May 2010 Blended Land and Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies in degrees Celsius

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature during March–May 2010 was 14.4°C (58.0°F) and ranked as the warmest such period on record, 0.73°C (1.31°F) above the 20^th century average of 13.7°C (56.7°F).

March 2010 – May 2010 Blended Land and Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies in degrees Celsius

The warmest anomalies occurred over eastern and northern North America, eastern Brazil, northern Africa, eastern Europe, and southern Asia. See the deep red dots along the land masses of the Arctic and in southern Greenland and the eastern U.S. and Canada. Anomalously cool conditions were present over eastern Asia and the western United States.

Looks to be a long, hot summer.

May Global Hemisphere plot

NSIDC explains why Arctic ice went so rapidly from near normal to approach record lows:

[S]everal regions of the Arctic experienced a late-season spurt in ice growth. As a result, ice extent reached its seasonal maximum much later than average, and in turn the melt season began almost a month later than average. As ice began to decline in April, the rate was close to the average for that time of year. In sharp contrast, ice extent declined rapidly during the month of May. Much of the ice loss occurred in the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, indicating that the ice in these areas was thin and susceptible to melt. Many polynyas, areas of open water in the ice pack, opened up in the regions north of Alaska, in the Canadian Arctic Islands, and in the Kara and Barents and Laptev seas.

The polynyas are clearly visible in high-resolution passive microwave images from the Advanced Microwave Sounding Radiometer (AMSR-E) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite. What do current ice conditions mean for the minimum ice extent this fall? It is still too soon to say: although ice extent at present is relatively low, the amount of ice that survives the summer melt season will be largely determined by the wind and weather conditions over the next few months.

Analysis from scientists at the University of Washington shows that ice volume has continued to decline precipitously.

Joseph Romm comments at Climate Progress on a presentation by Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School, one of the country’s leading experts on the Arctic, indicating the Arctic is in a death spiral.  By 2016 (+/- 3 yrs) the Arctic will be essentially ice-free by the end of the melt season – decades ahead of the projections in the 2007 IPCC report.

And here’s the latest multi-year chart of Arctic ice extent from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency website.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has a terrific graphic on its website showing multiple years of Arctic ice extent. As you can see, it’s much too early to predict that 2010 will see a new record low, although conditions in the Arctic such as areas of open water in the pack ice and broad areas of more scattered ice cover indicate that the ice may be posed to retreat rapidly.

The area of sea-ice cover is often defined in two ways: sea-ice “extent” and sea-ice “area.” Sea ice extent is defined as the areal sum of sea ice covering the ocean (sea ice + open ocean), whereas the “area” definition counts only sea ice covering a fraction of the ocean (sea ice only). Thus, the sea-ice extent is always larger than the sea-ice area.

Regardless of ice extent, Arctic ice volume continues to hit record lows.

RealClimate has posted this graph showing the measured warming as compared to previous and model estimates:

Basically, if the total flux of energy entering the Earth’s atmosphere is greater than energy losses, then has to go somewhere – and that somewhere is mainly the ocean. Other reservoirs for this excess energy, like the land surface or melting ice, are much smaller and are for most purposes negligible.

An article about the study by Jason Socrates Bardi quotes Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado (Trenberth was not involved with the study):

Ninety percent of the energy [trapped by increased greenhouse gases] goes into the ocean. It’s important to track this in order to properly understand what is happening in the climate system. If you dump heat in the ocean and it gets moved around and reappears somewhere, it has consequences in terms of the weather patterns.

Another new study in the journal Oceanography titled The Volume of Earth’s Ocean finds the Earth’s ocean is smaller  than the most recent published estimates, by a volume equivalent to 500 times the Great Lakes or five times the Gulf of Mexico. The study’s authors used satellite altimetry data to better measure ocean depth and thus to more accurately estimate the ocean’s volume.

Additionally, last month’s average ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for any April, and the global land surface temperature was the third warmest on record.

April 2010 was the 302nd consecutive month with average global surface (land + ocean) temperature above the 20th century average.  The last month with an average global surface (land + ocean) temperature below the 20th century average was February 1985 -  over 25 years ago.

Rising temperatures are being felt in the Arctic. While Antarctic sea ice extent in April was near average, just 0.3 percent below the 1979-2000 average, Arctic sea ice extent has been plunging in May. The pace of ice extent decline is now catching up to the record-setting pace set in 2007. The record low minimum extent occurred September 16, 2007.

While Arctic ice extent in 2008 and 2009 failed to reach the record low of 2007, Arctic ice volume continues to decline year over year.

The record low for Arctic ice volume set in September 2009 at 5,800 km^3 or 67% below its 1979 maximum (for the period 1979-2009).

Things are warming up in the incubator of hurricanes, too.

Jeff Masters explains the significance at WunderBlog:

When SSTs [sea surface temperatures] in the MDR are much above average during hurricane season, a very active season typically results (if there is no El Niño event present.) SSTs in the Main Development Region (10°N to 20°N and 20°W to 85°W) were an eye-opening 1.46°C above average during April. This is the third straight record warm month, and the warmest anomaly measured for any month–by a remarkable 0.2°C. The previous record warmest anomalies for the Atlantic MDR were set in June 2005 and March 2010, at 1.26°C.

The high April SST anomaly does not bode well for the coming hurricane season. The three past seasons with record warm April SST anomalies all had abnormally high numbers of intense hurricanes. Past hurricane seasons that had high March SST anomalies include 1969 (0.90°C anomaly), 2005 (1.19°C anomaly), and 1958 (0.97°C anomaly). These three years had 5, 7, and 5 intense hurricanes, respectively. Just two intense hurricanes occur in an average year. The total averaged activity for the three seasons was 15 named storms, 11 hurricanes, and 6 intense hurricanes (an average hurricane season has 10, 6, and 2.) Both 1958 and 2005 saw neutral El Niño conditions, while 1969 had a weak El Niño.

The SSTs are already as warm as we normally see in July between Africa and the Caribbean[.]

The current El Niño is fading fast – a transition to ENSO-neutral conditions is expected by June 2010. Hurricanes may soon be piling on to the Gulf’s oil woes.

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning has conveniently posted a couple of maps from the paper (which would otherwise cost you $10 to get a peak at). First, today’s world.

Currently, the inland Amazon and northern India are pretty uncomfortable, with the eastern US, northern China, and much of Australia not far behind.

Right now, we are tracking above the worst case IPCC scenario (which, if you remember, does not include feedback loops such as the Arctic releasing methane).  If we don’t do anything about climate change, we could get to about two doublings by the end of the century (over pre-industrial levels of 280ppm of CO₂). With the caveat that there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding Earth’s climate sensitivity, what might that world look like ?

Most of the world’s major population centers will be uninhabitable outdoors – like, people would literally drop dead – during heat waves.

Of course, this says little about the Earth’s capability to support agriculture under such conditions. People would die of starvation long before they would be felled by heat stroke.

During April, Arctic sea ice extent declined at a steady pace, remaining just below the 1979 to 2000 average. Ice extent for April 2010 was the largest for that month in the past decade. At the same time, changing wind patterns have caused older, thicker ice to move south along Greenland’s east coast, where it will likely melt during the summer. Temperatures in the Arctic remained above average.

The very late maximum ice extent, on March 31, means that the melt season started almost a month later than normal. This graph shows that ice extent has now begun to plunge.

The Polar Science Center at the University of Washington reports total Arctic ice volume for March 2010 was the lowest over the 1979-2009 period and 38% below the 1979 maximum.

While itself a consequence of climate change, the shrinking Arctic ice cap is contributing to a positive feedback loop in which global warming and loss of ice reinforce each other. White sea ice reflects most of the incoming sunlight back into space. But when the ice melts, more heat is absorbed by the darker water, which in turn heats the atmosphere above it.

An APF story about the study quotes study co-author James Screen:

It was previously thought that loss of sea ice could cause further warming. Now we have confirmation this is already happening.

The findings show that the main driver of  “polar amplification” – warming in excess of the global average – is shrinking ice cover, rather than increased cloudiness or changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation.  The study’s findings also suggest that current forecasts underestimate the degree to which the polar region could heat up in the future.

A new report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency titled Climate Change Indicators in the U.S. states the extent of Arctic sea ice in 2009 was 24% below the 1979 to 2000 historical average. The area covered by ice is typically smallest in September, after the summer melting season. September 2007 had the least ice of any year on record, followed by 2008 and 2009.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports Arctic sea ice running only a bit below the 1979-2000 average – so far.

But the ice is thin, and it’s still early.

Here’s the abstract of the Screen  & Ian Simmonds study, published this week in the journal Nature:

The rise in Arctic near-surface air temperatures has been almost twice as large as the global average in recent decades — a feature known as ‘Arctic amplification’. Increased concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases have driven Arctic and global average warming; however, the underlying causes of Arctic amplification remain uncertain. The roles of reductions in snow and sea ice cover and changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation cloud cover and water vapour are still matters of debate. A better understanding of the processes responsible for the recent amplified warming is essential for assessing the likelihood, and impacts, of future rapid Arctic warming and sea ice loss. Here we show that the Arctic warming is strongest at the surface during most of the year and is primarily consistent with reductions in sea ice cover. Changes in cloud cover, in contrast, have not contributed strongly to recent warming. Increases in atmospheric water vapour content, partly in response to reduced sea ice cover, may have enhanced warming in the lower part of the atmosphere during summer and early autumn. We conclude that diminishing sea ice has had a leading role in recent Arctic temperature amplification. The findings reinforce suggestions that strong positive ice–temperature feedbacks have emerged in the Arctic increasing the chances of further rapid warming and sea ice loss, and will probably affect polar ecosystems, ice-sheet mass balance and human activities in the Arctic.

Published reports on the potential for sequestration fail to address the necessity of storing CO2 in a closed system. Our calculations suggest that the volume of liquid or supercritical CO2 to be disposed cannot exceed more than about 1% of pore space. This will require from 5 to 20 times more underground reservoir volume than has been envisioned by many, and it renders geologic sequestration of CO2 a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of CO2 emissions.

The study, titled “Sequestering carbon dioxide in a closed underground volume”  by Christine Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M, and Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at University of Houston, is published in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering.

Total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2007 were 6.02 billion metric tons (tonnes) including 2.16 billion tonnes from coal fired electric power generation, 2.6 billion tonnes from petroleum consumption mainly for transportation, and 1.2 billion tonnes from natural gas consumption. The EIA projects that US carbon dioxide emissions are forecast to reach 6.41 billion tonnes by 2030.

The Kyoto Protocol aims to keep the global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels and aims at stabilizing CO2 concentrations below 550 ppm – a target which scientists now believe is completely unrealistic.  Keeping CO2 levels below 350 ppm, perhaps far below, is necessary to maintain Earth’s climate as it has been over the time human civilization developed.

If we’re to save Earth’s climate, the evidence is growing that our only hope is that oil runs out quickly and that we can muster the will to stop burning coal before we destroy ourselves.

The southern McMurdo Sound core yielded clear evidence of some 74 cycles of ice sheet buildup and retreat during a 6-million-year stretch starting in the Miocene Epoch some 20 million years ago. According to geologist Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the policy implications are grim, as many population centers worldwide are within a few meters of sea level.

Our models may be dramatically underestimating how much worse it’s going to get. We’re seeing ice retreat faster and more dramatically than any model predicts.

The answer to the puzzling disparity between model predictions and the core data could lie in an erroneous assumption about Antarctica itself. Some parts of the land underlying the East ice sheet might be much lower than currently believed. As warming oceans strip away the surrounding ice shelves, significant chunks of the ice sheet could slide into the ocean.

A prior core, extracted from the McMurdo Ice Shelf between October 2006 and January 2007, indicated that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has frequently advanced and retreated.