Northman's Fury

A neat little article in the LA Times regarding a purported difference between the way liberals and conservatives think.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.

The implications being that conservatives are apparently more likely to react in a knee-jerk fashion, while liberals are better at responding to changes. Needless to say, not a few on the right side of the political spectrum aren't exactly thrilled about the study, (and besides, them scientist-types are a pack of liberals themselves). And of course, more than a few on the left side of the spectrum are doing a bunch of congratulatory back-slapping and laughter at their ideological opponent's expense, but for myself, I'd actually be surprised if this actually turned out to be right.

Granted, a fair bit of what's left of Bush's base does seem to act in a very knee-jerk fashion, but I've seen much the same reaction when you move into the farther reaches of the left spectrum. Thinkers are most likely the bulge in the middle, though most of those consider themselves liberals these days thanks to what Bush and the boys have done to conservatism.

These stories about the Arctic ice situation just seem to cluster. I posted on Tuesday about the record low amount of ice cover in the Arctic Ocean. Now there's a story about how the increasing speed of Greenland's glaciers is causing small earthquakes as huge chunks break off.

Dr Corell, director of the global change programme at the Heinz Centre in Washington, said the estimates of sea level rise in the IPCC report were based on data two years old. The predicted rise this century was 20-60cm (about 8-24ins) , but it would be at the upper end of this range at a minimum, he said, and some believed it could be two metres. This would be catastrophic for European coastlines.

He had flown over the Ilulissat glacier and "seen gigantic holes in it through which swirling masses of melt water were falling. I first looked at this glacier in the 1960s and there were no holes. These so-called moulins, 10 to 15 metres across, have opened up all over the place. There are hundreds of them."

This melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier creating a lake 500 metres deep which was causing the glacier "to float on land. These melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic."

The glacier is now moving at 15km a year into the sea although in surges it moves even faster. He measured one surge at 5km in 90 minutes - an extraordinary event.

It's looking more and more like the North may have reached a tipping point where one the dreaded feedback mechanisms climate scientists try to warn us all about it already having its way. In this case, the effect results from sea water absorbing far more heat than the highly reflective sea ice. The ocean gets warmer, melts more sea ice, which increases the amount of heat that gets trapped, which warms the ocean, which melts more sea ice, so much that the ice can't recover in the winter and the next summer's cycle starts in a far better position for melting to take place.

All the freshwater from the glaciers in Greenland reduce the ocean's salinity, making it both easier to melt and to freeze, absent the heat absorption effect, but can also trigger a shutdown in that big Atlantic conveyor belt. Not too many people notice what happens in the north since there are so few people living here, but when that happens, everybody will notice, and all these stories point to it happening a lot sooner than most people expect.

Interesting times indeed.

I already knew that the ice cap had dropped below record levels this summer, but I had no idea it was as bad as this.

Experts say they are "stunned" by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone.

So much ice has melted this summer that the Northwest passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the Northeast passage along Russia's Arctic coast could open later this month.

. . .

The new figures show that sea ice extent is currently down to 4.4m square kilometres (1.7m square miles) and still falling.

The previous record low was 5.3m square kilometres in September 2005. From 1979 to 2000 the average sea ice extent was 7.7m square kilometres.

The sea ice usually melts in the Arctic summer and freezes again in the winter. But Dr Serreze said that would be difficult this year.

"This summer we've got all this open water and added heat going into the ocean. That is going to make it much harder for the ice to grow back."

I posted about this a month ago before the sea ice had retreated below record levels. I linked to a story then about a new climate model that took into account short-term climate effects to give an idea of how the Earth would warm or cool over shorter periods rather than the usual climate models that looked at the long term. The significant point bears repeating:

the Hadley Centre researchers said that the influence of natural climatic variations were likely to dampen the effects of emissions from human activities between now and 2009.

But over the decade as a whole, they project the global average temperature in 2014 to be 0.3C warmer than 2004.

Meaning this record sea ice level is during a period where natural cycles are dampening the warming effects of carbon emissions.

The next decade is going to be very interesting.