Sunday, December 2, 2007

Expansion of the tropics - also ahead of schedule

Listening to another article, it appears that it's not just the arctic that's far ahead of the climate models. Most models predict that the tropics will expand by 2 degrees of latitude by the end of this century, but there's a report being presented at the Bali climate conference that says that amount of expansion has already happened.

By the way, the Bali conference which runs for two weeks, is the start of the process of negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Accord. The hope is that negotiations will be concluded by 2009, while Kyoto expires in 2012. But even the person leading this conference advised the BBC interviewer to keep his expectations of "success" extremely low. Even the perosn chairing the conference, in other words, doesn't expect much to be accomplished there.

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Arctic ice melt - WAY ahead of schedule

Just listened to a BBC "One Planet" documentary on the northwest passage. I knew that the Northwest passage was ice-free this summer for the fist time ever, but I didn't quite understand how big of a deal this was. I already understood less ice = more warming = less ice next summer, but I'll jsut quote David Bancroft's explanation. He's director of the Canadian Ice Service, which is the government agency responsible for monitoring sea ice.

DB: "I think it was some time around mid-august that I was looking at it and thinking that this was something out of a science-fiction setting. It's stunning. It's... I had no expectation of seeing this rapid a reduction in sea ice frankly for the next 10 years. There is no hint of this in the climate models for decades to come. And it happened in this last summer."

Interviewer: "Some scientists say this might be a kind of tipping point. Talk us through what you think."

DB: "It means that it can accelerate. The more open water you have in the summer time, the more sunshine gets trapped in the oceans, the more it warms up, and the faster it retreats. Eventually it can get to the point where there is no ice in the summertime. And the concern of some scientists is that we may have reached that point with the summer of 2007, where it's just going to retreat until there is no summer ice.

Interviewer: Now, there have been lots of forecasts for the date at which the Arctic in the summer would be ice free. It used to be 2100, and then 2080. How does this summer fit in to those forecasts?"

DB: "This point here [apparently pointing at one of the computer models they had displayed for this past summer] at the minimum ice that's shown, closely resembles what we see in the models or simulations of climate for the year 2040, on the worst case scenario [his emphasis, not mine.] So the summer of 2007 was stunning because it was decades ahead of where we expected to be in reduced sea ice."

Luckily 2008 is designated international polar year, so there will be a lot more research into this area of the earth, but we'd all better hope that the other climate models aren't also 35 years too conservative...