Water in Changing States Regulates Climate
Herman A (Alex) PopeApril 10, 2024
Many factors influence climate and climate responds immediately to many factors. Climate is self-correcting and some responses are immediate, but some self-correcting factors work over long periods of time. Most people only look at a static energy balance and immediate responses to change.
I have often written or said that water in all of its changing states is most important in regulating the climate.
In order to cool anything, it is most effective to transport the energy to somewhere colder in order to radiate the energy out. Ocean currents transport water warmed in the tropics to the polar oceans and ocean currents transport water cooled by thawing ice back to the tropics. Climate cooled over fifty million years as warm ocean water currents were increasingly blocked from flowing near the equator and diverted into the polar regions.
Ice is abundant in polar regions and other cold places. Ice is ignored by all and that is a major mistake. I have been told that the freezing and thawing of ice all occurs inside the greenhouse and it equals out and can be ignored. This is not correct, the most ice is formed and sequestered in warmest times when the polar oceans are thawed, the most cooling by ice thawing is in coldest times when polar oceans are frozen and when ice extent is most on land. Ice core records show the ice accumulations are most in warmest times and least in coldest times, therefore ice advances after warmest times and causes colder, ice retreats after coldest times and causes warmer, this is cause and not result. Ice ages got colder as ice extent increased, ice advanced fastest as the warm times became cold times, the volume and weight of ice was most at that time, but then the ice volumes were decreasing as the great ice sheets spread and thinned, melt water helped with the spreading and thinning of the great ice sheets. The weight of ice around the Arctic depressed the land and melt water flowed downhill into the Arctic Ocean and was trapped until the end of the ice ages. Evidence of
this is the warm cycles during the major ice ages in Greenland ice core records, those were meltwater surges into the Arctic Ocean. This is the reason sea level did not rise as the great ice sheets thawed. The rapid warming as the coldest times ended and rapid warming started, occurred because the great ice sheets had already thinned. Sea level rose, 20 to 10 thousand years ago, in surges, as the trapped melt water broke out of the Arctic.
Climate change stopped having major ice ages because enough ice is sequestered on land that the oceans cannot get deep and warm enough to cause a major warm period with enough warm water in the arctic to produce enough ice to start another major ice age.
Antarctica gained much ice during every past major warm period and did not give it back fast enough. It took many repeating, increasingly larger ice ages to accomplish this and now the new ten thousand years of alternating warm and cold periods that exchange much less ice and water is the new normal. CO2 does not influence the temperature that sea ice freezes and thaws and will not change the temperature bounds, the temperature bounds are determined by the advancing and retreating ice extents on land and the increasing and decreasing volumes of ice the thaw for cooling and the increasing and decreasing ice extents that change albedo. Water is abundant, water changes states, water in its changing states regulates the climate. If any factor causes warming, that will promote more ice formation which will counter the warming. This ice and water cycle has alternating warm and cold periods, there is no static equilibrium, this is a dynamic cycle. There is thermostat control, the thermostat setting is the temperature that sea ice freezes and thaws, the control function is the sea ice, sea ice is removed when more land ice is needed, sea ice is restored when enough land ice is being pushed into the turbulent saltwater currents to chill the water to below freezing.
The ice cycle cooling, the ice cycle self-correction, long term self-correction, changed over time, for some examples, forty-thousand-year cycles became hundred-thousand-year cycles and now have become thousand-year cycles. These changes occurred because the volumes of ocean that became ice age ice on land and then thawed and became ocean water changed over time as 2
circulation of warm water into the Arctic changed over time and as the ice retained on Antarctica over multiple cycles increased.
Static energy balance theory wants to maintain a steady state condition with stable ice shelves and stable sea ice that does not change.
Ice shelves are build by land ice pushing out over oceans, ice shelves are removed by water thawing the underside, or the ice shelf breaking off and floating into warmer water, there is not a stable steady state condition, when land ice is depleted the salt water currents remove sea ice and even ice shelves and then the evaporation and snowfall rebuilds the land ice until it sends out new ice shelves and enough ice is pushed into the oceans to rebuild the sea ice. Land ice can only be replenished when the oceans are thawed and exposed for evaporation. Land ice can only deplete when the oceans are covered with ice shelves and sea ice. This is dynamic selfcorrecting balance, not static steady-state balance. Ice core records show that ice accumulation on Antarctica was more during the warmest time 130 thousand years ago, when oceans were deeper than now and warmer than now, periodic loss of sea ice and ice shelves are necessary to maintain the sequestered ice on land.
Climate future will have alternating warmer and colder cycles, as it has had for millions of years, but the temperatures and sea levels will cycle inside the bounds of the most recent ten thousand years, this is the new normal. This will continue as long as the flow of the Gulf Stream into the Arctic Ocean is not disrupted, not significantly changed or the flow of ocean currents around Antarctic are not disrupted, not significantly changed.
My theory has evolved over more than 15 years since April 2008 when I attended a lecture by Tom Wysmuller about theory by Maurice Ewing and William Donn from the 1950-60s.
Reference: http://colderside.com/Colderside/F.A.Q..html
Especially 2c