According to nearly all climate models, earth's polar regions should be the most sensitive and vulnerable areas on the planet to climate change; and, in the words of Przybylak (2000), "warming and cooling epochs should be seen most clearly here and should also occur earlier than in other parts of the world." This being the case, one would expect that with all the fuss being raised about global warming at various climate change meetings by international politicos, the Arctic must be exhibiting some awfully strong signs of this phenomenon. Real-world data, however, tell a much different story.
Przybylak, for one, could find no sign of any net warming in the Arctic for at least the past 70 years. In his own words, "in the Arctic, the highest temperatures since the beginning of instrumental observation occurred clearly in the 1930s." Glaciers continue to melt; but Dowdeswell et al. (1997) indicate that they appear to be responding to "a step-like warming in the early twentieth century with the end of the Little Ice Age." In fact, the latter investigators have determined that "almost 80% of the mass balance time series [of Arctic glaciers] also have a positive trend, toward a less negative mass balance," which is just the opposite of what one would logically expect if the world were truly experiencing an unprecedented warming of the globe as claimed by the climate alarmists.
Signs of recent CO2-induced global warming are also absent from the Russian arctic. Zeeberg and Forman (2001) have reported a significant and accelerated post-Little Ice Age glacial retreat on Novaya Zemlya in the Russian Arctic during the first and second decades of the 20th century. However, by 1952, this region’s glaciers had experienced between 75 to 100% of their net 20th century retreat; and during the next 50 years, the recession of over half of the glaciers stopped, and many tidewater glaciers actually began to advance. Temperature data from weather stations at Novaya Zemlya corroborate the cooler temperatures inferred from glaciers during the last four decades of the 20th century, as summer and winter temperatures since 1961 were between 0.3 to 0.5°C and 2.3 to 2.8°C colder than they were over the prior 40-year period, respectively.
Similar temperature trends have been reported over the much larger region of the Asian subarctic. Vaganov et al. (2000) analyzed proxy temperatures from a 600-year record of tree-ring widths and found that the Asian subarctic experienced a slight warming from the beginning of their record until about 1750. Thereafter, a severe cooling trend ensued, followed by a 130-year warming trend from about 1820 through 1950, after which temperatures fell once again. Furthermore, Vaganov et al. report that 20th century warming "does not go beyond the limits of reconstructed natural temperature fluctuations in the Holocene subarctic zone." Furthermore, fluctuations in temperature over the 600-year period were found to be well correlated with fluctuations in solar radiation.
Examination of permafrost degradation in central Alaska tells much the same story; climate models predict accelerating degradation due to CO2-induced global warming, but observational data do not support the predictions. Jorgenson et al. (2001), for example, analyzed the extent, history and rates of permafrost degradation in central Alaska over the past 300 years and concluded that 83% of the permafrost degradation took place prior to 1949. Additionally, they report that half of the degradation took place prior to 1850, before any significant buildup of atmospheric CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, which clearly suggests that something other than CO2 is largely, if not completely, responsible for the melting of the permafrost in this region over the past three centuries.
With respect to changes in Arctic sea ice extent and thickness, there is considerable year-to-year variability in the short-term records that exist (Venegas and Mysak, 2000); and the magnitude – and even the sign – of the trend can be altered depending on the period of study. Vinnikov et al. (1999), for example, examined trends in Arctic sea ice extent between 1953 and 1998, concluding that the observed decrease during this time period was related to anthropogenic global warming. Likewise, Johannessen et al. (1999) came to the same conclusion using data over the period 1978-1998. Yet a close analysis of these authors’ own data reveals that from 1990/91 onward, sea ice area in the Arctic has actually increased. Furthermore, an analysis of Arctic sea ice thickness data by Winsor (2001) revealed that mean ice thickness has remained on a near-constant level over the period 1986 to 1997.
On the biological side of the ledger, things are also much less worrisome than they have long been made out to be. For many years the story out of the Alaskan Arctic tundra, for example, was that global warming would change the land from a carbon sink to a carbon source. Although such a change did indeed occur in response to localized warming in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, we report in our Editorial No Pain, No Gain that further increases in local air temperature experienced between 1992 and 1996 actually led to some of the natural ecosystems there becoming carbon sinks once again.
But what if the Arctic were to warm as a result of a rise in atmospheric CO2? For starters, it would be difficult to discern any anthropogenic forcing on Arctic climate, given the great natural variability that exists in the region. But if it did warm, and that is a pretty big "if" in our opinion, it appears there is a natural built-in thermostat in the Arctic that does not allow air temperature there to rise and remain more than a degree or two higher than it is now for any significant period of time. As we outlined in our Editorial Sound the Alarm Bells!, any CO2-induced warming of the current climate would likely trigger a subsequent cooling as a consequence of increased fresh-water flow into the North Atlantic Ocean.
The bottom line of these several observations is that the great political juggernaut that drives the global-warming-seeking IPCC process is truly "much ado about nothing," as climate model predictions appear to be totally at variance with what is actually happening at the "top of the world."
References
Dowdeswell, J.A., Hagen, J.O., Bjornsson, H., Glazovsky, A.F., Harrison, W.D., Holmlund, P., Jania, J., Koerner, R.M., Lefauconnier, B., Ommanney, C.S.L. and Thomas, R.H. 1997. The mass balance of circum-Arctic glaciers and recent climate change. Quaternary Research 48: 1-14.
Hall, A. and Stouffer, R.J. 2001. An abrupt climate event in a coupled ocean-atmosphere simulation without external forcing. Nature 409: 171-174.
Johannessen, O.M., Shalina, E.V. and Miles M.W. 1999. Satellite evidence for an Arctic sea ice cover in transformation. Science 286: 1937-1939.
Jorgenson, M.T., Racine, C.H., Walters, J.C. and Osterkamp, T.E. 2001. Permafrost degradation and ecological changes associated with a warming climate in central Alaska. Climatic Change 48: 551-579.
Przybylak, R. 2000. Temporal and spatial variation of surface air temperature over the period of instrumental observations in the Arctic. International Journal of Climatology 20: 587-614.
Vaganov, E.A., Briffa, K.R., Naurzbaev, M.M., Schweingruber, F.H., Shiyatov, S.G. and Shishov, V.V. 2000. Long-term climatic changes in the arctic region of the Northern Hemisphere. Doklady Earth Sciences 375: 1314-1317.
Venegas, S.A. and Mysak, L.A. 2000. Is there a dominant timescale of natural climate variability in the Arctic? Journal of Climate 13: 3412-3434.
Vinnikov, K.Y., Robock, A., Stouffer, R.J., Walsh, J.E., Parkinson, C.L., Cavalieri, D.J., Mitchell, J.F.B., Garrett, D. and Zakharov, V.R. 1999. Global warming and Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent. Science 286: 1934-1937.
Winsor, P. 2001. Arctic sea ice thickness remained constant during the 1990s. Geophysical Research Letters 28: 1039-1041.
Zeeberg, J. and Forman, S.L. 2001. Changes in glacier extent on north Novaya Zemlya in the twentieth century. The Holocene 11: 161-175.