The recession accounts for the long drop of the year before the news day.

The 10% in one day (mid day, it ended a bit over 11%) is all news / event driven. This is off topic, but day trades are all news and event driven. Long trend trades are driven by major cyclical shifts like recessions.

Stock prices are fractal, you have to pick your time period and the time period specific factors that drive that period. For example, during boom years you would have a long term (secular) up trend to a retailer like Macy’s. Cold Christmas shopping season news would STILL cause a day-trade down, it would just ‘correct’ to the upside in following days.

Good job on trying to explain the puzzle. When I saw the plots at NANSEN, with ice extent decreasing while area remained mostly flat, I figured it had to be strong storms/wind/current holding back the expansion of ice extent with ice being compacted.

Looks like everyone’s been puzzled by this little oddity, even the folks at NSIDC. Here’s a posting at Roger Pielke Sr.’s website with feedback by NSIDC’s Mark Serreze. Seems they’ve been checking around to confirm the data they’ve been getting.

http://climatesci.org/2008/12/23/update-by-mark-serreze-on-current-sea-ice-coverage/

The stop in expansion that began Dec 10 seems to have finally ended. Data at IARC-JAXA is finally showing increase in the AMSR-E Sea Ice Extent, beginning Dec 21 and increasing even more Dec 22.

And for everybody out there, have a very Merry Christmas!

Great site Anthony. I too am obsessed and spend way too much time reading/learning from it. Do my best to increase your numbers by spreading the URL and my enthusiasm for it.

Happy Christmas to all.

I can attest to that. I live in France too. This is one of first sites I look at in the morning.

Happy New Year to all

Thanks again for the best blog in the world – to date. May it may itself redundant as quickly as possible! BTW, if you want to learn some of the basics of Climate Science and the debate – visit us here and in our forum that has grown in no small measure due to Anthony’s pioneer work. In a year I’ve changed from 200% committed AGW to… well… humbler, wiser, much more scientifically knowledgeable, and still hopeful. Thank you community too.

And congratulations to the website for achieving a high audience.

“Heard on the Biz news – worst weather (coldest, snowiest) during the shopping season in 20 years in the North East.

This is an important metric, what retail stocks do, like Macy’s M or Penny’s JCP, are directly driven by the weather during the Christmas shopping season. It is watched very closely by retail stock traders. Fewer folks go out to shop in the cold and snow; and Lord help the retailer who stocks to few (or two many) warm coats in cold (or warm) weather… M is down ~10% mid day on this news, for example.”

Move South … its still a mild and (grey climate) but no need to heating … not seen decent snow or ice for 10 years .,… but at least this year spring plants have had the decency to wait until January to appear.

Here’s my Christmas message to you. Santa is alive and well, and his kidnapping by Greenpeace was a (another) hoax ….

http://gpsinformation.info/main/merryxmas.swf

“… the unproven hypothesis that human produced CO2 is causing warming and or climate change. The evidence is based solely on the output of 18 computer climate models selected by the IPCC. There are a multitude of problems including the fact that every time they run them they produce different results. They use an average of all the runs. The IPCC then take the average results of the 18 models and average them for the results in their Reports.”

” Atmosphere and oceans are fluids governed by non-linear rather than linear equations. These equations have unpredictability or randomness – also known as chaos – it explains why the models get different results every time they are run. These problems well known outside of climate science were specifically acknowledged in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” (TAR, p.774.)”

“It is hard to imagine a better example of Beadle’s axiom paraphrased as follows, “Half the work done by the IPCC is to make things appear what they are not.”

I hope in some little way I have helped you get some of these numbers. I link to this site all the time when I’m arguing AGW with ecofascists.

In their honor, I made up an Eco game… http://giovanniworld.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/new-eco-game-hits-the-net/

Gio-

Looked at the ice data on http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=12&fd=11&fy=2008&sm=12&sd=21&sy=2008 and chopped out the view for Hudson Bay and west Greenland, North Atlantic and the Bearing straits.

It looks like ice grew in Hudson Bay and West of Greenland, moved around but about the same area (by eye) in the bearing straits and fell back some in the Eastern North Atlantic. See image at http://gallery.me.com/wally#100002/Ice%2012-11_12-21&bgcolor=black

So a flat curve for total ice does not appear out of line. If you note from winter of 08 there was some strong dips in the total ice area.