Climate Brief: More bad news from the Poles

Introduction: The Poles and Global Warming

The Polish people have been participating for decades with other human beings, in a nefarious plot to breathe out too much CO₂. This has resulted in an increase in CO₂ concentrations from about 350 ppm in 1950 to over 420 ppm today. COP26 chose to ignore the exhalation of CO2 by Poles and other humans in its assessment of global warming, and provided no solutions to prevent a 2^oC increase in global mean temperature by 2100.

WTF?

I’ve been in a strange mood for the last couple of weeks, as you can tell from my attempt at humor here. Part of it is the time of year; I’m a bah humbug type of person who has trouble getting into the holiday spirit. The rest is feeling negative about the long term prospects for the country. To those of you who object to demonizing the Polish people with such a ridiculous smear:

1. I included other human beings as causing the problem, which should reduce the risk of an individual group from being harmed, and
2. Smears belong on bagels, not humans.

Okay, I got that out of my system. Pray for me.

The Real Introduction

The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration of the U.S. (NOAA) issues an annual report referred to as “The Arctic Report Card”. The 2021 report card was issued yesterday, 14 December, and highlights the continued rapid change observed in real time, which has been discussed in these pages frequently during 2021, and periodically for a number of years previous to that. A convenient graphic in that report card highlights observed Arctic-wide and regional changes here.

See more information on this under the “Arctic” subheading.

While the Arctic is big in the news today, we don’t want to ignore the Antarctic. How’s this for an eye-grabbing headline? Crucial Antarctic Ice Shelf Could Fail Within 5 Years, Scientists Say.

We’ll also briefly discuss the Antarctic Ice Shelf problem at the end of this entry.

Arctic-wide Events

Much of what is in the 2021 Arctic Report Card has been reported on in Climate Brief, so in many ways it is a summary of the diary entries found therein. Important overall global warming effects were noted, including:

Increasing surface air temperature

The graphic below shows the annual mean temperature anomaly (compared to 30 year 1981-2010 mean) of the Arctic and the globe as a whole for the last 121 years. Notice that the warming in the Arctic is amplified since 2000 by about a factor of 2.  This Arctic amplification has long been predicted by climate models.

Verification by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) of the highest temperature ever observed in the Arctic in Verhoyansk

Greening of the tundra

1. Data on the amount of active vegetation has been measured by satellite for the past 39 years. Arctic-wide greenness in 2021 was the 2^nd highest among those years.
2. The growing season has begun, on average, 2.3 ± 0.7 days earlier per decade, and has ended 1.3 ± 0.9 days later per decade. On Svalbard, in the Norwegian Sea, ground-based cameras and satellite data showed that the 2018 growing season started 10 days earlier than in 2017. This shows that year-to-year variability can be quite large.
3. Some regions are bucking the overall trend. One area (blue oval in graphic) has browned over a 2000-2021 period. This has been attributed to permafrost melt making the surface soils wet enough to inhibit tundra growth.

Decreasing Arctic sea ice

1. The Arctic Ocean sea ice melt season was somewhat less extreme than some previous seasons, but ranked 12th lowest since 1979. The last 15 years have had the 15 lowest minimum sea ice extent.
2. The area sea ice trends from March (maximum) and September (minimum) 1979-2021 are shown in the 1^st graphic to the right. Both show statistically significant decreases over the 43-year period. For September, the year-to-year changes are more noisy than those for March, which can result in short-term trends that differ from the long-term decline.
3. The bottom graphic shows the change in sea ice age (a proxy for sea ice volume) from 1985 to 2021 [(a) and (b)], and the trend in the area of ice lasting multiple years during the period. We can also clearly see the decrease in minimum sea ice area over the 37 year period. Note also the previously large area of multiyear ice (light blue through red) is now less than half of the total ice area. In 1985, almost all of the sea ice was multiyear.
   
   The line graph at the bottom shows the year-to-year trend of multiyear and 4-year and older Arctic sea ice, consistent with the Arctic Ocean maps.

Intensifying Arctic water cycle

According to the 2021 Arctic Report Card:

Arctic river discharge is a key indicator reflecting changes in the hydrologic cycle associated with widespread environmental change in the Arctic.

It impacts:

1. Arctic Ocean salinity, and thus the seawater density and sea ice formation
2. The geochemistry of the Arctic Ocean (11% of global surface water discharge into 1% of global ocean water)
3. The biological activity at the bottom of the Arctic food chain (algae)

The graphic above shows the eight largest river basins as measured by river discharge in the Arctic. These cover 70% of the total Arctic watershed. Six of these river basins are in Eurasia (Kolmya, Lena, Yenisey, Ob’, Pechora, and Severnaya Dvina), while the other two are in North America (Mackensie and Yukon).

trends in arctic river discharge

On the right are the trends for the (a) Eurasian and (b) North American annual river discharges since about 1935 and 1976, respectively. Both are strongly statistically significant. For the Eurasian watersheds particularly, the speedup of the Arctic water cycle is apparent from the trend. Year-to-year variations in discharge are the result of spring water equivalent snow cover. Higher water equivalent leads to higher total discharge.

Annual cycle of arctic river discharge

In general, maximum discharges come earlier in the spring than in the past. This can, depending on timing with relation to the calendar month, lead to anomalously high monthly river discharges followed by anomalously low ones. In 2020, this phenomenon was observed for the Eurasian basins, with May discharge at well over 99% above normal, but June discharge at about 99% below normal. This was the result of high Eurasian snow cover melted away at a record pace during a record warm spring, coinciding with the month of May.

Glacial and permafrost melt

Melting glaciers and thawing permafrost impact human infrastructure, lives, and ecosystems in significant ways. Entire hillsides can give way and coastlines can melt into the sea, taking structures with them.

We can see the locations of hazard areas in the Arctic below. The grey to blue shades show general areas of permafrost, while the brown circles show the locations of specific permafrost hazards. Dark blue circles show the location of glacier hazards.

We’ve seen pictures of roadways for example, where the permafrost has melted from below. Here’s an example of a road damaged by permafrost thawing by the National Park Service in Wrangell- St. Elias Preserve, AK.

When permafrost melts below trees and shrubs, they randomly tilt in such a haphazard way that the area becomes known as a “drunken forest”. The example below was also taken at Wrangell- St. Elias Preserve, AK.

Other items include the emerging disruptions of ocean noise resulting from the loss of sea ice and increased commercial ship traffic, and the expansion of the effective range of the beaver into the Alaskan tundra (beaver pond numbers up by a factor of 2). The beaver ponds act as a disrupter of permafrost and are transforming lowland tundra ecosystems. Additionally, record amounts of foreign trash from ship traffic piled up along the Siberian and Alaskan shorelines of the Bering Strait.

Disruption of the Antarctic Ice Shelf

I was going to add some information about the possibility of the Antarctic ice shelf holding back the Thwaites Glacier disintegrating in the next three to five years, but I see that Pakalolo has done his usual thorough and informative job on that subject. You can see what I mean here.

Conclusions

Changes in the Arctic continue apace. Mostly a warmer and wetter climate trend will continue over the long term, with lots of variability from year to year and a continuation of ecosystem disruptions resulting from loss of sea ice, permafrost, and temperature/precipitation changes. Things beyond beavers may find their way into the Arctic as conditions become more favorable to them. Changes will often occur in unexpected and disturbing ways, as we have seen in recent years.