Satellite Imagery Shows Arctic Ice Still Unmelted

“I’d say we have a ways to go yet before the sea ice melts completely.”
You are hereby awarded the degree of M.U. (Master of Understatement), honoris causa.

If I’m selling something, and that something fails to perform as advertised, then customers can take me to court. I’d be in trouble from the Trade Practices Commission (aus), the Department of Fair Tading (nsw, aus) and guilty of offences under the Trade Practices Act (aus) at the very least.
If I go on TV and totally defame someone, I’m guilty of numerous offences.
If I’m in a shopping center and yell “Fire!” and cause a mass panic, I would be in quite a deal of trouble.
In short, if I go around lying, misrepresenting the truth or causing mass panics, I’m probably going to be doing jail time.
Why is it, then, that a person can yell “The ice caps are melting” or “temperatures are rising” or “sea levels are rising”, and when it doesn’t happen there is a collective shrug and no one is charges with (at least) causing a public mischief?

Captain Obviousness, actually it’s worse than that. The media blurs the distinction between prediction and reality. So the prediction becomes the reality for most people. I bet if you surveyed people, most would think Arctic ice is already at a record low due to the stories about the predictions that it will and written to look like fact by the media.
Thank G— for the internet.

Reading the details in the scientists interviewed in the “Arctic Ice Will Melt This Year” articles, I noticed that those interviewed said the odds were 50-50. A cute way to set yourself up for a win whichever way it happens. But the layperson reading only remembers something about the Arctic ice is melting. Clever.

It will all be gone by August 15.
Or September 23.
Or as soon as NASA gets one of their crack Imaging Teams to “adjust” the raw data from AQUA.

The problem with the failure of predictions is that the failure is never acknowledged. Instead it is explained away as resulting from some heretofore unknown ‘human influenced process’ that caused the prediction to fail. The underlying theory is proclaimed ‘correct’ even though prediction after prediction fails. Or, in some cases, mind boggling statistical procedures (some unique and never before seen) that ‘prove’ the actual observed result is actually within acceptable distributional limits.

The lowest amount of arctic sea ice almost always occurs around mid September so we’ve got a ways to go yet. It is obvious that the western Arctic sea melts more than the eastern due to warmer currents coming through the Bering Staits and since we have not yet reached the annual high temps for that water, more melting is sure to come. More melting from ocean currents that is, not air temperature.

Terry S (15:17:44) :
Theres an article here from the BBC which, if you didn’t know any better would, make you think the arctic melt this year was ahead of last year.
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard several ‘experts’ on the radio news proclaiming the impending doom. As a regular oberver of this site (Thanks, Anthony for your work, and hope you and yours are safe), I either laugh or shout back at the radio (headphones on, observers think the mailman’s whacked).

I guess we’ll have to wait to September. June is the arctic ice at it’s peak, after all.

eideard,
Do drop by and see what happens in September or whatever. The ice status was bloged in an objective manner despite your implications. If you read more, you’ll see that the site’s creator IS skeptical of AGW hype but not ideologically married to an outcome. Nature is exciting and may confound all who read here yet. Stay tuned.

Another excellent entry Anthony. I look forward to the experts eating crow (although I know they won’t). So far, according to Steve McIntyre, there’s more ice right now on this date in the Arctic than any year since 2004.

As you are well aware Anthony and perhaps many people who visit this site – but just a heads up: One has to be careful when looking at visible satellite imagery – it can be easy to confuse ice with cloud, particularly low cloud cover due to very similar albedos and in this picture it looks like there may be considerable cloud cover. Tom in Florida gave a very nice link. Also Environment Canada’s ice centre site gives a limited picture of sea ice coverage and departures from normal:
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/App/WsvPageDsp.cfm?ID=1&Lang=eng

Here’s the graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center showing the time of the peak ice four months ago {March 10}:
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/200804_Figure2.png
From that first image at the top of this post it looks to me like there’s large coverage of high albedo clouds, sure to lessen ice melt while present. Should be interesting to see how the melt proceeds to its average max in two months {Sep}.

Looks like a lot of ice to me. But not I’m not a former vice president, so what do I know?

Fred Colbourne,
I agree that the satellite image of polar ice means relatively little in providing evidence of climatic change. But does mean a lot to counter misinformation as recently appeared in the press, like so-and-so thinks that there is a 50% percent probability that the ice will disappear over the North Pole this year. It is like a meteorologist saying that there is a 50% probability of rain over the next 24 hours. What it means that he has absolutely no idea whether it is going to rain or not.

But what about the children penguins??!?
…and in other news, still no sunspots…

There is about 4 more weeks of melt left and the daily melt rate should decline later this week as sun angle begins to decline at an increasing rate. Ice cover hits minimum around August 15th, stays at about that low for about a month or so and then starts to increase about the middle of September.
We have probably already passed maximum daily melt rates for this year. The arctic seems a lot more cloudy than it was last year.

Thanks for this. I had a very disturbing conversation with a niece last week. She is in high school and the indoctrination she is getting in the classroom is beyond belief. She was incredulous when I disputed her statement that “all the ice is melting.”
When I stated some facts and pointed to some references like this one she asked with astonishment; “But the teachers wouldn’t teach us something that is just wrong?” I could not answer that.
The postscript from her amused mother, my sister, was pragmatic; “Uncle Dean might be right but you can’t answer that way in school, or you won’t pass your exams.”

Side Note: Bob Tisdale has some interesting grahps today under the lead-line: The Correlation Between Temperature and Precipitation: Can’t Find One
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/

Wyatt,
Not very up to date. For those betting we’re gonna reach last year’s lows, you’d better be hoping for a mjor arctic heat wave. Similar to Leon’s link:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Still it’s gotten and has been quite warm in Siberia: http://www.findlocalweather.com/weather_maps/temperature_north_asia.html

Wyatt A: needs to be updated to mid-July 08. Will look very different.
(1 million Km2 plus over 2007)
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg

As I mentioned a week or so ago, chances are only 8% that last year’s lows will be reached – that according to one German institute. (IN ENGLISH):
http://www.awi.de/de/forschung/fachbereiche/klimawissenschaften/mitteilungen/arctic_sea_ice_in_summer_2008_an_outlook/

Roger,
That’s just how I have to advise my son (who is sceptical all by himself ie. without any prompting from me).
The orthodoxy here in the Land of Oz is hard-over AGW – and we are about to have an emission trading scheme so we can “lead the way”……

Gosselin: Personally I think Gore will bump out Arnold.
That’s a toss up for which would be worse.
There’s a story by AP reporter Scott Lindlaw which perfectly reflects what happens when the Climate Change lobby buys off the media…
Heavy rains complicate Calif. firefighting efforts …
water falling from the skys measured in inches is supposed to in no way help fighting forest fires. Only in climate change media could you hope to find this sort of thicket of shutes and ladders Rube Goldbergian pretzel like spin of what would normally be considered outstandingly great news.
Any thinking person can spot the contorted logic employed by this propagandistic hack, but the majority audience for this cowflop of a story don’t live in California so they won’t know that onshore flow of cold ocean air is the 100% best news that Cali firefighters could get.
[snip – libelous statement there, tone it down please – Anthony]

On last season of Deadliest Catch, where they fish for crab. The entire harbor (in the Alleutian Islands) was iced over and nearly crushed one of the fishing boats. Other boats had to hastily pull their equipment out of the water as ice advanced faster than anyone expected. Since this is on the Discovery Channel (which is alway pimping Green this Gree that) Im suprised they didnt ask the crews what they thought about the Global Warming crises and they were using sledge hammers to knock several inches of ice off their boats to prevent them from rolling over and sinking.

This enitre “waiting for Godot” mentality has become quite boring. It is now big entertainment for those in the AGW camp to write stories, publish studies and generally fill the airways with tripe concerning the melting ice cap(s). The same thing occured in 2005-2006 concerning tropical cyclones, and when Mother Nature refused to cooperate, that faucet was shut-off quickly and a new faucet was turned on -namely the melting artic ice cap (or whatever they call it these days). So now from May through September the world must stop all activity as the Alarmists wait and hope against hope that for just a few hours the Northwest Passage might open up. One can just imagine the headlines on Drudge. In the meantime, scientists at the cryosphere and other insititutions will adjust the ice coverage and worry over the thinness of the ice, and perhaps a few oceanographers could say the Gulfstream is weakening and the sea levels are rising 100,000 times faster than the IPCC forecasted.
Most people forget this was all brought about when surface temp anomalies didn’t do what they’re suppose to do (flattened or went negative), and the next El Nino event is still at least a year out. How can an Alarmist alarm people with flat graphs, mild summers, and cold winters? For not even Hansen has the nerve to blame the California fires and drought on AGW (however, I wouldn’t put it past him saying that AGW causes more extreme La Ninas).
If the next El Nino fails to materialize by next summer, look for some other phenomena (maybe coral bleaching) that will be used to hammer the masses. The folks at Hadely, NASA, and the UN are a very persistent bunch and barring any rapid drop in global temperatures can keep the narrative going until something like El Nino gives them a boost.

“I find that quite shocking.”
I’m guessing that you don’t have kids in school. Public schools these days more resemble indoctrination centers, than they do institutes of learning.
REPLY: As a fromer school board member in a California Public School District, I can vouch for that. Even the textbook system is rigged to prevent choosing an alternate of the “approved list” – Anthony

Lucy Skywalker writes:
“We do have a population issue;”
Actually, we don’t.

Last night I made the mistake of watching the first episode of Planet Earth: The biography.
The author made the claim that the reason the earth was at all inhabitable billions of years ago, when the sun was 30% less bright than it is today, was because of CO2 in the atmosphere. (No mention of the half dozen other factors that have been discussed here.)
In a further effort to prove the power of CO2, he pointed to Mars and Venus. Mars, he declared, is cold because it doesn’t have enough CO2, and Venus is hot because it has too much.
I stopped watching at that point, and I won’t be bothering with the rest of the episodes.
My recollection is that Mars has an atmosphere about 1% as dense as the Earth’s. It’s also almost mostly CO2. If that is the case, the Mars actually does have about as much CO2 as does the earth. It’s all the other gasses that are missing.

JP
I’ve been hearing lots about ocean acidification lately.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
Shows that there is nearly 1 million MORE square KM of sea ice in the arctic this day than on the same day last year. Then the AGW’s complain that it is thin, one year old ice…Well DUH…it was WATER last year…how is it supposed to be older ice?

Pierre, Vincent,
I posted the most recent anomally (july 08, which I think is the current month). I was busy this weekend and thought that the curve explained itself; which was a mistake. The plot shows that this year’s loss is diverging from last year’s. A few weeks ago when the curves were closer, the predictions of an impending massive melt made their way into the papers. I think the latest variance curve that I posted (reposted below) shows a growing deivation from last years “record melt”.
Arctic Sea Ice Comparison
This should mean more ice for my Mojitos, right?

Paul Clark – This website updates the daily sea ice extent figures each evening (10:00 pm Eastern).
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
The daily sea ice data back to 2002 is also included in a nice readable Excel/CSV spreadsheet.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/plot.csv

Maybe someone could answer a somewhat related question for me. If the glaciers, snow and ice are melting like “they” are saying at the poles and across the globe, and knowing that global temps haven’t gone up in the last ten years (in fact have gone slightly down), and knowing that ice and snow reflect sunlight, helping to cool the planet (I don’t know the actual impact) shouldn’t we have sped up with warming? I mean, taking it by itself, less snow and ice would mean less reflecting, which would mean exponential melting and warming right? Yet it hasn’t happened, despite their claims that we’ve had record melting everywhere. Thanks for any answers and or corrections.

lane,
I read that this weekend. What happens if SS24 hasn’t started by September, then the length of SS23 will be outside 1 std dev from the mean (SS23 is 140 months long – longest of the past 150 years and 1 std dev is 142 months)? I wonder how they’ll spin that? I think the fact that SS23 is so close to exceeding the 1STDDev line is noteworthy in itself.

I would like to make a commentary here as a native of Idaho. Do you posters know that tornadoes can and do occur in the mountainous north of Idaho? We have been getting either confirmed tornadoes or visual evidence of funnel clouds since the late 1980s. Up and until then, Idaho, especially in the Panhandle was never really known for tornadic activity. For such severe weather to occur in this part of the state, and we get tornadoes at least once a year or tornado like conditions at least once a year, means that there is climate change. I will also add, that being a native of Idaho, and esp. of the panhandle of the region, I have seen “record snow falls” and “record cold” but that the last “record snow fall” that we had where snow levels in the valleys were 5 feet or better, we did not have a “record cold” to go with it. IE subzero weather. That was back in 1968/1969. As far as I know, where I live in Dalton Gardens, Idaho; we did not have any subzero temps in January to April though we had a lingering winter during the same time period. So, while you guys are gloating over how the greenies got it wrong on “climate change” we who live in the weather corridors of the nation have seen:
disastrous flooding.
tornado outbreaks occurring in January and February.
record heat waves and high pressure zones on the east coast that kept storms backed up from the northwest to the midwest and pummeling the midwest in particular with “100 year floods.”
a Santa Ana style wind that rolled through the Inland northwest last week that picked up blazes in Washington state and caused a lot of damage depending where you were in the region.
As someone who has seen weather taking bizarre turns in the state where I live, I wouldn’t discount too quickly the facts of climate change.

jeh 15
So, history started when?
The house I’m livingin now sits on the site where it’s predecessor was blown away by a Tornado in 1895. We’ve had rough weather recently, while we had relatively mild weather during the 70’s and 80’s.
Cycles.

As someone who has seen weather taking bizarre turns in the state where I live, I wouldn’t discount too quickly the facts of climate change. And just what might those “facts” be, Jeh15? Yes, climate changes. Continually. We know. The question is, is it caused by man, though? No, it isn’t. And that’s a fact worth considering on your part.

By the way, looks like there is a lot less ice on the North Poll than existed in prior years. You’ve missed the point entirely, Jeh15. Did you even read the article? The rate of melting has slowed so that is far behind last years’, making the alarmist cries of a possible ice-free North Pole this year look ridiculous (which indeed all of their claims are). As for the North Poll, I hadn’t heard of that – was it a poll of polar bears?

Jeh15,
I would guess that in your neck of the woods, very cold Maritime Polar Air aloft during the winter and spring months could trigger an occaisonal funnel cloud. With last year’s moderate-strong La Nina, the polar jetstream was very strong, and very moist/cold air aloft advected into the interior of the Rockies. If the 500mb temps dropped to say -40 deg C and if you factor in the upslope affect of the mountains, you have the ingredients for some pretty intense convection. This is pretty rare for Idaho, but last winter was something you don’t see every year. I heard that the ski slopes were still open in Idaho as late as May, and that some of the higher mountain passes were still being plowed out in June.

Jeh15
You talk like climate change is some kind of a new phenomena that had never existed before.
No one is doubting that the climate is changing. What we doubt is the ridiculous claim that it was static until we came along and caused it to change.
Yes it has changed in the Idaho panhandle, and the rest of the world. That’s normal! It’s natural. It’s as green as anything can be.
Climate is always changing. And we are not going to be able to put a thermostat on it.
Finally, why is it that whenever people like you are presented with data that indicates no crisis, you absolutely have to refuse to believe it?
Why is it for you people the only true science is science that calls for the end of the world? Why can’t your life mean anything without a coming doomsday?
All you people do is insist the end of the world is coming. That’s all you want to believe. Optimism makes your stomach roll, doesn’t it?
You need a slap or two in the face…to wake you up from that spell or hypnosis Gore has on you. Think for yourself!
Again I probably wasted 10 minutes of my time responding to you brainwashed zombies.

All I know is you can send some of that ice down here to Folsom California because it is hot and the fires around the area send in more and more smoke.
http://www.folsomnative.wordpress.com

Evan,
And your one trillion dollar solution is??

Regardless we have to make a change and the faster we do it, the more time we have for it to take effect.

@jeh15
Listen my friends and you shall hear
Of the year the winds blew and rain was dear
It was the summer of 65
And few remember the sand that darkened the sky
The basin that the Columbia drains
Had not received spring nourishing rains
The sand blew and covered the roads
The tumbleweeds flew through towns in droves
Wildfires burned out of control
Despite the efforts of the fire patrol
The needed rains finely did arrived
Allowing the basin to survive
What appears to be unusual weather may not be that unusual.

Ice melts from the bottom up, you can’t tell from this type of picture how much ice has melted.

We really should spend our trillions on a really humongous evaporative swamp cooler on the west coast…………….or would that heat things up if there’s more moisture in the air? I’m so confused.

Anthony, have you see this, the Russians are leaving the North Pole due to early melting, as always due to global warming.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/07/14/polar.station.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

That is a great idea. If you’re taking requests, put one of those babies between Victoria, Texas and old man Sol.

sung to “Jean” by Oliver.
Pam, Pam, roses are red
and some of the hairs on your head.
And your eyes, I can’t say
but your last name is Gray.
I sure have fun with your name.
Pam, Pam, you’re young and alive
since nineteen and fifty five.
And you’ll live evermore
if I know what’s in store
for a bonny lass
named Pam Gray.

Pierre/Bill/Aaron,
Thanks for the comments/links. Anyone know of anything before 2002?
Paul

Evan,
I think that there was a study released recently showing the whole ‘mirrors in space’ thing was not workable.
Sad part is I usually remark to myself, “I need to remember where this is in case it comes up in conversation”. But I never seem to remember where I save this stuff. I have great empathy for squirrels as I grow older.

MarkW (07:01:42) 14 July says (to me): I’m guessing that you don’t have kids in school.
No. Four out; next generation a couple years to start; but in hindsight I feel my “shocking” line was knee-jerk in a sense. I know this was happening way, way back, but the thought that it is still happening bolted me.

Evan Jones (20:01:04) wrote: Launch a series of satellites that deploy and maintain…
Way, way back, Evan, the Russians proposed the same with giant mirrors to warm the tundra and light the streets of their cities at night.
Just have to swing the mirrors and back at y’, Sol and show him not to mess with the Jones’ boy…

Giant mirrors in space have two problems (apart from cost): Solar wind and tidal forces. Read “Neutron Star” for the second, and a story I can’t remember the title of about solar wind. They just won’t stay where you want them. And turning something 50 km in diameter could be quite a trick. We’re talking HUGE mirrors to have any effect. Not a solution.
Putting a lid on soot emissions would help, just have to get the soot emitters to agree.
I hope that doesn’t require nukes…

Bigger and stronger storms, tornados in europe, some beaches gone in south Europe, and many other proofs. I wish that all this was only some alarmist warnings, or just talk from crazy people! However, it’s not.
Jonix, wish no more, because it’s all alarmist nonsense. Yes, it is. You need to do some research. You will find you’ve been hornswaggled by AGW alarmist hype and propaganda. Start with a history of AGW here: Global Warming: How It All Began
And here’s a good scientific (written in layman’s terms) article:
Editorial: The Great Global Warming Hoax?
Happy reading.

Evan,
The orbiting sunshade idea is not new. A few calculations. Put a sunshade (either in one piece or many little ones) at L5 (Is that the libration point between Earth and Sol?) That’s a long way away, and Sol is much bigger than Earth so you will need a sunshade of the order of the Earth’s diameter to give an annular eclipse effect. That’s 8000 miles. Take aluminium about 50 microns thick. (Let’s work in SI – easier to make orders-of-magnitude errors but easier for rough computations) So, 7000*7000*PI*0.0000000005=about 7.7 cubic kilometres, or 7,696,902,000 cubic metres of aluminium. At a density of 2600kg/cu.m that’s 20,011,945,203.367 tons (OK, technically tonnes if you want to use FFMs (Funny Foreign Measurements)) of aluminium to be chucked up to a distance that I think is one-third the way to the sun.
Are you sure this is easy?

20000/4500000000, factor by 2:
=1/225,000
ratio: how long ago NYC was covered by a mile high pile of snow divided by guess at how the earth is.
So in the geologic instant of 20,000 years, 1/225,000th of age of earth ago, we had snow from NYCity to Portland, under which nothing grew or lived or saw the sun. Then some blowhard ancester of Al Gore began boring the cave dwellers and the ice has been retreated ever since. In those days, he was griping about flint I think, and the dangers of fireplaces.

All y’alls comments are encouraging.
Sadly, “news” stopped being news. Now opinion is “news”.
More sad is how readily culture accepts opinion as news.
Reason and critical thought have been demonized.
Another step on road to tyrany. Beware.
Peaceful journeys.

There are “ocean deserts” in the sth/nth pacific/atlantic, and sth indian ocean.
the centres of these oceanic “gyres”- whirlpools with very low nutrient levels -have biological production as low as the desert regions on land.
The main reason for this is lack of the trace nutrient Iron. Required for phytoplankton.
Many trials have been done showing that 1 ton of finely ground iron powder will produce a plankton bloom of up to 1000 sq km, lasting several mths. Around 500 000 to 5 million ton of carbon sinks to the ocean floor as dead Plankton. “sequestered”.
The carbon credit payout for doing this is very lucrative.
The rest of the bloom is a huge boon for the marine foodchain.
If we also netted up the blooms with converted trawlers, the plankton would be an easy substitute for fossil oil for diesel, ethanol, plastic/chemical production.
And 1 ton of iron powder could produce 10’s of millions of tons of fuel.
Not a happy thought for big energy moguls tho- they could not monopolise and control the supply of fuel and feedstocks like they are used to doing with oil because Oil has enourmous costs to get into. Algaefuel doesn’t.
They’d much rather bring us planet destroying breeder nukes with millions of times worse than chernobyls millions dead result inevitable, and high tech/cost hydrogen. -Monopolisable energy economy.

We are in uncharted territory with the way this is unfolding. There is currently 0.25 million km more area of sea ice in the arctic than this date last year. More fractured and thinner than then. Certainly less multiyear ice, and the opening of clear water around the top of Greenland and the nth Canadian islands is significant.
The most significant factor on how this season will unfold is probably the effect on the gulf streams drawing of warmer water to the arctic thru the nth sea that the current scenario will have. Either:
-The current will slow or stall, subduction blocked by a surface pool of fresher, lighter water from the ice melt. A cooler euro-summer and possible temporary reversal in the arctic melting trend resulting.
-Or the Meltwater may become insignificant on the thermo-haline density gradient if the ice has dropped below the volume where the extensive wind/wave mixing now happening all over the polar basin eliminates haline density differences. The gulfstream could then accelerate, driven by the anticlockwise polar wind circulation. If this happens then we might see an arctic whirlpool, with the currents subducting “plughole style” at the nth pole. This happened for around 24hrs a month ago. If that became established there would be a dramatic polar, nthern warming from the increased heat transfer nth on the currents and a big risk that the buffering of sea level that the deep ocean side of the circulation system(water around 4C, warming causes contraction, offseting the expansion of warming surface waters) provides. If deep ocean water starts getting over 5C then rapid and unstable sealevel change as has been standard in some past epochs is probable.

There’s been an acceleration in melting in the last 2 weeks.
We are now back to very near the same total arctic sea ice area as this date last year.
Still more fractured, spread out, thinner and less mass of ice than last year this date.