http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/arctic-sea-ice-melt-20140305/#.U0BAj6hdVA1

This Arctic process contrasts starkly with those that occur in Antarctica, a frozen continent without any large rivers. The sea ice cover in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica has been relatively stable, while Arctic sea ice has been declining rapidly over the past decade.

“River discharge is a key factor contributing to the high sensitivity of Arctic sea ice to climate change,” said Nghiem. “We found that rivers are effective conveyers of heat across immense watersheds in the Northern Hemisphere. These watersheds undergo continental warming in summertime, unleashing an enormous amount of energy into the Arctic Ocean, and enhancing sea ice melt. You don’t have this in Antarctica.”

Nifty Peekaboo Slider Graphic

In the Antarctic, however, the river water is all just above freezing, or in the case of glaciers, well below.

according to this discussion, Arctic sea ice decline is 3 times the Antarctic gain.

I don’t recall were I read this, but some have postulated that the melting of the Antarctic glaciers is adding fresh water to the ocean around the Antarctic land mass, which freezes more readily than the salty water.

The problem is the earth climate machine is very complex. Its hard to predict what, if any, effect any specific action will have, perhaps even one totally opposite of what you might expect. Global warming might even precipitate a new ice age. It may have happened in the past, there’s no reason it can’t happen now, even without our help.

The climate does seem to be self-correcting through multiple feedback mechanisms, but it is also riddled with tipping points that can unexpectedly lead to runaway excursions.The stability of the entire system varies depending at which time resolution you look at. I think the hip new word is “granularity”.

All we know for sure is that for the last few centuries things have been warming up very fast, by geological standards. And in the last generation, the one indicator which is most sensitive and which can be unambiguously and reliably monitored (Arctic ice) has apparently redlined.

Look at those regressions superimposed on the September data I’ve been posting. The first ice free arctic summer could occur at any time, and unless some negative feedback mechanism kicks in to turn things around, the arctic will be ice free every summer in about 20-30 years at most. Just follow that blue line until it intercepts the x-axis. Summer ice has been melting at the rate of 13% per decade. Since the satellites have been monitoring (1979), almost HALF the summer ice has vanished.

Of course, the arctic will always be iced over in winter, because that’s when the sun doesn’t shine. But having a high albedo doesn’t help the overall heat budget much when its totally dark outside.

Then there’s that South Polar volcano that I think has been causing the ozone-hole effect over the past million years or so.

I like the albedo approach — the whiter the planet the more reflective, and therefore the colder it gets. Of course there’s a limit to this in the Habitable zone — not a very comfortable limit, but a limit none the less. If we end up with a new Snowball-Earth, then we’ll need to polute the hell out of it to lower temps. Can do, as keeping warm would require a lot of dark exhaust from all that fossile fuel.

Then again, we could just darken the snow — somehow.