FLASHBACK TO 2017

DR. JONATHAN BAMBER, PhD [LINK] PHYSICIST AND PROFESSOR OF PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL IS A CLIMATE SCIENTIST WITH A SPECIFIC RESEARCH INTEREST IN POLAR ICE MELT AND SEA LEVEL RISE.

HE EXPLAINS ….

1. “What’s happening to ice and why? The way in which ice acts on the global climate and what’s happening to ice and why it’s happening and the ways in which changes to the ice in the Arctic are having global impacts on our climate system and therefore causing effects which we need to really be worried about. It’s not just the ice disappearing by itself. There are two effects. One is the albedo feedback. When sea ice melts and retreats, a big area of white which was the ice is replaced by a big area of dark which is the ocean water.
2. The ice surface reflects. Fresh snow on the ice reflects 80% of the radiation. It’s called albedo, so it has an albedo of 80%. As the ice gets dirtier as summer approaches and it starts to melt, the albedo goes down but it still has some albedo left. It goes down to 50% or 60% but as soon as the ice goes completely, the albedo of open water is less than 10%. That means that a huge amount of energy is now being absorbed by the surface that wasn’t being absorbed before because it was being reflected, and that speeds up global warming because it increases the temperature of the planet.
3. So we have our first positive feedback – positive meaning nasty, which is that the retreat of sea ice directly impacts the rate of warming of the atmosphere. As more of the ice melts the faster the ice can melt. This feedback is what we need to worry about in terms of polar ice melt.
4. So Professor Jonathan Bamber asked 22 researchers how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) would respond to a 5C warming scenario. Aggregating their responses he found a 1 in 20 or a 5% probability of global mean eustatic sea level rise as high as 2 meters. This is something we really really need to worry about.
5. Bloggers comments: So that’s the science of it anyway, and the physics too. Of course the climate deniers will deny these things because that is their way. They don’t believe in science, so they deny climate science in defense of the fossil fuel industry and they surely profit from their denial in various ways. Believe it or not this kind of nasty climate denial is actually found in polite society as shown in the images below.