More nonsense from Roger Harrabin:
A rapid climate shift underway in the Barents Sea could spread to other Arctic regions, scientists warn.
The Barents Sea is said to be at a tipping point, changing from an Arctic climate to an Atlantic climate as the water gets warmer.
A conference in Norway heard that the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea – both further to the east – are likely to become the new Arctic frontier.
The scientists warn that it will affect ecosystems.
It may also impact on global weather patterns, although there’s no agreement on that.
They’re concerned because the northern Barents Sea has been governed by an Arctic climate since the end of the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago.
The Arctic Ocean has a cold, fresh surface layer which acts as a cap on a layer of warm, saltier Atlantic water beneath.
But now in the Barents Sea, there’s not enough freshwater-rich sea-ice flowing from the high Arctic to maintain the freshwater cap.
And that’s allowing warm, salty Atlantic water to rise to the surface.
In what’s known as a feedback loop – the more the layers mix, the warmer the surface gets. And the warmer the surface gets, the more the waters mix.
So it’s now only a matter of time, the researchers say, before this section of the Arctic effectively becomes part of the Atlantic. It could happen in as little as a decade, they warn….
And in another puzzle, freshwater in the western Arctic seems to be increasing as it diminishes in the eastern Arctic. Scientists are still struggling to fathom the complexities of human impact on the planet.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46976040
Why on earth should any of this have to do anything to do with “human impact on the planet”?
You only have to go back to the 1920s to see exactly the same climatic changes in that part of the Arctic.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0493%281922%2950%3C589a%3ATCA%3E2.0.CO%3B2
This period, called the Warming in the North, is well known to scientists, and lasted from around 1920 to 1960.
Bob Dickson and Svein Osterhus wrote extensively about it in their seminal paper, “One hundred years in the Norwegian Sea”:
As our hydrographic time series is lengthened into the middle decades of the 20th century, it begins to capture evidence of one of the largest and most widespread regime shifts to affect our waters within the modern instrumental record. These were the decades of ‘the Warming in the North’, when the salinity of North Atlantic water passing through the Faroe-Shetland Channel into the Norwegian Sea reached a century-long high (Dooley et al. 1984), when salinities were so high off Cape Farewell that they were rejected as erroneous (Harvey 1962) and when a precipitous warming by more than 2°C in the 5-year mean pervaded the West Greenland banks (Fig. 6), and also when the northward dislocations of biogeographical boundaries for a wide range of species, from plankton to commercially important fish, terrestrial mammals, and birds, were at their most extreme in the 20th century. The astonishing nature of these radical events is vivid in the contemporary scientific literature, most notably in the classic accounts by Knipowitsch (1931), Sæmundsson (1934), Hansen et al. (1949), Stephen (1938), Jensen (1939), Tåning (1943), Tåning (1949), Fridriksson (1949), and many others summarized in a comprehensive bibliography by Arthur Lee (1949) and reviewed in an ICES special scientific meeting on ‘Climatic Changes in the Arctic in Relation to Plants and Animals’ in Copenhagen in 1948.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00291950701409256
The Warming in the North ended abruptly in the 1960s, when Arctic currents took over again, and brought the sea ice back.
Go back a bit further, and we can see how sea ice around the Barents Sea fluctuated backwards and forwards:
And go back 3000 years, and we can see that current sea ice extent to the north of Iceland is near historical highs.
It should not take Harrabin more than a few minutes to check this out for himself. So why does he continue to peddle every bit of junk science he is fed?
Read more at Not A Lot Of People Know That
Why the “tipping point” urgency in climate change headlines? I suspect it is partly for alarm and attention, but could it be the frequency of elections? There’s always an election somewhere, and liberal candidates need a boost.
The BBC is becoming as bad as CNN not real news just leftists propeganda
THE ARCTIC
The Arctic ice-sheet is in reality a large iceberg which floats in the Arctic Ocean over the North Pole. It’s big – around 50 million square miles at its maximum freeze, almost 60 times the size of Great Britain. Every year, around the month of March, the Sun starts to heat the waters around the ice-sheet and it gradually melts. During the six months of its Summer, it will lose anywhere from half to two-thirds of its ice. Over the course of the next six months, when the Sun goes down for its 6-month Winter night, the seas around the ice-sheet gradually re-freeze again.
Beneath the ice-sheet down on the sea-bed up to 3 miles below is the boundary between two tectonic plates- the mid-Arctic rift. Eruptions along the Rift cause heat to rise into the seas around the Arctic ice-sheet. It’s not enough heat to completely melt the ice, but when the Sun starts to shine, the combination of the two is more than enough.
It doesn’t always melt and refreeze to the same extent, however. The strength of the Sun and the angle of its rays vary over time, varying the amount of heat the ice-sheet receives and the amount of the Summer melt. When the melt is a large one, the climate alarmists are in full cry, predicting the imminent end of the ice. Some of them go so far as to say the melting of the ice will raise sea levels, with disastrous results for coastal areas.
If the Arctic ice were all to melt, sea-levels would not be affected. You can prove this with a simple experiment you can do at home.
Take a jug, fill it half-full of warm water and put a large ice cube in the water. Mark on the jug the top level of the water. Now wait. The ice will melt, becoming water and will mix with the other water in the jug. Eventually, the ice cube will melt. Look at your mark. The water level won’t have changed. How come?
The answer is simple science. When an ice cube floats in water, 90% of it is under the water and 10% is above the waterline. To understand what happens next, remember that when water freezes, it expands. ( That’s why pipes burst when the water in them freezes. ) The opposite is also true: when ice melts, it contracts to a smaller amount of water. So the 90% of the ice cube under the water will actually lower the waterline as it melts.
Let’s not forget the 10% of the ice cube that’s above the waterline: when that melts, it contracts too. However, the melted ice – now water – adds to the water in the jug to bring the water level back to the mark on the jug. So, no change in the level.
But what if the Arctic ice were to melt completely? From our little experiment with the jug and the ice cube, we’ve seen that the sea level wouldn’t rise at all. The Northwest Passage would be permanently open to shipping, saving shipping lines massive amounts of time and money. The polar bears would migrate south and perhaps revert to being the black bears they once were. We’d have no more daft people trekking to the North Pole and getting frostbite; no intrepid sailors trying to sail to the North Pole and getting stuck in the ice half-way. Finally, the several nations who lay claim to the North Pole would see their flags floating away, removing a source of potential conflict. A win-win, I’d say.
The alarmists say that the loss of Arctic ice would mean less sunshine reflected back into space and more absorbed by the seas, generating more Global Warming. Since Arctic ice is less than 1% of the total ice on Earth and half to three-quarters of it now melts every Summer and there’s no Sun to melt it for six months of the year, that’s just another alarmist false scare.
Al Gore: in 2008, he predicted that all the Arctic ice would have melted by 2013. Six years after your deadline it’s still there Al, bigger than ever.
Sorry, Al, that should read TEN years after your fatuous prediction.