Silflay Hraka

Ngnat has developed a psychic ability to fortell the future, or at least the next day’s headlines. As evidence, on the way home from school yesterday, she inquired of me what Santa would do once all the ice melted at the North Pole. Would he build a boat?

I assured her Santa would, that he could easily construct a vessel large enough to house all the reindeer, elves, talking snowman and Bumbles he could find. Furthermore, given his obvious familiarity with manufacturing efficiencies, Santa would find it cheaper in the long run to build his magical Christmas boat than to spend his cash attempting to reduce his output of greenhouse gases.

Satisfied, she returned to her languid study of the passing landscape outside the car window, and ventured no more inquiries until we arrived home, at which point she discovered a pressing need for a Fresca. Santa, she was evidently satisfied, could take care of himself.

So can the polar bears, despite the latest in the EVERYBODY PANIC!!! series of stories on the coming seasonal disappearance on the Arctic Ice pack.

Further increases in the atmosphere of so-called greenhouse gases may lead to global warming that causes the already- retreating ice to begin melting four times faster in about 20 years’ time, a team led by U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Marika Holland says today in research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“We don’t see this sort of behavior in the absence of increases in greenhouse gas concentrations,” Holland said in an interview aired today by British Broadcasting Corp. radio’s “Today” program. The melting “very definitely is caused in the climate model by increased greenhouse gas levels.”
….
The loss of sea-ice cover poses risks to the way of life of indigenous Arctic people such as the Inuit, who travel between islands across the ice, and to animals such as polar bears who rely on sea-ice as their hunting ground.

The full text of the Holland/Blitz/Tremblay article in Geophysical Research Letters can be seen here, though it may be available only to those coming from a .edu address. One can also view a good animation of the predicted reduction in the ice pack, here. One perhaps inevitable shortcoming of the news coverage regarding the story is the ineluctable focus on greenhouse gases as the proximate cause of the ice-pack decline when black carbon, i.e. soot, may bear more of the blame for the decline. Why? Perhaps because the major source of Arctic soot isn’t the First World, but rather the Third, which does Kyoto proponents absolutely no good.

Black carbon (BC) particles, derived from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, may have a severe impact on the sensitive Arctic climate, possibly altering the temperature profile, cloud temperature and amount, the seasonal cycle, and the tropopause level and accelerating polar ice melting. We use the Goddard Institute for Space Studies general circulation model to investigate the origins of Arctic BC by isolating various source regions and types. The model suggests that the predominant sources of Arctic soot today are from south Asia (industrial and biofuel emissions) and from biomass burning. These are the primary global sources of BC (approximately 20% and 55%, respectively, of the global emissions), and BC aerosols in these regions are readily lofted to high altitudes where they may be transported poleward. According to the model the Arctic BC optical thickness is mostly from south Asia (30%) and from biomass (28%) (with slightly more than half of biomass coming from north of 40N); North America, Russia, and Europe each contribute 10–15%. Russia, Europe, and south Asia each contribute about 20–25% of BC to the low-altitude springtime ‘‘Arctic haze.’’ In the Arctic upper troposphere/lower stratosphere during the springtime, south Asia (30–50%) and low-latitude biomass (20–30%) are dominant, with a significant aircraft contribution (10–20%).

To be fair, the Holland/Blitz/Tremblay article does factor the effect of black carbon in its climactic model, so the presumptions of a summer vacation on the part of the ice pack may be correct, but what neither the article nor the news coverage about it don’t point out is that the Arctic ice has vanished before, most recently less than 10,000 years ago, in a period known as the Hypsithermal Interval. Obviously, the the polar bears survived.

While welcoming the June 1, 2006, publication in “Nature” of three papers (refs. 1,2,3) revealing the sedimentary evidence of an early Tertiary ice free Arctic Ocean I wondered why science writers fail to mention the data which indicate that summer ice free oceanic conditions also existed in the far north within the last ~ 10,000 years of the Holocene period? This would add perspective for those who seem to worry that such a near-future event, driven by 20th & 21st century gas emissions, would be unprecedented in geologically recent times, and these data might modulate the current concern about polar bear extirpation, since Ursus maritimus survived such ice loss just a few millennia ago.

I write as a long-term student of paleo-environmental change in the arctic, and needless to say I have no connection whatsoever with funding or influence by the hydrocarbon industry. I am sympathetic to the plight of the southernmost population of polar bears in Hudson Bay, but note that they have demonstrated a remarkable ability in the late Quaternary period to evolve from the brown bear species to the fully maritime modern ‘ice bear’ and to survive many climatic changes.

Nor is the expected impact of an ice-free Arctic discussed, but to put it simply, less ice in the Arctic might very mean more ice elsewhere. (As I can only find the abstract, I’ll see if I can locate a hard copy of the whole paper and post it. At first glance the paper appears to be available to members of the Defense Community–odd.)

An assessment is made of each component of the heat budgets of the surface and of the earth–atmosphere system in the central Arctic, both for an ice-covered ocean and for an ice-free ocean. The annual patterns of atmospheric heat loss for both conditions are obtained as residuals; the relation of these patterns to general atmospheric circulation and glacier accumulation is discussed. It is shown that atmospheric cooling in the Arctic is closely related to certain indices of atmospheric circulation. An ice-free Arctic Ocean would probably be associated with atmospheric circulation more vigorous in summer at subarctic latitudes and of comparable vigor in winter. The cool summers and warm, moist winters would be highly conducive to glacier growth.

So presumably Santa will have other icy places to relocate to, even if he doesn’t construct his magic Christmas Clipper. He’ll be fine. So will the polar bears, which have been around for the last three million years, meaning that they’ve survived numerous Arctic warmings. Though presumably each warm period stressed the species as a whole, enough of the population survived to pass along their genes to future generations. Absent any other negative influences on the population, such as disease or pollution, Ursus maritimus will survive this one as well. Of course, that’s not to say such influences won’t occur. After all, once the Arctic is ice free, human activity in the area will undoubtedly increase–supertankers passing through the NorthWest Passage spring to mind–but the whole point of the Lomborgian analysis is that managing such threats is a more efficient use of resources in the long run than the economically painful, increasingly mis-targeted and ultimately futile greenhouse gas cuts proposed by the Kyoto Accords.

If you’re concerned about the Polar bears, give the Nature Conservancy a buck or two and ignore the news stories lamenting their upcoming demise. Save your worries for the giant space rocks.