Polar Temperatures/CO2 Extrapolations

May 7, 2023 rjdavison

OPS-69 – Polar Temperature/CO₂ Extrapolations

When can we expect the ice in Greenland, the Arctic and/or Antarctica to disappear? The alarmist community would have you believe that the polar ice is set for an imminent collapse. The oceans will quickly rise and overwhelm Miami, New York, and every other major coastal city around the world. Really? Since early 1991, sea level rise has been 3.35 mm/year (according to NASA), essentially the same rate as the sea level rise during the Dirty 30s/40s. That period that has been homogenized out of existence, but still holds most of the high temperature records. Sea levels fluctuate with the global temperature, accelerating when temperatures rise, decelerating when they fall. Why would those early 20^th century sea levels rise at the same rates as today when 86%+ of human emissions have occurred post-1950? Sea levels were looked at in detail in my CSS-33 – Sea Level Rise – Is There Acceleration (certainly not in the individual tide gauges) post. But this post is about the polar regions and their potential melt scenarios. So, let’s get back to the coldest areas on the planet.

#climatechange #delaythegreen #globalwarming #showusthedata

I will be presenting the data from the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) Lower Troposphere Satellite Temperature dataset. As an aside, the UAH data has recently been corroborated by NASA (as per the Financial Post, April 12^th, 2023). That must be very unsettling for the alarmists in the crowd.

Let’s start up north and move south. Based on the UAH, temperatures in the Arctic are increasing at a rate of 2.47 °C/century. Sounds a bit scary, but all that increase has occurred during the cold winter months when the ice generally cannot be melting. During the melt season, Arctic temperatures barely average more than 0 °C, for just ±70 days of the year. A lot more freezing going on than melting. So, what happens if our CO₂ levels (and Arctic temperatures) continue to rise on their current trajectories? Neither scenario will play out that way, since neither CO₂ nor temperatures will continue to rise indefinitely for a variety of reasons (both anthropogenic and natural).

Under the implausible scenario of accelerating, uninterrupted CO₂ concentration increases, we would reach the limits of our ability to increase atmospheric CO₂ levels some 220 years from now. Burning all the coal, oil, and natural gas reserves on the planet can only raise our CO₂ levels to the 1600 ppm range (0.16%). As mentioned earlier, Arctic temperatures are increasing at a 2.47 °C/century rate. Based on the Arctic’s -16 °C average annual temperature, we should be good for ±630 years. Obviously, that assumes that the natural forcings have stopped acting on our planet as per the CAGW alarmist narrative. However, the cooling phases of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO), the Grand Solar Minimum (GSM) and the lunar cycle are all set to take temperatures lower over the next few decades. The only place the temperatures are not dropping is in the IPCC computer projections (those self admitted models that run too hot and use implausible emission scenarios (RCP-7.0 and RCP-8.5)). For the record, Arctic Sea Ice melting has no affect on sea level rise.

Greenland ice melt does affect sea level rise and could be very significant given that almost 10% of the land ice is contained there. But as with the Arctic, Greenland temperatures will not reach 0 °C for ±780 years, based on the current 1.26 °C/century measured temperature rise (based on the average station data available from NASA/GISS). The NASA/GISS “homogenized” temperature rise is actually lower at 1.01 °C /century. And the temperature trend over the first 22 years of this century (not extrapolated) are almost flat (despite rising CO₂ concentrations). Not much chance that Greenland is melting away anytime soon. Before moving on to the Antarctica extrapolations, I would like to present a few interesting Greenland statistics that are routinely ignored by the alarmist community (links and additional discussion in my CSS-11 – Snow and Ice – July 2021 Update post).

To start with, in a typical year Greenland adds ±370 Gt of ice to its Surface Mass Balance (SMB, the difference between the amount of ice that melts in the summer and the amount of snow that falls throughout the winter). That value does not include glacier calving.
A recent NASA study showed that Greenland lost 3800 Gt (roughly 150 Gt/year, including glacier calving) over the 1992 – 2018 period. The alarmist community loves to throw that study out as proof of “Global Warming”. What they do not bother to point out is that Greenland in 2100 will still have 28.4 of its existing 28.5 million Gt of ice at those melt rates. They also neglect to mention that similar melt rates were present during the early 20^th century (especially during those pesky Dirty 30s). Or the much lower global ice volumes present during the warmer periods of the Holocene (the Holocene, Minoan, Roman and Medieval Climate Optimums).

More detail on Greenland is presented in my CSS-23 – Greenland/Iceland – Homogenization, CSS-26 – Greenland/Iceland – AMO/PDO/CO₂ Distribution, and CSS-28 – Glaciers in Greenland posts.

The news does not get any better for the CAGW alarmist crowd as we move to Antarctica. Temperatures down under (based on all the UAH measured data) are almost flat at just 0.14 °C/century. That gives us ±43,000 years assuming we use the Average Annual Interior temperature (-57 °C) as the starting point. In the real world, the planet will be engulfed in a deep ice age long before any significant Antarctic melting could occur. Note, the UAH data is relatively flat, but there is evidence that temperatures may be declining in Antarctica. The arithmetic average of the long-term weather stations (NASA/GISS data) over the last 40 years has been down and a study by Zhu et al 2021 showed significant declines as well. That detail is available in my CSS-13 – A Look at Homogenization and CSS-27 – Is CO₂ Really the Primary Climate Driver posts (complete with the “official” fact check and my rebuttal). And for good measure, 2021 saw the coldest 6-month period ever recorded in Antarctica.

What do the temperature/CO₂ extrapolations tell us? We have time (even if the IPCC “science” were correct)! What we do not have is ethical, common sense, science driven political “leadership”. We are wasting money (huge, unaffordable amounts) on unsubstantiated, unscientific “green” initiatives and ignoring the real threat from “Climate Change”, Global Cooling.