Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Arctic Optimism

UPDATE: Don't fret about Antarctic ice either.


Still worried about the supposedly melting Arctic ice? According to a new paper from four researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, don't be:
We examine the recovery of Arctic sea ice from prescribed ice-free summer conditions in simulations of 21st century climate in an atmosphere-ocean general circulation model. We find that ice extent recovers typically within two years. The excess oceanic heat that had built up during the ice-free summer is rapidly returned to the atmosphere during the following autumn and winter, and then leaves the Arctic partly through increased longwave emission at the top of the atmosphere and partly through reduced atmospheric heat advection from lower latitudes. Oceanic heat transport does not contribute significantly to the loss of the excess heat. Our results suggest that anomalous loss of Arctic sea ice during a single summer is reversible, as the ice-albedo feedback is alleviated by large-scale recovery mechanisms. Hence, hysteretic threshold behavior (or a "tipping point") is unlikely to occur during the decline of Arctic summer sea-ice cover in the 21st century.
(via Watts Up With That?)

3 comments:

A_Nonny_Mouse said...

"Still worried about the supposedly melting Arctic ice?"
=======================

Actually, no I wasn't.

But I *AM* worried that my local newspaper keeps carrying hand-wringing articles about the Coming Horror of Global Warming -- STILL, EVEN NOW, 1-1/2 years after Climategate and all the debunking of AGW "science"; after all the protestations by real, independent scientists that there is *NOT* a "consensus" and that the science is NOT "settled". The True Believers of the Religion of AGW are STILL foisting their propaganda upon We-the-Public, aided and abetted by our lamestream media. (It's no longer "all the news that's fit to print", it's now "only the news-and-views we want to report".)

How in the heck is this country supposed to hold any kind of informed debate about ANYTHING: Islamic extremism, finding ways to cut the deficit, what we should do about our dependence on foreign oil, whether Quantitative Easing and monetizing our debt is good, bad, or inconsequential... when our media outlets apparently consider "freedom of the press" to be "absolute license to control public discourse by presenting only the Liberal-Progressive side of any issue of national importance"??? Feh.

(And the Loony Left Liberal wall-of-noise opposing Rep. Peter King's hearings on "the radicalization of Muslims in America" has me caught somewhere between fury and despair. Are we supposed to pretend that Buddhists and Mennonites are as likely as Muslims to become jihadists??? Fer cryin' out loud...)

OBloodyHell said...

The latest one is blathering about some study that says that Arctic plankton blooms are maxing out sooner and sooner. They claim that, since 1979ish when the satellites have been taking pictures of them, that they've been occurring steadily earlier and earlier, now roughly 50 days sooner than the late 70s.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110306/sc_livescience/arcticsspringphytoplanktonbloomsarriveearlier#mwpphu-container

Not sure how relevant the "max" is, or that one can assume that warmth and/or CO2 is the key factor in that maxing...

As usual, there's a lot of presumption in the notions of causality vs. correlation here.

Smock Puppet said...

>>> Are we supposed to pretend that Buddhists and Mennonites are as likely as Muslims to become jihadists???

Of course! Anything else would be rather blatantly "racial profiling".