STUDY: Explosion In Antarctic Sea Ice May Cause New Ice Age
While alarmists claim “global warming” is settled science, reports come out weekly that deliver different data. The climate was indeed warming throughout the 1990s, but that then dropped off.
Now, a new study finds that an increase in sea ice may lead to another ice age.
“Using computer simulations, the research suggests that an increase in sea ice could significantly alter the circulation of the ocean, ultimately leading to a reverse greenhouse effect as carbon dioxide levels in the ocean increase and levels in the air decrease,” Fox News reports.
“One key question in the field is still what caused the Earth to periodically cycle in and out of ice ages,” University of Chicago professor and the study’s co-author, Malte Jansen, said in a statement. “We are pretty confident that the carbon balance between the atmosphere and ocean must have changed, but we don’t quite know how or why.”
Jansen and former UChicago postdoctoral researcher Alice Marzocchi ldetail how a change in climate could kick off a chain reaction that leads to an ice age. “Their model shows how the increase in Antarctic sea ice in a colder climate could trigger a waterfall of changes that could contribute to tipping the global climate into glacial periods,” they say.
For example, we’re currently in a break between ice ages; for the past two-and-a-half million years, glaciers have periodically covered the Earth and then retreated. Scientists, therefore, have been piecing together clues about how this process of glaciation works and how it’s triggered. It’s likely that slight changes to Earth’s orbit led to some cooling. But that alone wouldn’t do it, Jansen said. There would have had to have been massive accompanying changes in the climate system to account for the amount of cooling that followed.
“The most plausible explanation is that there was some change in how carbon was divided between the atmosphere and the ocean,” Jansen said. “There’s no shortage of ideas about how this happens, but it’s not quite clear how they all fit together.” Simulations disagree, and none line up completely with the geological evidence available to scientists.
The study’s lead author, Alice Marzocchi, said “this suggests is that it’s a feedback loop. … As the temperature drops, less carbon is released into the atmosphere, which triggers more cooling.”
“What surprised me is how much of this increased storage can be attributed to physical changes alone, with Antarctic sea-ice cover being the key player,” Marzocchi added.
Read more at www.thegatewaypundit.com
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Vance Lunn
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I think the main takeaway from this is that any minor, slight, seemingly insignificant act of nature completely overwhelms any effect Man might have or anything he might do to try to achieve a desired climate outcome.
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geran
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Just more psilly pseudoscience:
“Less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to a reverse greenhouse effect, causing the planet to cool.”
CO2 does not cause warming, so less would not cause cooling.
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Tom O
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To a degree, you are probably correct in your last statement, but only to a degree. CO2 doesn’t cause warming but it does retain warmth to some degree, so less of it would retain less warmth and thus apparent cooling. To call it Psilly Pseudoscience is probably just as applicable to your point of view.
What is taken out of consideration in the article is the furnace that supplies the heat in the first place. They have not factored in anything but orbital changes, and not the many other aspects of the solar-Earth coupling that can and do affect climate. But it is at least a step in a direction where they are recognizing the dangers and possibilities of “global cooling.” The excerpt also gives the impression that the periods of glaciation and the periods between are “sort of” similar instead of being about 10 to 1 or more.
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Zoe Phin
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Tom,
“CO2 doesn’t cause warming but it does retain warmth to some degree”.
Warmth can not be retained. A warm object emits in accordance to Stefan-Boltzmann Law (kind of). If the warm object doesn’t emit, then it’s not warm.
Heat can not be retained because it’s a flow. Trapping a flow (heat) is an oxymoron.
I started to point out the flaws of the greenhouse effect on my new blog: http://phzoe.wordpress.com
Enjoy!
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geran
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Sorry Tom O, but CO2 does not “retain warmth” either. That’s just an attempt to play with the truth.
While CO2 absorbs IR energy, it also emits IR energy. The retention times are less than microseconds. If CO2 could “retain warmth” forever, the effect would be to cool the planet. The relevant physics can be quite confusing to the uninformed.
The “psilly pseudoscience” starts when people start playing with the truth.
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Zoe Phin
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Hi Geran!
How’s it going? Could you please ask Postma how we get 390W/m^2 at the surface from the sun alone?
Could you ask him how a hemisphere emits 30C worth of radiation and still manages to have energy left over for the 12 hours of night?
I look forward to eventually exposing his fallacies on my new blog:
http://phzoe.wordpress.com
Hopefully he will explain away his fallacies without using sophistry so there is nothing left for me to complain about.
See ya! Take care.
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geran
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Do you even know where the 390 W/m^2 comes from?
Obviously not.
390 Watts/m^2 is the emitted flux from a blackbody surface at 288 K. It’s a value from pseudoscience. The math is correct, but the physics is wrong.
Your “30C” is just as bogus.
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Zoe Phin
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So the surface is not really 15C?
How does Postma create 240 emission to space from an average of 390 and 90, if the 390 doesn’t exist?
The 30C is Postma’s number for a hemisphere.
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geran
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The 15C is believed to be Earth’s average surface temperature, but you can’t get a meaningful flux from an average temperature. That’s like saying the average temperature of 100 kg of water at 100C, and 1g of ice at 0C, is 50C.
Temperature and fluxes can NOT be treated as simple numbers, as is done in pseudoscience.
You appear to be mixing up numbers from pseudoscience with other values. You should study some of Postma’s videos. He’s a good teacher.
Zoe Phin
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LOL. Lots of sophistry from you, geran. So please tell me how the sun creates a 15C average (20C – daytime, 10C nightime).
Postma’s math can only create 30C for 12 hours and then -273C for the next 12.
What’s funny is that if the sun was not enough (it’s not), you and Postma spout the perfect BS to avoid this. Evasive as hell.
geran
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Zoe, I believe you’re more obsessed with Postma than you are with me.
I’m jealous….
Zoe Phin
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Well, I did admire him before I realized he was full of it.
Herb Rose
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I hate to nitpick but there are no polar bears in the antarctic as the picture depicts. In Antarctica the top predator is the seal which eats penguins. In the arctic the top predator is the polar bear which eats seals.
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WhoKoo
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Hi Herb.
It is actually called a Pseudo Polar Bear Penguin, a species on the verge of extinction.
in fact, the one shown is the very last living example.
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HerbRose
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Hi WhoKoo,
Is the reason they ate going extinct because they fart a lot causing the sea ice to melt?
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WhoKoo
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Hi Herb.
I like your thinking.
The Pseudo Polar Bear Penguin does feast on carrion, unique for a penguin, making it a walking methane digester.
Curiously the Pseudo Polar Bear Penguin signed a petition supporting Susan Crockford to not have her university cut off her adjunct status but as there was only the one signature to the petition nobody gave the petition weight.
WhoKoo
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Julian Fell
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I agree with Geran. This study has no credibility.
1. It’s based on modelling which is a polite way of saying garbage in gets you garbage out. The IPCC has demonstrated that big time.
2. CO2 does not warm.
3. The atmosphere has no heat accumulation/storage capacity. This ability lies in the ocean where heat storage is infinite and heat loss is so slow that a mere 2% difference in insolation (= one extra/less clear day of sunshine per year) can cause an increase/decrease in global temperature, albeit but very slowly.
4. Heat reflected by polar ice is a miniscule part of the global heat budget
5.Antarctic pack ice is within the convergence and will not change circulation elsewhere.
6. Any increase in cold saline water caused by pack ice freezing sinks to the abyss and has no effect on surface temperatures elsewhere.
7. The abyssal turnover rate is so slow (100,000 years +/-) is slower than Ice age cycles.
and gee, that penguin sure looks ursine.
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Julian Fell
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. Top predator in the Antarctic is the Orca, which eats seals. Top seal predator is the Leopard seal which eats penguins and other seals. Unless you consider Blue and Fin whales which eat krill.
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