In fact, to measure climate warming one must use the maximum winter ice extent, as it is the only way to remove short term (intra-annual) effects, generally known as weather.

this is simply falser. there IS a reduction in winter ice. just not as much as in all other seasons.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg

why would “weather” have a bigger impact on summer than on winter?

One must remove these affects in order to talk about global warming affects on that melt, if you can find any. The problem with that is that any remaining melt assumed to be the result of AGW would be smaller than the error bars, making it proof of the null hypothesis: that AGW does not have a significant affect on summer melt. Any statement to the contrary cannot be supported by accepted scientific statistical analysis.

the TREND in summer ice is longer than 2007. the claim that it is 100% of a “wind effect” is wild, at best.

It is time for those that make unsubstantiated claims to come to terms with long-standing gold standard analysis of real-time noisy data that determines measurement error bars so that the tiny affects will no longer be touted as proof of anything. If measures of anything rise above or below the error bars, then we can have a debate as to why. There is an old doctor saying: pay attention to the first encountered pathology prior to digging deeper. The summer melt of late has its cause. That cause has been proposed and accepted by the very pervayers of data we often disparage (NSIDC) and the AGW camp loves. Winds and oceanic currents.

i am pretty shocked by this statement. it is a serious misrepresentation of the facts.

It is in no way a misrepresentation of the facts. The misrepresentation is to use the summer sea ice extent as it it were the only measure of Artic sea ice.

You then make this misrepresentation by posting a graph of annual Arctic sea ice showing a trend as if it supports your point, which it doesn’t because the trend results from summer sea ice extent, not winter sea ice extent.

looking at the WINTER area, is an attempt to mislead. winter area will not show the full effect, because the arctic sea is surrounded by land.

Your point here, poorly explained I might add, is that the land that mostly surrounds the Artic Ocean limits the extent of winter sea ice and hence winter reductions in sea ice will be limited.

Let’s call this the accident of geography argument.

Firstly, we have no way of verifying this because we don’t have another Arctic Ocean without this geographic constraint to compare against.

Secondly, the Arctic Ocean isn’t completely surrounded by land, and any winter melt should be found in the large areas not surrounded by land such as where the Arctic Ocean meets the North Atlantic.

There is no significant winter melt trend in these areas.

In fact, to measure climate warming one must use the maximum winter ice extent, as it is the only way to remove short term (intra-annual) effects, generally known as weather.

Well maybe there is NO sea ice on land NOW… but there used to be…

See this overlay an comments from Steve Keohane:

“Regarding another popular depiction of NH ice, I spent a little time on Cryosphere the other day and noticed something odd in comparing 12/20/80 to 12/22/08 NH ice extent. Hudson Bay and the outlet of Ob river in Russia, the boot-shaped inlet next to the arctic, appeared larger in the 1980 plat. I took the landmass/shoreline from 1980 and overlaid it on the 2008 plat, and got this:

http://i44.tinypic.com/330u63t.jpg

The Arctic and Bering Seas appear to have been encroached upon, ie. made smaller. The white adjacent to the shoreline is the current snow/shoreline, and shows the loss of available ’sea’ area for ice. I think that the representation of the river Ob’s outlet is more realistic on the 2008 shoreline, but previously a much greater extent of ice was measured there. There are extensive areas off eastern Russia that used to be measured for ice extent but now are designated ’snow’, as is much of the shoreline of the whole arctic….
Please note that I retained the star background in all images, and used their pixels for image registration. At full size, I see no perturbation of those pixels from one image to the other, and therefore assume they are correctly registered.”

I would also add increased volcanic activity because if it is true that land volcanic activity increases during low solar activity, that must also apply to sub-sea level volcano.

Apparently, icebreaker activity would also play a very important role in the breakup of the summer ice. I thnk the Russians did a study on this. It makes sense that the ice reforming at the back of icebreakers is not as strong as that that was there before it was broken and mixed with salted water.

If Mr Watts will not be gratuitously insulted by the comparison, he probably represents ‘the Fat Man’ in THOG, whose first rule in THOG was: ‘Do Nothing!’ He played the game by his own rules, he retained sanity within medicine, but wanted his young interns to take the right decisions for their own lives, rather than conform for conformity’s sake. He was loved and admired by all those who remained human within that crucible……

There are many lessons for climate scientists to learn from THOG. Nothing to do with climatology, a lot to do with how a bunch of very intellectually intelligent, ambitious, driven people reject emotional humanity to the detriment not only of their own lives but of those they sought to serve.

I still think that the 21st century will see some warming due to the 75 year long-term peak of solar activity in the 20th century. There may be some short-term cooling as well if solar activity continues to decline. And if Yellowstone or Alaska goes ker-splat, then we might have more than we bargained for.

But at least these guys are discussing everything. Not having attended and not being a specialist, I can’t be sure of their conclusions at third hand, but the first rule of good science and public policy is to understand all the variables. And to do that, you have to be both aware of them and prepared to understand their contributions in a variety of scenarios.

Perhaps hosting this soon in Europe may help to balance the rhetoric coming out of Copenhagen, eh?

well, the model of the glass is pretty accurate in the most important point: arctic is enclosed by land. there is NO sea ice on land.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.some.000.png

there is a serious limit to WINTER sea ice area.

so it is no surprise, that the effect of the warming is stronger on SUMMER sea ice.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg

using the winter sea ice area is misleading. it doesn t contradict that “Arctic sea ice is disappearing”

1. latitude address and land interactions,
2. various oceanic warm and cold currents that are well known in the Arctic and elsewhere,
3. the variably swirling vortex of wind that moves around the pole (so to speak) as it interacts with
4. the main flow of the jet stream, and
5. seasonal axial tilt

If you study and follow these ice producing and melt condition parameters, you might come to a different conclusion as to what causes trends in both ice thickness, area, extent, and melt in the Arctic ice area. Regarding your example of the frozen water in the glass (which is simplistic but point taken), ice melt in the Arctic melts in a way nothing like the glass enclosed ice, nor does it grow and thicken in any way similar to your example.

i am pretty shocked by this statement. it is a serious misrepresentation of the facts.

thae arctic sea ice area is showing a significant [downward trend](http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/trend).

looking at the WINTER area, is an attempt to mislead. winter area will not show the full effect, because the arctic sea is surrounded by land.

here is a simple experiment: put a glass full of water into the freezer for a short time. you will have a thin layer of ice. now leave it for a day. all the water will be frozen. Monckton is claiming, that because the frozen “area” is the same, there is no difference between the two situations.

“There was no climate crisis, there is no climate crisis and there will be no climate crisis”, he said. “The correct solution to global warming is to have the courage to do nothing”.

this conclusion is obviously based on false assumptions.

“Dr Sununu advised his audience to recognize that the climate change issue will never go away, no matter how much the false alarmism of global warming is exposed. The reason is that global warming is not the real target, but just a convenient demon around which anti-growth and anti-development activism can be mounted.”

Indeed, we need to always remember this when faced with another preposterous alarmist claim. Remembering this will allow us to better frame any response.

Yes. To put it in layman’s terms, Milkankovitch pointed out that if the heat is more evenly distributed (warmer winters, cooler summers) that occurs with lower eccentricity (more regular orbit) and less obliquity (axial tilt), there is far less ice melt during summer and therefore much greater albedo (reflection of sunlight back into space) overall, and this results in ice-age conditions.

The part when Lord Monckton, in his big speech at the end, singled out Anthony Watts for particular praise!