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SoylentNews had a story last month about temperatures in the Arctic that were 20°C (36°F) warmer than usual. That was just a warm up.
Richard James, who holds a doctorate in meteorology, found November produced the most anomalously warm Arctic temperatures of any month on record after analyzing data from 19 weather stations.
In the middle of the month, the temperature averaged over the entire Arctic north of 80 degrees latitude spiked to 36 degrees [Fahrenheit] above normal.
Now, storm activity around Greenland has caused a warm spell in the vicinity of the North Pole, with temperatures 50°F (28°C) higher than usual.
As of the morning of Thursday, December 22 (3 a.m. EST), the International Arctic Buoy Programme (IABP), operated out of the University of Washington, recorded temperatures from these buoy[s] up to 0°C or slightly higher.
There was a similar pattern of unusually warm weather in the Arctic in November and December of 2015.
The warm spell [...] marks the second straight December of freakish warmth spreading across the Arctic due to weird weather patterns.
additional coverage:
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @03:22AM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday December 28 2016, @07:21AM
My take is that a few of us are aware of the thermodynamics concerning the enthalpy of fusion of water, and are quite concerned - knowing how this works - how this should play out if the math we know so far is a predictor of what to expect.
Like an ice cold beverage - as long as there is ice in it, the ice will melt/form to regulate the temperature of the mix. But once the ice or liquid is gone, there is no more thermal regulation provided by the latent heat of fusion.
This is a territory we haven't been in since dawn of recorded history. Once the earth's polar thermal regulators are offline, now what?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday December 28 2016, @09:30AM
Like an ice cold beverage - as long as there is ice in it, the ice will melt/form to regulate the temperature of the mix.
You still have heat radiating to space as the fourth power of temperature. That remains the dominant regulator of the temperature of Earth.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @09:37AM
So does Venus.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:09AM
So does Venus.
And it is quite regulated too.
(Score: 4, Informative) by anubi on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:16AM
True. I do not expect runaway heating, as no net thermal energy has ever been produced or absorbed by the polar ice. It has acted as a stabilizer.
I do expect an increase in thermal energy on Earth due to the albedo effects of white reflective ice versus deep blue sea in the polar area - as once sunlight gets into the sea, it will heat it up. Not a lot, but probably enough to keep ice from forming again. Mess things up for a few animals who depend on the ice.
It may screw up the thermohaline ocean circulation. The result of doing so has been mathematically modeled, but no one I suppose knows for sure if anything will happen or if the models accurately predict the outcome.
Its one thing to lose one's life savings at Vegas gambling on outcomes one does not know. But another to gamble away our home planet.
My concern is now the swings of thermal energy.
Knowing that both our weather and steam engines are driven by the same thermal energy to mechanical shaft work thermodynamic equations, I am expecting additional mechanical shaft-work to be produced to the atmospheric steam engine we call "the weather". This one driven by the volumetric change between water in its liquid and vapor state.
More water in the air, resulting from higher temperatures, combined with more temperature differential, will release more mechanical shaft work... aka wind ... which I believe will result in more vigorous storms.
Now, this is my understanding of the mathematical models underlying the concern.... now whether or not they are accurate? I guess time will tell. I am one of the timid ones who like to know the depth of the water before diving in.
I am not all gloom and doom here, though. In the last fifty years, we have made tremendous advances in technology which allow our creature comforts at a much lower cost to our environment. Look at some of those old photos of the beginning of the industrial age and all those smokestacks. I think we are on the right path. I hope we can continue to advance our technology faster than we advance our wants and economy which fulfills those wants.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:30AM
Its one thing to lose one's life savings at Vegas gambling on outcomes one does not know. But another to gamble away our home planet.
Pascal's wager doesn't work. There are more than one possible cataclysmic outcome. Thus, you need to have actual knowledge in order to make good decisions.
My concern is now the swings of thermal energy.
Not mine. Wealthy societies are very good at dealing with that sort of thing.
More water in the air, resulting from higher temperatures, combined with more temperature differential, will release more mechanical shaft work... aka wind ... which I believe will result in more vigorous storms.
And more heat radiated to space. I think this is the primary error in modern climate modeling.
I am not all gloom and doom here, though. In the last fifty years, we have made tremendous advances in technology which allow our creature comforts at a much lower cost to our environment. Look at some of those old photos of the beginning of the industrial age and all those smokestacks. I think we are on the right path. I hope we can continue to advance our technology faster than we advance our wants and economy which fulfills those wants.
Doesn't take much technology advancement to get the developing world up to speed.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday December 31 2016, @11:54AM
Those have to be some of the truest words ever strung together by anyone. Seems most of us have beliefs, not true knowledge.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @11:15AM
>to gamble away our home planet.
The home planet saw a number of much warmer periods before, and will see yet more of them even if we, the humans, go and extinct ourselves this very day. Read up on geologic history, it helps filtering out crazy alarmism.
And BTW, arctic ice cap is a much more recent feature than the Homo genus. Have we really become *that* dumber than our naked ancestors, to now fear the very climate in which they thrived?
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Wednesday December 28 2016, @01:04PM
I for one would like to see human species and more than that human civilisation last a bit longer, and not see us go extinct or regress to Paleolithic technology and population levels, so I do not think that geologic history is of any help whatsoever in curbing crazy alarmism. The human species has built up a global civilisation that is dependent on the climate being one way and cannot quickly adapt to it swinging another way. We cannot so easily move our cities and farmlands to wherever the changing climate makes them viable. Climate change can and has destroyed human civilisations in the past (e.g. the 4.2 kiloyear event [wikipedia.org] which was said to have caused the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Akkadian Empire), and the kind of climate change we are talking about now has the potential to destroy all of modern human civilisation. This will probably not be enough to drive the human species completely extinct, but I don’t think the death of 90% to 99% of the human species and a reversion to barbarism among the survivors is a good thing.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 29 2016, @12:47AM
The human species has built up a global civilisation that is dependent on the climate being one way and cannot quickly adapt to it swinging another way.
The obvious rebuttal is that we see plenty of evidence that human civilization radically changes over the course of a single human lifespan. My view is that it would be hard for us to even notice the effects of climate change just due to how quickly we adapt to it.
Further, some of the proposed mitigation approaches (such as widespread, very selective use of Pascal's wager or redoing humanity's energy infrastructure to prevent modest climate change) would increase the fragility of human civilization.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @01:58PM
”Thrived” is a relative term. To say our “naked ancestors thrived” is laughable compared to how we moderns have “thrived”. Human populations in the Paleolithic did not exceed 100,000 to 300,000 individuals. Today of course there are well over 7 billion humans on the planet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @03:47PM
>Human populations in the Paleolithic did not exceed 100,000 to 300,000 individuals. Today of course there are well over 7 billion humans on the planet.
Religions forbidding ancient birth control practices are a relatively recent invention; humans have *not* evolved to breed like crazed rats, quite the reverse in fact.
Do read up on tribal reproductive practices; remedying one's ignorance is good for one's intellect.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 28 2016, @01:49PM
The only minor fine tuning I'd apply is there already seem to be weird limits to weather phenomena such that we never see 600 MPH tornadoes or 300 MPH hurricanes ... ever. In that way to dissipate the energy I suspect we'll see the same plain vanilla stuff we're always saw just more often and slightly larger range.
Like where I live its very difficult geographically and meteorologically to squirt more than maybe 15 inches of snow out of an individual blizzard for some fundamental distance, altitude, grams of water per kg of air limitations. What we're likely to see is not 16 inch blizzards which would require massive geological alterations if not changes in physical laws, but more likely we'll get 1.1 blizzards like that per decade instead of 0.9 now.
Now what would be really exciting is not the sea level rising 1 cm or whatever, but a metastability limit reached such that we get a permanent hurricane like Jupiter's red spot. Now that would be interesting. I think we have too high of a land:water ratio in the tropics for it to happen, however.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday December 28 2016, @01:23PM
I'm not asking for the number who are *scared* of being inundated, but the number who are *actually, tangeably* inundated.
And I think we should exclude those who built their house at an elevation of <0 m and are genuinely at risk of polders failing, you made a dumb choice.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves