Jason Box, my personal hero and famed Greenland climatologist turned glaciologist, penned an editorial titled Earth’s Ice Is Melting Much Faster Than Forecast. Here’s Why That’s Worrying which was published in Garn Press in early February. I recommend you read it as he and other climatologists are the true heroes of mankind. They have warned us, and continue to warn us, that we have added so much greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels into the atmosphere that we now can expect the biggest threat that humankind has ever had to face become a nightmarish reality. President Obama in 2015 warned that it is not ISIS or even nuclear armed rogue states that is the biggest world threat, but that there is “No greater threat to future than climate change”.
In his editorial, Box provides the process of how climate change in Greenland has rapidly progressed during his career as a Greenland glaciologist, and how we can expect many unwanted surprises going forward.
Most of us are familiar with the basics of the changing Arctic. We see dramatic videos of glaciers calving, starving Arctic wildlife, meltwater rivers falling over the towering walls of ice shelves, and disappearing via a water carved portal in the great ice streams that shatters and fractures the ice approximately 2 miles to the bedrock. Scary stuff to be sure. So alarming that Box put out a code red alert to the world in 2014, “If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd. ”. We have already observed a glimpse of that small fraction of sea floor carbon.
Box warns us now that current climate models lack key processes that will reinforce warming even faster than previously expected.
If the past decade of scientific inquiry is any indication, I’d say we are in for more surprises. That notion is further supported by the fact that climate models used to project future temperatures lack key processes that likely reinforce warming or the effects of warming, not regulate it.
Despite decades of progress by many clever scientists engaged with climate modeling, climate models used to inform policymakers don’t yet encode key pieces of physics that have ice melting so fast. They don’t incorporate thermal collapse— ice softening due to increasing meltwater infiltration.
Climate models also don’t yet incorporate increasing forced ocean convection at the ocean fronts of glaciers that forces a heat exchange between warming water and ice at the grounding lines.
Climate models don’t yet include ice algae growth that darkens the bare ice surface.
Climate models don’t yet prescribe background dark bare ice from outcropping dust on Greenland from the dusty last ice age.
Climate models don’t include increasing wildfire delivering more light-trapping dark particles to bright snow covered areas, yielding earlier melt onset and more intense summer melting.
As a result of some of these factors and probably some as yet unknown others, climate models have under-predicted the loss rate of snow on land by a factor of four and the loss of sea ice by a factor of two.
Climate models also don’t yet sufficiently resolve extended periods of lazy north-south extended jet streams that produce the kind of sunny summers over Greenland (2007-2012 and 2015) that resulted in melting that our models didn’t foresee happening until 2100.
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