The 2014 ‘Arctic Report Card’ is here, and yes, it suggests global warming

This is an important blog!!

By Andrew Freedman

The Arctic is warming at the fastest rate of any region on the planet, about twice as quickly as the globe’s average rate of warming, scientists recently reported. Not only that, but the effects of this warming are increasingly visible well beyond the region’s iconic sea ice and polar bears, according to the 2014 Arctic Report Card, which was released earlier this month by an international team of scientists.

Spearheaded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Arctic Report Card has been produced each year since 2006, and with each passing year, the footprint of climate change throughout the far north is growing.

The 2014 Arctic Report Card paints a picture of a region in transition from a largely frozen, sealed off region to one that is accessible by ships and other means on a seasonal basis, with huge changes taking place in the region’s marine and land-based species (yes, including polar bears).

See also: U.S. could see damage of at least $1.1T through 2100 from sea level rise, storm surge

Unlike in some of the other years, this report found evidence of temporary developments that would seem to go against the prevailing global warming trend, such as a temporary pause in the accelerating total ice mass loss rate of Greenland’s ice sheet, for example.

However, the report concludes, “… Overall, the long-term trends provide evidence of continuing and often significant change related to Arctic amplification of global warming.”

Here are some of the key findings:

Average annual air temperatures continue to increase in the Arctic about twice as fast as in the rest of the world.

Arctic and global mean annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomalies (in degrees Celsius) for the period 1900-2014 relative to the 1981-2010 mean value. The Arctic data are for land stations north of 60°N latitude.

Image: NOAA Arctic Report Card 2014

October to January average near-surface air temperature anomalies (in degrees Celsius) for the years 2009-2014 relative to the final 20 years of the 20th Century (1981-2000). The strongest warming signal (dark red) is over the Arctic regions of Canada and the U.S.

Image: NOAA Arctic Report Card 2014

Despite a modest uptick in sea ice in 2014, the long-term decline continues.

In September, the minimum sea ice extent was the sixth-lowest in the post-1979 satellite era record. Scientists noted a slight increase in the prevalence of older, thicker ice in some parts of the Arctic. Such sea ice does not melt as readily during the summer months, and could be an indication that 2015 will also see a bit of an increase in sea ice extent.

However, sea ice specialists do not see 2014’s slight recovery as evidence that long-term sea ice loss is changing course.

Time series of Arctic sea ice extent anomalies in March (the month of maximum ice extent, black symbols) and September (the month of minimum ice extent, red symbols). The anomaly value for each year is the difference (in %) in ice extent relative to the mean values for the period 1981-2010.

Such short-term variability does not mask the long-term trend, which is for far less sea ice and more areas of open water during the summer and early fall. The September monthly average sea ice extent trend is now -13.3% per decade relative to the 1981-2010 average.

The eight lowest sea ice extents since 1979 have each occurred in the last eight years, according to the Arctic Report Card.

Hey Greenland: You’ve got an albedo problem.

The Report Card — which never actually gives the Arctic a letter grade — shows that melting affected about 40% of the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. The average albedo of the ice sheet, which is a measure of the reflectivity of the ice, during summer was the second-lowest on record since such measurements began in the year 2000. A new, ice sheet-wide record low albedo occurred in August 2014.

The albedo is relevant because it is an indication of how much solar energy the ice sheet is absorbing versus how much it is reflecting back to space. A high albedo means the ice is reflecting a lot of incoming energy back out to space, most likely leading to less melting. A low albedo is a sign of an ice sheet that is primed for higher amounts of melting.

For example, on a hot summer day, dark sidewalk pavement, which has a low albedo, tends to be far hotter compared to lighter surfaces.

Greenland melt anomalies in June and July 2014.

Image: NOAA Arctic Report Card 2015

What is unusual about the 2014 Greenland melt season is that despite the record low albedo, the ice sheet did not lose more mass than it did in the previous year. The highest measured ice mass loss rate occurred in 2012, when the ice sheet lost an estimated 474 gigatonnes of ice.

Greenland albedo anomaly for summer 2014.

Image: NOAA Arctic Report Card 2015

Ice loss from Greenland, Antarctica and glaciers around the world are now the leading contributors to sea level rise. The fate of the ice sheets will determine how much sea levels will increase during the next several decades and beyond.

Here is what the mass loss trends look like, with what may be a temporary leveling off between 2013-14, depending on a variety of factors, including the prevailing weather patterns during the summer of 2015.

Monthly mass anomalies (in Gigatonnes, Gt) for the Greenland ice sheet since April 2002 estimated from GRACE measurements. The anomalies are expressed as departures from the 2002-2014 mean value for each month.

Image: NOAA Arctic Report Card 2015

And about those polar bears…

For better or worse, polar bears have long been the iconic symbol of global warming, and new data bolsters the case that declining sea ice as well as faster spring melting of land-based snow cover, together with other aspects of a changing climate, are adversely affecting various populations of polar bears that live across the Arctic region.

Population trend assessment for all 19 acknowledged polar bear sub-populations assessed in 2013 by the IUCN/SSC-PBSG. Abbreviations: AB: Arctic Basin; BB: Baffin Bay; CS: Chukchi Sea; DS: Davis Strait; EG: East Greenland; FB: Foxe Basin; GB: Gulf of Boothia; KB: Kane Basin; KS: Kara Sea; LS: Lancaster Sound; LP: Laptev Sea, MC: M’Clintock Channel; NB: northern Beaufort Sea; NW: Norwegian Bay; SB: southern Beaufort Sea; SH: southern Hudson Bay; VM: Viscount Melville; WH: western Hudson Bay.

Image: NOAA Arctic Report Card

The Arctic Report Card finds that, in areas where there is high quality data about polar bear populations, there are some worrisome signs emerging.

For example, between 1987 and 2011, a decline in the survival of female polar bears of all ages has now been attributed to earlier sea ice break-up and a later freeze-up in the fall. In the southern Beaufort Sea, “polar bear condition and reproductive rates” have declined, according to the report.

Studies show that polar bears have been through long periods of population decline during the last one million years, including in periods of lower sea ice, making predictions about future polar bear populations difficult.

Topics: arctic, Climate, glaciers, Greenland, sea ice, U.S., US & World, World

We Cannot Know Too Much About ALBEDO

Ponds can predict extent of Arctic ice melt.

DDN Correspondent Posted on 18 Jun, 2014 at 12:02:PM IST

According to a recent research, the quantity of water in ponds that accumulates on top of icebergs at the time of spring warming can assist to forecast how much the Arctic ice will melt during the summer.

 The new research is conducted by the University of Reading.

The scientists have anticipated that the extent of minimum Arctic ice this September will be around 5.4 million sq km, which is similar to what it was last year. The scientists concluded it on the basis of observing the melt-pond region in spring, as they discovered a strong association between the spring pond fraction and sea ice extent in September.

According to the researchers, this has connection with the albedo, which is the reflective power of ice. The scientists found in the month of April that the maximum extent of sea ice in the Arctic was reducing, with the melting season continuing five more days.

The study says existence of more ponds decrease the albedo and a lesser albedo results in more melting and more melting increases pond fraction. The findings help elucidate the acceleration of Arctic sea-ice reduction that took place during the past decade.

Another research published in February indicated that the loss of ice shows that a smaller amount of sun heat was being reflected back into the atmosphere, which was increasing global warming.

Arctic Sea Ice Freefall is Mirror Image of Carbon Dioxide Ascent

23 Jan 2014 9:59 AM

 

By earthpolicyinstitute

By Emily E. Adams

The amount of Arctic sea ice has plummeted in recent decades—a bold manifestation of the rise in temperature resulting from the rapid increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. After staying below 300 parts per million (ppm) for some 800,000 years, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere skyrocketed as humans started burning more and more fossil fuels. In 2013, atmospheric CO2 averaged 396 ppm.

Carbon dioxide traps heat, reducing the amount escaping into space, thereby warming the globe. Together with other heat-trapping gases, the additional CO2 has so far raised the Earth’s temperature by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century. The extra heat is melting snow and ice around the world, including Arctic sea ice, changing the face of the planet as we know it. For some 1,500 years the late summertime size of the North Pole’s ice cap fluctuated narrowly around 10 million square kilometers; in recent summers, ice covered half that area. The ice pack is expected to keep shrinking as temperatures continue to rise.

As Arctic ice melts, polar bears switch diets to survive, studies say

John Roach NBC News       Jan. 24, 2014

Arctic polar bears may be adjusting their eating habits as their sea ice habitat melts and the furry white predators stand to lose the floating platform they depend on to hunt seals, their primary food. According to researchers, however, the bears are displaying flexible eating habits as their world changes around them.

Indeed, scientific studies indicate polar bear populations are falling as the sea ice disappears earlier each spring and forms later in the fall. But a series of papers based on analysis of polar bear poop released over the past several months indicate that at least some of the bears are finding food to eat when they come ashore, ranging from bird eggs and caribou to grass seeds and berries.

“What our results suggest is that polar bears have flexible foraging strategies,” Linda Gormezano, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a co-author of several of the papers, told NBC News.

Robert Rockwell / American Museum of Natural History

Quinoa, a Dutch shepherd who was trained to sniff out polar bear scat, sits next to find. Analysis of the polar bear scat reveals the animals have a flexible foraging strategy.

The results stem from research in western Hudson Bay, near Chruchill, Manitoba, Canada, which is in the southern extent of polar bear habitat and serves as a harbinger of what the animals are likely to face throughout their Arctic range as the climate continues to warm and sea ice breaks up earlier and earlier each spring.

The flexible foraging strategy of polar bears “means that there may be more to this picture in terms of how polar bears will adjust to changing ice conditions” than indicated by models based on the spring breakup date of the sea ice and thus their access to seals, Gormezano said.

She added that nobody knows for sure how well polar bears will adapt to the changing food supply, but a big step toward an answer is to study what they eat on land “rather than assume that they may just be fasting.” 

Let them eat car parts
In addition to berries, birds and eggs, Andrew Derocher, a University of Alberta polar bear biologist who was not involved with the recent studies, said people have seen a polar bear drink hydraulic fluid as it was drained out of a forklift, chomp the seats of snow machines, and eat lead acid batteries.

 

“Polar bears will eat anything,” he told NBC News. “The question is: Does is it do them any good? And everything we can see from what bears eat when they are on land is it has a very, very minimal energetic return relative to the cost.”

Gormezano said the plants found in any given pile of poop were usually the same, suggesting the bears eat whatever they find in their immediate surroundings — they don’t spend a lot energy searching for food. Mothers and cubs, who wander farthest inland, feast on berries found there. On the coast, where adult males linger, the poop is predominantly shoreline grass seeds.

Animal remains, however, showed no pattern, which fits with a landscape rich with nesting birds and caribou and polar bears opportunistically eating whatever crosses their path, according to a paper Gormenzano and colleague Robert Rockwell published in BMC Ecology in December 2013.

In a paper published in Polar Biology in May 2013, the researchers report observations of polar bears chasing and capturing snow geese with the efficiency of a skilled hunter — snagging one right after the other.

Robert Rockwell / American Museum of Natural History

A polar bear eats a caribou on land. Recent studies suggest polar bears have a flexible foraging strategy, which help them survive as they come ashore earlier due to melting Arctic sea ice.

“Previously, it had been thought that that would not be a very energetically profitable thing for a polar bear to do because they expend more energy in the chase than they get from consuming the food,” Gormezano noted. 

The biologist stressed that polar bears have always exhibited a flexible foraging behavior. In a study published in Ecology and Evolution in July 2013, she and Rockwell compared scat collected in recent years with scat collected 40 years earlier. “The diet overlapped tremendously,” Gormezano noted. 

The bears do, however, eat more migratory snow geese now, whose Hudson Bay population exploded from 2,500 nesting pairs in the 1960s to more than 50,000 today due to a boost in their food supply further south.

 

What’s more, the polar bears come ashore a few weeks earlier due to the melting ice, which aligns with the nesting period for the geese, meaning more eggs to eat. “That’s a very easy food source because they don’t need to expend much energy in order to get it,” she said.

No seals, no polar bears
Gormenzano said she hesitates to speculate about how the polar bears will fare if the sea ice completely disappears — “that’s a long way off,” she noted, but added the flexible foraging they observed “could compensate for some energy deficits stemming from lost seal (hunting) opportunities.”

Derocher, the polar bear biologist, said the only reason these polar bears are eating the snow geese and other plants and animals is that they still have sea ice in the winter to hunt seals and pack on the fat. Once on shore, his and other studies show, polar bears lose about 1.5 pounds per day. 

“We’ve got bears that are dying of starvation on land in the Churchill area at the end of the ice free period. These are bears that don’t have enough energy coming off the sea ice. So any resources that they by default have got while they are on land haven’t been enough to change that trajectory,” he said. 

The most recent published population estimates for Hudson Bay polar bears is 935 as of 2004, down from 1,194 in 1987. Unpublished estimates put the current population at around 800, Derocher said. Climate models indicate that the region will be free of suitable ice for polar bears to hunt seals by the middle of this century, perhaps sooner.

“You can’t just push polar bears on shore and expect them to do just fine,” Derocher said.

Canadian expedition spotlights thinning Arctic sea ice

September 28, 2013

Phil Hirschkorn, Terrell Brown   (CBS News) NEW YORK –

From afar, we watched this summer as four Vancouver-based men launched their custom-made, kevlar-coated, wood and fiberglass row boat, the Arctic Joule, from Canada’s Northwest territory in early July, heading east, toward Greenland.The rowers — Kevin Vallely and Frank Wolf, from Canada, with Denis Barnett and Paul Gleeson, originally from Ireland — set out to navigate part of the mythic Northwest Passage, the Arctic waters between Europe and Asia, a long-sought shortcut between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

For centuries, frozen ice made this sea route impassable. But the thinning Arctic sea ice, particularly during the summer melting season, has opened up the waters like never before.”Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” stated the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published Friday. “The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.”

The IPCC called the last three decades the warmest 30 year period of the last 1,400 years and found most of the gained heat has been stored in the oceans, spurring the melting of the polar ice caps. The panel forecast sea levels could rise three more feet by the end of this century.

four Vancouver-based men launched their custom-made, kevlar-coated, wood and fiberglass row boat, the Arctic Joule, from Canada’s Northwest territory in early July, heading east, toward Greenland.

Last year, summer Arctic ice covered the smallest area since satellite measurements began, according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center, in Colorado. This summer was the sixth smallest area.

“Countless explorers have died in the Northwest Passage just because it’s been chock full of ice over hundreds of years,” said rower Kevin Vallely. “There’s still ice up there, but there’s far less ice than there was before, and we really wanted to bring awareness to that by traversing it solely under human power in a 25 foot row boat.”

Their motto, painted on the boat, was “pulling together against climate change.” The was no engine and no sails on board. Just two men at a time rowing, changing shifts every three hours.

“We did go for 50, 60, 70 hours at a time, and we got into the groove of doing that. You get a little sleep-deprived, but you do get your naps,” Vallely said. “We needed to keep moving.”

Their determined movements covered, on average, 21 miles a day. When the crew took a break to sleep, they typically dropped anchor at sea and snuggled in sleeping bags below deck in a tiny cabin most of us would find claustrophobic.

“At anchor, we could all four of us just squeeze in there kind of like sardines,” rower Frank Wolf said. “Imagine like four dudes in boat about a month in having eaten just freeze dried food — what that would have smelled like.”

There were no baths, unless the rowers took a dip in the frigid waters.

Promoting alternative energy sources, three solar panels built into the boat powered their GPS and a desalinator that let them drink converted sea water.

Part of the mission was data collection for the Canadian Department of Oceans and Fisheries, so the rowers took measurements of the ice and water.

The rowers, ranging in age from 32 to 49, were all experienced adventurers. Vallely had trekked on skis across the South Pole in record time. Wolf has cycled the frozen Yukon to the northern coast of Alaska. Gleeson and Barnett had rowed the Atlantic.

But the Arctic adventure came with its own special danger.

“A piece of ice actually came in when we were sleeping at anchor and pinned our boat and was actually pulling us underneath the ice,” Wolf said.

That ice was 40 feet thick. Vallely cut the boat’s anchor so they could escape.

“The reality is this ice is supposed to be up at the pole. It’s breaking up now,” Vallely said.

Besides thinning ice, wildlife was another indicator of climate change.

They expected to see herds of musk-ox and caribou — and did — but it was a surprise to see grizzly bears roaming in polar bear country.

“They’re seeing all these species up there that never used to be up there coming up from the South and now living in the Arctic,” Wolf said.

In case the grizzlies set their sights on them, the rowers slept with a shotgun but never had to use it.

In the end, wind was their worst enemy, impeding their progress and sometimes making it impossible to row for entire days.

“It was the journey that mattered the most. We learned so much out there, and we tried everything we could,” Vallely said. “Where we stopped we had to stop.”

The rowers suspended their journey earlier this month after 55 days and 1,163 miles, reaching Victoria Island, about 700 miles short of their goal, but making it halfway to Greenland.

Wolf, an experienced environmental filmmaker, whose last release, “On The Line” discusses the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline project, documented the Arctic rowing trip and is planning to put together a feature film about it.

“Things are melting up there and changing up there. It’s going to raise sea levels worldwide,” Wolf said. “It’s going to affect people in New York City; it’s going to affect people in Los Angeles; it’s going to affect people in any kind of coastal community.”

Two Hundred People Swept to Sea

29 Mar 2013
By Ian Johnston, Staff Writer, NBC News
        More than 200 people were swept about three miles out to sea on two large ice floes off the coast of Latvia, an official said Friday. A rescue operation managed to save all 223 people caught on the ice as they drifted out into the Gulf of Riga in the Baltic Sea, State Fire and Rescue Service spokesperson Victoria Sembele said by phone.
       Friday is a national holiday in Latvia and many were fishing through holes cut in the sea ice when two large sections broke off at about 12:30 p.m. local time (6:30 a.m. ET), Sembele said.
“Nobody fell in the sea … it’s very lucky for those people who were there,” she said.