About five days before the flushing becomes obvious
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
23 comments:
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The management.
Still time for the good guys to win.
ReplyDeleteIf it doesn't then we have a new low. Even if it does we most likely have a new low as right now the base is below 2007
ReplyDeleteYou broke IJIS, it's down today ...
ReplyDeleteThe next two weeks will be interesting, there's still low-hanging fruit to melt, i.e. Hudson's Bay, which was gone by now last year ...
Nick stokes has been experimenting with (useful) Javascript techniques for showing reconstruction spaghetti graphs, seem to be starting on ice extent.
ReplyDeleteThese are nice for letting the reader emphasize any of the lines.
I'd still wish for IPCC AR4-like density plots for the temperature reconstructions, but still, Nick's stuff seems helpful.
a) it was IUP Bremen
ReplyDeleteb) it was Eli who suggested the idea to Nick
c) Eli is a very old, lazy bunny.
"a) it was IUP Bremen"
ReplyDeleteYeah, but the bettors are using IJIS and tend to be a bit myoptic :)
re: lazy: yes, delegating work to eager volunteers is always a good idea,
ReplyDeleteand my note here was for the other bunnies who might not have seen it.
Even modest graphics improvements should be encouraged.
I hope we have a new low because that should point to a warmer winter than last year's bun freezer, which should mean a lower use of heating oil, propane, and natural gas, and thus a lower level of carbon emissions...which is what we all want, eh?
ReplyDeleteSo I read something the other day that has me worried. The amount of heat, calories, energy, or whatever to cause a phase change from ice to water is the same amount of energy required to heat that water to 176 deg F. Am I out to lunch on that or is it true. Also does this mean the gradient continue to weaken which could open the refrigerator door in the winter which could give Canada a relatively warm winter an the US another cold winter?
ReplyDelete"I hope we have a new low because that should point to a warmer winter than last year's bun freezer,"
ReplyDeleteI don't think it is at all clear that low Arctic sea ice means a warm winter in, say, the continental US (if you live on the north shore of Alaska, ignore this assertion). In the long run, less sea ice does mean more warming of the overall system because of the albedo change, but in the short run I think the best we have is the Overland, 2010 paper which suggests, if anything, that low sea ice might lead to more cold events over the US, I think (the paper is all about the Arctic oscillation, and I'm not entirely clear that I have the relationship right with the AO and US weather, and the paper itself didn't claim that the sea ice to AO relationship was all that robust anyway...)
-M
Scrooge, where did you read that?
ReplyDeletePerhaps you're thinking of the recent comments in this page?
http://www.grist.org/climate-change/2011-07-12-gore-launches-new-climate-reality-project-tells-grist-about-it#
That's not news; he's saying it's hard to estimate how much of the energy going into the planet is going into melting ice compared to warming the oceans for example.
If you want to look it up, metric units will help.
176F is 80C
The heat of fusion for water = 80 Cal/g
You can find assistance making that sort of calculation at the homework help sites, like:
http://www.jiskha.com/search/index.cgi?query=heat%20%20of%20fusion%20of%20ice
It's not that easy yet, Eli. Meteorological conditions like clear skies and warm Siberian air made for a giant melting phase in august 2007 and it remains to be seen whether such could be repeated this summer. OTOH the base re ice volume is below 2007. Far below any year, in fact. I am actually still reckoning with a one third (totally speculative) chance of first ice free summer this year.
ReplyDeleteStarted reading Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer. Scenario 2, Russia 2019, opens with a quote from James Maslanik of University of Colorado (2008):
ReplyDelete"The biggest finding from our own work is not so much that the ice has retreated, which everybody pretty much knows, but that the ice that's remaining is a lot younger and a lot thinner than in the past... It takes less energy to melt the thin ice, so the same amount of solar energy, the same amount of heat in the water, can melt that one-meter ice much quicker than it can the three-meter ice.
[...]
The climate models are suggesting that we really shouldn't be seeing these big changes like we had in 2007 until about 2030 or 2040, towards the midpoint of the century. If we see this a couple of years running, that tells us that it wasn't just a fluke; that we are about twenty or thirty years ahead of where we are supposed to be based on the climate models."
Hank Roberts.. Thanks for drawing that verbal picture. One side of my brain is pretty dominate so I like pictures. It still is worrisome though.
ReplyDeletecRR, the graph in this post shows that the conditions that made for the 2007 melt, peaked in the last or next to last week of July. We are essentially there. The 2011 melt started from a lower base than in 2007, has more first year ice to work on and is following the track for melt/day of 2007. If 2011 follows the tracks for just about ever other year than 2007, then the new low will not only exceed 2007 but smash the record by a lot
ReplyDeleteps to Eli, thanks for making the chart a live link so we see the current day's graph on coming back to the page.
ReplyDeleteSo the question is whether regression to the mean is about the absolute values of the Y axis for the lines in every other year, or the slope of the lines for every other year. We'll find out.
ReplyDeleteI think we have a few more days of relatively large extent decrease ahead of us, but then things could be shifting more to the way they were last year. For more info on that read my latest SIE update. The melting season has been quite spectacular so far. I've called it mega-melt, but today the word cryocide popped into my head. ;-)
ReplyDeleteTrue, but that gets us under 2007 in September.
ReplyDeleteI think ER is correct. Today's report shows 7.346 million left. We should see at least another 1.35 million loss in the remaining 15 days in July (average 90k per day), then if August should chip in an average melt of 1.43 million, we hit 4.57 million by September 1. The 2007 record is 4.254 so only it is quite likely that the record low is exceeded sometime in the first week of September.
ReplyDeleteAnd if the remaining July and August melt comes in only 7k per day higher then these average estimates, which is quite possible, we break the record low extent before the end of August.
Paul K2
Eli et al, I maintain 2007 may not, or only just be reached by end of september.
ReplyDeleteLook at http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/sea.ice.anomaly.timeseries.jpg and concentrate on the speciale melting phase in September 2007. That flushdown was assisted by meteorological conditions.
I do agree such conditions may be less or not necessary for a repeat of 2007. Whereas rerealization of such conditions may result in a near total wipe-out this autumn.
NSIDC's press release from 2007, for a recap on the meteorological conditions then.
ReplyDeleteGo go go go....
ReplyDelete