How the Sun Controls Arctic Sea Ice and Temperatures

Watch: How the Sun Controls Arctic Sea Ice and Arctic Temperatures 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyBz8OtnWmg

Here is the transcript

Welcome back 

Today in part three on Arctic climate, I examine the connection between how the sun heats the oceans and how the oceans heat the Arctic from decades to millennia. The tropics receive more than twice the solar energy as the Arctic does, heating tropical ocean surface temperatures to about 30 degrees centigrade or 86 Fahrenheit. In contrast polar regions warm only to about negative 2 degrees.Centigrade or 28 Fahrenheit.

Thus, the Tropic serves as a reservoir of heat for the polar regions. Some researchers believe that sunspot cycles have affected climate change, but solar energy emissions during sunspot cycles varies by only about plus or minus 1.3 Watts per meter squared. So most agree,  that small amount of energy is not enough to now warm the earth from the cold depths of the Little Ice Age to it lasted from about 1300 to 1850 AD, leading some scientists to ill-advisedly dismiss the sun's role in climate change. 

Alternatively, the greater amount of energy from increasing greenhouse infrared energy suggested it is rising CO2 that has been warming the earth, but there are also problematic in consistencies with their hypotheses. 

For example, although it is claimed the oceans are absorbing 90% of the CO2 greenhouse energy, unlike solar energy, greenhouse infrared rays penetrate less than the width of a human hair into the ocean surface. So other dynamics affecting the ocean heating must be considered 

As we will see, despite low energy differences, sunspots do affect temperatures by altering critical dynamics governing global heat distribution. 

Furthermore, solar and greenhouse radiative energy are not the only sources heating the earth surface changing sea ice cover either insulates or ventilate, huge amounts of storage solar energy in the ocean. Peer reviewed studies have documented that the Arctic heat released can vary from 10 Watts per meter squared through three meter thick ice to 700 Watts per meter squared through newly formed, thin ice, such heat ventilation easily explains why the Arctic air temperatures have warmed much faster than elsewhere in the world.

All scientists agree that heat is being transported from the tropics to the Arctic. The blue line here shows the average amount of solar heat that's absorbed by tropical oceans is about 300+ Watts per meter square. The red line shows much less of that absorbed heat is radiated away and from the tropics. The difference between incoming and outgoing radiated heat is labeled Surplus indicating that the surplus heat must have been exported out of the tropics by ocean and atmosphere occurrence.

Now, the difference between the solar heat absorbed in the Arctic is a much greater amount of heat than is radiated away from the Arctic, and is labeled the Deficit. It is the inflow of solar heated tropical water. That accounts for that deficit as described in part one, how transport of tropical ocean heat causes an overestimation of the global average temperature I showed via a very simple experiment, how global warming average is greatly biased by this heat transport into the Arctic and its subsequent release to describe the different critical dynamics of heat transport into the Arctic.

The analogy of a residential water system is useful. The  dynamics that affect the surplus heat in the ocean reservoir, I refer to as tropical factors. But like your home's faucets, sub polar factors control how much tropical heat enters the Arctic ocean.  

For this analysis of Arctic climate change, I'll limit the video to changes in the Northern Atlantic. One critical sub polar effect controls how much heated water arriving via the Gulf stream continues into the Arctic versus how much is recycled in the subtropical gyre back towards the equator.

One critical tropical effect controls how much warm Southern hemisphere waters are directed across the equator to the Gulf stream. The sun plays a role in both factors.

The sun and the tilt of the Earth's axis conspire to pump various amounts of warm water into the Arctic between seasons and between cold glacial periods in warm interglacials. 

In recent times, the Earth's axis is tilted 23 and a half degrees. It always points to the north star, but it will point to other stars during a 23,000 year Milankovitch cycle called procession, the earth orbit around the sun also varies from circular to elliptical in another Milankovitch cycle lasting a hundred thousand years. Currently the earth is farthest from the sun during our Northern hemisphere summer. Nonetheless, it is our warmer season due to the tilt of the axis 

Without a tilt, the sun's warmest rays would  strike the equator as happens now, only during each spring and autumn Equinox.

However, due to the tilt, the axis points our Northern hemisphere towards the sun during summer, having caused the warmest solar heating to move northwards to the Tropic of cancer, 23.5 degrees north of the equator. And due to the resulting effects of the winds, moist tropical heat is also drawn towards the Arctic. The tilt also puts Arctic circle in full sunlight, but the Antarctic in full darkness. 

During our winter, the access points away from the sun. So the warmest solar heating happens over the Tropic of Capricorn 23.5 degrees south of the equator, and the flow of the warm ocean water into the Northern hemisphere dwindles. And despite being closer to the sun, we experience winter and the Arctic descends into full darkness with a rapid increase in sea ice.

But the axis tilt also changes with the third Milankovitch Cycle called obliquity. The axis tilt will cycle between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees every 41,000 years with surprisingly major ice age effects. 

The glacial maximum of the last ice age ended as an increasing tilt, also increased the flow of warm Atlantic waters into the Arctic. The warmest period of the interglacial called the Holocene optimum happened during maximum obliquity coinciding with maximum warm Atlantic inflows.

As the axis tilt, then cycled back to a lesser tilt, increasingly less Atlantic water entered the Arctic and accordingly Arctic sea ice gradually increased as temperatures cooled in what scientists call the neoglacial. 

Now scientists have published about a related and relevant scientific conundrum [The Holocene temperature Conundrum; Liu (2014)]. Over the past 6,000 years of a declining tilt, as sea ice increased and reached its greatest extent and thickness during the cold little ice age from 1300 to 1850 AD, you also had during that time, a slight uptick in CO2 concentrations.

So it's odd that some climate scientists, with a more catastrophic view of climate change, believe rising CO2 will prevent further cooling that has been knowingly attributed to declining Obliquity,  a decline that will continue for the next 10,000 years. 

Where the earth is the warmest, the InterTropical Convergence Zone or ITC Z forms.

The warm zone forms a low pressure zone that draws in the winds in the ocean currents from the north and the south. Where winds converge it causes the air to rise. Sailors back in Columbus's day, were stranded in the ITC Z because it was a windlass patch that they called the doldrums. Today, we see the location of the ITCZ from satellite pictures as a narrow band of clouds and circling the earth. However, although the ITCZ shifts northward and southward with the seasons, its location does not strictly adhere to the location of the son's greatest heating during our summer.

The June ITCZ only shifts 9 to 10 degrees north [over the oceans]. And this is partly due to the mixing with cooler waters. During our winter, the January ITCZ barely shifts south of the equator over the oceans, and because the land heats faster than the ocean, the ITCz more closely follows the sun's position southward  over South America. So on average, the ITCZ remains between 2 and 9 degrees north of the equator, drawing warm tropical Southern Hemisphere waters across the equator to amplify warm waters, reaching the Gulf stream. 

Now the shape of South America also affects how much warm water gets pumped towards the Arctic. The Eastern point of Brazil serves as a divider that can direct more warm water north or south. When the ITCZ is north of the equator, as it is today, it also shifts the Tradewinds and the ocean's warm currents northwards above the Brazilian divider, guiding more warm water towards the Gulf stream. This tropical effect factor warms the north Atlantic.

Furthermore, the northern location of the ITCZ has a sub-polar effect, causing the north Atlantic high pressure system to shift northwards, So that its clockwise circulation guides more Gulf stream and North Atlantic Current (NAC) waters into the Arctic.

During cooler periods, like the last ice age, or the recent little ice age, colder Northern temperatures cause the ITCZ to shift southwards. This tropical factor causes more warm currents to be deflected southward by Brazil, cooling the north Atlantic. The high pressure system also shifts southward with a sub-polar effect that re-circulates more warm water back towards the equator. With less warm water intruding the Arctic, the Arctic is cooler.

Now a group of Scandinavian scientists recently formed the Barents Sea Ice project, analyzing the past 400+ years of varying sea ice and inflows of Atlantic water. One of the primary factors affecting the Barents Sea southern ice edge was correlated with sunspot cycles. Despite the insignificant changes in solar heating, the increase in the number of sunspots increases the effect of solar winds on the Earth's magnetic fields. Stronger magnetic fields slow the rotation of the earth, which then affects the eastward momentum of the oceans current.  During low sunspot periods, such as the Dalton minimum in the early 1800s, the Earth's rotation sped up causing a stronger westward momentum for the North Atlantic Current, which reduced warm water inflows into the Arctic (seen as yellow) and redirecting warm waters eastward (seen in more orange) 

During high sunspot years of our 20th century, a stronger magnetic effect, slowed rotation and allowed more warm water to intrude into the Arctic.

During the Maunder Minimum of the late 1600s, less warm water entered the Arctic and simultaneously more warmer water and moisture was diverted towards the Southern Europe. This caused a peak in Swiss glacier growth across the Alps, threatening Swiss mountain villages and even engulfing some in ice, It wasn't colder Swiss temperatures that prompted that glacier growth. It was the greater supply of moisture that also coincided with higher lake levels at lower elevations.

Likewise, other peer reviewed studies have correlated sunspot with changes in intruding Atlantic water and  changes in Barents Sea ice. When sunspot numbers were high, rotation slows and inflows increased and sea ice extent dropped. When sunspot numbers dropped, sea ice grew as inflows were reduced. 

The effects of sunspots on the Earth's rotation also agrees with independent length of day studies.The longer the length of day in the 1970s correlates with a stronger sunspot cycle 21. A shorter length of day and thus faster rotation, correlates with the reduced solar winds of the sunspot cycle 24. 

So why hasn't the Arctic sea ice grown during this decade, if a faster rotation deflects more warmer water from the Arctic? 

So some suggests the failure of sea ice to increase despite falling sunspots should be expected due to the predicted CO2 warming. But CO2 based predictions have also failed. For example, published in the 2012 Guardian, Arctic sea ice expert Dr. Walheim predicted accelerating sea ice loss and the complete loss of summer sea ice by 2016 as CO2 concentration rise. But no such thing has happened .

On the other hand, Dr. Solheim's prediction of an extreme drop in Svalbard's temperatures by 2020, based on sunspot effects and reduced Atlantic water inflows, has also failed to materialize 

Both failed predictions, illustrate why it's dangerous to predict sea ice extent based on only one or two variables. However, the rapid decline in sea ice that once prompted alarmists' dire climate change predictions has now leveled off since 2007, revealing that dynamics stronger than CO2 warming are also in play.

For 30 years, natural climate oscillations in their warm phase have offset predicted sunspot cooling effects and aligned with CO2 warming predictions. But those oscillations are now shifting to colder phases. So the next decade will determine whether or not the current leveling off of ice extent is signaling the beginning of a return to increasing sea ice. 

So up next: part four will be how natural climate oscillations affect the Arctic climate.

And until then embraced renowned scientists. Thomas Huxley's advice that 

"skepticism is the highest of duties and blind faith, the one unpardonable sin."

And if you appreciate the science clearly presented here, science rarely presented by mainstream media. Please give it a like, share it, or copy the URL and email the video, or subscribe to my YouTube channel or read my book, Landscapes and Cycles an Environmentalist Journey to Climate Skepticism.

Thank you.

Pt 2: How Sea Ice Controls Arctic Heat Ventilation and Arctic Air Temperatures

Watch youtube video Pt 2: How Sea Ice Controls Arctic Heat Ventilation and Arctic Air Temperatures

https://youtu.be/bm8UcrOQoso

Below is the transcription of the video

Welcome 

Today, I'm looking at part two,  how sea ice controls the ventilation of heat from the Arctic ocean and the Arctic's air temperatures. 

Now there are three major factors affecting sea ice extent and thus Arctic temperatures. The first, as detailed in part one, the volume of inflowing warm Atlantic water into the Arctic has correlated with sea ice extent for decades and millennia. The warm inflow circulates inside the Arctic for 25 to 30 years and peer reviewed studies such as Polyakov (2017) have determined there is currently enough heat flowing into the Arctic to completely melt all the sea ice.

However, the heat of the inflowing Atlantic water has no effect on air temperature, if sea ice insulates that warmth from the atmosphere. Furthermore, the layers of fresher water, such as the inflowing Pacific water float above the warm Atlantic water, and also insulate the ice and the atmosphere from warmer subsurface temperatures.

The warm inflows create a warm subsurface Atlantic water between about 150 and 900 meters.

Due to the effects of saltiness, the melting point of Arctic water is a negative 1.8 degrees centigrade or 28.8 Fahrenheit. But peer reviewed study such as Shu (2019) has determined the warm water entering Arctic via the Fram Strait is much higher, about three degrees centigrade or 37.4 Fahrenheit, easily melting sea ice.

As the Atlantic water circulates around the Arctic heat ventilates from the open water and the thinner ice, and warms the air while it is cooling to about 0.4 degrees centigrade; still warm enough to have melt sea ice. However, regions with thick multi-year sea ice will insulate Atlantic water heat from radiating back to the atmosphere. Now the 3 degrees of inflowing heat through the Fram Strait thins the sea ice along its Eurasian coast pathway. But as the heat ventilates into the atmosphere, the inflowing water cools to 0.4 degrees centigrade. So sea ice in the Central and Western Arctic tends to be thicker than in the Eastern Arctic. 

But before that 3 degrees centigrade Atlantic water reaches the Fram strait,  water entering the Arctic circle (designated by this red line) is much warmer and has been keeping most of the Greenland, Norwegian and Barents eSeas free of winter ice. Now, the effects of thicker sea icce explains the results of a peer reviewed paper published in 1993 in the esteemed scientific journal Nature. Researchers measuring air temperatures over Western and central Arctic ice, found no warming over a period of 40 years and even a slight cooling.

So they reported no evidence of any greenhouse warming.

The effect of sea ice on Arctic temperature is more dramatically exhibited by the  Dansgaard-Oeschger events.                                                                                    

Between our current warm interglacial and the previous warm inter-glacial, there is the cold 100,000+ year glacial period. A closer look at that glacial period reveals over 20 rapid warming Dansgaard-Oeschger events, during which air temperature rose by an incredible 5 to 15 degrees centigrade or 9 to 27 Fahrenheit in just a few decades.

And despite a heavily glaciated Northern hemisphere, temperatures were almost as warm as the final warm event that led to the present warm into glacial.

Now there are several hypotheses, all of which may be in play explaining why se ice suddenly released ocean heat to produce those warm Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Some hypothesize that these warm events were caused by an increase in warm water inflows. 

Other suggests because thicker ice was preventing heat from ventilating as their temperatures cooled, sub surface temperatures increased to the point it melted the ice. 

And also as the glaciers grew covering the land from Chicago to Boston, with ice a half a mile thick,  sea level fell creating the Bering Strait land bridge that allowed humans to migrate from Asia to north America, but it also lowered sea level and blocked the inflow of fresher Pacific water.

And without the insulating layer of Pacific water, the warm Atlantic water had a greater direct contact with sea ice, which was then melted more readily.

In our present interglacial, sea ice grows each winter and then it melts each summer.

But typically only the thin first year sea ice represented by the purple color is lost, allowing heat to ventilate. The following winter, summer's open water is covered again by the new ice.  

Thick multi-year sea ice only grows where slabs of ice pile on top of one another, especially where ice slabs are pushed against the Northern Greenland coast or the Canadian Islands as represented by non purple colors. That is where the thickest four-year-old and older ice is maintained. And the bulk of that multi-year ice large is largely unaffected between winter and summer temperatures. However, the amount of thick ice can be greatly altered by the winds of the natural Arctic oscillation, which varies on timescales from weeks to decades to millennia

Peer reviewed science by Ignatius Rigor determined that in 1989, the positive phase of the Arctic oscillation became more dominant and removed thick multi-year ice from the Arctic allowing more heat to ventilate from the subsurface causing the recent rapid Arctic warming.

Now previously in the 1970s and eighties, when the negative phase dominated winds, trapped sea ice inside the Beaufort Gyre, seen in the lower yellow curve, increasing the amount of colliding and overlapping ice.

Along the Eurasian coast, the cold Siberian winds guided the Transpolar Drift (TPD) the upper yellow curve, which primarily carried just thin first-year ice out of the Arctic through the Fram straight to melt in the Atlantic 

The 1989 switch to the positive phase caused a Transpolar Drift to dive deep into the center of the Arctic. Following the path of the red curve seen here and then drove increasing amounts of thick multi-year sea ice out of the Arctic into the Atlantic, through the Fram Strait.

Ocean and atmospheric circulation are clearly the critical climate dynamics, controlling sea ice, heat ventilation, and Arctic warming. But those dynamics are the elephants in the room, rarely addressed by a mainstream media bent on pushing clickbait, driven by climate crisis headlines.

So to summarize 

Presently warm Atlantic inflows mediate sea ice extent and maintain the warm subsurface Atlantic water layer. 

The release of heat from the surface is largely mediated by sea ice thickness. The varying winds driven by the Arctic oscillation can either trap and grow thick ice or remove thick ice 

Combined, those two dynamics have reduced sea ice extent in recent decades, allowing more subsurface heat to ventilate. The ventilating heat cools the ocean while warming the Arctic air.  Higher temperatures caused by a cooling ocean should NEVER be added to a global average temperature that's intended to measure increasing stored heat. 

And although it's true, more ventilation made available more heat available to be recycled via the greenhouse effect, that dynamic is relatively insignificant. Rising CO2 attribution is the media's way of having the tail wag the elephant.

Ocean and atmospheric circulation are by far the most significant drivers of sea ice changes and Arctic warming.

I emphasize again,  ocean and atmospheric circulation are the most significant drivers of the so-called Arctic amplification. 

Up next In part three, I'll examine how the sun affects the amount of warm tropical waters flowing into the Arctic. 

And until then embrace Thomas Huxley's advice "That skepticism is the highest of duties and blind faith, the one unpardonable sin."

 And if you appreciate the science clearly presented here, science rarely presented by mainstream media.

Then please give it a, like, give it a share or copy the URL of the video and email it to friends, subscribe to my channel or read my book, landscapes and cycles and environmentalist journey to climate skepticism.

 Thank you.

HOW TRANSPORT OF TROPICAL OCEAN HEAT CAUSES AN OVER-ESTIMATION OF THE GLOBAL AVERAGE TEMPERATURE

Watch my youtube video HOW TRANSPORT OF TROPICAL OCEAN HEAT CAUSES AN OVER-ESTIMATION OF THE GLOBAL AVERAGE TEMPERATURE  PART 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNT7oB53pRY

 

Below is a transcript of THEE video 

 Welcome back everybody, 

 Today I'll examine how the transport of tropical ocean heat raises both the Arctic's air temperature and biases the global average temperature. Now the Arctic has warmed dramatically, but why? A few researchers simplistically suggest it's polar amplification of greenhouse warming, but that explanation fails to explain why at the Southern pole, most of Antarctica has never warmed. This video explains how extensive transport of tropical ocean heat uniquely warms the Arctic. It also demonstrates why it's an abuse of statistics to average extreme warming temperatures in the Arctic with temperatures elsewhere, such as the cooling in north America. 

Averaging two temperatures caused by vastly different dynamics is meaningless and useless for understanding climate change. It’s as useless as averaging apples and oranges just because they're both fruits. So here in part one, I'll examine how transported tropical ocean water affects the Arctic sea ice.   Part 2 examines how the natural Arctic oscillation affects the presence or absence of thick sea ice and how sea ice controls the release of stored heat and affects Arctic temperatures. And in part 3, we'll examine the climate dynamics that control the changes in the ocean heat transport.

First, we need an overview of how the world's ocean temperatures vary. The oceans are warmest in the tropics (seen in red) Due to the sun's most intense heating of the surface, temperatures are averaging 20 degrees centigrade or 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Ocean temperatures decrease towards the higher latitudes as the Earth's curve and the axis tilt decrease solar heating. Between 50 and 60 degrees south latitude, we see temperatures are much lower, averaging between five and zero degrees centigrade. And due to the Antarctic circumpolar current, the warmer subtropical waters, averaging about 10 plus degrees centigrade seen in green, can't intrude further south preventing any warming of Antarctica. As discussed in a previous video “The Antarctic Refrigeration Effect”,  in contrast between 50 and 60 degrees north, warm subtropical waters intrude deep into the Arctic. 

Now talking with fellow scientists and lay people about Arctic warming, I am constantly amazed that typically, they're totally unaware of how ocean circulation affects the Arctic. 

Here I'll focus on the Northern hemisphere’s circular pattern of ocean circulation, creating what's called subtropical gyres. A similar pattern also occurs in the Southern hemisphere. 

Now due to intense solar heating, the tropical waters are warmest and that heating also generates the trade winds blowing water from the east to the west. When reaching the ocean’s western boundary, those heated waters are guided towards the poles, via the Gulf stream in the Atlantic, and the Kuroshio current in the Pacific. 

 Upon reaching the mid-latitudes, the westerly winds then guide the warm waters back towards the east. Upon reaching the continents’ west coast, the now cooler waters are pumped back towards the equator to complete the subtropical gyre’s circulation. 

Of importance to humanity, the currents moving back towards the equator also create the four upwelling regions that support humanity's richest fisheries. 

 We also observe again in the Southern hemisphere, that the gyre’s warm tropical waters don't penetrate past the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, keeping Antartica cooler than average. 

In contrast, there's a slight leakage of warm water from the Pacific through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic. And more importantly, it's the large volume of warm water transported via the Gulf stream into the north Atlantic that enters the Arctic, melting sea ice and warming the region. 

To understand how the transport of ocean heat biases temperature statistics, there's a simple experiment you can do at home and it is easily understood by children. 

All you need is an infrared temperature gun (they cost less than 20 bucks) and a pot of heated water. I used the temperature gun to show students in environmental studies classes, how surface temperatures dramatically changed between open sunlit areas and shaded areas, or between different vegetation types, or moist versus dry ground. 

So first heat up a pot of water, then turn off the heat, so no further energy is being added. Now measure the surface of the heated water and nine random spots on your kitchen floor. Add up those temperatures and divide by 10 to get the kitchen's average surface temperature. 

Next, scoop out half of the water and throw it on the kitchen floor, and again, take the same 10 measurements. The pot of water lost the heat due to water removal, but the remaining water still keeps the same temperature. Now, however, the average temperature will be much higher, not because there was any energy added to the kitchen, but simply because the redistribution of heat raised the average statistic. 

So to understand climate change, we must accurately separate temperature changes due solely to the redistribution of heat from changes due to added energy. And to date, I know of no researchers making this distinction when they are generating the global average temperature. 

Now this illustration shows the general pathways of intruding warm Atlantic waters being re-distributed from the subtropics into the Arctic. The water changes color from the initial red to the lighter pink as it loses heat to the air and the surrounding waters as it circulates. 

The small squiggly pink arrows represented here, show where most of the intruding warm water heat escapes to the air, primarily where there is no insulating ice. 

Also because the warm inflows make the ocean warmer than the land, the Arctic winter winds blow towards the ocean and push ice away from the coast. This creates open-water winter polynyas. 

Those open waters have allowed a subspecies of walrus that normally would migrate south each winter in search of open waters to feed, to instead remain all winter in the Laptev Sea 

To estimate changes in temperature and volume of inflowing Atlantic water, scientists have placed moorings along the major pathways, such as the Fram straight and elsewhere (represented here by the yellow lines) to monitor the inflows. 

But it is extremely difficult to measure exactly the amount of redistributed heat, partly because inflowing waters follow very complex pathways while ventilating heat and mixing with cooler Arctic ocean waters. 

Furthermore, an increase in the volume of inflows will raise temperatures even without any change in the inflows temperature. 

Conversely, less inflow volume can still warm the Arctic, if the source waters of the inflows are warmer. 

Estimating temperature changes in the source of the inflowing waters is also difficult because temperatures of the north Atlantic waters vary due to dynamics such as the natural Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation. So according to Ruiz-Barradas in his 2018 peer-reviewed study, between the 1980s and the 1990s, the north Atlantic warmed, but it has been cooling since then. 

Now some researchers use the recent changes in sea ice to estimate changes in inflowing water. In Antarctica, there has been no long-term declining trend in sea ice, and that's because the Antarctic Circumpolar Current blocks warm inflows. In the photo on the right, the white circle here represents the Antarctic Circle. And because sea ice growth is unimpeded by continents, sea ice expands past the circle symmetrically, each winter until it reaches the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. 

In contrast as seen in photo on the left, Arctic sea ice is confined by surrounding continents and stays inside the Arctic circle, (in black here). Yet as in Antarctica, winter temperatures are cold enough to form sea ice outside the circles, as seen in the Hudson Bay that freezes over completely each winter. More importantly, unlike Antarctica, due to the inflows of warm Atlantic water, sea ice is melted deep inside the Arctic circle, keeping ocean water ice free during the winter over most of the Barents Sea. 

On a larger timescale, Moffit-Sanchez’s 2017 paper examines the relationship between changing inflows and sea ice cover over the past 3000 years. Unfortunately, there are two illustrations shown here, with reversed the timelines.

The panel on the left shows that  during the Roman Warm Period around 2000 years ago, there were strong Atlantic inflows and accordingly sea ice extent was very small. Then sea ice began to grow with the reduced inflows during the following Dark Ages Cold Period. 

During the Medieval Warm Period about 1000 years ago, warm inflows increased again and sea ice again declined, but not to the same extent as in the Roman Warm Period. Then during the following Little Ice Age starting around 700 years ago, inflows became persistently low and Arctic sea ice reached its greatest extent in over 5,000 years. 

When the Little Ice Age ended around the 1850s, inflows increased up through the present times and sea ice declined, but not to the low extent of the Roman or Medieval Warm Periods. 

Researchers also compared the warmer Atlantic inflows during three recent warm periods to the intervening cold periods. Their results also found a strong relationship between increasing warm inflows and decreasing sea ice. During the cold periods inflows decreased and sea ice increased. 

Similar studies found the warmth of the Holocene Optimum about 9,000 years ago, coincided with strong Atlantic water inflows that raised sub-polar ocean temperatures to four degrees Celsius above the temperatures observed today. 

Similarly, during the most recent 5,000 years, known as the Neo-glacial, the gradual decrease in Atlantic inflows have coincided with increasing sea ice, culminating in the Little Ice Age’s greatest sea ice extent. 

Clearly, both short-term and long-term studies find the extent of Arctic sea ice is regulated by changes in the warm Atlantic inflows. 

Up next, part-two examines how shifting winds due to the natural Arctic Oscillation controls where sea ice is present or absent and how much thick multi-year ice survives and thus, how sea ice contributes to the control of Arctic temperatures. 

And until then embrace the renowned scientist, Thomas Huxley's advice that 

“skepticism is a highest of duties and blind faith, the one unpardonable sin.” 

 And if you appreciate the science clearly presented here, science rarely presented by the mainstream media, then please give it a like, give it a share or copy the video's URL and share it with friends through the email, subscribe to my video channel or read my book: Landscapes and Cycles an Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism. 

 Thank you.

Bogus Ocean Suffocation Crisis

 Watch my new video "Bogus Ocean Suffocation Crisis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI9YveBDT4g&t=49s

Transcript of this video is below

Bogus Ocean Suffocation Crisis

Welcome back everybody. I promised my next video would be about the Arctic ocean, but I had a few colleagues asked me about the bogus ocean suffocation crises that are being pushed by the media. About a week ago, the Seattle times had the big headlines that low oxygen levels in the Pacific Northwest are a silent climate change crisis. And this is nothing new. This suffocation crisis has been pushed for at least the last five years. In 2016, one media headlines said that, the oceans would suffocate by 2030. The New York times has also pushed this idea that the oceans are rapidly losing their oxygen. And they all do this because it's clickbait and is profitable. Not only did the New York times push this headline, but they took out a Google ad to push this crisis type headline. So, so all the media push this but it doesn't make any scientific sense.

International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) misrepresent oxygen changes

Now the IUCN  is the International Union for the Conservation of nature. And there's a lot of good scientists that I really appreciate, who are trying to protect the environment, but they're also dependent on donations. And so they are not immune to trying to push a crisis in order to get more funding. Now they just recently pushed this "DEOXYGENATION is a wake up call to save our suffocating seas". And they blame climate change for causing a dramatic loss in life-sustaining oxygen.

They attributed that loss to three main causes. 1) They said that that CO2 is causing a warming of the ocean and warmer waters lose oxygen quicker. 2) They blamed stratification of warming surface layers that prevents vertical mixing of water. And so that prevents oxygen from the atmosphere from reaching deeper layers. and 3) They push eutrophication, which has nothing to do with climate change, but they pushed it anyways.

So I want to talk about eutrophication first. Now dead zones in the oceans, due to eutrophication, has been a known problem for several decades now, and many places are attempting to try to resolve this problem. What happens is the dumping of nutrients from agricultural waste, or sewage into the rivers enters the oceans and all these nutrients create a boom in algae growth. But once the algae growth stops, algae dies, and the decay consumes all the oxygen. Without oxygen, the fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico would see that these dead zones seen in red, where all the fish would leave. And so it was a crisis but this is not just happening at the Gulf of Mexico

Known sites of hypoxia due to eutrophication

All these little red spots here represent the places around the world. And we see it's usually around major population zones where this waste is being dumped into the ocean. This has nothing to do with climate change, but is something we definitely must deal with it's, it's a problem.

So the IUCN is arguing that since the 1960s, the global oceans of loss, about 2% of their oxygen that they blame on global warming; kind of sprinkling this bogus climate crisis with a little bit of truthful physics by saying that as water warms, it holds less oxygen. But this ignores the real issues. Dr. Francisco Chavez is a Peruvian oceanographer who is now chief scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Data from Chavez 2011

And he looked at the effects of upwelling along the coast of Peru, on oxygenation of the waters. He looked at the data from over 700 years and during the Little Ice Age when the waters were much colder (that period of time is shaded in a light blue). And during that time, the waters were highly oxygenated (upper panel). Then around 1800, as the water started to warm, and the global temperature started to warm, the amount of oxygen in the water dropped. And this at first glance would seem like it's consistent with the global warming theory. But if you look deeper, you see the real significance has to do with upwelling.

Chavez looked at how much nutrients were found in the upper levels of the water. And they noticed that what happened as the earth warmed as it came out of the little ice age, upwelling increased. That brought nutrients up to the surface where plankton could grow. And what you see then is when that happened, there was this tremendous amount of productivity that's happened (lower panel).

So the warming we've experienced over the last hundred years has been a great benefit to the whole Marine ecosystems. Now you'd expect from this extra photosynthesis that because photosynthesis produces oxygen, and productivity was great, there'd be more oxygenated waters. But there's another issue just like the eutrophication. When those particles of organic matter that was created during photosynthesis start to sink and decay or be digested, they consume oxygen.

A recent paper in 2018, also created a spurt of media climate crisis, uh, claims.  Chavez was a coauthor of Breitberg (2018) "Declining oxygen in the global ocean and the coastal waters". They noted it's an "important paradox to consider that the large scale effects of future  deoxygenation that nutrient rich coastal systems, due to upwelling, are associated with oxygen minimum zones, but also support some of the world's most prolific fisheries."

Now it, at first glance, it appears that there's a great paradox here. That greater amounts of photosynthesis would cause a greater depletion of oxygen. But if you understand that more photosynthesis, creates more organic matter in these upwellings zones, and the more organic matter that's produced, the more it decays and consumes oxygen. And it's in these upwelling zones that we see the greatest oxygen minimum zones. If we look at a global illustration of oxygen minimum zones around the world (below) in dark blue, the greatest amount of upwelling are also the greatest places of oxygen minimum zones.

If we look at this illustration about oxygen concentrations as we drop in depth, we see at the very surface that the oxygen concentrations are at their highest, but that's in just the top 100 meters of the ocean. And below that photosynthesis stops. We see that the oxygen begins to be consumed as organic matter sinks, and by the time it reaches about one kilometer depth, we create these oxygen minimum zones where all this decaying organic matter consumes most of the oxygen. 

And then once you drop below those oxygen minimum zones, the oxygen in the deeper water starts to increase again. And that's because there's very little organic matter left to decay. And the mixing of deep cold waters that have been highly oxygenated and brought from more polar regions, start to add oxygen to the water. 

Now to understand why this hundred meter depth marks the difference between super saturated oxygen in the surface layers and a declining amount of oxygen below that, we have to understand how light penetrates the water. Here in this illustration, we see the sunlight is broken up into his basic colors or wavelengths.

We see that that red light, which is really critical for photosynthesis, really doesn't penetrate past the first one meter. (Infrared that is produced by greenhouse gases, can't penetrate any deeper than about one micron. So it doesn't warm the oceans directly.) By the time you get to 10 meters, the yellow light can't penetrate any deeper. Green light can't penetrate much deeper than 50 meters and blue light, which is another critical wavelength for photosynthesis, can't penetrate any deeper than a hundred meters.

Now, this is an average sometimes in very clear water, you get a little greater penetration, in murky waters you have a little bit less. But we we can break up these depths in a very general way. We'll call the upper surface later that euphotic zone where there's enough sunlight to foster photosynthesis. And then below the euphotic zone, you get a little bit less light in the dysphoric, but not enough for photosynthesis. In the aphotic there is no light whatsoever, and in those regions photos without photosynthesis, decay in digestion dominate so  oxygen not produced only consumed, so oxygen minimum zones are created.

So let's look at the paradox of why upwelling zones not only create the most abundant areas of rich and diverse marine life, but why they can also cause some deadly consequences.  In the lower layers within the zones where there's no photosynthesis, decay and digestion dominate and they consume all the oxygen as they do that. The decay and digestion releases all these nutrients that can now be recycled into the surface above. Now the winds, and this happens typically along the west coast of all the continents, as they blow towards the equator, the winds cause the water to move away from the coast, and this causes the subsurface water to rise and replace it. 

As that water rises, this water without oxygen will cover some of the sea floor, near the surface where invertebrates live. Some of the fish, if they can, move away because of lack of oxygen, But other invertebrates that aren't so mobile, may die. And this was noticed by crab fishermen in Oregon when they brought up their crabpots and found dead crabs in them.

But the upwelling also has all these nutrients. It injects nutrients into the sunlit zone, and this enables a burst of photosynthesis and it's these phytoplankton blooms that are the basis for the whole food chain for this very robust ecosystem. And, at the same time because photosynthesis dominates, it's super saturates, the surface waters with oxygen.

Now, the second thing that the promoters of a climate crisis push is this idea of stratification, meaning that because the water on the surface is warmer, it won't mix with the colder water below it. And so they're arguing that CO2 warming is going to increase the stratification. Now, anyone that has studied oceans or lakes understands that this kind of stratification happens every summer and it breaks down every winter, but this is sort of the sprinkling of scientific truth used to make this bogus climate crisis narrative seem more plausible.

So let's look at a peer reviewed study from 2015 that examines the oxygen profile throughout a full year and through the seasons from summer to winter. This is from a station near Alaska around 50 degrees latitude north. What you can see here is the blues are our regions below the surface that are unsaturated with oxygen, meaning that at that temperature, these waters could hold a lot more oxygen than they do, but they don't because of decay and digestion. The yellow and the red show areas of super saturation, meaning there's far more oxygen in those surface waters, then you would expect to diffuse in from the atmosphere.

The purple thick line shows the stratification depth and how it changes throughout the season. So if we look at the summer from June through October, when the waters are warm, we see that the strata is  definitely very shallow. But we also see this is a region where there's super saturation and often this shallow stratification enables greater photosynthesis because it prevents turbulence that can carry phytoplankton down to deeper depths with, with less light.

As we move into the winter, the early fall and late spring with colder temperatures, we see this stratification gets deeper, but we also see there's much less oxygen there. Even though you have this deeper strata of water now, it's mixing in unsaturated water. So this deeper stratification, this deeper mixing of water, is not always a benefit for supplying oxygen. And if we look at the waters below a hundred meters where decay and digestion dominate and get rid of oxygen, we see this unsaturated water is really not affected that much by the changes in the stratification above it.

So if you understand the science, if you understand the marine systems, then you understand that there is no climate change oxygenation crisis. When people are trying to manipulate your opinions, it's easy to mix in a small fraction of truth, a small fraction of science with a large fraction of lies to push an earth crisis that makes people afraid, makes them concerned, & makes them willing to accept different solutions that are pushed by politicians or media clickbait.

You must be aware of this vicious circle of exaggerated crises. The media will promote click-based crises for a profit, and then politicians and researchers seeking funds will claim that they have solutions for these non-existent crises. Beware! 

Now as promised before, my next video will be about how Arctic ocean ventilation biases the global average temperature.

But until then, embrace the renowned scientist Thomas Huxley's advice that skepticism is your highest of duties and blind faith is the one unpardonable sin.

And if you appreciate the science clearly presented here, science rarely presented in mainstream media. And please give it a like, share or copy the URL and email it to your friends, subscribe to this YouTube channel, or read my book landscapes in cycles it environmentalist journey to climate skepticism. 

Thank you.

 

How Antarctica Caused Global Cooling or Why Earth Remains in Ice Age Mode for Next 200 Million Years

 Watch my new video 

"How Antarctica Caused Global Cooling or Why Earth Remains in Ice Age Mode for Next 200 Million Years"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxVL_lGaJc0&t=50s

Oceans are a tremendous reservoir of heat. The upper 10 feet of ocean water holds more heat than the earth's entire atmosphere. Due to the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, enabled by plate tectonics, Antarctica became thermally isolated from the rest of the earth initiating 1) a permanent ice cap, 2) extensive sea ice that extruded cold brine that filled the ocean's bottom water, and 3) Intensified upwelling that increased productivity that drew down atmospheric CO2 to current levels. As a result of increasing cold Antarctic Bottom Water, oceans ventilated its its displaced ancient bottom water heat. As a result of a 50 million year cooling trend, the earth is now locked into a fluctuating balance between cold ice ages and warm interglacials

Transcript of Presentation below:

Welcome back, everybody. Thanks for all the kind comments today. I want to discuss what I call the Antarctic refrigeration effect. And if you understand that, you understand why the earth will remain in ice age mode for probably the next 200 million years. Now, climate change is a huge in complex problem, and it's akin to the, the Indian, east Indian parable of the blind men characterizing an elephant. Unfortunately, there's one cadre of scientists who are trying to force a singular viewpoint: Carbon dioxide is the climate control knob. But once you understand how important ocean circulation is, you just might be convinced that the greenhouse gas effect is really the tail wagging the elephant.

If you look at ancient climates, we'll see that 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous that the earth's continents were warm from the polar region to the equator, and Antarctica was a tropical rainforest. It had its own dinosaurs, Glacialisaurus sp. Well, the dinosaurs had a major extinction event about 66 million years ago when an asteroid collided with the earth and caused the extinction about seventy-five percent of all global species. So I'm going to skip ahead to the Eocene and the cooling trend that happened about 50 million years ago. Now temperatures back in the during the Eocene, the Arctic's Ellesmere island summer temperatures, even though it was, it was a polar place was about 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

The coldest month only dropped down to just above freezing. Yet today we look at Ellesmere Island, which is adjacent to Greenland, and the average temperature there is about 2.3 degrees C. So we've had a tremendous cooling trend since then. And along with that cooling trend was the development of polar glacial ice caps.

Now we look at around 34 million years ago, Antarctica started to have its permanent ice cap, but it then took until about two and a half million years ago for a permanent ice cap to form on Greenland. So the question becomes if CO2 is the control number of temperature and ice formation, why is this this 15 to 30 million lag between Antarctic in Arctic ice cap formations now to understand the earth climate before the great global cooling trend began, we have to go back to the age of dinosaurs back then the continents were all connected in one continuous continent, known as Pangea with the lack of glaciers.

50 million year cooling trend from the Eocene to the present

During the age of dinosaurs, there were higher sea levels which created shallow coastal seas. And there was the creation of the Tennessee, another shallow sea shallow seas heat up more quickly and evaporate water more quickly. And that causes more warm salty water to sink to the ocean floor.

Pangea with shallow seas (purple)

So at the beginning of the Eocene, the oceans of the world were dominated by warm, salty, deep water (WSDW), the oceans bottom waters (WSDW) were about 10 to 13C warmer than they are today. And that warm water would also upwell around the Antarctic and be carried back to the equator by a current known as the Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW). But that dynamic was about to change as Pangea broke up throughout the age of dinosaurs.

And pretty soon Antarctica became isolated as it is today. When Antartica separated from south America, Australia, and Tasmania, it allowed for one continuous current to loop around Antarctica known as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). And it had had some major impacts on the world's climate. That current blocks, the warm sub-tropical waters from entering Antartica waters and that initiated extensive sea ice growth and glaciation.

It also increased upwelling and diatom productivity, which is associated with the evolution of baleen whales that now we're able to just filter feed through the ocean. That tremendous productivity caused more CO2 sequestration, which caused the amount of atmospheric CO2 to drop.

Antarctic Circumpolar Current

And now the Antarctic Circumpolar Current through the Antarctic intermediate waters would feed all the rest of the world's oceans in the Aaliyah scene lasting from 34 to 23 million years ago, the Antarctic circumpolar current deepened and strengthened the formation of sea ice now cause cold brine rejected from that sea ice to sink to the bottom and replace the warm salty water. And that began to change the temperature profile of our oceans.

Changing Oligocene ocean bottom waters from warm salty WSDW
to cold Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW)

And that began to change the temperature profile of our oceans.

Now due to the shape of the earth and its tilt of this axis, the sun more intensely heats the earth around the equator relative to the polar regions, which receive more diffuse sunlight. So the polar regions don't heat up much. And then due to the polar nights where there's no sun at all, it radiates all that heat back to space. The current temperatures in the polar regions are maintained by a flow of heat from the tropics into the polar regions, through ocean currents and atmospheric currents, uh, such as the Gulf stream or the Kuroshio current.

And we can see this illustrated here in this diagram where there's an excess amount of heat and the equator relative to his temperature and that excess heat is transported to the polar regions, which warm those regions.

Heat transport from warm tropics to warm polar regions

So based on those dynamics, I like to refer to the cooling that's been happening for the last 50 million years as the Antarctic refrigeration effect. Now every refrigerator has this compressor & fan apparatus, which removes heat from the refrigerator and blows it out the back. Now it's not quite analogous, but the polar regions remove heat away through radiation especially during the the polar nights.

Now, if a refrigerator door is left open, then the heat is blown out the back of the refrigerator just re-introduced through the front. So there is no cooling, but if you shut the door, the refrigerator cools and the Antarctic circumpolar current shuts the door on the Earth's temperature circulation Now is heat is blocked from entering the Antarctic southern waters increasing sea ice.

More extensive sea ice creates more brine ejection, which sinks to the bottom and cold salty brine replaces the warm salty waters. Now the formation of cold Antarctic bottom water sets the stage to create the profile of temperatures we see throughout the modern day oceans. We see that the bottom waters are dominated by Antarctic bottom waters and that cold water helps feed, uh, the Antarctic intermediate waters, which transports the cooler temperatures to the equator in, into the Northern hemisphere.

Ancient warm salty deep water replaced by AABW & North American Deep Water (NADW)

And here's another way of looking at that profile. You have Antarctic bottom water on the bottom. You have North Atlantic deep water above that's been formed in the Arctic under the cooler conditions of today. We see the Antarctic, intermediate Water is flowing up past the equator and we still see some sinking warm salty water due to evaporation happening in the Mediterranean.

And here's a profile of the Atlantic at about a thousand meters depth. We see this warm salty water coming out of the Mediterranean Ocean.

Now the sinking Antarctic bottom water, which is the coldest water in the oceans mixes and lowers the temperature of the North Atlantic Deep Water. And together that feeds the cool Antarctic intermediate waters that moves towards the equator and affects most of the upwelling regions around the world.

Now, by looking at the Pacific Ocean todeay, we can appreciate the power of upwelled cold water that changes the global temperature during the La Ninas. Warm waters are pushed over to the eastern side of the Pacific and cold waters rise from below to replace that warm water with cold water.

If we look at satellite temperature data, we see the major drops in global temperature happened during Linea events as represented by the red arrows.

The problem is the Pacific cold water upwelling didn't begin until 4 million years ago, Before the Arctic region began to form its glaciers and ice caps. And the reason for that is this Antarctic refrigeration effect had to build up the Antarctic bottom waters to a large enough volume to feed cold Antarctic Intermediate Waters, raising it close enough to the surface to allow it to be upwell and then affect the Earth's climate.

Now around 2.5 million years ago, Greenland's permanent ice cap took hold. And that correlates with the closing of the central American Seaway by the rise of the Panama isthmus connecting North America to South America. Now, some researchers say that this blockage of the central American Seaway, enabled the glaciations to begin, but others say that it delayed the glaciation. There's not enough time to talk about whether that's true or not, but the changes in ocean circulation around 2.5 million years ago, we're not just relegated to the isthmus of Panama, but happened around the Bering Strait, and around Indonesia.

So we see there was a tremendous change in circulation. Now, one result of the creation of the Panama isthmus that might be of interest, is it allowed the animal fauna between North and South America to move upwards or southwards. If you look at the brownish green silhouettes, those are all South American animals that moved into North America and the silhouettes in blue are North American animals then moved into south America. That causes one to question if temperature has anything to do with similar kinds of migrations

To summarize 50 million years of global cooling, we start with the ESC a time period 50 million years ago when carbon dioxide was a a thousand parts per million or greater in the atmosphere in global atmospheric temperatures, as well as warm salty, deep water was at least 23 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer or 13 degrees centigrade warmer than today by 34 million years ago.

The Antarctica Circumpolar Current was now blocking any kinds of flow of subtropical, warm water from reaching Antartica. And this caused three critical things. 1) it allowed the initiation of Antarctica's permanent ice cap that persists today, 2) it caused extensive sea ice to increase, which caused brine rejection, which added to the volume of the cold Antarctic bottom waters.

And 3) the current also increase upwelling. It caused high productivity from diatoms, the evolution of the baleen whales and that productivity sequestered more and more CO2 dropping CO2 down to levels of 300 parts per million to 700, depending on your models, which is lower than today in many cases. And surprisingly, as the Oligocene proceeded, the late Oligocene was warming despite the continued drawdown of carbon dioxide. By the Miocene, the CO2 was down around 400 parts per million, and, but global temperatures were seven degrees to eight degrees centigrade, 14 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today.

And so some models said that that CO2 had to be higher in order to justify those temperatures. But we could also say that the reason we saw this warming in the late Oligocene, or we saw it in the Miocene as, as Antarctic bottom waters, increasingly, uh, replace replacing warm salty waters in the bottom, the ocean, it raised those ancient, warm waters to near the surface where that warm water could ventilate as heat back to the atmosphere by the Pliocene, which ended around 2.5 million years ago, we saw the initiation of the Greenland's permanent ice cap that was partly associated with the Panama isthmus as well as other changes in plate tectonics, which caused changes in ocean circulation. At that point, CO2 was again around 400 parts per million and upwelling of warm water. Up until that point had kept temperatures around three degrees or 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today.

Temperature changes between cold ice ages and warm interglacials

Now the growing amount of cool upwelling waters caused the Pleistocene 2.5 million years ago to reach a point where it's very sensitive to any changes in energy imbalances on earth, that caused the Earth's climate to fluctuate wildly between glacial cold periods in interglacial warm periods.

We had the warm interglacial the previous one hundred thousand years ago that was warmer than today by about four to five degrees centigrade. And then the last glacial maximum temperature was down to about a minus 11 cooler than today