Arctic Ocean soon ice free?

The Arctic Ocean could be free of ice in the summer as soon as 2010 or 2015 -- something that hasn't happened for more than a million years, according to a leading polar researcher.

"And it's probably going to happen even faster than that," said Fortier,

"Brenda" said
From the same article, in addition to Ziggy's quote:



That will be... this coming summer right?

Clear. Wind northwest 30 km/h. Low minus 32. Wind chill minus 48.

Time to cut off this guys grant money!

"sasquatch2" said
So much for gloom and doom.............

Currently the Sahara has shrunk by thousasnds of sqkm due to increased rainfall.

If the Sahara should disappear....how many people would starve?

Now it appears that Sahara has indeed been shrinking, not growing, since the mid-80s. New Scientist is reporting that extensive studies of satellite data shows that Northern Africa is getting greener.

"New Scientist has learned that a separate analysis of satellite images completed this summer reveals that dunes are retreating right across the Sahel region on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Vegetation is ousting sand across a swathe of land stretching from Mauritania on the shores of the Atlantic to Eritrea 6000 kilometres away on the Red Sea coast."

With global warming it is forecast agricultural out put will increase as will the amount of forested land. The only problem is that disease bearing insects will increase in number, as swamps grow, and there will be an increase in forest fire frequency and size.

Africa, too, is plagued with expanding deserts. In the north, the Sahara Desert is pushing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria northward toward the Mediterranean. In a desperate effort to halt the advancing Sahara, Algeria is geographically restructuring its agriculture, replacing grain in the south with orchards and vineyards.

On the southern edge of the Sahara, in the vast east-to-west swath of semiarid Africa between the Sahara Desert and the forested regions to the south lies the Sahel—a semiarid region where herding and farming overlap. In countries from Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia in the east, the demands of growing human and livestock numbers are converting land into desert. (See data.)

Nigeria, slightly larger than Texas, is losing 1,355 square miles of rangeland and cropland to desertification each year. While Nigeria’s human population was growing from 33 million in 1950 to 134 million in 2006, a fourfold expansion, its livestock population grew from 6 million to 66 million, an 11-fold increase. With the food needs of its people forcing the plowing of marginal land and the forage needs of livestock exceeding the carrying capacity of its grasslands, the country is slowly turning to desert. Nigeria’s fast-growing population is being squeezed into an ever-smaller area.

Several new studies indicate increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 benefit global plant life. A study on variations in northern vegetation inferred from satellite data from 1981-1999, reported in Journal of Geophysical Research (Vol. 106: 20,069-20,083 (2001)), found an 8 to 12 percent increase in vegetation across North America and Eurasia, respectively. A subsequent comment in the same journal, Journal of Geophysical Research (Vol. 107, 10.1029/2001389), employed statistical analysis to conclude that a concurrent rise in atmospheric CO2 was primarily responsible for the increased vegetation.

An article in the September 16, 2002 issue of New Scientist magazine reports “Africa’s deserts are in ‘spectacular’ retreat.” The article documents how vegetation is reclaiming large expanses of barren land across the entire southern edge of the Sahara desert. This evidence directly contradicts statements by climate change alarmists that global warming is already having an adverse affect on poor and underdeveloped African nations by increasing desertification.

According to the author of the study, Frank Pearce, “the southern Sahara desert is in retreat, making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa. ... Burkina Faso, one of the West African countries devastated by drought and advancing deserts 20 years ago, is growing so much greener that families who fled to wetter coastal regions are starting to go home.”

As several experts have demonstrated in great detail, Brown used incorrect data, made unlikely assumptions, and did not take into account the technical and economic potential for improving China's domestic food supply

"Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming,"

Similarly the PDO and AMO are very well correlated with arctic temperatures as warm
Pacific water is know to enter the arctic through the Bering Straits and warm north
Atlantic water from the Barents Sea. As NSIDC (National Snow and Ice data Center)
stated in their blog
“One prominent researcher, Igor Polyakov at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, points out
that pulses of unusually warm water have been entering the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic,
which several years later are seen in the ocean north of Siberia. These pulses of water are
helping to heat the upper Arctic Ocean, contributing to summer ice melt and helping to
reduce winter ice growth.

Another scientist, Koji Shimada of the Japan Agency for Marine–Earth Science and
Technology, reports evidence of changes in ocean circulation in the Pacific side of the Arctic
Ocean. Through a complex interaction with declining sea ice, warm water entering the Arctic
Ocean through Bering Strait in summer is being shunted from the Alaskan coast into the
Arctic Ocean, where it fosters further ice loss.”

This research supports the notion that the natural cyclical warming Atlantic is partially
responsible for the ice loss. How did that warm water get to the Barent’s sea? Well it was
the natural thermohaline circulation cycling that warmed it in the last decade after
cooling down the area for the previous 3 decades. In other words, the AtlanticഊMultidecadal Oscillation. And Jennifer is exactly right, once the ice melts there is some
positive feedback through that albedo effect.

The headline in this press release from the European Space Agency reads “Satellites witness lowest Arctic ice coverage in history”. In history! That sounds like a long time. However, when you read the article you find “history” only goes back to 28 years, to 1979. That is when satellites began monitoring Arctic Sea ice. The article also says “the Northwest Passage – a long-sought short cut between Europe and Asia that has been historically impassable.” I guess these people flunked history class. It has been open several times in history, without ice breakers. The first known successful navigation by ship was in 1905.

While the news focus has been on the lowest ice extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979 for the Arctic, the Southern Hemisphere (Antarctica) has quietly set a new record for most ice extent since 1979.