The sharp drop in Arctic sea ice area has been matched by a harder-to-see — but equally sharp — drop in sea ice thickness. The combined result has been a collapse in total sea ice volume.

Many experts now say that if recent volume trends continue we will see virtually ice-free conditions sometime in the next ten years. And that may well usher in a permanent change toward extreme, prolonged weather events “Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves.”

It will also accelerate global warming in the region, which in turn will likely accelerate both the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet and the release of the vast amounts of carbon currently locked in the permafrost.

The European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 probe confirms what the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center has been saying for years: Arctic sea ice volume has been collapsing faster than sea ice area (or extent) because the ice has been getting thinner and thinner.

In fact, the latest satellite CryoSat-2 data shows the rate of loss of Arctic sea ice is “50% higher than most scenarios outlined by polar scientists and suggests that global warming, triggered by rising greenhouse gas emissions, is beginning to have a major impact on the region,” as the UK Guardian reported last month:

If the current annual loss of around 900 cubic kilometres continues, summer ice coverage could disappear in about a decade in the Arctic.

I have focused on sea ice volume for the past 6 years, since I was fortunate enough to hear Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski of the Oceanography Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in a 2006 American Meteorological Society seminar.  He reported that models suggested Arctic ice volume had dropped sharply since the mid 1990s. He then made an alarming forecast:

“If this trend persists for another 10 years–and it has through 2005–we could be ice free in the summer.”

That was in 2006, so he was talking about the possibility of being ice free in 2016.

Looking at volume and thickness helped me avoid the mistake that so many others made in thinking that the sea ice “recovered” after the 2007 minimum in sea ice extent.  The scientific literature and actual observations continued to vindicate Maslowski’s projection.

Since Maslowski’s warning appears to now have been vindicated by the CryoSat-2 data, I asked him for a comment. He said he didn’t want to comment on that data specifically until he’s seen the published results — since there are many inherent uncertainties involved. But he then added:

Regardless of all these uncertainties and for the record, if any of these estimates of arctic sea ice volume decline is close to reality, a near ice-free Arctic in summer can happen not in 2100, 2050 or 2037 but much sooner. One of the main reasons I believe it will happen sooner (i.e. the trend of sea ice volume decline will continue) is that with the shrinking sea ice cover in summer the Arctic Ocean increases its net annual heat content through absorption and redistribution, especially in the upper water column, below the surface mixed layer.

This constitutes a positive feedback to sea ice melt in addition to ice-albedo and other feedbacks, mainly because it can affect the sea ice cover year around, including in winter through upward heat entrainment and reduction of ice growth. The warmer Arctic Ocean can also affect air temperatures and circulation, not only during freeze-up but also in winter and spring. Observational evidence (Jackson et al., 2010 and 2011) suggests increasing sub-surface temperatures and over increasing area in the Canada Basin through 2009, which independently of models supports the argument about the increasing upper ocean heat content.

I do realize that the above sounds ‘alarmist’ and I’ve heard such criticism more than once before but I believe it’s my obligation to make sure that this message is heard by the policymakers and general public.

Maslowski did not make a new timing prediction, but instead directed me to a recent article he was lead author on, “The Future of Arctic Sea Ice,” in Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

That article estimated a loss of 1,120 cubic kilometres per year from 1996 to 2007, quite close to the recently reported CryoSat-2 measurements. It continued:

Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of 2007 at less than 9,000 km³ (Kwok et al. 2009), one can project that at this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty associated with such an estimate, it does provide a lower bound of the time range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover.

This is the same estimate Maslowski made in 2006, although he has couched it more conservatively here and has explained that he wouldn’t be surprised if some summer ice lingers above Greenland and Eastern Canada into the 2020s. That’s why he uses the term “nearly ice-free.”

What’s interesting is that the volume trend has in fact continued according to PIOMAS and CryoSat-2. Many other experts are warning that we have effectively passed the point of no return and nearly ice-free are imminent. Fen Montaigne, senior editor of Yale e360, reports:

Peter Wadhams, who heads the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge and who has been measuring Arctic Ocean ice thickness from British Navy submarines, says that earlier calculations about Arctic sea ice loss have grossly underestimated how rapidly the ice is disappearing. He believes that the Arctic is likely to become ice-free before 2020 and possibly as early as 2015 or 2016 — decades ahead of projections made just a few years ago.

Mark Drinkwater, mission scientist for the European Space Agency’s CryoSat satellite and the agency’s senior advisor on polar regions, said he and his colleagues have been taken aback by the swiftness of Arctic sea ice retreat in the last 5 years. “If this rate of melting [in 2012] is sustained in 2013, we are staring down the barrel and looking at a summer Arctic which is potentially free of sea ice within this decade,” Drinkwater said in an e-mail interview.

Wadhams told the BBC how much warming is accelerated by just replacing the reflective white ice with the more absorptive open ocean:

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by Richard W. Caperton, Matt Kasper, and Nicholas Richter

Despite pledging to protect American employment, Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney opposes critical clean energy policies that will encourage investment and create jobs on American soil. Gov. Romney wrote in a Columbus Dispatch op-ed that, “In place of real energy, Obama has focused on an imaginary world where government-subsidized windmills and solar panels could power the economy. This vision has failed.”

How does this translate into policy? Take Gov. Romney’s opposition to the production tax credit, which provides a tax credit of 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for the production of electricity from wind energy. According to Navigant Consulting, allowing this credit to expire would cost 37,000 American workers their jobs. This position has put him at odds with other prominent Republicans such as Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and Gov. Terry Branstad, both of whom recognize the value of this incentive in boosting employment in their state. In fact, more than 81 percent of installed wind capacity is located in districts with Republican representatives.

Although Gov. Romney touts his tenure at Bain Capital as valuable private-sector experience that gives him a business-minded approach to jump-starting our economy, four major financial institutions—Wells Fargo, Bank of America Corp., Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., and Citigroup, Inc.—have signaled their disagreement with his reluctance to embrace clean energy policies by pledging to invest a combined $170 billion in a cleaner economy. Even some of our largest companies believe a clean energy future is both a solid investment and a valuable venture.

Other nations such as China, Brazil, Germany, and India recognize the promise of clean energy for economic growth and have implemented long-term policies to attract investment from their own companies and others around the world, including U.S. companies. The leaders of these nations know that capital will flow to the best policy environments for clean energy innovation. By opposing the policies that would keep green jobs in America, Gov. Romney harkens back to his Bain Capital days, showing a similar pattern of shipping overseas American jobs that could remain in our borders.

The United States led in clean energy investments worldwide in 2011, with $48 billion invested in clean energy in our country. U.S. companies received more than 75 percent of all venture capital investments in clean technologies. But our status as a clean energy leader is far from permanent. We must continue to support the policies that have catapulted us to first place and ensure that our clean energy economy—which grew by 8.3 percent during the depths of the recession from 2008 to 2009—continues to thrive.

In this issue brief we will describe some of the clean energy policies with a proven track record of spurring investment and creating American jobs, highlighting where the two presidential contenders stand on each issue. The clean energy investments pledged by American banks are a strong barometer of the potential the United States has to grow an even more robust clean energy economy—one that creates and sustains recession-proof jobs, reduces our reliance on oil from foreign nations, and reduces the air pollution that claims thousands of lives every year.

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by Michael Conathan

At the end of last September, I wrote a column enthusiastically titled “Optimism for the New England Groundfishery.” My theory was that after a history of overfishing, subsequent belt tightening, and implementation of a new management system, the industry was on the cusp of recovery.

The piece came out just days after New England’s beloved Red Sox sealed a historic September swoon, blowing a nine-game lead in just 24 days and losing the last game of the season in excruciating fashion to keep them out of last year’s playoffs. My assumption was that both the Sox and the groundfishery had nowhere to go but up.

Less than a month later, news broke that a new scientific assessment of Gulf of Maine cod, one of the fishery’s keystone species, showed it was in worse shape than scientists previously thought, and even if all fishing was halted, it would not recover by the end of its legally mandated timeline in 2014. As a result, fishermen saw their allowable catch of the fish reduced by more than 20 percent—an outcome all parties knew was just a one-year band-aid on what would have to be far more drastic cuts in 2013.

So much for optimism.

Similar results emerged as the cod assessment’s methodology was applied to other species in the fishery. Looking to 2013 the groundfishery now faces additional allowable catch cuts of 72 percent on Gulf of Maine cod, 70 percent on its cousin Georges Bank cod, 51 percent on yellowtail flounder, and 69 percent on American plaice, commonly known as sole. In the face of these numbers, it’s time to step back and reconceive of what this fishery can and should look like in the future.

As I detailed in my report, “The Future of America’s First Fishery,” the New England groundfishery had a decades-old history of overfishing. In recent years that practice has almost entirely been curtailed as legally mandated catch limits kept total harvest to sustainable levels. But populations left decimated by past overexploitation have been slow to rebuild, as the recent assessments indicate.

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How much extra energy are we putting in the atmosphere through emission of greenhouse gases? One Australian researcher put it into context: “The radiative forcing of the CO2 we have already put in the atmosphere in the last century is … the equivalent in energy terms to almost half a billion Hiroshima bombs each year.”

With more energy radiating down on the planet rather than back up into space, the planet continues to heat up. As the atmosphere warms, it is able to hold more water vapor — thus strengthening the global hydrological cycle.

With all that extra energy, more water is pulled out of the subtropic regions and moved toward higher-precipitation areas in the subpolar regions, resulting in stronger droughts and stronger storms. Or, as the video below explains, how the wet gets wetter and the dry gets drier.

Through five decades of observations and future climate modeling, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has put together this educational piece on how a warming planet will make weather more extreme:

Romney Calls For More Scientific ‘Debate’ On Climate Change, But Opposes Any Serious Effort To Cut Carbon Pollution

Politico received an email from a Romney campaign staffer asserting that the Democrats’ concern about the threat from global warming is supposedly at odds with their spending priorities:

“If armageddon is coming from climate change,” the staffer asks, “wouldn’t your first priority be shoring up defenses to protect natural resources, have Guard and Reserves and ships and planes for disaster relief?”

That brings to mind the old saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like your thumb.

As is typical from the anti-science crowd, when they aren’t blocking action — or mocking action — on man-made global warming, they are saying it is too late to do anything. Politico reports:

Here’s what this week’s official Democratic platform says on the issue: “The national security threat from climate change is real, urgent, and severe. The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of vital ecosystems across the globe.”

It is what it is, the campaign staffer said — but how can a party both have such a bleak vision and support $487 billion in reduced defense budget growth over the next decade?

First off, the vision is bleak only if we listen to the do-nothing crowd. While we can’t avoid serious global warming at this point, we still have time to avoid “Armageddon” — the end times battle for humanity!

Second, while other countries now out-invest us in what will be the biggest job creating sector of the century — clean energy — we appear to have a lock on defense spending. The very modest proposed cuts in defense would mean that instead of U.S. military spending that is “bigger than that of the next 17 countries combined,” as the Economist put it, we might only have a military budget that is bigger than the next 15 countries combined.

Darn you Canada and Turkey!  Of course, even that assumes those other 15 countries don’t slash their military budgets over the next decade, which many will as the growing reality of climate change necessitates vastly greater spending on mitigation and adaptation

The Romney campaign email does underscore the clever fallback position that the right-wing has when reality trumps their denial in the coming years. They’ll just acknowledge that we were right all along that climate change is a national security threat and that it necessitates solely a national security response. Why exactly we would need more “defenses to protect natural resources” —  which are typical codewords for keeping the shipping lanes open to the Persian Gulf oil — is somewhat of a mystery.

In a related story, Team Romney has responded to a questionnaire on science policy from “Science Debate,” which is cosponsored by many leading U.S. scientific organizations.

Unfortunately, Romney seems to have taken the “debate” part more seriously than the science part and channeled GOP word-meister Frank Luntz. So when Romney was asked his position on climate change he replied:

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General Motors, the largest auto manufacturer in the U.S., just reported the best sales month ever for its electric car, the Volt. In August, GM sold 2,800 Volts, beating its previous record of 2,289 vehicles sold in March.

Nissan also reported record sales of its all-electric model, the Leaf. In August, the company sold 685 units in the U.S. market — a much smaller number than GM, but a record for Nissan.

The EV market is still a very small part of overall auto sales in the U.S. However, the surge in sales marks a significant consumer shift toward purchasing smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles.

U.S. Automobile sales in August increased by nearly 15 percent over last year, even with gas prices rising at the end of the  month to $3.80 a gallon. The New York Times highlighted the trends driving strong vehicle sales:

“Although trucks had a solid month, the small-car performance is what’s most impressive about G.M.’s numbers today,” said Jessica Caldwell, an analyst with the automotive research site Edmunds.com.

The Ford Motor Company said its August sales increased 12.6 percent, to 196,000 vehicles. It reported its biggest gains in the Focus compact car and the new Escape, its smallest sport utility vehicle.

Focus sales were up 35 percent compared with the same period a year earlier, and Escape sales rose 36 percent.

“As fuel prices rose again during August, we saw growing numbers of people gravitate toward our fuel-efficient vehicles,” said Ken Czubay, Ford’s head of United States sales and marketing.

An executive from Chrysler called the U.S. auto market “incredibly resilient” due to the surge in demand for fuel-sipping cars. Chrysler saw a 14.1 percent increase in vehicle sales, partly due to its new compact sedan, the Dodge Dart.

Last month, the White House finalized new fuel standards that will boost the efficiency of the nation’s automobile fleet to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Those standards could reduce oil consumption by 12 billion barrels by that date, thus saving consumers roughly $1.7 trillion in fuel costs. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that those fuel standards could reduce save Americans $68 billion each year after 2030.

According to a 2011 national poll from the Consumer Federation of America, three quarters of consumers in the U.S. said they supported an increase in fuel standards, with 65 percent saying they would support targets of 60 miles per gallon by 2025.

In May, the Congressional Budget Office issued a report concluding that the only way to protect consumers from oil price shocks is to use less petroleum — not more drilling: “Policies that reduced the use of oil and its products would create an incentive for consumers to use less oil or make decisions that reduced their exposure to higher oil prices in the future, such as purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles or living closer to work.”

by Jim Lane, via Biofuels Digest

As people debate the conflict between food and fuel, entrepreneurs and scientists are giving us something even more precious than resolution of that debate: options and alternatives. Here, Biofuels Digest takes a look at 6 technologies and strategies that address food vs fuel, and offer alternatives.

1. Feedstock diversification.

In biofuels, it is more talked about – the push beyond corn starch and cane sugars into corn stover, sugarcane bagasse, woods and forestry residues, animal wastes, algae, municipal solid waste, and energy grasses as well as new inedible oilseed crops such as jatropha, carinata and camelina.

But there are opportunities for food manufacturers as well.

Take for instance Solazyme Roquette Nutritional’s whole algalin flour. According to the makers, it provides “an outstanding solution for improving nutritional profiles in many applications, such as bakery, beverages and frozen desserts. Acting as a whole food ingredient, Whole Algalin Flour is very low in saturated fat, is trans-fat free, cholesterol free, and considerably reduces calories, as well as provides fiber and protein, while providing the same overall mouth feel and consistency as a full fat food.”

Much of the underlying problem of food vs fuel is that multiple sectors have fallen in love with the same feedstock – frankly, that’s Nestle’s problem, and the problem of many biofuels producers. If the US is addicted to oil, many producers are addicted to corn or cane, and both sides benefit from diversifying where possible.

2. Increasing yield per ton.

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The U.S. Justice Department is ramping up its rhetoric against BP PLC for the massive 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, laying out in a new court filing examples of what it calls “gross negligence and willful misconduct.” [Reuters]

“The behavior, words, and actions of these BP executives would not be tolerated in a middling size company manufacturing dry goods for sale in a suburban mall,” government lawyers wrote….

Under assault from Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, President Obama and other leading Democrats are planning a vigorous defense of the administration’s track record on energy issues, highlighting a sharp drop in oil imports, a doubling in renewable energy output and improved fuel efficiency in new vehicles. [Washington Post]

The books have closed on meteorological summer, which encompasses the June-through-August period, and the data that is starting to trickle in from the National Weather Service shows that tens of millions of Americans experienced their hottest summer on record. [Climate Central]

As the final weeks of the 2012 presidential campaign unfold, one of the starkest contrasts between the recently released Democratic and Republican party platforms is in climate change policy. [Huffington Post]

It will likely take weeks to bring Louisiana back to normal after last week’s visit from Hurricane Isaac, an unusually wet storm that caused serious flooding in 10 parishes and damaged more than 13,000 homes. [Los Angeles Times]

A wildfire in the Angeles National Forest has consumed 3,600 acres, driving local residents and thousands of holiday weekend visitors from the popular wilderness area about 25 miles east of here. [New York Times]

The municipal government of Guangzhou, a sprawling metropolis that is one of China’s biggest auto manufacturing centers, introduced license plate auctions and lotteries last week that will roughly halve the number of new cars on the streets. [New York Times]

Once known for oil and gas production, Oklahoma has quickly established itself as a major player in the wind power generation industry. Today the state is taking advantage of its abundant natural resources with rapid development of wind. [Renewable Energy World]