Europe freezes, Arctic thaws

deaddirty

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Here in UK, we're getting the full blast of Putin's icy breath.
Cold as hell here (by our standards) - -3C by day, icy wind, snow comes and goes but sometimes as heavy as I've known it, even thundersnow this morning. The gritters/snowploughs keep rumbling past, but in the heaviest blizzards they can't keep up even on the main roads. We call them 'gritters', but actually it's naturally-gritty rocksalt that they spray out from the back, with a snowplough on the front when needed.
I gather it's bitter over most of Europe too.

Meanwhile, the seriously scary stuff - in the Arctic it's not bitter at all, it's thawing. The North Pole is above freezing, parts of the Arctic are 35C above normal for February, northern Greenland is at +6C, and Greenland has already had 61 hours above freezing this year which is over three times the previous record for a whole year. And it's February, still full winter with 24/7 darkness!
https://www.theguardian.com/environ...scientists-alarmed-by-crazy-temperature-rises
 
-20°C in Bulgaria tonight there are no people outside we can hardly keep warm. I saw on the news about the UK cold and snow but also Italy badly affected too.

I think the world is headed for uncontrollable and rapid climate change.

Thanks for the post and the links.
 
Though people everywhere are understandably frightened by the changes in climate, I believe that, in the end, all will turn out well enough. Scientists will figure out ways to put the world in order again. Except maybe for Miami Beach, which will probably be fucked no matter what.
 
Though people everywhere are understandably frightened by the changes in climate, I believe that, in the end, all will turn out well enough. Scientists will figure out ways to put the world in order again. Except maybe for Miami Beach, which will probably be fucked no matter what.

And Mar-a-Lago :green grin:
 
Yes, deaddirty, when the creek rises, President Trump's Florida cottage will be swamped. I'll bet he's already making plans to move elsewhere. Have the Trumps been invited to Harry's wedding? Do you know? You'd better be nice to Donald or he will set up housekeeping in England, out of spite.
 
This fucking snow at the streets really pisses me off. I haven't seen so much of that shit a before. And cold weather is not going to leave. Melting I think will last up to the end of April.
 
If it's abnormally bad even in Russia it really is bad! Bad news for us, our very worst winter weather normally comes from the east, from Siberia, rather from the north, the Arctic. That sounds odd, but there's just too much relatively-warm sea between us and Greenland or the Arctic Ocean - it may still be snowy, but not the intense all-day cold of the rare outbreaks direct from Siberia.
We may get another outbreak from the east this weekend but I don't think it will be as cold - the weather map shows it coming from European Russia not Siberia, and it's just too late in the winter for the really intense cold - the days are too long and the sun too strong.
 
Latest models suggest a second major arctic outbreak over the UK early next week.

6zziTt6.jpg
 
Yes, deaddirty, when the creek rises, President Trump's Florida cottage will be swamped. I'll bet he's already making plans to move elsewhere. Have the Trumps been invited to Harry's wedding? Do you know? You'd better be nice to Donald or he will set up housekeeping in England, out of spite.

I don't think Harry will let the Trumps anywhere near the wedding - imagine the diplomatic incident if he groped the Queen at the reception and got beheaded on Tower Hill! It would solve a few problems though ....
Of course he's got two golf resorts in Scotland, but guess what they're both beside the sea so they'll go under too. And if he sets up house in Scotland it will be us not the Scots who detonate the explosive bolts along the Border on Brexit day. But hey, that will at least reunite the Canadian Shield after only 65 million years - there's always a silver lining isn't there? :dancing:
 
Latest models suggest a second major arctic outbreak over the UK early next week.

6zziTt6.jpg

That doesn't look good. Bu looks like the most intense cold will be over the south, we may just miss it up here.
 
I hate cold, so I can sympathize with anyone in the path of Siberian winds. I try never to complain when temperatures are in the 90s, because I know how much worse it would be if temperatures were below freezing.
 
President Trump isn't letting this cold weather slow him down. He is about to straighten out the troublesome issues involving Kim Jong Un! As Donald said the other day, the problems with North Korea should have been dealt with long ago, but former administrations left the mess for him to clean up...and clean it up he will. You may look for worldwide peace and prosperity soon, thanks to Trumpism.
 


 
Last weekend's Siberian blast was a wimp compared to the 'Beast from the East', though another is forecast just in time for Easter.
Meanwhile, the Gulf Stream/North Atlantic Drift is weakening and there are increasing fears that it may be about to switch off completely:

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...ns-rise-50-worldwide-in-a-decade-figures-show

Flooding and heavy rains rise 50% worldwide in a decade, figures show

Such extreme weather events are now happening four times more than in 1980, according to a European science paper

Global floods and extreme rainfall events have surged by more than 50% this decade, and are now occurring at a rate four times higher than in 1980, according to a new report.
Other extreme climatological events such as storms, droughts and heatwaves have increased by more than a third this decade and are being recorded twice as frequently as in 1980, the paper by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (Easac) says.
The paper, based partly on figures compiled by the German insurance company Munich Re, also shows that climate-related loss and damage events have risen by 92% since 2010.
Prof Michael Norton, Easac’s environmental programme director, said that greenhouse gas emissions were “fundamentally responsible for driving these changes”.
“Trends towards extremes are continuing,” he said. “People have experienced extreme weather already - big switches [between] warm and cold winters - but the frequency of these shifts may be changing.”
“Some of the underlying drivers of extreme weather which were speculative four years ago are now looking less speculative and [more like] credible hypotheses. That is the weakening of the Gulf Stream and the meandering behaviour of the jet stream.”
The Easac study, Extreme weather events in Europe: Preparing for climate change adaptation, looked at new data and models focused on a potential slowdown of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, due to an influx of freshwater from melted ice sheets in Greenland.
It was compiled by experts from 27 national science academies in the EU, Norway and Switzerland, although the data was not peer-reviewed.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has assessed the probability of a slowdown before 2100 at more than 90% - or “very likely”. However, a complete “switch off of the gulf stream – or Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – is increasingly thought possible by some scientists.
Some studies say this could lower land temperatures in the UK, Greenland, Iceland and Scandinavia by up to 9C.
UK arrays positioned in the north Atlantic measured a 30% drop in AMOC strength between 2009-10, the Easac study says. And while uncertainties persist about the pace and scale of possible future changes, the decline in Gulf Stream strength itself has now been “confirmed”.
Citing “gathering evidence of an emerging negative phase” in Atlantic temperature swings driven by a weakening Gulf Stream, the study calls for research to be stepped up.
“With potentially substantial implications for the climate of north-west Europe, it is clearly desirable to quantify this risk further,” it says.
 
The last time the North Atlantic Drift (or AMOC as it is apparently now known to its friends) failed was around 12,900 years ago (though dates and durations do vary a bit between sources) causing the Younger Dryas cold period (also known as the Loch Lomond Readvance in Britain since it caused the reappearance of an icesheet in Western Scotland extending as far south as Loch Lomond, with local glaciers also re-forming on the mountains in the Lake District and Wales. The climate cooled from near current levels to full glacial in perhaps as short a period as 50 years then after maybe 1200 years it returned to temperate levels perhaps even more quickly (Columbia University below suggests as fast as 10°C in 10 years!).

I can't find a single online source to reference for this (most of my knowledge comes from good old-fashioned books and articles over the years), but try
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/arch/examples.shtml
https://http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12165/www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/The Younger Dryas
https://www.slideshare.net/aland/loch-lomond-readvance
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/915/1/clarkcd2.pdf
 
I don't like to hear bad news. I would have been one of those kings who kill the messenger (and fuck the groom).
 
"The climate cooled from near current levels to full glacial in perhaps as short a period as 50 years..." Now THAT is scary! Once again, I am relieved to know I won't be here. :p
 
You will die like that seigneur , your ghost rising in the form of a goat!
 
Scientists shocked by Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than predicted
Ice blocks frozen solid for thousands of years destabilized
‘The climate is now warmer than at any time in last 5,000 years’


Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.
A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia.
“What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.“
With governments meeting in Bonn this week to try to ratchet up ambitions in United Nations climate negotiations, the team’s findings, published on 10 June in Geophysical Research Letters, offered a further sign of a growing climate emergency.
The paper was based on data Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analysing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The team used a modified propeller plane to visit exceptionally remote sites, including an abandoned cold war-era radar base more than 300km from the nearest human settlement.
Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognisable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier.
The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks – waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter provided from the constant wind.
Torn between professional excitement and foreboding, Romanovsky said the scene had reminded him of the aftermath of a bombardment.
“It’s a canary in the coalmine,” said Louise Farquharson, a postdoctoral researcher and co-author of the study. “It’s very likely that this phenomenon is affecting a much more extensive region and that’s what we’re going to look at next.“
Scientists are concerned about the stability of permafrost because of the risk that rapid thawing could release vast quantities of heat-trapping gases, unleashing a feedback loop that would in turn fuel even faster temperature rises.
Even if current commitments to cut emissions under the 2015 Paris agreement are implemented, the world is still far from averting the risk that these kinds of feedback loops will trigger runaway warming, according to models used by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
With scientists warning that sharply higher temperatures would devastate the global south and threaten the viability of industrial civilisation in the northern hemisphere, campaigners said the new paper reinforced the imperative to cut emissions.
“Thawing permafrost is one of the tipping points for climate breakdown and it’s happening before our very eyes,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International. “This premature thawing is another clear signal that we must decarbonise our economies, and immediately.”
 
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Photograph lays bare reality of melting Greenland sea ice
Research teams traversing partially melted fjord to retrieve weather equipment release startling picture.

Rapidly melting sea ice in Greenland has presented an unusual hazard for research teams retrieving their oceanographic moorings and weather station equipment.
A photo, taken by Steffen Olsen from the Centre for Ocean and Ice at the Danish Meteorological Institute on 13 June, showed sled dogs wading through water ankle-deep on top of a melting ice sheet in the country’s north-west. In the startling image, it seems as though the dogs are walking on water.
The photo, taken in the Inglefield Bredning fjord, depicted water on top of what Olsen said was an ice sheet 1.2 metres thick.
His colleague at the institute, Rasmus Tonboe, tweeted that the “rapid melt and sea ice with low permeability and few cracks leaves the melt water on top”.
Olsen tweeted that his team relied on traditional knowledge from local hunters and their dogs as they searched for dry spots on the ice. The team also used satellite images to plan their trip. He said the photos documented an “unusual day” and that the image was “more symbolic than scientific to many”.
Ruth Mottram, climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, told the Guardian: “This year the expedition to retrieve the instruments – by dog-sled, still the most practical way to get around in this region at this time of year – ran into a lot of standing water on the sea ice. The ice here forms pretty reliably every winter and is very thick, which means that there are relatively few fractures for meltwater to drain through. Last week saw the onset of very warm conditions in Greenland and in fact much of the rest of the Arctic, driven by warmer air moving up from the south.”
She said these conditions had let to “a lot of melting ice, on the glaciers and ice sheet, and on the still-existing sea ice”. The DMI weather station nearby at Qaanaaq airport registered a high of 17.3C (63.1F) last Wednesday and 15C (59F) last Thursday, which is high for northern Greenland, even in summer. Mottram cautioned that the numbers were provisional and would be subject to checking.
In other areas, meltwater drains away through fractures in the ice to the rocks far below, and so does not leave standing water on the surface. But because the ice in the region is thick and fracture-free, the water pools above the ice, giving rise to the dramatic photograph.
Melting events such as the one pictured would normally not happen until later in the summer, in late June or July. Mottram said it was too soon to say what role global warming had played, because although these temperatures were unusual, the conditions were not unprecedented and “still a weather-driven extreme event, so it’s hard to pin it down to climate change alone”.
In general, however, she said: “Our climate model simulations expect there to be a general decline in the length of the sea ice season around Greenland, [but] how fast and how much is very much dependent on how much global temperature rises.”
She said forecasts indicated that the warm conditions over Greenland would persist at least for another few days, so the dog-sled teams will face further tough going.
The photograph emerged amid concerning temperature data from Greenland. On Saturday, the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang said European weather models showed that temperatures over parts of Greenland peaked at 22.2C (40F) above normal last Wednesday, the day before the photo was taken.
Above-average temperatures over nearly all of the Arctic ocean and Greenland during May have led to an early ice retreat, with the second-lowest extent of ice in the 40-year satellite record being registered, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre.
The centre said that Arctic sea ice for May was 12m square kilometres (4.7m square miles), 1.13m square kilometres below the 1981-2010 average.
Air temperatures at the end of May along the western Greenland coast were as much as 7C above the 1981–2010 reference average for the month, the centre said. It also recorded Arctic ocean temperatures of 2-4C above the average.
“The melting is big and early,” Jason Box, an ice climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told the Washington Post.
At a local level, the sea ice melt provides significant problems for communities in Greenland, who rely on it for transport, hunting and fishing.
“Extreme events, here flooding of the ice by abrupt onset of surface melt, call for an increased predictive capacity in the Arctic,” said Olsen.
• This article was amended on 18 June 2019. Temperatures in Greenland last Wednesday are thought to have peaked at 40F above normal. This figure was incorrectly converted to 4.4C, rather than 22C, above normal.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/18/photograph-melting-greenland-sea-ice-fjord-dogs-water
 
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