In this week's Headline Earth video, host Katie Fehlinger finds out what the job of an environmental planner is all about.

It looks like there will not be a new record minimum Arctic sea ice extent this year.

Much of this summer it looked like there would probably not be a new record minimum, but then late in August there was a sudden drop in sea ice extent according to the NSIDC graph and the 2007 record seemed to be threatened. But, over the past few days, the loss of Arctic sea ice has almost completely leveled off, possibly signaling the ending of the summer melt season.

Here is the latest chart..........

This kind of reminds me of the original classic movie 'The Fog', which is one of my all-time favorite horror flicks.

I just saw this story from the Times Online, about a professor from the University of Edinburgh who proposes using a fleet of 1,500 unmanned cloud making ships in the oceans to reduce global warming. Say what?

According to professor Steven Salter, the rotary-sail technology would be operated by computer. The ships would spray tiny droplets of seawater into existing clouds in order to enlarge and thereby whiten them, which will send more radiation back into space, cooling the lower atmosphere.

Where would these ships be deployed? The best locations would be off of Nambia, California and the southern Ocean.

You can read a shorter, more detailed article with images on this proposed solution right here.

The above image is courtesy of Wikipedia.

A closeup of the latest sea ice concentration around the Northwest Passage. Image courtesy of the University of Bremen.

NASA satellite images taken last week now show that the Arctic has become an island for the first time in man's history as both the north-west and north-east-passages have been opened due to melting ice, according to the Telegraph article.

Strong words........

Prof Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in the US said the images suggested the Arctic may have entered a "death spiral" caused by global warming.

UPDATE

Andrew Revkin of the New York Times posted a blog yesterday disputes this story. According to Revkin, the National Ice Center operated by the Navy, says flatly that the satellites are misreading conditions in many spots and that there is too much ice in a critical spot along the Russian coast to allow anything but ice-hardened ships to get through. Here is the article. Mark Serreze of the NSIDC also concurred with this information.

Another Ice shelf breaks away

The 4,500 year old 50 sq/m Markham Ice shelf in Canada has broken completely away from Ellesmere Island and drifted into the Arctic Ocean, according to the Canwest News Service. The break up occurred in early August, which leaves just 4 Canadian Arctic ice shelves intact.

Here is some solid data on longer term sea level changes that can be usually difficult to find.........

Warming water and melting ice have raised global sea levels an average of 1.7 inches (4.5 cm) from 1993-2008, but as you can see from the image below, the rise is far from uniform, according to the NASA News article.

This image was made possible by the detailed record of sea surface height measurements begun by Topex/Poseidon and continued by Jason-1.

Why are there so many differences in sea level change across the world? Variation of winds, currents and long term changes in atmospheric circulation patterns. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has certainly had an impact on the higher rise in the western Pacific due to the warming of the ocean water.

Key

The light blues indicate fairly constant sea level since 1993.

The light green indicates a moderate rise in sea level during the period.

The white, red and yellow colors indicate regions where sea levels have risen most rapidly during the 15-year period (up to 10 mm a year).

Here is the latest Remote Sensing Systems global temperature anomaly image for August, using microwave sounding units mounted on NOAA satellites, which measures the temperature of the lower troposphere.

August 2008.

Observations.....

1. Well above the 1979-1998 mean from Hudson Bay, Canada to west of Greenland and also over northern Siberia.
2. Cool compared to normal once again over Alaska and also over Australia.

For fun comparison, here is the image from August, 1998 (Strong El Nino year).

And August, 1988 (That was a very hot/dry summer in the Eastern U.S. as I recall)

Actual statistics for August, 2008

Global land/sea temperature anomaly: +0.146 K

Northern Hemispheric temperature anomaly: +0.315 K

Arctic region temperature anomaly (60N to 82.5 N): +0.935 K

Year so far globally.......+0.041 K by my calculations

Acknowledgement

MSU/AMSU data are produced by Remote Sensing Systems and sponsored by the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program. Data are available at www.remss.com

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Update (UAH data)...................

The University of Alabama at Huntsville has posted their latest global temperature anomaly map for August. These are measured against the 20-year average from 1979-1998.

UAH also gathers their data through microwave sounding units on NOAA satellites, but their version covers more of the polar regions compared to RSS.

Here are the UAH temperature anomaly results for August, but they are still preliminary.

Global: -0.01 C or -0.02 F
Northern Hemisphere: +0.17 C or +0.31 F
Southern Hemisphere: -).19 C or -0.34 F

Researchers previously associated with the famous and controversial "Hockey stick" temperature diagram have determined that the last decade ending in 2006 was the warmest such period in the Northern Hemisphere for at least the last 1,300 years and possibly longer.

The research team utilized a much wider variety of sources compared to the "Hockey stick" study, which led to a congressional investigation in 2005. In addition to tree rings, the team also looked at sediments, stalactites and stalagmites, which in their opinion provides much more reliable conclusions.

"We sort of removed that asterisk," because the new study's conclusion didn't depend as much on one kind of data, said Michael Mann, director of Penn State's Earth System Science Center.

The decade ending in 2006 in the Northern Hemisphere was a bit more than .5 degree F warmer than the decade-long average dating back 1,300 to 1,700 years.

According to the Arizona Daily Star article, the paper is "one brick in the wall" of the case for saying that human-induced causes such as greenhouse-gas emissions are raising temperatures, said Malcolm Hughes, a dendrochronologist at the UA's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

The study will be published on September 9th in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences. It was authored by Malcolm Hughes, a dendrochronologist at the University of Arizona.

The is a short summary of the study and results on the right side of the Arizona Star article in the grey box.

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Update

Steve McIntyre from climate audit has a detailed critique of this study. Here is the link.

Image courtesy of the United Nations Environment Program.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) just released their latest preliminary data on the continuous mass balance values for 30 glaciers across the world for the year 2006. Obviously, it takes a while to gather this information.

The latest WGMS data shows the continued trend in accelerated ice loss during the past 25 years.

This bottom graph from the report clearly illustrates the steady decline in mean cumulative net balance.

Here is a link to some of the latest facts and figures on global glaciers from the United Nations Environment Program

An older power station at Kingsnorth. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

He's back!

Dr. James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently joined a protest against the construction of a new coal plants (The first one being Kingsnorth) in the UK.

In an interview with stop Kingsnorth, which you can watch right here, courtesy of YouTube, Hansen says that there really is no such thing right now as "clean" coal technology since only a small fraction of carbon dioxide is captured.

Hansen favors renewable and alternative energy and that trying to actually make coal technology "clean" would be too expensive anyway.

In the interview, Hansen talks about how some of the poorest nations would be impacted by global warming due to sea level rise and a reduction of fresh water due to glacier melt.

Speaking of sea level rise, Icecap posted a graph of sea level rise going back to 1993.

In a letter from July of 2007, Hansen wrote the following from NewScientist.........

As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting adds 1 centimetre to sea level for the decade 2005 to 2015, and that this doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by 2095.

Of course, I cannot prove that my choice of a 10-year doubling time is accurate but I'd bet $1000 to a doughnut that it provides a far better estimate of the ice sheet's contribution to sea level rise than a linear response. In my opinion, if the world warms by 2 °C to 3 °C, such massive sea level rise is inevitable, and a substantial fraction of the rise would occur within a century. Business-as-usual global warming would almost surely send the planet beyond a tipping point, guaranteeing a disastrous degree of sea level rise.

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From what I can tell, based on the graph, I do not see any indication of his 10-year doubling time showing up yet. It is is still early in the century though.

Global sea ice analysis as of September 11th, 2008. Image courtesy of NOAA.

I know I have been discussing the status of Arctic sea ice a lot recently as it approached the record minimum set back in 2007. In addition to another Arctic update, I think it is a good time to look at the Antarctic and the current global status of sea ice.

Arctic sea ice

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) revealed last week that the month of August set a record for rate of ice loss. Arctic sea ice extent is still second lowest on record after 2007. According to the NSIDC, there is still another week left in the melt season, but it still looks like it will come up short of the record as the loss has almost leveled out.

The Cryosphere today site from the University of Illinois at Champaign also confirms that the Northern Hemispheric sea ice area is just slightly greater than what it was last year at this time, but still almost 2 million sq/km below normal.

Antarctic

The latest graph from the Cryosphere today shows that the Southern Hemispheric sea ice area anomaly is right at normal. Much of last winter and into the first half of this summer the Antarctic sea ice anomaly was close to 1 million sq/km above normal.

Globally

Finally, here is the latest Cryosphere today graph showing the status of the total global sea ice area. At this time, it appears that the sea ice globally is running close to 2 million sq/km below normal thanks to the situation in the Arctic. Also, despite the notable anomaly increase late last year and early this year, there is currently a slight downward trend that began late in 2004.

Mark Paquette, who is a new colleague of mine here at AccuWeather.com came to me last month and wanted to get involved with the global warming blog. In addition to being one of our new early morning forecasters, Mark has a particularly strong interest in climate change. Mark will pop in from time to time with a blog, especially during one of the weekend days when I normally would not post anything new. Brett.

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As a new meteorologist at AccuWeather I am not going to be pretend to be an expert at global warming, or maybe more appropriately named, climate change. This subject has interested me since grade school, and I even considered studying it at the graduate school level.

I recently came across a research report written by Don J. Easterbrook, a Professor of Geology at Western Washington University that explains his theory of global cooling, which he says began in 2002, was interupted by the El-Nino of 2005, and will continue, by his projections until 2040. For the whole time period of 2002-2040, he expects a drop in temperature of about 0.5 C. Curiously, his projection is only for the Northern Hemisphere. This article stood out to me simply because since the late 80's, 1988 in particular, we have been bombarded with media stories warning of the dangers of global warming. Our more experienced readers may remember that in the 70's, there were many an article about global cooling and even an impending return to ice age conditions. So, an article on global cooling in this day and age, which may be seen as being more appropriate 30 years ago, piqued my interest. Also interesting is his explanation why he has the earth cooling. There have been recent studies and observations of a lack of (or at least not as may) sunspots. Professor Easterbrook says that the recent lack of sunspot activity may be part of a bigger trend of lower sunspot activity ( possibly similiar to what happened in the Maunder Minimum from about 1600-1700 AD where there was almost a complete lack of sunspots altogether), and lower sunspot activity signifies a slight reduction in the amount of energy being put out by the sun, and thus received by the earth. This was at leat part of the reason (if not the main reason) for the "Little Ice Age" that occured from about 1300-1800 AD. So the Professor basically says, if cooling happened back then from a decrease in the amount of the sun's energy hitting the earth, why couldn't it happen now? I personally think this is a possibility, the scientific reasoning looks sound, but I question where he gets his temperatures. The earth has been cooling since 2002, only brie