Here is an idea I've been toying with.
I've noticed this year in Auckland the air feels cool and wet so far. Over in Melbourne a few weeks ago, it felt the same. Everyone there was saying it seemed unseasonably grey and there were waves of cloud and cool air coming up from the South.....but not a lot of rain for it. Though more than they had seen for a while.
At the same time, the opponents of climate change have been crowing about how the global temperature had not experienced a new peak for the past decade.
Maybe the two are related. This is the part I now want to go away and have a look at, but thought I'd post the train of thought here first as a benchmark (mainly for my use, but others may be interested in the idea if they have not already come across it).
The polar ice began melting - in earnest - relatively recently. Roughly the past decade. What happens when ice melts? The water around it gets colder. Like an ice cube in a drink. The more of the ice that melts, the greater the cooling effect my mask what is actually a rise in the surrounding levels of heat energy going into the system. Like ice in a drink on a hot day. Nice and cold...but its fate is certain.Perhaps the 'plateau' in global temperature rise is a temporary effect due to ice melting in greater volumes than it is able to form each year....resulting in a net ice loss, year on year.
As anyone with a drink knows, even a relatively small ice cube will continue to keep your drink cool.....but when the last of the ice is gone, the surrounding heat will quickly warm the contents of the glass up.
In the case of the global climate system, I doubt it will be as neat and tidy as that, but it may well be that the same underlying principle is in operation.
The world is warmer, but as the ice melts (due to the rising warmth) many parts of the world may well feel cooler.....until some critical threshold is passed and the heat really takes off.....perhaps accelerated even further by the release of sea bed methane which has 20 times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.
Should we get to that point, the changes that follow may have been human triggered.....but they will be fully 'natural' in their cascading consequences.
No ice at the North Pole by September 2013? I wonder where the temperatures in the Northern Hemishere will go after that.....or will the Greenland Ice Sheet continue to moderate northern climes as it continues to melt?
Thanks for thinking out loud. Your suggestion is interesting and may have some merit.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if we aren't more attuned to unusual weather events because it is high profile at the moment.
Unusual snow in Las Vegas, massive snow storms in Maine,USA, yet in Nova Scotia, Canada, (pretty close to Maine) there has been no snow in three weeks and unusual daytime temperatures of +12 celsius.
I thought the NZ winter this year was the coldest I have felt for a long time, following on from the worst drought right across NZ for a very long time.
My father always maintained that crushing native bush in the central north island would remove the "attracted" rainfall. But which came first, the native bush or the rain.
I read, on another blog, a comment quoting the rapid polar ice cap disappearance in 1922.
Vast tracts of South American rain forest was suffering dramatically from two consecutive droughts, and a third (I think this year) would mean devastation. I have not heard the lastest position.
There seems to be plenty happening, but has it happened before?
And today the temperature in Nova Scotia has plunged to -20 celsius!
ReplyDeleteHi Steve. Most of the warming in the Southern Hemisphere is being taken up by the oceans. Warming water takes huge amounts of energy compared to warming air, so there is necessarily a strong lag in SH temps behind the NH.
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