Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

Data from the Univ. of Illinois shows the NW Passage is now mainly clear of ice.

Meteorologist Jeff Masters has a lot more about it, but the NW Passage is now mainly free of ice and is navigable. You can see a cool 30 day animation of the melt here. It looks like the NE Passage from Europe to Alaska is almost free as well. Masters says this is the 4th consecutive year that the passage has opened. It’s also the 4th time in recorded history.

The sea ice will continue to melt for a couple of more weeks but the big freeze is already starting above 80 degrees. There were already signs of summer’s end when I was in Greenland three weeks ago.

The real story is not so much the amount of ice on the surface but the overall volume of the ice. This too is dropping very rapidly.  Look at the graphic below from the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington.

Dr. Masters has an excellent detailed writeup on this with a commentary that is spot on.

The surface sea ice melt will not reach a new record this year but it will be close.

The great melt off at the top of the World continues.

Predictions made 20 years ago by Hansen and others that climate change would show up first and most strongly in the Arctic have certainly been proven true…

from Church J.A. and White N.J. "A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise" Geophys. Res. Lett. 2006; 33: L01602

NASA’s top climate scientist James Hansen has put together a new website. It basically updates the graphics in his book “Storms of My Grandchildren“. Definitely worth checking out for the graphics which are from papers published in the peer reviewed literature.

If you have not read the book, I highly recommend it. It’s even available for iPad and Kindle (Which makes me happy since I pretty much read everything on my iPad now).

From NASA GISS

From NASA GISS

NASA released the July global temp data this evening. The last 7 months are the warmest January – July on record. The thermometer record goes back to 1880. Before 1880 there are proxies for temperature. Tree rings and ice cores for example. These proxies  (See Oldest Ice Core Recovered from Greenland) indicate we are very possibly in the warmest period in at least one thousand years.

The temperature anomalies map shows that the higher latitudes are continuing to warm the fastest. This comes on the 30th anniversary of a now famous paper by Wally Broecker back in 1980. Broecker predicted in 1975 that the slight cooling trend of the 1970’s would reverse itself and a significant warming trend would begin due to increasing greenhouse gases. The blog Real Climate (written by several climate experts) has details on this. You can also read the paper for yourself.

July 2010 was the warmest July on the record for the Northern Hemisphere as well.

Amazing satellite image from Monday showing smoke covering much of Western Russia. NASA/Modis image. Click for higher resolution. Fires denoted by red dots.

The death toll from the heat and smoke in Moscow is climbing rapidly. BBC Radio reported today that the death rate in Moscow is running 2-5 times normal.

This is not an ordinary heat wave. It’s actually almost unbelievable meteorologically. It’s not unusual to set a record high. It’s very rare to set an all time high temperature, but it happens from time to time in extreme situations.

What IS nearly unheard of is setting a new all time record high, then tying or breaking it 5 times in the same month! Imagine setting a record high and breaking the old record by 19 degrees F.! That’s what Moscow did on Monday 9 August. The old record was 90 in 2001. Monday Moscow hit 99F and that ties the warmest temp. Ever recorded there.

This has been going on since July as well. This kind of heat in a city where almost no one has or needs air conditioning.

CHOKING FOREST FOREST FIRES

The heat and dry weather has caused the swampy land full of peat bogs around Moscow to dry out and they are now burning. The smoke they are producing has reduced the visibility in Red Square to about 1 km. On Saturday, the Carbon Monoxide levels reached 5 times the unhealthful level.

RELIEF IN SIGHT?

There are some strong indications that a cool front will bring at least some temporary relief to NW Russia in about 5-7 days. Unfortunately, several thousand people will not likely live to see it.

Temperature anomalies in July over Eastern Europe. The heat has gotten worse since then...

SOME OTHER OPINIONS

Meteorologist Jeff Masters has a very good writeup about the heat in Russia here. There are some amazing pics from Russia courtesy of the Boston Globe as well.

CLIMATE CHANGE RELATED

You have to be very careful in blaming any one weather event on climate change. That said, the warming over the last 50 years has been much greater in the higher latitudes. Dr. Michael Tobis at the Univ. of Texas in Austin makes a decent case for calling this event at least VERY suspicious as far as climate is concerned.

Dan

Arctic Sea ice continues to drop in areal coverage AND in thickness. Image from NSIDC.

The Arctic sea ice level dropped to the second lowest July levels on record last month. The data record goes back to about 1978. That’s when reliable satellite based measurements began. The lowest amount on record was on 16 September in 2007.

Arctic sea ice extent compared the the long term average and the record low year of 2007. Click for larger image.

Will we set an all time low record this year. Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado are thinking that we likely will not. It will be very close though. Record low or not, the levels will be well below the average ice levels of 1979-2000.

The bigger part of this story that is sometimes missed is the thinning of the ice. Submarine records from the past and modern methods all indicate the ice is getting much thinner. The Arctic of Cook and Perry does not exist anymore. It is quite possible that large areas of the Arctic may be ice free before 2050 in summer. Scientists are still trying to figure out just what that will mean for the hemisphere and the planet as a whole.

Make no mistake, the Arctic is the Northern Hemisphere’s air conditioner. If the ice starts disappearing in the summer, it will have a significant impact on our climate. These are the kind of questions that scientists hope the ice core drill sites like NEEM will answer.

That's me at NEEM on July 28,2010. The ski equipped C-130 from the New York Air Guard carried science types and ice cores back to the real world.

The NEEM site brought up ice from the warm period before the last ice age. This period is called the Eemian and it was a bit warmer than this warm period that has lasted about 10,000 years now. How much ice was there in Greenland in the Eemian, and how did it affect global temperatures is a question the NEEM ice core may answer.

It will be possible to estimate ocean temperatures as well as greenhouse gas levels with the ice core. Even the amount of volcanic dust in the atmosphere can be measured. It’s really amazing how the past can be such a spotlight on the future climate change we are forcing on ourselves.

More on NEEM with pics and videos soon.