Comments on: Historic Variation in Arctic Ice

By: John F. Hultquist

John F. Hultquist — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:46:45 +0000

7/28/09 Also just read this. Great material. Glad there was the link back.

By: David Ball

David Ball — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:51:27 +0000

TonyB , I have just come across this thread. I do not know how I missed it. I may have been traveling. An amazing read . Superlative. I thoroughly enjoy your writing, and the subject matter speaks to me. Just so you know, I have had the opportunity to read the actual documents in the Hudson’s Bay archive. Can you imagine wintering over in Fort York in the late 1600′s? People whine when their house is not 70 f ! It is too bad that more people don’t appreciate history. Great stuff!!

By: P. Jones

P. Jones — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 07:42:51 +0000

Outstanding historical data Tony, my deepest thanks for your efforts in affirming seasonal shifts in ice concentrations. I had the opportunity to work at the U.S. Navy Polar Oceanography Center for 6 years. Maybe you remember “DIFAS”? In that time, each Friday the Scientists provided a brief that seasonal ice expansion and contraction was within historical “Mean”. I often wondered why and how cyclical events never seem to make into the minds of the alarmist who would use “Global Warming” or “Climate Change” as a weapon of fear. By the way, I know first hand that those Scientist considered Al Gore to be a “Moron” of epic proportion.

By: TonyB

TonyB — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:24:04 +0000

Thanks for the many kind comments about my article. I am working on the next article which is a look back in time from 1750 through the Vikings and Ipatuk to the ‘virtually ice free’ arctic of 5000 years or so ago.

In that connection there were some very interesting links including from Tommoriarty that will help

Bill; The period from around 1715 to 1735 had many similarities to today in as much there was a considerable period of warmth. It may be possible to pick it up from historic records as an arctic oscillation to match the 1817-1860 warming and the 1920-1940 warming.

Dr Potter: I mentioned there were some great books on the Arctic and if anyone would care to click on his name they will find much fantastic material

Frank; Glad it went well with your interview

Pamela; Fascinating idea. Have you got access to a couple of million in funds so we can do a joint study? :)

Roger Carr. Apparently each bow head whale contained the equivalent of 100 barrels of oil. I saw a defunct whale fishery in Iceland once and it is extraordinary as to the effort we placed on harvesting these magnificent creatures.

Tonyb

By: Pamela Gray

Pamela Gray — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:47:18 +0000

Of course, sea ice is a time-limited item. But not ice sheet core rings nearby. I wonder if there would be a match.

By: Pamela Gray

Pamela Gray — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:45:09 +0000

Ice core rings are like tree rings. Once you find out that tree rings have a pattern of slow years of growth and then fast years of growth, you can begin to look at other similar patterned oscillations, like salmon, algae blooms, and the PDO. The PDO was inadvertently discovered when salmon catch was correlated to ship’s logs about sea temperature. Algae blooms and tree rings match PDO oscillations. What else might show a match? Because measured PDO temps match measured tree rings, a proxy for PDO became available that when far back in modern time. Tree rings now allow a proxy PDO back to the 17th century. What would ice rings say if they were to be compared against this proxy PDO?

By: Roger Carr

Roger Carr — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:16:38 +0000

My only concern about these reports is that most of them were from people funded by Big (Whale) Oil…

By: Steve (Paris)

Steve (Paris) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:24:52 +0000

And as an added bonus I have just discovered the music of Stan Rogers. Just maxed out my ITunes budget for the month.

By: Frank Lansner

Frank Lansner — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:29:40 +0000

Hi Tony, fantastic and useful work! ! !
Thankyou.

I promised to tell how it went with the television take for Danish Television:
I made one argument come through: CO2 comes after temp and not vice versa.
Then Danish television tried to have i professor at DanishTechincalUniversity respond to this little problem. The professor respondet that the Vostok data is “old data”, which is nonsence. Ín other words, the professot could not answer and came up with the first the best answer.

But i was not allowed to say much more. But it was OK!!

K.R. Frank

By: Dr. Russell A. Potter

Dr. Russell A. Potter — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:09:33 +0000

I was a participant in the documentary you mention, and had a chance to talk with Roy Koerner inbetween takes as we were standing on the ice out on Resolute Bay. Koerner, who died last year, was probably the most experienced glaciologist in Canada, besides having been a member of Sir Wally Herbert’s trans-polar trek in 1968-69 and therefore among the first men ever to reach the Pole on foot. While the documentary doesn’t misquote him, it does take his work out of context; Roy told me that the kinds of cores he studied from the 1840′s were very compact ones (that is, ones in which the years are quite close together) and that his conclusions about Franklin should taken with a possible error rate of +/- 5 years. Overall, however, the glacial climate record does show a generally colder period then.

Dr. Russell A. Potter

By: ralph ellis

ralph ellis — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 11:15:33 +0000

>>>if you’re doing an experiment, you should report
>>>everything that you think might make it invalid–not
>>>only what you think is right about it

Trouble is, we have become too commercial, too results-based. A failure in your experiment may be deemed to be a detriment to funding and therefore a possible failure of your career, so the temptation is to skew the results (especially if those results agree with government thinking).

Thus the potential for scientific fraud is becoming ever more likely.

By: redneck

redneck — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:50:09 +0000

One summer when I was in the Arctic I met a fellow who was working on trying to trace the route that some members of the Franklin Expedition took south in an attempt to return to civilization after their ships had frozen in. The route was traceable from various items like life boats, guns, sheets of lead (for making bullets) and other things that these men carried with them and dropped along the way. The fellow I met remarked that the most obvious marker of the route were human leg bones. He theorized that as these men were surviving by engaging in canabalism when a man died the others dined on their dead companion and then hacked off the legs which they carried with them to be eaten at a later date. Pretty gruesome stuff.

Somewhat less gruesome is Stan Rogers song The Northwest Passage,

By: J. Peden

J. Peden — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:38:11 +0000

Thanks, Tony B, there’s nothing like hearing from some well-written first hand, unbiased observers.

starzmom (18:31:41) :

Great article!

Regarding the Franklin expedition, I recall reading a book about them..They apparently died of lead poisoning, due to the lead solder in the tinned food they carried.

Yes, I was wondering if this expedition was the one I read about in a “throwaway” medical journal ~20 years ago and it probably is. As I recall, the expeditioneers dragged their life boats behind them for some distance after they abandoned their frozen-in ships.

The article was essentially quite well done “color” for the journal, which also contained many very useful medical articles, free, and NOT Peer Reviewed. I received dozens of such journals, and many were very good sources of info.

By: Philip_B

Philip_B — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:20:11 +0000

The ice which has this year surrounded the northern coast of Ireland ( see footnotes1) in unusual quantity and remained there unthawed till the middle of August That's a typo. It should be Iceland.

By: Austin

Austin — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 02:49:32 +0000

There is a lot of ethnographic evidence that the Arctic was nearly ice free 3-4K years ago. The legends of the Eskimos about Indian raids and the herding they used to do.

Closer to today are the oral legends of the Vikings and the Irish.