Tag: Albedo Feedback

bookmark_borderClimate Change and the Carbon Feedback Loop

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by Daniel Brouse

The atmosphere is acting like a blanket… and the earth (land and sea) is acting like a battery. 91% of the energy (as heat) is trapped/stored in the oceans.

Feedback Loops Example

The Albedo feedback loop between the earth and the CO2 in the atmosphere accelerates global warming at an exponential rate. Albedo is the fraction of incoming solar radiation that gets reflected back into space. Carbon plays a double whammy role in feedback loops.

Brown carbon on ice, snow, or permafrost absorbs more heat and releases more carbon and methane into the atmosphere… resulting in more warming… leading to more carbon being released from the earth, etc.

Brown carbon is light-absorbing organic carbon with a very low Albedo. “This class of organic carbon, known for its light brownish color, absorbs strongly in the ultraviolet wavelengths and less significantly going into the visible,” reports the Argonne National Laboratory.

There are several feedback loops between brown carbon, lightning, wildfires, and arctic warming. Brown carbon from wildfires warms the arctic. The warmer arctic absorbs more heat causing more wildfires. In turn, more wildfires cause more brown carbon resulting in a warmer arctic. The cycle keeps reinforcing itself as it repeats.

Studies have found lightning and forest fires are creating a feedback loop. Global warming causes more extreme weather events and conditions for lightning. More lightning sparks a vicious cycle, as trees and soil set ablaze release warming CO2 creating more storms and more lightning. The study Forests at Risk Due to Lightning Fires found a sensitivity of extratropical intact forests to potential increases in lightning fires, which would have far-reaching consequences for terrestrial carbon storage and biodiversity.

More wildfires create more CO2 and more brown carbon that result in more global warming that results in more lightning strikes creating more wildfires resulting in more global warming thawing more permafrost  allowing more emissions of CO2 and methane resulting in more warming, creating many more feedback loops.

Feedback loops and tipping points are parts of an equation that determine the rate of acceleration in climate change. Triggering these tipping points results in the CO2 stored in nature to be released without the assistance of humans. Though we do not know how much carbon is stored in nature, it would be reasonable to assume that the temperature could be pushed from 3 degrees to 6 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Humans cannot thrive above a rise of 1.5 degrees. Much of the Earth will be uninhabitable if the temperature rises an additional 6 degrees Celsius. If humans also add 3 degrees Celsius, the temperature and humidity will approach a wet-bulb temperature that will not sustain human life.

When a tipping point topples and knocks over other tipping points, it is called the Domino Effect.

bookmark_borderThe Snowfall Feedback Loop

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by Daniel Brouse
November 26, 2023

Global warming is causing warmer and shorter winters. Not only are White Christmases less frequent, so are icebergs, sea ice, and glaciers. An analysis and maps from NOAA found snowfall is declining globally as temperatures warm due to anthropological climate change.

Snowfall Decline
Snowfall Decline

As the atmosphere’s heat and humidity increase, precipitation is more likely to fall as violent rain or hail than snow. “Eventually the laws of thermodynamics mean that as you keep warming you’re just going to transition more and more of that snow over to rain. You can get away with things for a little bit, and it can hide some trends, but overall the laws of thermodynamics will win out,” said Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist with the National Weather Service in Alaska.

Justin Mankin, a climate scientist and associate professor of geography at Dartmouth College, said with rising temperatures snowfall will not decline linearly (at a 1-to-1 rate.) Rather, there is a tipping point. Once a certain temperature threshold is reached, “we should expect the losses to accelerate. It means we can expect a lot of the places that haven’t exhibited massive snowfall declines to maybe start to exhibit them with just a little bit more warming.”

Albedo is the reflective nature of snow and measures how much light is reflected without being absorbed when hitting an object (e.g. the fraction of incoming solar radiation that gets reflected back into space). Snow has a very high albedo that reflects most of the light and absorbs very little heat. The snow-albedo feedback loop occurs when the atmosphere gets warmer due to human induced climate change resulting in less snowfall. The less snow reflecting heat back into space, the warmer the earth becomes. The warmer the earth, the less snowfall. The less snowfall, the warmer the earth.

Feedback loops and tipping points are parts of an equation that determine the rate of acceleration in climate change.

The Human Induced Climate Change Experiment

bookmark_border10% of Swiss Glaciers Melt

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* As thawing accelerates, Swiss glaciers lost 10% of their volume in the past 2 years
* One glacier had to stop being measured because it disappeared
* The thaw is irreversible
* Much of Europe’s drinking water comes from the glaciers

“The acceleration is dramatic, with as much ice being lost in only two years as was the case between 1960 and 1990. The two extreme consecutive years have led to glacier tongues collapsing and the disappearance of many smaller glaciers,” the Swiss Academy of Sciences said.

The AP reported:
Swiss meteorologists reported in August that the zero-degree Celsius level — the altitude where water freezes — had risen to its highest level ever recorded, at nearly 5,300 meters (17,400 feet), which means that all the Swiss Alpine peaks faced temperatures above freezing.

Matthias Huss, head of the GLAMOS glacier monitoring center, said, “Glaciers are the ambassadors of climate change. They make it very clear what is happening out there because they respond in a very sensitive way to warming temperatures. The study underlines once again that there is big urgency to act now if you want to stabilize (the) climate, and if you want to save at least some of the glaciers.”

“And once we have destabilized ice sheets, there will be no stable coastline for centuries. I repeat: There will be no stable coastline for centuries. I apologize to the children,” said Sidd Mukherjee in the paper Longthaw.

Also see:

Climate Change: Rate of Acceleration Brouse and Mukherjee (2023)

Sea-level Rise Mukherjee and Brouse (2022 and 2023)

Climate Change: How Long Is “Ever”? Brouse (2023)

bookmark_border1/3 of World Heritage Glaciers Will Disappear by 2050

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The United Nations says, “New UNESCO data highlight the accelerated melting of glaciers in World Heritage sites, with glaciers in a third of sites set to disappear by 2050. But it is still possible to save the other two thirds, if the rise in global temperatures does not exceed 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial period.”

The UNESCO report World Heritage Glaciers found:

Glaciers across the globe – including the last ones in Africa – will be unavoidably lost by 2050 due to climate change.

Glaciers in a third of UN World Heritage sites will melt within three decades.

Mount Kilimanjaro’s last glaciers will vanish as will glaciers in the Alps and Yosemite National Park in the US.

They will melt regardless of the world’s actions to combat climate change.

50 UNESCO World Heritage sites are home to glaciers (A total of 18,600 glaciers have been identified in these 50 sites, covering around 66,000 km2), representing almost 10% of the Earth’s total glacierized area. They include the highest (next to Mt. Everest), the longest (in Alaska), and the last remaining glaciers in Africa, amongst others, giving a representative overview of the general situation of glaciers in the world.

But a new study by UNESCO, in partnership with IUCN, shows these glaciers have been retreating at an accelerated rate since 2000 due to CO2 emissions, which are warming temperatures. They are currently losing 58 billion tons of ice every year – equivalent to the combined annual water use of France and Spain– and are responsible for nearly 5% of observed global sea-level rise.
Only one effective solution: quickly reduce CO2 emissions

The report concludes that glaciers in a third of the 50 World Heritage sites are condemned to disappear by 2050, regardless of efforts to limit temperature increases. But it is still possible to save the glaciers in the remaining two thirds of sites if the rise in temperatures does not exceed 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial period.

“We hope we might be wrong, but this is the hard science,” said UNESCO project officer Tales Carvalho Resende, one of the authors. “Glaciers are one of the valuable indicators of climate change, because they’re visible. This is something we can really see happening.”

The remaining glaciers in the other two thirds of UN World Heritage sites could be saved, but only if the world limits global warming to 1.5C, the authors say. Another UN report last week found that the world currently had “no credible pathway” to achieve that.

“What is quite unprecedented in the historical record is how quickly this is happening,” said Beata Csatho, a glaciologist from the University of Buffalo.

“In the middle of the 1900s, glaciers were quite stable,” she said. “Then there is this incredibly fast retreat.”

“This is really a call to take action at every level – not only at the political level, but at our level as human beings,” said Carvalho Resende.

Sea-level Rise: Greenland and the Collapse of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet |
Anthropologic Climate Change

bookmark_borderAntarctica and Greenland Ice Melt Faster Than Anticipated

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Antarctica’s Collapse Could Begin Even Sooner Than Anticipated
The article in Scientific American states, “Two expeditions to the Thwaites Ice Shelf have revealed that it could splinter apart in less than a decade, hastening sea-level rise worldwide.

“As Scambos and Wild gazed down from their Twin Otter plane this past January, they spotted several new tears in the shelf—three kilometers long and several hundred meters wide—where it lifts off the seafloor. Ragged cliffs of ice tilted 50 meters up into the air, exposing deep layers that had not seen daylight for thousands of years. “I think it’s losing contact with everything that used to be bracing it,” Scambos says. Not only is the ice shelf separating from its pinning point. As it speeds up, it is also stretching and tearing away from the glacier upstream.

The team was so alarmed that Pettit and Wild decided they will return this December to install a new instrument station: “BOB,” short for Breakup Observer. They hope BOB will survive long enough to record the final throes of the ice shelf as it fractures into shards. It might not take long.”

Greenland Rainfall and Albedo Feedback
The WMO (World Meteorological Organization) released the report State of the Climate in Europe 2021. “Temperatures in Europe have increased at more than twice the global average over the past 30 years — the highest of any continent in the world. As the warming trend continues, exceptional heat, wildfires, floods and other climate change impacts will affect society, economies and ecosystems, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).”

“Temperatures over Europe have warmed significantly over the 1991-2021 period, at an average rate of about +0.5℃ per decade. As a result, Alpine glaciers lost 30 meters in ice thickness from 1997 to 2021. The Greenland ice sheet is melting and contributing to accelerating sea level rise. In summer 2021, Greenland saw a melt event and the first-ever recorded rainfall at its highest point, Summit station.”

Does the rainfall have a significant impact? Yes; however, it is the Albedo Feedback that is of the most concern.

“It turns out that the rain itself wasn’t the most important factor”, says Prof. Jason Box from GEUS and lead author of the paper Greenland Ice Sheet Rainfall, Heat and Albedo Feedback Impacts From the Mid-August 2021 Atmospheric River reporting their results in Geophysical Research Letters.

“There is an irony. It’s not really the rain that did the damage to the snow and ice, it’s the darkening effect of the meltwater and how the heat from the event erased snow that had overlaid darker ice across the lower third of the ice sheet.”

“Unusually warm atmospheric rivers swept along Greenland in the late summer months, bringing potent melt conditions when the melt season was drawing to a close.”

“The researchers found that, between 19 and 20 August 2021, this melt caused the altitude of the ice sheet’s snowline near Kangerlussuaq to retreat in elevation by a whopping 788 metres, the snowline retreated, exposing a wide area of dark bare ice. Under normal circumstances, snow would cover and insulate this ice, but the snow melted suddenly and exposed the ice to heat, causing even more melting.”

“The authors conclude that the heatwave causing the rain event serves as an excellent example of ‘melt-albedo feedback that amplifies the melt impact of the initial melt perturbation'”.

Sea-level Rise: Greenland and the Collapse of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet |
Anthropologic Climate Change