Thanks for doing this fantastic collab with me, Adam - as always it was such a pleasure to work with you (and obvs a special privilege to see the plant wall irl)
I remember being called an alarmist over a decade ago for saying we'd prolly see summer free ice in artic by the early 2030s. But was I alarmist enough?
2030s still seems most likely. 2023 is barely in the 'top 10' lowest Arctic Sea Ice years (so far -definitely could move up the rankings). Does look like the 'ice free' definition will be in the early 2030s rather than late though
We all that follow science sound alarmist. but I am kind of James Lovelock the situation is so complicated there are so many aspects of life on Earth that we are in very serious trouble. We depend on all beings to be alive and this is a huge problem, is not just about the climate. It's about nature itself and we are part of it so the consequences are upon us. The companies and the gov they will keep business as usual but the problem require a break of paradigm and our model as civilization is overdue. In my point of view, we will go really down by the end of the century and maybe we survive. time will say
Absolutely loved this collaboration. I think it really adds depth to have two qualified scientists cutting through both denialist but also alarmist crap. This is the sort of stuff I would like to see the public getting on TV and hearing on the radio rather than the often, one way or the other, biased programmes one gets when reporters spin their narratives.
It seems you are too optimistic about losing Arctic sea ice. It is easily reversible because it melts and freezes again every season. However, having no ice in this region means that instead of an ice mirror, a black ocean will accumulate a lot of heat. This will speed up heating in the northern hemisphere. Additionally, there is a risk, such as big fires in the boreal forest and an unknown amount of methane trapped in the Arctic region. Basically, losing the ice cap is like transitioning from an ice age to an interglacial period.
Artic Ice...the situation for the Polar bears and seal will be that they need to be on land, seals will be affected so it is a big interruption in the animal ecosystem.
I'm not sure you understand the severity and implications of losing the Arctic Sea ice. When the Arctic Sea ice vanishes....humans will vanish shortly thereafter.
The intro was really well done! Fun watching you guys have a more casual conversation. In the future, you might want to consider angling your seats slightly towards each other and using 3 cameras (one focused on each person and one getting a wide shot). I was impressed how well you managed to edit it from just the single angle though!
Some thoughts I had after listening: 2 thoughts in the direction "yeah, ice-free summer must be a tipping point allright"... 1) besides being a mirror (influence on albedo), that sea-ice is also a considerable local 'anchor' on temperature: as long as you have ice around, the local temperature is anchored to not rise considerably above 0°C. In a locality where this ice has alltogether disappeared, temperature can start rising considerably above 0°C, first-and-foremost opening up a buffer where excess heat is stored (an energy buffer which later on has to be shed before ice can be created anew) so I'd expect a kind of inertia to arise hindering the subsequent restoration of sea-ice. In some localities, there've gotta be some ecological consequences to a significant >0°C event as well. 2) Ecologically, I'd expect the topology of the sea ice to have some significance, i.e. I'd expect some species to use the ice as a bridge or a roof to go from one place to another. If you start thinking along those lines, maybe not the surface area of the sea ice is the most interesting but e.g. whether there's an ice bridge from Canada to Russia... 1 thought in the direction "nah, ice-free summer probably not a tipping point"... 3) There's of course a lot of talk about the permafrost melting, but I don't see why there would be a discontinuity in the rate of melting in the event of an ice-free summer. I'd expect ecological interactions with the melting soil to be the bigger issue.
"It's never too late to take action." That might be true with regard to physics, but with regard to economics there's only so much that our very fragile capitalist system can bear. Look at how it buckled under Covid, & that was only a small temporary event compared to 2 degrees warming. The fact of the matter is that we can certainly save society, but we absolutely cannot save an economic system which depends upon an ever-increasing degree of extraction, production, consumption. As has always been the case: the ultimate choice we face is socialism or barbarism.
I'm 54. Do you know how many times in my life I've heard the ice in the Arctic is going to disappear? It started over 30 years ago. But, this time, it totally, like, for real is gonna happen.
In 2006 they predicted ice free arctic by 2040 and in 2000 it was predicted to occur by 2050. The predictions have stayed pretty consistent over the last 23 years and are currently right on schedule.
@@metoo3342 If not...ahead of schedule based on the most recent paper. The things we have heard about for 30 years...we've done nothing. And the predictions, the scientific ones, are more or less happening or worse than predicted.
@@metoo3342stayed consistent…. Ok so… Stated in 2000 and 2006 gonna be ice free 2050 or 2040 … 2024 Half way there and .. sea level have risen half of worse case and key west New Orleans fine… even Venice roads still visible …Sea rise ☑️ no problem Next.
Climate restoration via intervention, geoengineering, etc. 95% confidence will be needed so research and readiness ASAP must be prioritized to prevent climate catastrophe! CDR SRM SSRM Space Solar Radiation Management should be a goal and is trending to becoming economical
So a scientist issues a climate statement/prediction that is alarming. The press runs with the click-bait alarmism. No contemporaneous push-back from the scientific community (some rare exceptions, but these don't get the press coverage). Statement/prediction is falsified in the real world by the passage of time. Now scientist claims "Oh, but you ignored all my caveats". We see this play out with every IPCC report. The Summary for Policy Makers (i.e. politicians and the press) comes out well before the bulk IPCC report does. The SPM is far more alarmist than one would conclude by reading the underlying science reports, which are filled with caveats, EXCEPT you won't get to see this part until quite some time later AFTER the politicians and press have scared the populace with their dire warnings.
Interesting video, thank you! It's good to know that there's at least some things that aren't irreversible damage :) Bit concerned that there'll be fossil fuel companies rejoicing about the lack of ice making it easier to drill for oil... but I think they do that already...
I disagree about one thing. When ice melts that water is allowed to mix. As long as it mixes with warmer water it will never freeze again. For example, no matter how cold it gets you will never freeze the water in a hot tub. In my opinion if the Arctic sea ice minimum reaches the threshold of the "Blue Ocean Event" It will never come back in our lifetime.
The water in the Arctic seas already mixes with the world's oceans. While circulation patterns mag shift as heat gradients shift, this isn't an on/off shift that would take place.
@@ClimateAdam I suppose that the original poster meant that without ice, more waves can be formed in the ocean, which consequently mixes the water more, making creation of the ice more difficult on the surface. Without sea ice, the wind can also cause more water currents on the surface, which also mixes water more. Furthermore, without the ice, the water temperature can also climb rapidly for 2 reasons: (1) water is much darker than sea ice, so it absorbs more heat (lower albedo). (2) once the ice is melted, there is no latent heat anymore to melt ice. As a result, all the absorbed energy goes to warms up the water (as opposed to also going into melting ice). Both should cause an irreversibility, although I do not feel qualified to tell whether it is big enough to prevent ice forming in the next years. I can only intuit that it could be big enough to contributes to a tipping point to some extent.
I think the language of tipping points could be replaced by a more sober language about reversible and irreversible disequilibrium elements. Only the irreversible ones are actually tipping elements, with a prediction of an irreversible transition to a new stable state, that would take considerable additional energy / intervention to return to the historically prior equilibrium level. The melting of arctic sea ice is clearly replacing the equilibrium of summer sea ice cover that has existed for millennia with something different, and there is a clear driver for the change -- the reflecting power of the white ice. But that driver disappears every winter, giving sea ice a chance to form again, indicating the process is reversible. However, the hot new equilibrium of a summer dark sea in the arctic will start to affect nearby and global disequilibrium elements, some of which may in fact be irreversible. Nearby, the pace of melting of the Greenland ice sheet may accelerate and permafrost may melt. Each of those disequilibrium elements may be irreversible, in the sense that there will be runaway change that won't stop even if greenhouse gas emissions were completely stopped. The likelihood and pace of those changes is probably quite difficult to predict accurately, if we can't even pin down the decade when an ice-free arctic summer will happen. It might be a good idea to increase the number of climate scientists studying these problems by 10-fold or more.
Any reason why you guys omit the albedo effect? The fact that sea ice reflects sun rays and exposed water absorbs sunlight and causes more warming. Making the receding sea ice in the south and north an amplifying feedback loop.
that's exactly what Ella describes at 3:32 - the albedo effect is what drives the Arctic's much faster warming than the global average, and is an important way that Arctic sea ice regulates climate around the world
@ClimateAdam Thanks! It went by so fast and got cut, I missed it. But the conclusion that it's not a tipping point contradicts the Albedo Effect. It is irreversible change in the short term. She makes it seem like it can just go back to ice. How?
@@JohnnyBelgiumI think you're conflating positive feedbacks with tipping points. Lots of changes (including sea ice loss in the Arctic) amplify change. But that doesn't suggest they're irreversible or a sudden shift to a markedly different state.
No artic sea ice ... more tipping points .. more Methane released .. more tipping points , more sea water heating , not reversible ... no ice on greenland .... once albedo is lowered to a point ... more heating ... or is this wrong Adam ? are we all fine ?
Loss of permafrost is associated with methane release (though there are serious questions about whether this would be sudden), but we're talking about sea ice here, not frozen soils.
@@ClimateAdam But there is a relationship you guys missed: less sea ice, more and faster heating is a feedback on these other tipping points. And we have no way to reverse this.
Loss of Arctic Sea ice won't spell the end of the world. It just marks the first major tipping point we will know we crossed and mark a real point of the beginning of the end of humanity. Everyone loves to ignore the billions of tons of methane hydrates protected by the cold arctic. I get wanted to keep people's hopes up, but ignoring reality only makes it worse. Bad news does not get better with time. Repeat that and live it as it is true.
As someone who is both interested in and terrified by climate change I always appreciate the work you and other climate scientists do here on TH-cam. A bit off topic from this video in particular but I was curious to hear what a climate scientists perspective on this would be. I recently found a TH-cam channel called rethinkx that argues technological disruptions will lead to widespread adoption of renewable energies over the coming decades. I’m not sure if this is a realistic prediction or if it is just techno-optimism/greenwashing. I would appreciate your perspective on this.
To some extent that's what we're already seeing - renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels in very many contexts, and advantages grow as storage becomes better. At the same time, we don't just need to adopt these new techs - we need to shut down the fossil fuel infrastructure that we have today. And there's so much inertia in that system (financial, political, powerful), that we need pushes beyond the pure technological. That's my perspective at least! Thanks for watching!
@@ClimateAdam Please elaborate on these contexts. Every where I look, the infiltration of significant renewables leads to massive cost increases. See California in the US or the German Energiewende program. When the economics is on your side, you don't need massive government subsidies. See e.g. fracking and natural gas which led to a reduction of CO2 in the west as natural gas (methane) replaced coal. How about nuclear. especially molten salt modular thorium cycle reactors?
It's time to talk about the AMOC 😎 And geoengineering to bring it back to "normal" before reaching its tipping point. We don't like geoengineering, but 🤷♂
Satellite data have recently revealed that between 2002 and 2019, the mesosphere and lower thermosphere cooled by 3.1 degrees F (1.7 degrees C ). Mlynczak estimates that the doubling of CO2 levels thought likely by later this century will cause a cooling in these zones of around 13.5 degrees F (7.5 degrees C), which is between two and three times faster than the average warming expected at ground level.
It is not a tippingponint i climat cases. But for the great mammels, live in the arctic it is. I think polarbears seals and so on they are depending on the ice also in summer.
We need United Nations on Climate Action Now! All this money for shiny new bombs for war, tanks B52s... If we cannot cooperate now, the earth (and hardy life forms) will go on without😮
Could you quantify Arctic sea ice loss a bit more what percentage has gone I thought it was over 80%. Maybe about the rapid thinning happening at the moment seems to be over 1/2meter of thickness a month at the mo. I reckon next year for sure, and a blue ocean event just talks about when the arctic goes under 1million sq km isn't it so that's an event?
Ok, so taking that into account; and with retrofitting of buildings being so expensive in terms of cost; would that reflectance effect of ice principle be applied to develop super reflectant paint coverage for rooftoops, thus mitigating the " heat island" effect on cities?
Short answer, yes. Long Answer, There are a bunch of super white cool roof paints on the market already and Los Angeles is basically already doing that out of necessity. There are even a few daytime radiative cooling coatings that can stay below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight, though they're more expensive are not very common yet.
Then what you need is about 80 million buoys and on top of those buoy are connected to those buoys are mirrors. And those mirrors reflect the light back into space and basically all you need there is the mirrors have to be aligned to be a hexagon or octagon what it is the better shape for it. Probably an octagon since probably a hexagon since that's a better stronger position to shape something but then they only got to be is weatherproof and maintenance had to be done to them in the future won't be as cold in the Arctic so you don't have to worry about Arctic sea being too dangerous. And if it has hurricanes or bad weather then you just have to keep track of with satellites what happened to them years and see if you can fix them. She had to be able to walk on them they had to be weatherproof and they have to be pretty much solid steel mirrors. And that's all our problem with arctic ice right there from the beginning of the video. And basically from there all you have to do is and spend less money than sending one up in space then you would have to set one up on land. It'll cost about $80 billion dollars which is nothing in future money. Plus we'll have meteorites by then that we can study to make more money.
2 corrections to your presentation: 1.) An ice free Arctic is defined as having less than 1 million sq kilometers of total sea ice in summer in the Arctic Ocean at its nadir . We have 4 million sq km in summer now at its nadir. 2.) You need to factor in an additional water temp raising effect which is latent heat. Let's say we have an ice free Arctic in 2030. It takes 80 calories/g to melt ice to water. It takes 100 calories to raise 1g of water by 1 degree C. Therefore, the less sea ice there is the faster water temps rise in the Arctic simply due to thermodynamics (completely aside for the albedo affect ). I calculate that with 3 million less km of sea ice 2.208 10 to the 21st calories more will be absorbed by liquid water versus that energy being used to melt ice. We may not go from 4 million sq km to 1 million sq km of sea ice in 1 year but that energy is still real and must be absorbed by ice or water. I'm not a PhD. but I have a BS in Chemistry and have worked as an Analytical Chemist in the environmental testing and pharmaceutical fields for 37 years. I tested for PCBs and Dioxins from water and sediment samples from Love Canal in NY back in the day. That said, thank you for your content as always.
Do check out the link in the description to the climate tipping points article, which includes a discussion on latent heat. For (1) absolutely! And this is also the definition for *measurable* sea ice. I brushed over this by saying "doesn't have measurable ice _really_..."
@@ClimateAdam I did look at latent heat in the paper. Thank you. Oceanographer Jim Massa (on YT) gave a simple rule of thumb that it takes 20X the heat energy to melt a kg of ice than to raise the temp of 1 kg liquid water by 1 degree C(latent heat). To me this says when there is no ice (or reduced ice in an area) liquid water will heat by 20 degrees C locally. This latent heat effect is totally independent of the albedo affect.
Feels like there are some points not addressed by the video... am I wrong about any of this? Greenland Ice would definitely be harder than the sea ice but we also have a little longer before it's gone (Height of Greenland Ice meaningfully affects the altitude of the top and higher=colder). The Tipping Point aspect for sea ice comes from losing the heat sink. Those pesky 80j/g that get absorbed in the state-change of melting -while there's sea ice melting that energy isn't going somewhere else. It's not really a TP but it is very much like flipping a switch from 'melting ice' to 'heating water/atmosphere'. In the first instance it probably flips mostly to 'melting GreenLand ice' with consequences for Sea Level and AMOC.
for sure - ice sheets are a completely different question. the process of loss is much more gradual, but also like a runaway train - it will continue for centuries even after temperatures are stabilised.
Radiative forcing? Earth energy imbalance? You have managed to explain sth without those. What is the mechanism preventing spiraling out of control, balancing the increased absorption in the Arctic?
I respectfully ask. After all the summer sea ice has melted. Even if its just a few weeks in September. What about the principle of latent heat of fusion? Climate Scientists Im associated with believe once all the ice melts It will keep occurring because of this law of thermodynamics. Thank you Climate Adam.
you may find this article useful, which includes an explicit discussion of this effect: climatetippingpoints.info/2019/04/02/fact-check-will-an-ice-free-arctic-trigger-a-climate-catastrophe/
@@godfreypigott no.. "The darker ocean reflects only 6 percent of the sun's energy and absorbs the rest, while sea ice reflects 50 to 70 percent of the incoming energy. Snow has an even higher ability to reflect solar energy than sea ice. Snow-covered sea ice reflects as much as 90 percent of the incoming solar radiation."
@@megaflux7144 Do you not think 80% was a good compromise between 50-70 and 90? Your first post seemed to suggest you were challenging the ice-albedo effect, and your latest post seems to support it, so it's hard to know where you stand.
What happened 6000 years ago when the Arctic was last free of sea ice? Was that bad for people? You think a warmer arctic is bad for people living in the arctic?
It's an irrelevant question because we can presently observe that the current warming is in fact bad for people and the biosphere and a climate that has an ice free arctic would be even worse.
@@johnkosowski3321 Heat waves kill people, more hurricanes and forest fires destroy homes and infrastructure. Changing climates disturb animal habitats and species and agriculture.
I make lots of podcasts for other people (for example I recently made a podcast for Knowable Magazine, which included an episode on climate), but I've long been musing about having my own too... we'll see..!
As part of his 2007 Noble (Peace) Prize acceptance speech, Al Gore warned the audience that the arctic could be ice free in summer "in as little as seven years (dramatic pause) seven years!" Climate experts then went on a prediction spree of when the arctic would be ice free. The predictions ranged from 2012 to 2016. Back in the real world (not models) the ice reached a minimum in 2012 and now is thicker than it was in 2007. So, I guess, after yet another failed climate prediction, time to move the goal posts again.
@@-LightningRod- Mr. Heller was an Engineer involved in the PowerPC chip. He is skilled in software and data analysis. Nobody is going to burn, but we may well end up impoverished by the attempts to "fix" CO2
@@QT5656 I have a Ph.D. in physics and spent most of career writing code to model complex physical phenomena. I'll judge for myself. Naked (no supporting evidence) ad hominem attacks have no place in polite discussion and certainly none in science.
@ClimateAdam now you need to do a video on the long term effects of high Co2 on the human body. We are a low Co2 species not adapted to a high co2 environment. High Co2 levels eventually damage human health and the higher the outside Co2 levels is worse Co2 level becomes in our living space.
As fast as it melts in one area, it freezes in another area. Mother takes care of herself. You people have no idea, mother has been here for billions of years and has gone through many changes, she is going through a big change right now. There is nothing we can do, but watch. This is nature. Doing what she has done forever without you. You don't matter. At all. She will get rid of you if you aren't doing a good part for her. You are part of Mother, do your part. Go back to nature, be happy again. 😊
I understand that you have to dumb this subject down for beginners, but i don't hear any grounds for optimism here. Collapse is a process, not an event. Ella, you don't see any correlation between summer ice-free arctic and therefore a later and weaker re-freeze, with climate disruption? You've seen the graphs showing arctic sea-ice mass and volume reducing year-on-year. Tell us what you imagine the 'top-out' of temperature increase will be, assuming we do very little, as we are globally, to mitigate... Please.
@@fromnorway643 Of course, they will be safely retired by then. After having attempted to scare the populace with short-term catastrophic predictions they have realized that eventually these are shown to false.
@@jrcp106 That was an extreme lower bound estimate based on pure extrapolation without considering any other factors which even he called an aggressive interpretation with high uncertainty. It wasn't based on any modeling it was just pure extrapolation so it wasn't much of a prediction.
Thanks for doing this fantastic collab with me, Adam - as always it was such a pleasure to work with you (and obvs a special privilege to see the plant wall irl)
Stop misinforming people it is too late
I remember being called an alarmist over a decade ago for saying we'd prolly see summer free ice in artic by the early 2030s. But was I alarmist enough?
2030s still seems most likely.
2023 is barely in the 'top 10' lowest Arctic Sea Ice years (so far -definitely could move up the rankings).
Does look like the 'ice free' definition will be in the early 2030s rather than late though
Of course it could be 2040s or even later if AMOC breaks first!
My money is on the end of the century.
We all that follow science sound alarmist. but I am kind of James Lovelock the situation is so complicated there are so many aspects of life on Earth that we are in very serious trouble. We depend on all beings to be alive and this is a huge problem, is not just about the climate. It's about nature itself and we are part of it so the consequences are upon us. The companies and the gov they will keep business as usual but the problem require a break of paradigm and our model as civilization is overdue. In my point of view, we will go really down by the end of the century and maybe we survive. time will say
Your videos are so cute! It’s easier to hear depressing news this way.
Awesome to see you guys chat! Super informative and I love the laid back, casual vibes.
Well, you did not mention that this melting process is releasing even more carbon to the atmosphere, and that will not get trapped back.
Absolutely loved this collaboration. I think it really adds depth to have two qualified scientists cutting through both denialist but also alarmist crap. This is the sort of stuff I would like to see the public getting on TV and hearing on the radio rather than the often, one way or the other, biased programmes one gets when reporters spin their narratives.
It seems you are too optimistic about losing Arctic sea ice. It is easily reversible because it melts and freezes again every season. However, having no ice in this region means that instead of an ice mirror, a black ocean will accumulate a lot of heat. This will speed up heating in the northern hemisphere. Additionally, there is a risk, such as big fires in the boreal forest and an unknown amount of methane trapped in the Arctic region. Basically, losing the ice cap is like transitioning from an ice age to an interglacial period.
Correct. They missed quite a bit actually.
Artic Ice...the situation for the Polar bears and seal will be that they need to be on land, seals will be affected so it is a big interruption in the animal ecosystem.
I'm not sure you understand the severity and implications of losing the Arctic Sea ice. When the Arctic Sea ice vanishes....humans will vanish shortly thereafter.
The intro was really well done! Fun watching you guys have a more casual conversation.
In the future, you might want to consider angling your seats slightly towards each other and using 3 cameras (one focused on each person and one getting a wide shot). I was impressed how well you managed to edit it from just the single angle though!
the problem with that proposal is that one needs three cameras for it.
@@ClimateAdam heh that’s fair. Just figured I’d mention it for when you’re at a million subs and have more bandwidth for changes like that ;-)
Some thoughts I had after listening: 2 thoughts in the direction "yeah, ice-free summer must be a tipping point allright"...
1) besides being a mirror (influence on albedo), that sea-ice is also a considerable local 'anchor' on temperature: as long as you have ice around, the local temperature is anchored to not rise considerably above 0°C. In a locality where this ice has alltogether disappeared, temperature can start rising considerably above 0°C, first-and-foremost opening up a buffer where excess heat is stored (an energy buffer which later on has to be shed before ice can be created anew) so I'd expect a kind of inertia to arise hindering the subsequent restoration of sea-ice. In some localities, there've gotta be some ecological consequences to a significant >0°C event as well.
2) Ecologically, I'd expect the topology of the sea ice to have some significance, i.e. I'd expect some species to use the ice as a bridge or a roof to go from one place to another. If you start thinking along those lines, maybe not the surface area of the sea ice is the most interesting but e.g. whether there's an ice bridge from Canada to Russia...
1 thought in the direction "nah, ice-free summer probably not a tipping point"...
3) There's of course a lot of talk about the permafrost melting, but I don't see why there would be a discontinuity in the rate of melting in the event of an ice-free summer. I'd expect ecological interactions with the melting soil to be the bigger issue.
"It's never too late to take action."
That might be true with regard to physics, but with regard to economics there's only so much that our very fragile capitalist system can bear. Look at how it buckled under Covid, & that was only a small temporary event compared to 2 degrees warming.
The fact of the matter is that we can certainly save society, but we absolutely cannot save an economic system which depends upon an ever-increasing degree of extraction, production, consumption.
As has always been the case: the ultimate choice we face is socialism or barbarism.
Good news! Ths arctic ice isn't lost and isn't at levels outside of natural variability
However hard to expect cooling at this stage - emissions are still increasing.
I certainly wouldn't argue with that
I'm 54. Do you know how many times in my life I've heard the ice in the Arctic is going to disappear? It started over 30 years ago. But, this time, it totally, like, for real is gonna happen.
In 2006 they predicted ice free arctic by 2040 and in 2000 it was predicted to occur by 2050. The predictions have stayed pretty consistent over the last 23 years and are currently right on schedule.
@@metoo3342 If not...ahead of schedule based on the most recent paper. The things we have heard about for 30 years...we've done nothing. And the predictions, the scientific ones, are more or less happening or worse than predicted.
@@metoo3342stayed consistent…. Ok so… Stated in 2000 and 2006 gonna be ice free 2050 or 2040 … 2024 Half way there and ..
sea level have risen half of worse case and key west New Orleans fine… even Venice roads still visible …Sea rise ☑️ no problem
Next.
@@Think-dont-believe You're calling predictions for 2050 wrong when those predictions are still 26 years?
Climate restoration via intervention, geoengineering, etc. 95% confidence will be needed so research and readiness ASAP must be prioritized to prevent climate catastrophe!
CDR
SRM
SSRM Space Solar Radiation Management should be a goal and is trending to becoming economical
Great work both of yo0u!
w0000t thanks!
So a scientist issues a climate statement/prediction that is alarming. The press runs with the click-bait alarmism. No contemporaneous push-back from the scientific community (some rare exceptions, but these don't get the press coverage). Statement/prediction is falsified in the real world by the passage of time. Now scientist claims "Oh, but you ignored all my caveats".
We see this play out with every IPCC report. The Summary for Policy Makers (i.e. politicians and the press) comes out well before the bulk IPCC report does. The SPM is far more alarmist than one would conclude by reading the underlying science reports, which are filled with caveats, EXCEPT you won't get to see this part until quite some time later AFTER the politicians and press have scared the populace with their dire warnings.
Interesting video, thank you! It's good to know that there's at least some things that aren't irreversible damage :)
Bit concerned that there'll be fossil fuel companies rejoicing about the lack of ice making it easier to drill for oil... but I think they do that already...
I disagree about one thing. When ice melts that water is allowed to mix. As long as it mixes with warmer water it will never freeze again. For example, no matter how cold it gets you will never freeze the water in a hot tub. In my opinion if the Arctic sea ice minimum reaches the threshold of the "Blue Ocean Event" It will never come back in our lifetime.
The water in the Arctic seas already mixes with the world's oceans. While circulation patterns mag shift as heat gradients shift, this isn't an on/off shift that would take place.
@@ClimateAdam I suppose that the original poster meant that without ice, more waves can be formed in the ocean, which consequently mixes the water more, making creation of the ice more difficult on the surface. Without sea ice, the wind can also cause more water currents on the surface, which also mixes water more.
Furthermore, without the ice, the water temperature can also climb rapidly for 2 reasons:
(1) water is much darker than sea ice, so it absorbs more heat (lower albedo).
(2) once the ice is melted, there is no latent heat anymore to melt ice. As a result, all the absorbed energy goes to warms up the water (as opposed to also going into melting ice).
Both should cause an irreversibility, although I do not feel qualified to tell whether it is big enough to prevent ice forming in the next years. I can only intuit that it could be big enough to contributes to a tipping point to some extent.
Your opinion is wrong.
I think the language of tipping points could be replaced by a more sober language about reversible and irreversible disequilibrium elements. Only the irreversible ones are actually tipping elements, with a prediction of an irreversible transition to a new stable state, that would take considerable additional energy / intervention to return to the historically prior equilibrium level.
The melting of arctic sea ice is clearly replacing the equilibrium of summer sea ice cover that has existed for millennia with something different, and there is a clear driver for the change -- the reflecting power of the white ice. But that driver disappears every winter, giving sea ice a chance to form again, indicating the process is reversible. However, the hot new equilibrium of a summer dark sea in the arctic will start to affect nearby and global disequilibrium elements, some of which may in fact be irreversible. Nearby, the pace of melting of the Greenland ice sheet may accelerate and permafrost may melt. Each of those disequilibrium elements may be irreversible, in the sense that there will be runaway change that won't stop even if greenhouse gas emissions were completely stopped. The likelihood and pace of those changes is probably quite difficult to predict accurately, if we can't even pin down the decade when an ice-free arctic summer will happen. It might be a good idea to increase the number of climate scientists studying these problems by 10-fold or more.
Any reason why you guys omit the albedo effect? The fact that sea ice reflects sun rays and exposed water absorbs sunlight and causes more warming. Making the receding sea ice in the south and north an amplifying feedback loop.
that's exactly what Ella describes at 3:32 - the albedo effect is what drives the Arctic's much faster warming than the global average, and is an important way that Arctic sea ice regulates climate around the world
@ClimateAdam Thanks! It went by so fast and got cut, I missed it. But the conclusion that it's not a tipping point contradicts the Albedo Effect. It is irreversible change in the short term. She makes it seem like it can just go back to ice. How?
@@JohnnyBelgiumI think you're conflating positive feedbacks with tipping points. Lots of changes (including sea ice loss in the Arctic) amplify change. But that doesn't suggest they're irreversible or a sudden shift to a markedly different state.
I don't want to lose harp seals and snow 😭
I will not accept that reality
Embrace delusion
Learning so much from this channel! Thank you so much!
No artic sea ice ... more tipping points .. more Methane released .. more tipping points , more sea water heating , not reversible ... no ice on greenland .... once albedo is lowered to a point ... more heating ... or is this wrong Adam ? are we all fine ?
i thought the loss of arctic ice meant the liberation of huge ammounts of methane and that's why it is being called a tipping point
Loss of permafrost is associated with methane release (though there are serious questions about whether this would be sudden), but we're talking about sea ice here, not frozen soils.
@@ClimateAdam Okay! I thought there was methane also in the arctic. Thanks for clarifying that for me.
Love your content 🥰
@@juezna But don't worry, the methane is ALSO coming! Don't think of it as a tipping point. Think of it as a tipping cluster. :D
@@ClimateAdam But there is a relationship you guys missed: less sea ice, more and faster heating is a feedback on these other tipping points. And we have no way to reverse this.
The switch with the Fxxked. Let us act now, and not flick that switch.
I hope they are right. That weather is not climate.
Loss of Arctic Sea ice won't spell the end of the world. It just marks the first major tipping point we will know we crossed and mark a real point of the beginning of the end of humanity. Everyone loves to ignore the billions of tons of methane hydrates protected by the cold arctic. I get wanted to keep people's hopes up, but ignoring reality only makes it worse. Bad news does not get better with time. Repeat that and live it as it is true.
Correct, it's more or a herald than tipping point. But it is also associated with growing feedbacks that speed further warming.
As someone who is both interested in and terrified by climate change I always appreciate the work you and other climate scientists do here on TH-cam.
A bit off topic from this video in particular but I was curious to hear what a climate scientists perspective on this would be. I recently found a TH-cam channel called rethinkx that argues technological disruptions will lead to widespread adoption of renewable energies over the coming decades. I’m not sure if this is a realistic prediction or if it is just techno-optimism/greenwashing. I would appreciate your perspective on this.
To some extent that's what we're already seeing - renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels in very many contexts, and advantages grow as storage becomes better. At the same time, we don't just need to adopt these new techs - we need to shut down the fossil fuel infrastructure that we have today. And there's so much inertia in that system (financial, political, powerful), that we need pushes beyond the pure technological. That's my perspective at least! Thanks for watching!
@@ClimateAdam Please elaborate on these contexts. Every where I look, the infiltration of significant renewables leads to massive cost increases. See California in the US or the German Energiewende program. When the economics is on your side, you don't need massive government subsidies. See e.g. fracking and natural gas which led to a reduction of CO2 in the west as natural gas (methane) replaced coal. How about nuclear. especially molten salt modular thorium cycle reactors?
First! Thanks for the vid man~!
It's time to talk about the AMOC 😎 And geoengineering to bring it back to "normal" before reaching its tipping point. We don't like geoengineering, but 🤷♂
Brilliant .❤
Satellite data have recently revealed that between 2002 and 2019, the mesosphere and lower thermosphere cooled by 3.1 degrees F (1.7 degrees C ). Mlynczak estimates that the doubling of CO2 levels thought likely by later this century will cause a cooling in these zones of around 13.5 degrees F (7.5 degrees C), which is between two and three times faster than the average warming expected at ground level.
Your point?
I agree re podcast! Good idea.
The moment the ice is gone, we are finished. Obviously.
Nup
It is not a tippingponint i climat cases. But for the great mammels, live in the arctic it is.
I think polarbears seals and so on they are depending on the ice also in summer.
We need United Nations on Climate Action Now!
All this money for shiny new bombs for war, tanks B52s...
If we cannot cooperate now, the earth (and hardy life forms) will go on without😮
Could you quantify Arctic sea ice loss a bit more what percentage has gone I thought it was over 80%. Maybe about the rapid thinning happening at the moment seems to be over 1/2meter of thickness a month at the mo. I reckon next year for sure, and a blue ocean event just talks about when the arctic goes under 1million sq km isn't it so that's an event?
the arctic is importand for jetstreams and oceanwater conveyerbelt
Ok, so taking that into account; and with retrofitting of buildings being so expensive in terms of cost; would that reflectance effect of ice principle be applied to develop super reflectant paint coverage for rooftoops, thus mitigating the " heat island" effect on cities?
Short answer, yes.
Long Answer, There are a bunch of super white cool roof paints on the market already and Los Angeles is basically already doing that out of necessity. There are even a few daytime radiative cooling coatings that can stay below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight, though they're more expensive are not very common yet.
Then what you need is about 80 million buoys and on top of those buoy are connected to those buoys are mirrors. And those mirrors reflect the light back into space and basically all you need there is the mirrors have to be aligned to be a hexagon or octagon what it is the better shape for it. Probably an octagon since probably a hexagon since that's a better stronger position to shape something but then they only got to be is weatherproof and maintenance had to be done to them in the future won't be as cold in the Arctic so you don't have to worry about Arctic sea being too dangerous. And if it has hurricanes or bad weather then you just have to keep track of with satellites what happened to them years and see if you can fix them. She had to be able to walk on them they had to be weatherproof and they have to be pretty much solid steel mirrors. And that's all our problem with arctic ice right there from the beginning of the video. And basically from there all you have to do is and spend less money than sending one up in space then you would have to set one up on land. It'll cost about $80 billion dollars which is nothing in future money. Plus we'll have meteorites by then that we can study to make more money.
If those mirrors were each 10 square metres, they would cover a whopping 0.0002% of the earth's ocean surface.
2 corrections to your presentation:
1.) An ice free Arctic is defined as having less than 1 million sq kilometers of total sea ice in summer in the Arctic Ocean at its nadir . We have 4 million sq km in summer now at its nadir.
2.) You need to factor in an additional water temp raising effect which is latent heat. Let's say we have an ice free Arctic in 2030. It takes 80 calories/g to melt ice to water. It takes 100 calories to raise 1g of water by 1 degree C. Therefore, the less sea ice there is the faster water temps rise in the Arctic simply due to thermodynamics (completely aside for the albedo affect ). I calculate that with 3 million less km of sea ice 2.208 10 to the 21st calories more will be absorbed by liquid water versus that energy being used to melt ice. We may not go from 4 million sq km to 1 million sq km of sea ice in 1 year but that energy is still real and must be absorbed by ice or water.
I'm not a PhD. but I have a BS in Chemistry and have worked as an Analytical Chemist in the environmental testing and pharmaceutical fields for 37 years. I tested for PCBs and Dioxins from water and sediment samples from Love Canal in NY back in the day. That said, thank you for your content as always.
Do check out the link in the description to the climate tipping points article, which includes a discussion on latent heat.
For (1) absolutely! And this is also the definition for *measurable* sea ice. I brushed over this by saying "doesn't have measurable ice _really_..."
@@ClimateAdam I will. Thanks, Adam
@@ClimateAdam I did look at latent heat in the paper. Thank you. Oceanographer Jim Massa (on YT) gave a simple rule of thumb that it takes 20X the heat energy to melt a kg of ice than to raise the temp of 1 kg liquid water by 1 degree C(latent heat). To me this says when there is no ice (or reduced ice in an area) liquid water will heat by 20 degrees C locally. This latent heat effect is totally independent of the albedo affect.
7:00 isn´t ice reflective to IR too so does matter even in the winter?
Feels like there are some points not addressed by the video... am I wrong about any of this?
Greenland Ice would definitely be harder than the sea ice but we also have a little longer before it's gone (Height of Greenland Ice meaningfully affects the altitude of the top and higher=colder).
The Tipping Point aspect for sea ice comes from losing the heat sink. Those pesky 80j/g that get absorbed in the state-change of melting -while there's sea ice melting that energy isn't going somewhere else. It's not really a TP but it is very much like flipping a switch from 'melting ice' to 'heating water/atmosphere'.
In the first instance it probably flips mostly to 'melting GreenLand ice' with consequences for Sea Level and AMOC.
for sure - ice sheets are a completely different question. the process of loss is much more gradual, but also like a runaway train - it will continue for centuries even after temperatures are stabilised.
Radiative forcing?
Earth energy imbalance?
You have managed to explain sth without those.
What is the mechanism preventing spiraling out of control, balancing the increased absorption in the Arctic?
Polar ice melts in the summer then returns in the winter.
Yeah - great observation. You are clearly one of the greatest climate scientists.
Yes, they can block out the sun, they know how to do that. 😊
Rebound increased over last decade...
Wetlands are the largest natural source of atmospheric methane in the world, -Wikipedia
Thanks for your video. Sir David King has a project to grow the ice with water sprayed in the winter? Something like.
Is that a project, or an idea? Without a budget and staff and equipment, it’s not a project, it’s an idea.
No mention of sea level rise consequences of AMOC shuts down which is 95% likely by 2095 and 5% by 2025
blue ocean event. Paul Beckwith mostly .
I don't like ice...get rid.
I respectfully ask. After all the summer sea ice has melted. Even if its just a few weeks in September. What about the principle of latent heat of fusion? Climate Scientists Im associated with believe once all the ice melts It will keep occurring because of this law of thermodynamics. Thank you Climate Adam.
you may find this article useful, which includes an explicit discussion of this effect:
climatetippingpoints.info/2019/04/02/fact-check-will-an-ice-free-arctic-trigger-a-climate-catastrophe/
@@ClimateAdam Thankyou for responding to my question.
Haircut 💇♀️ was a good call
uh.. water reflects light too.
Yeah - about 10 to 20 percent.
@@godfreypigott ..depending on the angle of the sun, vs the 60-70% arctic ice reflects. it still reflects it though.
@@megaflux7144 You mean 80%.
@@godfreypigott no.. "The darker ocean reflects only 6 percent of the sun's energy and absorbs the rest, while sea ice reflects 50 to 70 percent of the incoming energy. Snow has an even higher ability to reflect solar energy than sea ice. Snow-covered sea ice reflects as much as 90 percent of the incoming solar radiation."
@@megaflux7144 Do you not think 80% was a good compromise between 50-70 and 90?
Your first post seemed to suggest you were challenging the ice-albedo effect, and your latest post seems to support it, so it's hard to know where you stand.
What happened 6000 years ago when the Arctic was last free of sea ice? Was that bad for people? You think a warmer arctic is bad for people living in the arctic?
There weren't as many people
@@oleonard7319 Does that matter? Do humans like it warmer or colder? Was it an emergency when there was no arctic sea ice?
It's an irrelevant question because we can presently observe that the current warming is in fact bad for people and the biosphere and a climate that has an ice free arctic would be even worse.
@@metoo3342 Really? How is it bad?
@@johnkosowski3321 Heat waves kill people, more hurricanes and forest fires destroy homes and infrastructure. Changing climates disturb animal habitats and species and agriculture.
Can you do a podcast
I make lots of podcasts for other people (for example I recently made a podcast for Knowable Magazine, which included an episode on climate), but I've long been musing about having my own too... we'll see..!
As part of his 2007 Noble (Peace) Prize acceptance speech, Al Gore warned the audience that the arctic could be ice free in summer "in as little as seven years (dramatic pause) seven years!" Climate experts then went on a prediction spree of when the arctic would be ice free. The predictions ranged from 2012 to 2016. Back in the real world (not models) the ice reached a minimum in 2012 and now is thicker than it was in 2007. So, I guess, after yet another failed climate prediction, time to move the goal posts again.
Just heard something interesting religious and cult people beleive in climate change do you get the picture thats very convincing
TH-cam: Tony Heller "Climate Fakery Part 16" is on topic.
MrHeller is an Oil Geologist , ..MrHeller will burn like the rest of us
@@-LightningRod- Mr. Heller was an Engineer involved in the PowerPC chip. He is skilled in software and data analysis. Nobody is going to burn, but we may well end up impoverished by the attempts to "fix" CO2
Tony Heller is a dishonest grifter.
@@QT5656 I have a Ph.D. in physics and spent most of career writing code to model complex physical phenomena. I'll judge for myself. Naked (no supporting evidence) ad hominem attacks have no place in polite discussion and certainly none in science.
COLAPSO DA AMOC.
Why you dont mention in impact of not having sea ice in artic ? I dont understand the point of the video apart of "we are fine !"
@ClimateAdam now you need to do a video on the long term effects of high Co2 on the human body. We are a low Co2 species not adapted to a high co2 environment. High Co2 levels eventually damage human health and the higher the outside Co2 levels is worse Co2 level becomes in our living space.
Lots of paleoclimate denier videos on TH-cam these days.
As fast as it melts in one area, it freezes in another area. Mother takes care of herself. You people have no idea, mother has been here for billions of years and has gone through many changes, she is going through a big change right now. There is nothing we can do, but watch. This is nature. Doing what she has done forever without you. You don't matter. At all. She will get rid of you if you aren't doing a good part for her. You are part of Mother, do your part. Go back to nature, be happy again. 😊
I understand that you have to dumb this subject down for beginners, but i don't hear any grounds for optimism here. Collapse is a process, not an event. Ella, you don't see any correlation between summer ice-free arctic and therefore a later and weaker re-freeze, with climate disruption? You've seen the graphs showing arctic sea-ice mass and volume reducing year-on-year. Tell us what you imagine the 'top-out' of temperature increase will be, assuming we do very little, as we are globally, to mitigate... Please.
It's truly terrifying. Climate scientists have predicted that the arctic may be ice free by 2014.
Most climate scientists say that mid 21st century is more likely, so we may still have 20-30 years.
@@fromnorway643 Of course, they will be safely retired by then. After having attempted to scare the populace with short-term catastrophic predictions they have realized that eventually these are shown to false.
The last 20 years of predictions have taken place between the 2030s and 2050 so which climate scientists predicted 2014?
@@metoo3342 Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, professor of Arctic Oceanography and Sea Ice at the Naval Postgraduate School in California.
@@jrcp106 That was an extreme lower bound estimate based on pure extrapolation without considering any other factors which even he called an aggressive interpretation with high uncertainty. It wasn't based on any modeling it was just pure extrapolation so it wasn't much of a prediction.
This is totally wrong information. We are in a period of ice age and polar ice have melted many times before. I wonder who fund you?
I wonder who taught you English.