Melting Ice off Greenland.

Just recently I interviewed a scientist who told me he assumed last year’s record melt in Greenland was a one-off thing and not necessarily a result of climate change. Or rather, he said, it was impossible to say until we see whether it actually happens again. Given that the Greenland ice sheet is the biggest ice mass in the northern hemisphere and would also have a huge impact on global sea levels if it melts, it is encouraging to know that a huge effort is going on to find out exactly what is happening.

Ice Blogger’s gallery on climate change in Greenland

Audio feature on climate change in Greenland (Irene Quaile, for DW)

Tim Radford of Climate News Network has just published an article on the subject, with an excellent overview. He quotes scientists from Sheffield, UK, who have come up with a new theory. This is what Tim has to say. I quote at length, as it such a good summary of what has been happening and the possible explanations so far. Thanks Tim Radford and Climate News Network for drawing our attention to the latest research and filling in so much background. Over to you:

“First: the story so far. For a few days in July 2012, almost 97% of the surface of Greenland began suddenly to thaw. This was a melt on an unprecedented scale.
Greenland carries a burden of three million cubic kilometres of ice and even in the summer, most of it stays frozen, partly because of the island’s high latitude and partly because ice reflects sunlight, and tends normally to serve as its own insulator.
The event was so unusual, and so unexpected, and on such a scale that nobody seriously suggested that the dramatic conversion of snow to slush was direct evidence of climate change because of human-induced global warming.

Soot, smoke and heat

At first, climatologists were inclined to see the thaw as a consequence of the record-breaking heat waves and forest fires that afflicted North America last summer: snow could have been darkened by columns of soot and smoke from forest fires, just enough to start absorbing the sunlight, some reasoned.

Then in April a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggested that freak cloud behaviour over Greenland at the time might have caused the melting. Clouds normally block sunlight and keep the terrain below them cool.

But these clouds could have been thin enough to let solar radiation through, but thick enough to trap the consequential infra-red radiation from the ground, and raise the local temperature levels.

Now Edward Hanna and colleagues at Sheffield report in the International Journal of Climatology that they have another explanation. Unusual atmospheric circulation and changes in the jet stream – the same changes that almost washed away summer in England – sent a blister of warm air sweeping over the ice sheet.

Hanna and his team analysed all the weather data collected by the Danish Meteorological Institute and by US researchers, and then employed satellite readings and a computer simulation called SnowModel to reconstruct the strange turn of events. And climate change may after all be a suspect.

High melt years

The Greenland Ice Sheet is a highly sensitive indicator of regional and global change, and, says Prof Hanna, been undergoing rapid warming, and losing ice, for at least the last five years and probably the last 20.

“Our research found that a ‘heat dome’ of warm southerly winds over the ice sheet led to widespread surface melting.” This was not predicted by the climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and perhaps that indicated a deficiency in those models, he suggested.

The event seemed to be linked to changes in a phenomenon known to oceanographers and meteorologists as the summer North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), another well-observed high pressure system called the Greenland Blocking Index, and the polar jet stream, all of which sent warm southerly winds sweeping over Greenland’s western coast.

“The next five to 10 years will reveal whether or not 2012 was a rare event resulting from natural variability of the NAO or part of an emerging pattern of new extreme high melt years.” It was hard to predict future changes in the Greenland climate in the current state of knowledge, but important to keep on trying.

There is an awful lot of ice on top of Greenland. Once it starts to melt, it is likely to be, say the Sheffield scientists,  “dominant contributor to global sea level change over the next 100 to 1,000 years.”

Tim Radford, Climate News Network, 18.6.2013.

The Ice Blogger is heading off for a short break.  Back July 8th, with new ice and snow pictures, I hope!

Receding glacier at Begich Boggs, Alaska.

“Came for climate change training and just got tear gassed by Turkish police on walk home from dinner to hotel. SHAKEN BUT NOT STIRRED…” was the message I got from Cara Augustenborg in Istanbul at the weekend. Cara, whom I first met in Alaska when she was a “Climate Change College” ambassador, is now Ireland’s first “Climate Reality Leader”.

Cara, in the green hat, posing with fellow youth climate ambassadors Aart and Erika in Alaska, 2008. They were filming publicity stunts for their climate-saving projects.

She will be writing a guest blog here in the next couple of days. If you take a look at the Ice Blog banner, the lady with the beige hat in the kayak is Cara. I took the photo from the kayak behind during the trip to Alaska in 2008 when the Ice Blog was born. The expedition was to find out about the impacts of climate change on the Arctic, including a trip to the Arctic research station in Barrow, meetings with local people in the northernmost town in the USA and a visit to the receding Begich Boggs glaciers near Whittier.

I was thrilled when Cara told me recently she had been chosen a “Climate Reality Leader” and invited to a climate workshop with Al Gore in Istanbul.  Expect more on that in her guest post for the Ice Blog very soon. As it turned out, she and her fellow “climate leaders” ended up bang in the middle of the pro-democracy protests.

Cara and Kayan – “Give me a solar-powered snow mobile and I’ll use it” was the young Eskimo’s quip in Barrow, Alaska.

Cara is one of those committed people who live, work and think climate. She set up Ireland’s first website on “greening” your home, worked on biofuels at Dublin University and now successfully runs her own consultancy.

“Baked Alaska” – Picture gallery from the Climate Change College Expedition to Alaska

Boat and icebergs in the Illulissat fjord, Greenland, 2009 (IQ)

I have come across an interesting perspective on this on www.chinadialogue.net. “The Chinese scramble into Greenland is overhyped” is the headline of an article by Jonas Parello-Plesner. The author maintains there is little evidence of a Chinese scramble for the Arctic. This would seem to contradict a lot of what I have been hearing and reading, so the title jumped out at me. The article appears on a bilingual English-Chinese site dealing with environment-related issues.

Clearly, Beijing is interested in accessing mineral resources all over the world. As far as the Arctic is concerned, the question, it seems to me, is to what extent that interest is already turning into involvement. The trade agreement with Iceland is one sure sign of interest in the shipping routes through the Arctic, as discussed here on the Ice Blog and in various articles over the past year or so. The new Chinese icebreaker and Chinese voyages through the High North are other indicators of interest turning into activity. When it comes to Greenland, Jonas Parello-Plesner has some interesting points. Let me quote one of them: “Actually, the public face of Chinese involvement, Xiaogang Hu of London Mining, who was spearheading a high profile investment in an iron ore project, left his position in April. Locals explained this as a result of new Greenlandic leader Hammond’s intention to revise the Large Scale Act, which was enacted under the previous government and allows scores of foreign workers on mining projects. Xiaogang was als the link to Chinese investors like Sichuan Xinye Mining Investment or the China Development Bank.”

This is, I believe, an interesting development. “It looks like Chinese investors – and their workers – are waiting and watching, rather than invading,” is the article’s conclusion from this. Remember all the talk of the 2,000 Chinese workers reported to be heading for Greenland? Concern about this was said to be one of the factors that led to the change of government. Understandably, the Greenlanders would like to have the wealth to fund independence from Denmark. But at what cost? The major price could well be environmental destruction. The other question for the island’s leaders is how they can ensure that Greenland actually benefits from mining or drilling activities.  The small population would have to work with foreign partners. The new government has introduced royalties to prevent profits disappearing offshore. Parello-Plessner says the challenge for Greenland is not just how to deal with Chinese interest, but “how to transform into a successful resource economy”.

I think he puts the situation in a nutshell: “With its tiny population, there are question marks over the ability of Greenland’s small negotiation teams to secure sufficiently stringent criteria that ensure investments are sustainable and environmentally acceptable. If it is unsuccessful, Greenland might simply become like other resource rich countries before it – it might think it had hit the resource jackpot, only to find out that it was really a curse.”

No life for a (sled) dog on melting ice?

Meanwhile, Greenland’s ice continues to melt. Let us not forget the reasons for the opening-up of the Arctic. And what consequences human-made climate warming will have for people all over the globe. Here is a link to one interesting recent report on the Greenland melt and implications for sea level rise:

At the big climate change impacts conference I attended in Potsdam recently, the experts stressed the need to adapt to climate change now and not wait for international agreements. Adaptation has become a necessity to avoid or minimize damage from climate-related events. I often wonder whether this could take attention away from the need to mitigate. Wolfgang Lucht from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts thinks it is the other way round. The more we know about the measures needed to deal with likely impacts, the more urgent becomes the need to mitigate climate change by reducing emissions. Our capacity to adapt is not unlimited, says Lucht, who also holds a chair in sustainability science at Berlin’s  Humboldt University. “We have evidence that climate change could have played a role in the collapse of complex civilizations. It is not certain, but there are signs that changes in the environment could have had a major impact, for instance through changing the availability of resources a society relied on”.

Can we keep that in mind when it comes to developing the Arctic for more oil, gas and minerals?

Melting ice off Svalbard, pictured 2011

The UN weather agency WMO (World Meteorological Organisation) has confirmed that the Arctic’s sea ice melted at a record pace in 2012, the ninth-hottest year on record. With just 3.4 million square kilometres (1.32 million square miles) during the August to September melting season, the sea ice cover was a full 18 percent less than the previous low set in 2007. The WMO’s Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said this was a “disturbing sign of climate change”, and pointed to the link between climate change and extreme weather events.

Meanwhile, a special briefing was called at the White House to discuss the possibility of the Arctic becoming ice free in the summer within just TWO years. Nafeed Ahmed, director of the “Institute for Policy Research & Development” headlines his post for the “Guardian“: “White House warned on imminent Arctic ice death spiral”. He describes the meeting, including NASA’s acting chief scientist Gale Allen, the director of the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon as “the latest indication that US officials are increasingly concerned about the international and domestic security implications of climate change”.

10 Arctic specialists were called in to advise the US government, including marine scientist Professor Carlos Duarte, currently director of the Oceans Institute at the University of Western Australia. I met and interviewed Prof. Duarte back in 2011 at the Arctic Frontiers conference, when he worked with the Spanish Council for Scientific Research.  At that time, he was already calling for urgent action and warning of the danger of “climate tipping points”, including the melt of the Arctic sea ice.  His conclusions are based on research which was presented in an article in Nature Climate Change last year.

The West Australian newspaper quotes Prof. Duarte as saying the “snowballing situation would prove as hard to slow down as a runaway train”.  He told the paper the ice melt was accelerating faster than any of the models could predict, and the prospect of an Arctic Ocean free of ice had been brought forward to 2015, compared with a prediction in 2007 that at least a third of the normal sea ice extent would remain in summer in 2100. When I spoke to him in 2011, the US navy was already assuming a date of 2050 and Duarte said he expected it to be even earlier.

Professor Carlos Duarte on Arctic Tipping Points

Prof Duarte also warned of the increasing danger of melting methane. Let me quote a little from the interview:

DUARTE: “We know from the history of ice covering the planet along geological time scales that ice is strongly a non-linear element in the earth’s system. It’s one of the components that show very rapid, very abrupt changes and tipping points. So we expect that once the ice will be lost quickly from the Arctic and also from the shelves in Greenland, then other forces will be set in motion, and many forces will be set in motion by loss of ice. One of them is the release of methane hydrates from the shallow continental shelves, mostly around Siberia, and those are molecules of methane that are trapped into ice in the sediments of the continental shelves and in the permafrost on land. So if this ice melts, this methane can be released abruptly and suddenly. And deposits of methane trapped in the shallow sediments of the Arctic amount to about five times the greenhouse power that humans have set in motion through burning fossil fuels. So if this five times what we have released in 150 years is released within a few years, that would be detrimental to the climate system and it could lead to a very rapid warming, and could again set in motion other forces like increased freshwater discharge to  the Arctic, which has already increased by 30 percent. And this involves a greater export of fresh water and buoyancy to the Atlantic, which may affect global circulation and global currents, and those in turn will affect regional climates  also further south to the sub-Arctic region. Also,  warmer temperatures are leading to dieback of the boreal forest and also the peat deposits in the boreal region are drying up to the extent that they can catch fire.”

(IRENE QUAILE:  How close are we?)

DUARTE: “We very much know what the threshold and the tipping point for the release of methanes will be, because the methane is kept in the hydrates, deposits in the salty sediments by ice, frozen sediments, and we know the freezing point of salty sediments may be around  minus 1 degree. So when the temperature of water in the summer goes well above freezing point, the hydrates will defrost and the methane will be released. So what we need to monitor is the temperature of the shallow waters in the Siberian shelf and other shallow waters in the Arctic, in the Canadian region as well, and see how close they’re getting to temperatures of 3 and 4 degrees, which will be those that will lead to melting of the hydrates.”

Scary? The interview, it seems, is as relevant as ever, the Professor’s warnings more urgent. I wonder what it feels like to be called in to the White House to brief the government of a country that is both a key player in the Arctic and a top emitter of the greenhouse gases that are causing the melt? On the one hand it must be satisfying for the scientists to know they are finally being heard. But there must also be some frustration about the extent of dangerous climate change that had to be set in motion first. Has the Arctic ice already reached a “tipping point”?

Let me close with another quote from that interview with Carlos Duarte:

DUARTE: “Unfortunately society is much more mobilised by opportunities than by risks. So the discourses and warnings of risks actually almost lead to inaction by society, whereas the sight of opportunities encourages society to set themselves in motion. So the opportunities for economic growth in the Arctic have dominated the discourse and the actions by society and policy makers. Those opportunities are new navigation routes across the Arctic, and the exploitation of oil, gas and fisheries, that were not accessible just a few years ago. The paradox in this is that the Arctic countries recognise that the forces that are improving access to these resources is actually climate change and that the reason for this climate change is the burning of fossil fuels by humans.  Arctic nations themselves are responsible for 26% of the release of these greenhouse gases and are taking advantage of these opportunities, which will involve greater emissions of greenhouse gases.  (…) I think there should be a balance between the economic growth these opportunities could bring about and the economic losses, they may bring about, which I don’t think have been quantified.”

Trees and shrubs are creeping farther north (Pic shows Alaska)

New research predicts that rising temperatures will lead to a massive “greening” or increase in plant cover in the Arctic. In a paper published in Nature Climate Change on March 31^st, scientists present new models projecting that wooded areas in the Arctic could increase by as much as 50 percent over the next few decades. They also show that this will accelerate climate warming at a faster rate than previously expected.

In the Ice Blog post of March 11^th, A Greener Arctic in a Warmer Climate, I wrote about a study of satellite data showing there have already been considerable changes, with plants growing further north and reaching higher heights than previously in their present locations. The new work, funded by the National Science Foundation, models how the “greening” of the Arctic could continue and what effects it could have.

Richard Pearson, the lead author on the paper and a scientist at the American Museum of natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation says “such widespread redistribution of Arctic vegetation would have impacts that reverberate through the global ecosystem”. Once again, we have a piece of research demonstrating the worldwide significance of what is happening in the far north of the planet.

The models suggest there could be trees growing hundreds of miles north of the present tree line in Siberia. As well as changing living conditions for flora and fauna, the researchers draw particular attention to the feedback effects which would be produced by having a green rather than a white Arctic. The albedo effect would have the greatest impact, they say. The white snow reflects most of the radiation back to space. “Dark” areas, on the other hand, in this case trees or shrubs, would absorb more sunlight, leading to a further increase in temperature. For the Arctic, that would mean “the more vegetation there is, the more warming will occur”, according to the study. It is the same phenomenon observed when the increased melting of the sea ice gives way to darker water, which absorbs more heat.

You might wonder if  the plant growth could offset this warming effect by absorbing atmospheric carbon. But this process happens too slowly for that, says co-author of the study Michael Loranty, from Colgate Unversity.:

“By incorporating observed relationships between plants and albedo, we show that vegetation distribution shifts will result in an overall positive feedback to climate that is likely to cause greater warming than has previously been predicted”, according to Wood Hole Research Center Senior Scientist Scott Goetz, another co-author.

The temperature in the Arctic is already rising at about twice the global rate.