Dwindling Arctic Ice Raises Fears For Rocky Mountain Snowpack

"A dwindling ice pack in the Arctic may lead to a more meager snowpack in the Rockies, according to two new studies. The disappearing Arctic ice pack - which is likely to reach record lows this summer - may lead to a shift in the jet stream that will pull winter storms north in coming decades.

"In the Rockies, we see about 17 percent less rain and snow, and ... a lot of your water comes from that," said Lisa Sloan, a professor of earth sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz who ran the computer-modeling study. "It was a result we were just astounded by," she said. The new findings, based on eight climate models, buttress earlier work published in Geophysical Research Letters by Sloan and Jacob Sewall, also a University of Santa Cruz researcher.

"In seven of eight, they produce this very dry bull's-eye in the Western U.S., and it's wetter in southern Alaska, the Canadian Rockies," Sewall said. "This result appears very robust. ... If you want anything better, you need to sit around and wait 50 years and watch." Some of the Arctic sea-ice data used in the study come from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder. There, polar researcher Mark Serreze has been watching the floating ice cover shrink for the last five years, a trend not seen in the previous 25 years of satellite records.

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"We're getting to some kind of tipping point here," Serreze said during a conference at the Denver Federal Center last week. "The sea ice can't recover."

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http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_2746404

It's the only way to be sure.

These effects are based on the warming trends already in effect. These would still occur even if we completely stopped using fossil fuels worldwide today. The time to make changes to avoid these problems was back in the '80s and '90s.

Now we can just hope to avoid making them even worse in the second half of the century. But even that is unlikely, since no nation is going to voluntarily give up using oil and coal.

So grab some popcorn and enjoy the show.
:popcorn:

We may want to lay in our supply of popcorn now, while we can still afford to grow it.

:hide:

a diminished thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic, and the possible big chill in northeatern North America and western and northern Europe.

Perhaps it doesn't matter. We are obviously so screwed all around.

As I recall, the northern hemisphere had a fairly dry climate during previous ice-ages.

At least it won't be a damp, wet cold.

Although I wouldn't count on a Day After Tomorrow scenario, the transitional periods from interstadial (now) to stadial (ice age) are climatically chaotic. Not only has geological evidence emerged that testifies to flooding, storms, and tidal changes, but so do ancient accounts of eras when the Gods punished Mankind for some wickedness or another. Paleo-indian folktales relate stories of floods, cold rains, years when the snow never melted, and years when the Sun never came out.

Folktales alone seldom meet the criteria for evidence, but combined with the physical evidence, point to an era of unstable, and often extremely harsh, weather.

Ice ages are by their nature dry periods. A huge volume of water is locked into the ice. But the process of getting an ocean of atmospheric water into ice requires rain, snow, and storms. (After which, the ocean contributes directly to the ice pack). I may be over-simplifying the process, but it is akin to massive atmospheric condensation during or after a very warm period -- water vapor saturates the atmosphere, migrates pole-ward, then as the air temperature falls at circumpolar latitudes, recondenses as storms, floods, snowpack, and eventually ice.

It is possible that we are entering just such a chaotic period of weather now.

Dress warm.

--p!