By Paul Homewood
More nonsense from Roger Harrabin:
A rapid climate shift under way in the Barents Sea could spread to other Arctic regions, scientists warn.
The Barents Sea is said to be at a tipping point, changing from an Arctic climate to an Atlantic climate as the water gets warmer.
A conference in Norway heard that the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea – both further to the east – are likely to become the new Arctic frontier.
The scientists warn that it will affect ecosystems.
It may also impact on global weather patterns, although there's no agreement on that.
They're concerned because the north Barents Sea has been governed by an Arctic climate since the end of the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago.
The Arctic Ocean has a cold, fresh surface layer which acts as a cap on a layer of warm, saltier Atlantic water beneath.
But now in the Barents Sea there's not enough freshwater-rich sea-ice flowing from the high Arctic to maintain the freshwater cap.
And that's allowing warm, salty Atlantic water to rise to the surface.
In what's known as a feedback loop – the more the layers mix, the warmer the surface gets. And the warmer the surface gets, the more the waters mix.
So it's now only a matter of time, the researchers say, before this section of the Arctic effectively becomes part of the Atlantic. It could happen in as little as a decade, they warn….
And in another puzzle, freshwater in the western Arctic seems to be increasing as it diminishes in the eastern Arctic. Scientists are still struggling to fathom the complexities of human impact on the planet.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46976040
Why on earth should any of this have to do anything to do with "human impact on the planet"?
You only have to go back to the 1920s to see exactly the same climatic changes in that part of the Arctic.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0493%281922%2950%3C589a%3ATCA%3E2.0.CO%3B2
This period, called the Warming in the North, is well known to scientists, and lasted from around 1920 to 1960.
Bob Dickson and Svein Osterhus wrote extensively about it in their seminal paper, "One hundred years in the Norwegian Sea":
As our hydrographic time series is lengthened into the middle decades of the 20th century, it begins to capture evidence of one of the largest and most widespread regime shifts to affect our waters within the modern instrumental record. These were the decades of 'the Warming in the North', when the salinity of North Atlantic water passing through the Faroe-Shetland Channel into the Norwegian Sea reached a century-long high (Dooley et al. 1984), when salinities were so high off Cape Farewell that they were rejected as erroneous (Harvey 1962) and when a precipitous warming by more than 2°C in the 5-year mean pervaded the West Greenland banks (Fig. 6), and also when the northward dislocations of biogeographical boundaries for a wide range of species, from plankton to commercially important fish, terrestrial mammals, and birds, were at their most extreme in the 20th century. The astonishing nature of these radical events is vivid in the contemporary scientific literature, most notably in the classic accounts by Knipowitsch (1931), Sæmundsson (1934), Hansen et al. (1949), Stephen (1938), Jensen (1939), Tåning (1943), Tåning (1949), Fridriksson (1949), and many others summarized in a comprehensive bibliography by Arthur Lee (1949) and reviewed in an ICES special scientific meeting on 'Climatic Changes in the Arctic in Relation to Plants and Animals' in Copenhagen in 1948.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00291950701409256
The Warming in the North ended abruptly in the 1960s, when Arctic currents took over again, and brought the sea ice back.
Go back a bit further, and we can see how sea ice around the Barents Sea fluctuated backwards and forwards:
And go back 3000 years, and we can see that current sea ice extent to the north of Iceland is near historical highs.
It should not take Harrabin more than a few minutes to check this out for himself. So why does he continue to peddle every bit of junk science he is fed?
from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2MAPRaX
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