Steward's Icebox...now without ice!

The figure on the right shows the yearly total area coverage of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean (y-axis), as a function of month of the year (x-axis). 2008 has had more sea ice coverage than in 2007, especially in the summer months, but is significantly below average. Image from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

There is absolutely nothing worse than getting into a black painted car with a black interior in the afternoon of a hot, sunny summer day. Just crack open the door and waves of heat strikes roll over you as the hot air escapes the vehicle. Black cars become hot because the sunlight striking the car is absorbed by the black paint. In contrast a silver or white car is cooler, because the sunlight striking the car is reflected away back towards the sky.

The same thing happens to the Earth’s air temperature. It’s really warm above dark objects that absorb sunlight and cooler above light objects that reflect that sunlight. And that is one of the many reasons why the ice covering the Arctic and Antartic regions is so vital, when sunlight strikes the ice, it is reflected back to space, cooling the Earth’s climate significantly.

This is why scientists are making such a fuss about the decrease in sea ice in the Artic Ocean. Sea ice acts as a reflective agent for the Earth moderating the climate. As the Earth warms in the next few years, the amount of ice will decrease as it melts, which in turn will further increase the temperature of the Earth as less sunlight is reflected and more is absorbed. Scientists refer to this as a “positive feedback” because an increase in one variable causes the system to respond by further increasing that variable.

This summer sea ice was found in greater abundance than was found in the summer of 2007. Summer is the point of the year that sea ice is at a minimum, and thus when the positive feedback is at its strongest. While having more sea ice this year is a good thing, it probably means very little in the long run, as the amount of ice found is still much less than what was observed for most of the 20th Century.

The annual summer retreat of the sea ice cloaking the Arctic Ocean appears to have ended with the ice not quite matching last year’s extraordinary recession, polar scientists said Tuesday.

Still, the scientists, at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., said that the ice in the Arctic this summer was 33 percent below the average extent tracked since satellites started monitoring the region in 1979 and that the trend continued toward an ice-free Arctic Ocean within a few decades.

As people who’ve been through a winter or two will tell you, some years are colder than others and Arctic climate is no different. This year, was a bit colder than last year, but the long term trend is robust. Sea ice is declining rapidly during the summer, and soon there will likely be no summer ice to speak of.

Dr. Meier said that small variations from one year to the next were less significant than the long-term trajectory, which remained toward progressively more open water. “It’s hard to see the summer ice coming back in any substantial way,” he said.

Decreases in sea ice have impacts beyond that of just climate. While some of our nation’s greatest politicians, who are obviously experts in the field of climate science may not agree with recent finding regarding the findings showing that Polar Bears and other Arctic species may struggle in an environment suddenly devoid of ice, scientists note that this is also a major concern:

Federal biologists have said that this long-term ice retreat is the main reason they had concluded that polar bears, which hunt seals from the ice, deserved protection under the Endangered Species Act. The Bush administration listed the species in May as threatened with extinction.

Global warming from the buildup of human-generated greenhouse gases almost certainly contributes to the Arctic ice retreats, according to a host of Arctic specialists. But many say natural variations in Arctic winds and cloud cover probably had a role in shaping the particularly large ice losses in the past two summers.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on sea ice in the summer months during the next few years. Maybe we should put a pool together to pick the first year without any sea ice? It’d be like fantasy baseball, but fantasy climate. This could be a money winner…

The file drawer effect

So why post this summers climate report? Well for one, I am a meteorologist and old habits die hard. But the thing I wanted to stress was how poor our memories are when it comes to recalling previously encountered environmental conditions. When it comes down to it we often remember only the events that concur with what we expect or hope for. This preferential recollection occurs so often that psychologists have a name for it, the file-drawer effect*.

(*- I'm more impressed with myself for remembering this from Psychology 101 class in Fall 2002 in Bailey Hall, than I am with psychologist for coming up with the effect. Of course, the reason I remember this class so vividly isn't for the class itself but rather the instructor, Dr. Jim Maas. I have never in my entire life attended a series of lectures by someone who thought so highly of himself and felt the need to share this opinion with his subjects on such a regular basis. The class was practically a shrine to his achievements, including the mandatory reading of his own book. My favorie Jim Maas story however has nothing to do with the class. My friend and former roommate Bhargav had sprained his ankle at one point, and needed a ride onto campus. So we piled into my saturn and stopped outside of his building. Mass pulls up behind us, and while we are helping the obviously injured and on crutches Bhargav out of the car Maas lays on the horn, flailing his arms about wildly. The kicker was that there was room for him to drive around us. The amazing thing is that as much as I envy Mass' academic success (I mean who wouldn't, he teaches the largest undergraduate lecture in the US, has multiple books read and is a successful researcher at an Ivy League school), I would never want to be like him in a million years.)



File drawer effect, gets its name from file drawer cabinets, where in years passed researchers would dutifully file interesting research papers on topics related to their research. Researchers would pick out papers that agree with their hypothesis, and ignore or file away deeply in their drawers papers that disagreed with their hypothesis. Thus, you create a large cache of supportive papers and ignore (the occasionally massive) the collection of papers that contradict your research.

This premise materializes itself with tales of the supernatural. You may walk up a flight of stairs in your home over 10,000 times in your life. In all likelihood nothing odd will happen 9,999 times. However if one time by chance, a ball suddenly bounces down the stairs in the middle of the night, and out observe it, you will remember that freak occurrence. In fact you will almost certainly not recall the other 9,999 times when nothing out of the ordinary occurred, but then point to that one time as proof that a ghost lives in your staircase and haunts you late at night.

Perhaps this explains why the more educated you are the more likely you are to believe in the supernatural.

The 2006 study of college students, done by Bryan Farha at Oklahoma City University and Gary Steward Jr. of the University of Central Oklahoma, reached a similar conclusion. Belief in the paranormal — from astrology to communicating with the dead — increases during college, rising from 23 percent among freshmen to 31 percent in seniors and 34 percent among graduate students.

I hypothesize that as you progress in education you are trained in the art of observation, and learn to draw hypothesis and inferences from these observation. In the case of extremely unlikely occurrences, rather than attribute things to chance (which trained scientists often never do), we attribute this to the supernatural.

Well my point to all of this is don’t believe what you remember when it comes to the environment. What you remember is likely to be biased to what you want to remember. When grandpa tells you he had to walk up hill in snow up to his knees to get to school he’s probably right, that did happen. However, it probably only happened once, and he has since selectively recalled this event, ignoring all the other days that he did not walk to school in snow up to his knees.

Climate vs. Weather

I apologize for today’s short post. Today is the Stony Brook University Intramural Softball championship game, and I have to leave the office early to hold down 3rd base. Tomorrow we’ll pick back up with “serious” environmental dialogue and address the insight that this blogs only reader, Mikey P brought to the table.

Weather versus Climate
The most difficult lecture for me to give to the students in my Environmental Problems and Solutions class at Stony Brook Southampton is the lecture on Global Climate. Specifically, trying to explain to the students what the major difference is between weather and climate. Here then are the definitions of climate and weather respectively from the American Heritage Dictionary.

cli•mate n.

1. The meteorological conditions, including temperature, precipitation, and wind, that characteristically prevail in a particular region.
2. A region of the earth having particular meteorological conditions: lives in a cold climate.
3. A prevailing condition or set of attitudes in human affairs: a climate of unrest.

Climate implies a long term series of conditions, the average of which we consider to be the “climate of a region.” It’s also important to consider the expected variability associated with a region, for example in April one could expect a day with a high of 30 or a day with a high of 70, both of which are within normal bounds, neither of which alone truly describe the climate of April.

weath•er n.

1. The state of the atmosphere at a given time and place, with respect to variables such as temperature, moisture, wind velocity, and barometric pressure.
2.
1. Adverse or destructive atmospheric conditions, such as high winds or heavy rain: encountered weather five miles out to sea.
2. The unpleasant or destructive effects of such atmospheric conditions: protected the house from the weather.
3. weathers Changes of fortune: had known him in many weathers.

Weather, the definition implies atmospheric conditions at one time. The weather can vary greatly from one day to the next, whereas the climate should vary only slightly from day to day or even week to week for a region.

Anyway I bring this up because today is a good example of why we need to include a degree of variability when ascribing climate to any region. The weather map below, taken from http://www-frd.fsl.noaa.gov/mesonet/ shows the wide range of temperatures in the Northeastern US today.



Today temperatures range from a very autumnal upper 50’s in the Adirondacks, Green, and White Mountains, to the 60’s across most of Western New York and the Catskills, to the 70’s throughout most of southern New England and the Hudson Valley to more a more “seasonable” lower 80’s in New York City and Long Island. However just to the south in New Jersey and Pennsylvania temperatures are in the 90’s with high humidity – the epitome of an August day along the Eastern US coastline. And of course far to the south Tropical Storm Fay continues to subsume Florida with rain and wind.

Any way, the point of all of this is just to say that when we define climate we need to be careful to include variability in our description. Today’s cool temperatures are part of a “normal” climate for the Northeast – although one may consider this to be somewhat extreme weather. This is a good example that one could use to explain the difference between climate and weather.