ists) Look at Glaciers

This caught my eye today (h/t Tom Nelson), titled "Canadians ought to care about the radical changes occurring in the polar regions", by Geoff Green, who describes himself as "Arctic Explorer - Environmental Educator".

In response to the question (the piece masquerades as an interview, though the byline is "by Geoff Green") "What inspired you to start bringing youth on Arctic expeditions?" he replies

What inspired it all was really seeing how incredible the polar regions are – how they are these cornerstones of our global ecosystem; windows to the health of the planet. Not to mention the fact that they are just beautiful places, home to huge concentrations of wildlife.

It's hard to pinpoint an exact moment, but I do remember one day standing on this beach in the Arctic surrounded by about 200,000 chinstrap penguins

It must be "hard to pinpoint an exact moment" because pygoscelis antarcticus, as the name rather gives away, are resident in the Antarctic. He continues

And I thought, “Imagine if we could bring kids or youth to these places at the beginning of their lives – at a time when that type of experience could help define their future and change their perspectives and motivate and inspire them.” I thought, “Wouldn't the polar regions be the greatest classroom on earth?”

For kids to be able to look into the eyes of a bowhead whale or a polar bear, and to experience the unbelievable beauty of the Arctic … I knew that would change them on a personal level and connect them, not just to nature, but to their place in this big global picture.

I suggest that if a kid looked into the eyes of a polar bear, he/she would connect directly to nature by becoming part of the food chain. Still, perhaps I'm being unfair, so let's read more

We are also seeing the affect on glaciers that are shrinking. We often go to Auyuittuq National Park. Auyuittuq is an Inuktitut word meaning “the place that never melts.” They’re going to have to change that name. They had to close the park three years ago because of flash flood warnings due to the rapid melting of the glaciers. Greenland is in the same situation.

"due to the rapid melting of the glaciers" - sounds catastrophic, surely glaciers don't melt, do they? What does the Auyuittuq National Park of Canada site have to say?

Auyuittuq National Park Closure is lifted as of August 8, 2008

Due to rain on snow, two weeks of record breaking warm sunny weather followed by more rain Summit Lake filled well beyond normal limits and burst out through the normal drainage into the Weasel River and scoured the outflow channel to bedrock through permafrost sending a pulse of extreme high water through Akshayuk Pass.

Subsequent to the high water that took out the Windy Lake bridge and some trails, areas of permafrost continued to melt causing erosion, cracking and slumping of affected areas from Crater Lake to Summit Lake. 

Nothing there about glacier melt being a major factor. When did those lakes form? The Great Canadian Parks site tells us

Three of the park's lakes, Crater, Summit and Windy, were created about 100 years ago when moraine ridges of gravel and boulders formed a natural dam that held back the meltwater when the glacier retreated. Much of the land is in the permafrost zone, where the earth's moisture, just centimetres below ground, is frozen solid for all time. In summer, the surface can become a slurry of sand and gravel, a hazard to hikers who must also beware the Owl River valley, where thawing is capable in some sections of creating waist-deep quicksand-like quagmires.

So the glacier had a major retreat 100 years ago, and it doesn't appear that there's any plan to change the name from Auyuittuq "the land that never melts" anytime soon. The previous paragraph gives some background

The buckling of bedrock by continental drift forces formed the Precambrian granite peaks of the jagged Penny Highlands which reach 2100 metres and range over 6000 square kilometres of the park’s landscape. The ice cap produced by the compression of accumulated snow into glaciers covers the highlands to depths of 300 metres. The remaining 2/3 of the park is mainly covered in ice that melts only at its edges and then only during the brief summer. The peninsula's coastline is cut deeply where glaciers shaped the valley floors below sea level, chiseling narrow fjords with 900 metre-high vertical walls. Glacial action that gave the valleys, such as the 97-kilometre Akshayuk Pass, their characteristic U-shape, is still actively shaping the land. 25 kilometre-long glaciers, spawned from the massive ice cap, slide down from the high plateau to the sea at Davis Strait pulled by gravity and their own weight. Glacial moraines - huge mounds of eroded rubble pushed by a moving glacier, and sandy areas where rock was ground into particles have become part of the landscape.

They don't sound as though they're concerned about future job prospects.

I recall an article I read several years ago (link long lost), in which a glaciologist (could it have been Geoff Green?) was recounting his depressing experiences on the Antarctic peninsula. He said "I was kept awake all night by the mournful sound of the melting glaciers". Kept awake? By the sound of flowing water? No, "the sound of the ice crashing into the sea". I haven't got a PhD in physics, but I do know when ice melts it becomes water, and it doesn't "crash into the sea". I'd suggest that scientists who are too emotionally involved with their subject of study might tend to be somewhat less than objective in their conclusions.