A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic
by Peter Wadhams
by Peter Wadhams
Please use this thread to discuss Ch. 6: Sea ice meltback begins.
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As you said, Wadhams based a projection on the exceptional melting of 2012, and therefore he asserted that summer ice would be gone by 2020. It will still be there after this month, but if it takes another 10-20 years to be fully gone, that isn't to say we have great breathing space, especially when we're doing relatively little about the problem.Robert Tulip wrote: Wadhams continues his cantankerous comments about climate modellers, commenting that they failed to recognise the major importance of this finding. Imagine if chicken egg shells thinned by 43%. That was a big factor in the banning of DDT due to its effect on eagle eggs. We are similarly walking on eggshells with the thin Arctic ice, but in this case the shell still protects the whole planet.
Unfortunately, Wadhams was still ignored by climate modellers, who complacently thought the Arctic ice would remain for the rest of this century. The summer minimum in September fully detached from the coasts of Siberia and Alaska for the first time in 2005, producing accelerating collapse, due to the open seas allowing bigger storms to break up the ice and send it out to the Atlantic.
No he did not, at least in this book. It is essential to be precise in such a charged and complex topic. What Wadhams actually wrote was as follows.DWill wrote:[Wadhams] asserted that summer ice would be gone by 2020.
Too often in climate debate, partisans distort a statement in order to belittle their opponent. I am not suggesting you are doing that here, but it is easy to see in this case how such a careless paraphrase can lead to incorrect impressions. This is something Wadhams says happens a lot.Peter Wadhams wrote:The trend in the PIOMAS data effectively gives us a drop-dead date of about 2020 for summer sea ice. Anyone who wishes to deny this date and replace it by a much later date must explain why the ice volume should deviate above the trend... there is no mechanism in sight to make this possible. (A Farewell to Ice, Ch7 'How do we know that all this will happen')
SROCC wrote: It is very likely that projected Arctic warming will result in continued loss of sea ice and snow on land, and reductions in the mass of glaciers. Important differences in the trajectories of loss emerge from 2050 onwards, depending on mitigation measures taken (high confidence). For stabilised global warming of 1.5°C, an approximately 1% chance of a given September being sea ice free at the end of century is projected; for stabilised warming at a 2°C increase, this rises to 10–35% (high confidence).