Down Spot, Down!

Scientists believed that reduced Sun-flare activity – a cycle that generally averages slightly longer than a decade – was an unexpected gift. Such cycles usually result in cooler temperatures here on earth, and impact the rain and drying patterns associated with El Niño/La Niña cycles. You can visualize the reason. Fewer hot flames leaping from the Sun’s surface generate less radiating heat. When the leaping flames subside, earth cools… a respite or at least a slowing of global warming.

But for a variety of reasons, this latest solar cooling trend is looking increasingly as if its impact will be much less than expected and last for a much shorter time period than we had hoped. Why? “Sun spot cycles previously lasted 11 years but have, for an unknown reason, lasted 13 years during a period of weak irradiance. A number of volcanic eruptions have also launched significant amounts pollution into the air, further diluting the sun's effects on the planet, the study found.

“Also possibly playing a role are the El Niño warming and La Niña cooling cycles in the Pacific Ocean, according to the team… ‘1998 was a strong El Niño year, which is why it was so warm that year,’ said Reto Knutti, Professor of Climate Physics at ETH Zurich… Significant gains in global warming science were made at the end of the last century, and many predictions were based on upward trending temperatures during the 1990s.

“Knutti explained that the models did not take a strong La Niña in recent years coupled with lower sun irradiance joining forces to keep temperatures stable into account… This combination is only a speed bump in the climate change steamroller. The models look deep into the future and do not account for these fluctuations…  ‘Short-term climate fluctuations can easily be explained,’ said Knutti. ‘They do not alter the fact that the climate will become considerably warmer in the long term as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.’” AOL.com, August 20^th.

All this is bad news to a scientific community that already may have seriously underestimated the ice loss in critical Polar Regions and ice masses in countries like Greenland. “Greenland and Antarctica are home to the two largest ice sheets in the world, and a new report released [August 20^th] says that they are contributing to sea level rise twice as much as they were just five years ago.

“Using the European Space Agency's CryoSat 2 satellite, the Alfred Wegener Institute from Germany has found that western Antarctica and Greenland are losing massive amounts of ice… ‘Combined, the two ice sheets are thinning at a rate of 500 cubic kilometres per year,’ said glaciologist Dr. Angelika Humbert, one of the authors of the AWI study, in a press release. ‘That is the highest speed observed since altimetry satellite records began about 20 years ago.’” Huffington Post, August 21^st.

The specifics are staggering. “The research in Nature Climate Change signals that many climate models may be too conservative in their projections through this century, as they are not considering ice loss from the northeast portion of Greenland. The discovered ice loss in the northeast -- which has been largely overlooked to date -- is worrisome because the drainage basin there covers 16 percent of the ice sheet and holds the capability of funneling ice deep from Greenland's interior out to sea, the scientists said.

‘This is an area we should be worried about because it's huge. Who knows, maybe this is starting something very big,’ said Shfaqat Khan, senior researcher at Technical University of Denmark, and the lead author of the study. The ice loss found in northeast Greenland is accelerating, and it is uncertain how many years it will continue, he said.

“The scientists reported that northeast Greenland was stable -- with a zero ice mass loss -- until about 2003, when summer temperatures spiked. The northeast was considered the last remaining stable part of the ice sheet, according to the researchers. Within a few years, the main outlet glacier draining the region -- Zachariae Isstrom -- retreated about 20 kilometers, and regional ice mass loss jumped from zero to roughly 10 metric gigatons a year…

“Ice loss from northeast Greenland into the Fram Strait abutting the Arctic Ocean is now closer to 15 to 20 metric gigatons a year and is still increasing, said Khan… In comparison, it took the Jakobshavn Isbræ ice stream -- a southwest Greenland region with a fast-moving glacier that has been a focal point of scientific examination of ice sheet melt -- 150 years to retreat 35 kilometers, said Khan. ‘We haven't seen something like this anywhere else,’ Khan said about the northeast.” ScientificAmerican.com, March 17^th.

In short, our expectations of bad are getting worse. We’ve seen how climate change tanks the quality of life for millions, fueling (if you will), droughts that in turn inspire anger and rebellion in volatile regions around the earth. Flooding plagues other lands, as insects and disease migrate to new regions, and as shorelines are recaptured by rising and surging tides. Still, there isn’t a global plan to contract the greenhouse effect… only how we can reduce how much carbon we are emitting. This seems to be the single most self-destructive act in the history of humanity.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder exactly what it will take for humanity to wake up and deal with the issue.