Dan’s Wild Wild Weather Journal

I talked a lot about the disappearing Arctic ice pack in the North of 60 special. When we put it together, there was talk of the summer ice disappearing by the middle part of this century! This is well ahead of even the most aggressive climate models a few years ago.

This week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in California there was a stunning presentation about the ice. Professor Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Post Graduate School informed the meeting that the climate models were underestimating the heat being brought into the Arctic from ocean currents. He showed new projections that estimated the ice may disappear in less than 10 years!

Is he right? Dr. Mark Serraze of the Snow and Ice Data Center is an expert on the ice and he thinks these new projections are a bit fast, according to an interview with the BBC. Still, he also thinks that models forecast may not be off by much. The climate models have severely underestimated the rate of loss, and this new paper may have hit on the reason why. The ramifications may be that we do not have the time we thought we had to fix our greenhouse gas problem before we make serious changes to our climate. NASA Scientist Dr. Robert Hansen (One of the smartest climate scientists on the planet) says we could be at the tipping point. Not a point of no return, but a point at which we are going to suffer some dramatic changes. Changes that will occur no matter what we do in the future.

Later,

Dan

I did something this Summer I have wanted to do all my life. I went to the High Arctic. The first two weeks of August found me in the High Arctic of Canada and Greenland. Not just near the Arctic Circle but 1000km North of it!

Climate change is showing up better in the Arctic than anywhere else and I wanted to see it for myself. So, for two weeks I was on an expedition aboard the Russian vessel Akademic Ioffe. I will write more about it and post some of my more than 5000 pictures in coming weeks.

The Arctic can be a dangerous place…. I was over 1000km from the nearest medical facility. (We did have a Doctor aboard.) It was without doubt the most beautiful place I have seen. The one thing I will remember about the Arctic more than anything else, however, is the quiet.

The quiet is hard to explain but trust me when I say that I have never experienced anything quite like it. Another strange thing is getting used to 24 hour daylight. This seriously confuses your body clock, and you find yourself trying to fool your brain into thinking it is night!

So, that is where I have been, and I will tell the story in words and pictures on this blog and in September we will do a 2 or 3 part series on air showing the places I visited, and talking about the issues of climate change in the High Arctic.

Later,
Dan

Our 6pm producer came back to the weather office this afternoon to ask me about a story on the wire about major cuts in the polar orbiting weather satellite program. I was unfortunately very familiar with the problems.

The National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) provides a ton of data for researchers and weather forecasters like myself.

You have seen these images on my weathercasts many times. While most of the satellite pictures you see on TV weathercasts are from the much higher GOES satellites, the much lower NPOESS images provide very high resolution views in full colour of weather systems.

What you do not often see is images and data from other sensors on these satellites. This data is critical to our understanding of the Earth’s heat budget. Thousands of students and researchers around the world use this data to improve the long term climate models that are so important to our understanding of climate change.

I attended a couple of sessions on the NPOESS problems back in January at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society. These meetings were packed with stunned scientists who were getting the bad news that many instruments that they depended on for their research would not be put onboard the next generation of satellites because of budget cuts.

There are strong rumors that the program has been mismanaged. One researcher told me it was “Badly mismanaged”. Frankly, I am not close enough to these programs to know whose fault (If any) that is.

There is definitely an overall feeling in the science community that the United States is no longer the leader in Earth Observation research. The European Union has plans for several satellites that will have these sensors so hope is not lost.

However, As a local scientist told me today, the students and their tuition will go to the universities in the counties that pay for this data…and that will be Europe.

Before you make up your mind on whether this research is worth the taxpayer money it will cost…spend some time to understand it.

Here is a link to more information on the NPOESS program:

A new article out tonight caught my eye. Researchers inthe Antarctic have now contructed a record of the earth’s Carbon Dioxide levels for the past 800,000 years.

It was thought that our CO2 might be higher right now than it has been in this time and sure enough that is what they found.

This is just another supporting piece of evidence that the industrial revolution is very likely changing our climate. Their is also a way comparing the relative amounts of two types of oxygen in the atmosphere to estimate the global temperature over the least 800,000 years.

See Oxygen comes in two types. O16 is what you and I breathe mostly but every now and then is a molecule of Oxygen with 18 protons instead of 16. It turns out that this ratio is very dependant on temperature.

So all you do is drill down through ice that is a half million years old in Antarctica, and extract some air frozen in ice bubbles. You compare the oxygen ratio with what we have now, and what we have already discovered about the climate in the last few hundred years. You end up with a record of planetary average temperature!.

A record that goes much further back than the invention of thermometers! Or science itself, for that matter!

So what does it show? It shows that when the CO2 levels rise, the earths temp. rises with it. When the CO2 drops, the earth gets cooler.

Since the CO2 levels are likely to keep rising, at an ever increasing rate, for the next century or so. This spells bad news for our climate.
So why care if it is a bit warmer? Just a few degrees of warming will melt the polar ice caps. Melt the ice caps and sea level rises enough to flood a good chunk of Florida, New York City and the home of about one out of every 5 people on the planet. Don’t think for a second that this is far fetched. For much of Earth’s history, there have been no ice caps and this planet was much warmer than now.
In the end though, things will average out. We will be heading into an ice age again in about 10,000 years…as much as I love snow, I wish I had been born about 9,500 years from now-that would be some fun forecasting!

later,
Dan