Behold, Greenland's albedo:

[phantom power]

Figure 2. The albedo (reflectivity) of the Greenland Ice Sheet at its highest elevations (2,500 - 3,200 meters, or 8,200 - 10,500 feet) has steadily decreased in recent years as the ice has darkened due to increased melting and dark soot being deposited on the ice from air pollution. This July, the high elevations of Greenland were the darkest on record, which helped contribute to the record warm temperatures observed at the Greenland Summit. Image credit: Dr. Jason Box, Ohio State University.

[hatrack]

1. Yeah, but it's coming back! See that fishhook at the bottom? Huh?!? What about that, treehugger?!

[phantom power]

2. right, it's like green shoots of albedo...

[XemaSab]

4. Probably because the melt ponds have started to drain

[GliderGuider]

3. Wow! Those Milankovitch cycles are getting faster and faster... nt

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. Or…

http://bprc.osu.edu/wiki/File:Timeseries_Reflectivity_07_All.png

[joshcryer]

6. The Dragon-King has arrived.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.4290/

[GliderGuider]

7. Very nice research! Thanks.

I'd only heard the term "dragon-king" recently, and had no depth of understanding of it. This looks like a significant concept for dealing with complex systems.

And yes, this sure looks like one, as does the recent Greenland ice-cap melt event, as did Katrina/Rita, the European heat wave of 2003, the Arctic meltdown of 2007... We're being over-run by dragons.

[joshcryer]

8. I saw someone mention it on Neven1's Arctic Sea Ice blog.

Ever since I have had a sick feeling in my stomach.

You know I am a technologist and it feels like we're fucked, that technology won't work, so it's just utterly nauseating for me.

The Dragon-Kings have arrived and they aren't going away.

[GliderGuider]

9. Inter-system coupling of turbulent and oscillating regimes,

cross-domain synchronization of apparently uncorrelated effects, resulting in unexpected amplifications...

The dragon-kings themselves would be bad enough, but the really frightening thing is that they are simply markers of the deteriorating states of the underlying systems and their increasing coupling. The message for me is that we don't know what sort of dragon-king style event might rupture the whole complex of complex systems we depend on for life as we know it, but we now know there's a good chance that one is coming.

And yeah, new technology or policy changes won't do much but perhaps delay the inevitable. Given the levels of complexity, inertia and hysteresis we're dealing with, by the time we see that the system is seriously out of balance (like now), simply fiddling with the inputs won't help. Of course, input-fiddling is all we've got, so we should pull out all the stops. But we shouldn't be surprised when one of these dragons snorts real fire.

[Bigmack]

10. And as the volume of fresh water in the North Atlantic

increases, and the thermohaline current sinks to the bottom further and further south of where it used to...... Ms Bigmack