There’s plenty of stories about how Arctic sea ice is now “rotten”. There’s darn few that talk about yearly comparisons or what other scientific outlets are saying about the claim.
As many WUWT readers know, 2007 was the minimum year of summer extent in sea ice, a year that is routinely held up as a cause for alarm. Another cause for alarm has been the “decline of multi-year sea ice”. Most recently we’ve gotten claims of “rotten ice” in the news media. That “rotten” ice is “duping the satellites” they say. This all from one fellow, Dr. David Barber on aĀ ship that took a short expedition in the Arctic and observed what he called “rotten ice”. Here’s Dr. Barber using the poster child for sea ice loss in aĀ presentation.
Seems that his “rotten” message resonated, even the media in Alaska (who can observe sea ice on their own) are saying it: New study: Arctic ice is rotten (Anchorage Daily News)
Over at the Greenbang Blog, they say that: āRottenā sea ice creates false impression of Arctic recovery
They cite:
Satellite data in 2008 and 2009 appeared to indicate that Arctic sea ice cover had started to grow again after reaching a record low, leading some to claim that global warming was reversing. However, University of Manitoba researcher David Barber found that wasnāt the case after he viewed the ice firsthand this September from an ice breaker travelling through the southern Beaufort Sea.
What the satellites had identified as thick, multiyear ice, it turned out, was in fact thin, ārottenā ice, Barber and his colleagues discovered.
This apparently was the conclusion from watching Dr. Barber’s YouTube video:
You can read Barber’s study here (Word DOC file)
So if the satellites are “duped” into seeing more ice than actually exists, then 2007 ice must have been really, really, rotten:
Compare for yourself, here.
Looks like it has firmed up since then. So no matter how you spin it, there has indeed been improvement in sea ice in 2007. Going from “really, really rotten” in 2007 to simply “rotten” Arctic sea ice in 2009 is definitely an improvement.
One other note, if this “rotten ice” problem and satellite duping proposed by Dr. Barber is in fact real, I’d fully expect that the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) would make some sort of announcement or post a caveat about it on the “Arctic Sea Ice News and analysis” web page where they present the satellite data. I couldn’t find anything on that page about “rotten ice” or satellite data being inaccurate.
Looking further, I used a Google search for “rotten” within NSIDC’s web site (available from their search tool in the upper right of their web page) reveals no recent documents or web pages using that word. Odd.
OK maybe Cryosphere Today? Nope nothing there either.
JAXA‘s sea ice page? Their News page?Ā Not a peep.
Nansen’s Arctic ROOS sea ice page? Or their news page? All quiet on the Arctic front.
Maybe the Danish Meteorological Institute (in Copenhagen no less) sea ice page? Surely, something must be “rotten” in Denmark, no? Alas, they don’t mention it either.
Gosh, the Arctic ice is rotten, the satellites are duped, and none of the major scientific organzations that track sea ice have anything to say about it?
It seems Dr. Barber’s conclusions are being left out in the cold by his peers.
The pole is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t! What can you do to shake the conviction of these people? Rotten ice isn’t the issue here but rotten science. The only decline they should worry about is the decline in the willingness of the public to accept their spin without question.
It’s worse than we thought.
They cannot compare the “rotten” ice this year to the amount of “rotten” ice in years past, because this ad hoc theory was not around then. So to claim that “rotten” ice is a sign of climate change is unfounded.
Hudson Bay seems to be the major difference this year.
Seem like this trip was a one shot deal. No comparison to previous surveys and contrary to the Polar 8 flight. The ice is normally at its minimum (and probably its rottenest) in September. Nothing to see here, lets move along. (unless his funding is running out)
Sooo…one 2 minute utube posting from one researcher is the basis for all these news articles and facts?
I guess they’ve just abandoned peer-review altogether!
Or maybe they just want to get out a shot before cop15 is done to try to get the one world government kicked off.
The only thing rotten here is the ‘rotten ice’ theory. Ice does not rot.
There is no physical mechanism for it. It may melt (fat chance at the below zero temps up there) and it may be chewed up by constantly running ice breakers through it to see how thick it is, though š
Rotten really refers to the science of global warming advocates.
What the hell is “rotten ice”?
Sounds like a very scientific measurement. I’d also like to see Barber’s comparison of 2007 rotten ice to 2009 rotten ice to show the increase. (Thanks, Anthony for the CT comparison). This is grasping at straws and nothing else.
What’s next? Rotten ice with inferior characteristics because it lacks cultural diversity?
Anthony,
Not so sure what i’m supposed to be looking at. Does the whitish patches on the purple ice imply thinner ice? Also, neat how it looks like solid ice between Russia and Alaska, but in 2009, we seem to be missing a bit of ice north of Canada. Wonder why, also looks like Russia is also under much more snow/ice cover then 2007.
Warmist: “There’s less and less Arctic Sea ice every year.”
Skeptic: “Really, isn’t there more this year than there was in 2007?”
Warmist: “Yes, but it’s rotten.”
Wait a minute! The thick multi-year ice is disappearing but not the “thin, rotten” one???
Is it me or does this guy look disturbingly like Doc Briffa? Makeup!
So now more ice is actually less ice,
global cooling is global warming and
the people who scream repent world is going to end! are now the sane ones.
Can some one tell me when I fell into 1984?
“How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston.
Sometimes they are five.
Sometimes they are three.
Sometimes they are all of them at once.
You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
Ice is ice is ice. They should grow up and recognise when they have made a mistake,
Good reference thanks. Always nice to see another view. Barber was on Mansbridge “One on One” the other night and that gets a wide coverage. Oh well.
But a comment/question. The current image shows Hudson Bay being mainly open. I wonder if that is accurate. Comments on HB?
Will we still be hearing that the ice has completely gone … when it is still there? Seems so.
Thanks
Clive
From the frozen plains of western Canada where cold temperature records have been shattered this week. Brrrrrrrrrrr
For a lack of better scientific word, they used the word “rotten” to talk about porous ice. In any case, more “rotten” ice is still more ice. What do these guys know about ice recovery? Maybe this is how it works, by expansion first of porous ice…
Rick (10:03:17) :
The accompanying document says ‘Geophysical Letters’, In Press. I guess that journal is peer-reviewed, what do you think Rick?
Crosspatch,
I think all of the ice went over to the Bering Strait.
The PR guy for the AGW priesthood is falling asleep at the switch. “Rotten Ice” is a poor bit of jargon. They should have found the proper eskimo word for it and labeled it as “distressed”.
“”As we went further and further north, we saw less and less polar bears because this ice wasn’t even strong enough for the polar bears to stand on,””
So the ice WAS strong enough for the polar bears to stand on in the south, but the ice wasn’t strong enough as they went further and further north????
That doesn’t make any sense.
“he viewed the ice firsthand this September from an ice breaker travelling through the southern Beaufort Sea.”
I flunked geography at school but I seem to remember that the Southern Beaufort Sea lies somewhere below the 75th parallel. Would not this be the very edge of the arctic ice pack?
Would be much more convincing if he had sailed, say, event 6 or 7 degrees furrther North or perhaps the ice there wasn’t rotten enough.
In a weird way, I’m not bothered by this – it shows variance and promotes debate.
I’m a big watcher of political polling data and it’s just the same – the results change when using slightly different methodologies such as when the research calls are made [get more home-makers/retired/unemployed], past voting behaviour [again depends on the time of the call – one pollster shows a bias to the government payroll vote], intention to vote [tends to bias older voters who also tend to be more conservative in outlook], am I in a marginal seat and may vote for a candidate I don’t want to win in order to keep another which is worse?
If climate scientists applied the same level of rigour to stats that people like me apply to betting on political outcomes, perhaps we’d have a much better chance of knowing what was really going on.
Something is rotten in Denmark too
As a skeptic, I can’t say I find any comfort in this. He’s been studying it for twenty years, had thought it was recovering and now predicts it’s receding due to warming.
What’s there to crow about?
If the satellites have been “duped” … then how we we be sure that previous satellite measurements were correct?
If satellites are incorrectly reporting ice cover, then would not the people at NASA be responsible for this lack of “cover” in the ice? Or should I have used the word “cover up”?
Perhaps we see more un-justified playing with software code that the public don’t get to see? Is this another hide the decline type of deal here?
Perhaps this is just more junk coming home to roost? You can only build a house up on so many lies. Eventually Madoff ran out of incoming money to pay the outgoing money. Perhaps NASA is running out of tricks? (oh..yes..more tricks? Sounds familiar).
I mean, if they messed up from a few years ago, then how can we even decide if ice is growing or shrinking then?
If satellite are reporting open water as thick ice, then as real ice forms it would look like ice is melting! The satellite would actually be showing a decline in ice when in fact open waters are decreasing and freezing up!
If the satellite can’t tell the difference between open water as opposed to water with dirty chunks of ice in it then this does beg more questions.
This could very well be much ado about nothing, but we must always question question question, especially now since the trust between the public and the keepers of the weather let us down. In normal times, this is a non question. With so much junk science junk we seen so far, this is real question.
Green Turtle
Definition of rotten ice:
http://amsglossary.allenpress.com/glossary/search?id=rotten-ice1
“Rotten ice may appear transparent (and thus dark) when saturated with seawater and so may be easily confused with newly forming black ice.”
So it should not appear as “thick, multi-year ice” to satellites
REPLY: The satellites use microwave emissions, not visible light to measure ice. They don’t see any “color”. So black, white, purple, or polka dot colros won’t matter. – Anthony
O/T and this is a few days old, but really, really good from Dr. Gray. Might be worth a thread, eh?
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/4369/Hurricane-Expert-Rips-Climate-Fears-There-has-been-an-unrelenting-quarter-century-of-onesided-indoctrination
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Look, that ice may be made of hydrogen and oxygen, but its poisoned I tell you. Poisoned by man’s hubris. And probably CO2. Maybe a dash of oil.
Oh blimey – I wrote my last post before Mr WUWT added in a load of info – looks like there was little to prove the Prf’s case at all.
Lots of chatter about “rotten ice.”
The satellite images have always (??) shown “sea ice” as areas where at least 15 of an area has hard ice, thin ice, thick ice AND ice slush vs. rock solid. Yes? No?
If so, the “rotten ice” comments by researchers are silly as we have no comparative data. One boat can’t cover all areas can it? (Ice locations shift year to year, so one trip is meaningless. Yes?)
We can ONLY use the data from 1979 to now as a real basis for comparisons … as others have noted: who was commenting ion “rotten ice” thirty years ago. No one.
Rules keep changing to support the need to keep us alarmed.
Seems like the ultimate in cherry picking. Barber must need a few more years of grants before he retires. āŗ Seems like a nice guy.
Clive
This old Far Side sums up the Alberta weather… āŗāŗ
http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/2/d/8/63987/coldagain-0.jpg
rotten ice: Old ice that has weakened just prior to meltingāreally dangerous if you step or drive on it
http://nationalzoo.si.edu/ConservationAndScience/AquaticEcosystems/Antarctica/Glossary.cfm
Gee, just what one would expect to find in September in the Artic when sea ice reaches its lowest point of extent.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Now, if this were happening in Feb/Mar this might be news.
Is this an appeal to authority – by Barber to Barber?
Something smells rotten, and it isn’t the ice.
Travelling on an icebreaker through the Beaufort Sea, Dr. Barber was doing his part to fulfill his prophesy that arctic ice is shrinking.
Does rotten ice smell bad in summer?
First there was record low ice extent. When the ice began its recovery, the new metric became ice volume. Now that multi-year ice is increasing, they announce it’s “rotten”?
And they did this in the southern Beaufort Sea? Which is where ice usually melts every summer?
We have now gone from junk science to rotten science.
FWIW, yesterday the ice extent (as reported by JAXA) increased by 170,000 kmĀ², mostly in Hudson Bay and the Bering Sea. That was quite a bump up in the ice extent. While it may be those cold temps finally taking care of business over Hudson Bay, it was probably a reversal of the jet stream over the Bering Sea that helped its sea ice expansion. Last week the jet stream was from the southeast, helping to compress the ice. Now its from the northwest, which may serve to spread the ice out even more. The next few days should tell if that’s the case.
And we should see next year if the mantra of “rotten” sea ice is taken up as the amount of multi-year ice further increases.
I love the laid back irony of Anthony’s article. You just gotta laugh at arctich*l*s like Barber.
I get it. If extent trumps the ice model expectations, then its rotten ice. Rather like when Anthropogenic warming doesn’t happen, its being “masked” (ie, rotten warming).
Anyway, there’s no denying the fact that 2007 ice was rotten to the core. If its just been discovered, then it must have been even rottener than now. Maybe CRU could do a rotten ice parameter and trace it back to 1960, with appropriate adjustments. Proxies of course, only this time to emphasise the decline
So, a new metric needs to be manned…er..ginned up, that shows the growth of rotten ice?
Tony Brookes (10:09:24) :
Ice is ice is ice. They should grow up and recognise when they have made a mistake
Hey. You missed the point. Watch the pea under the thimble as they move the argument around.
Now it shifted to qualitative data on ice instead of quantitative data on ice.
We even have mud slides in California. Low quality rain. High quality rain serves for bottled water and washing a lady’s hair.
So, where does this playbook come from?
“The Christian Science Monitor
reported on the potential ice age
as well, on July 3, 1923. āCaptain
MacMillan left Wicasset, Me., two
weeks ago for Sydney, the jumping-
off point for the north seas,
announcing that one of the purposes
purposes
of his cruise was to determine
whether there is beginning
another āice age,ā as the advance
of glaciers in the last 70 years
would seem to indicate.ā
Then on Sept. 18, 1924, The
New York Times declared the
threat was real, saying
āMacMillan Reports Signs of New
Ice Age.ā
Yes, scientists and explorers have travelled to the Artic before looking for evidence of
what they wanted to find. And they found it. Both ways.
It sounds like he’s right but doesn’t (want to) understand what he’s seeing.
First he says that the 2007 season left highly fragmented multi-year ice. Then he says that, while he expected to see greatly expanded multi-year ice in 2009, he was surprised to see a lot of rotten ice. Finally, he explains that rotten ice is an agglomeration of multi-year ice mixed into new, thinner ice.
Did he really expect the surviving multi-year ice to grow, and for the pieces to be joined together by new, multi-year ice?
Duh! As the water refreezes, isn’t it just logical to expect the new ice to be thin, first (and second) year ice? Doesn’t multi-year ice take multiple years to grow?
Astonishing, which person can claim to be a scientist today.
Has been that “study” peer-reviewed at all?
Maybe he should see if his “rotten” category fits in the official methodology.
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/App/WsvPageDsp.cfm?Lang=eng&lnid=3&ScndLvl=yes&ID=170
I think his category would be Goose Egg.
Or maybe he could teach a new course . .
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/App/WsvPageDsp.cfm?Lang=eng&lnid=23&ScndLvl=no&ID=172
More references to ‘rotten ice’. I like the bush pilots term – ‘punky’.
rotten ice – honeycombed ice starting to melt
http://www.playfarmers.com/canadianwords.htm
Rotten Ice – In hydrologic terms, ice in an advanced stage of disintegration.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/glossary/index.php?letter=r
Punky: Rotten ice on rivers or lakes that makes landing planes dangerous, particularly in late spring or with an early or unexpected thaw. Also used to describe someone who is a little “bushwacky” or soft in the head, especially after a long winter in the bush.
http://www.icepilots.com/pilot_slang.php
Rotten ice is loose term for ice that is melting, disintegrating, or otherwise formed, having water, air or contaminants between ice grains, causing the ice to be honeycombed. It forms on open water, when snowpack and ice are mixed together and other conditions.
http://www.answers.com/topic/rotten-ice-1
As before, this is exactly what one would expect to find in September when Barber took his boat ride.
RE: Jack M (10:21:09) : Thanks for correcting me Anthony.
REPLY: Thanks for being nice about it š
Post hoc rationalisation
same as:
– recent warming changed tree ring width sensitivity to temp
– I deleted that data
– I didn’t delete that data
– the model predicted right so AGW is proven
– the model didn’t predict right because climate is complex
These scientists are all budding Einsteins
BTW, can anyone describe what the theory of catastrophic AGW is, as a set of hypotheses falsifiable by physical experiments?
As a geologist we sometimes talk about “rotten rock”–altered in some way that changes the original minerals/fabric/overall composition. I suppose if one were to alter ice in some way it could be considered “rotten ice”… The problem is, however, that the only component they’ve been talking about to make ice rotten is heat. And since H2O in the solid state is ice and, after application of more heat, in the liquid form is water, maybe he meant all that rotten water that wasn’t ice is what’s considered rotten ice. And while my argument sounds like something they’d probably cook up at the CAP in Denmark or at the Hadley CRU, no matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney. š
What is with these people and black polo (turtle) necks?
I would say that Barber’s progressive, self indulging, science, is:
Decayed, decaying, bad, bad-smelling, corroded, corrupt, crumbled, crumbling, decomposed, decomposing, disgusting, disintegrated, disintegrating, fecal, feculent, festering, fetid, foul, gross, infected, loathsome, loud, mephitic, moldering, moldy, noisome, noxious, offensive, overripe, perished, polluted, purulent, pustular, putrescent, putrid, putrified, rancid, rank, rotting, smelling, sour, spoiled, stale, stinking, strong, tainted, touched, unsound.
I imagine rotten ice refers to ice with cavities. Cavities allow meltwater to run through and can lead to sudden melting of large surface areas that previously looked solid from above.
I though this was only a ground ice issue, though. Not sea ice.
Meanwhile, in Kyopenwarmin, world leaders are rushing their arrivals, carrying buckets overflowing with “rotten” money for the developing nations, to add to their own really, really rotten money.
They’ll claim next that “rotten air” is confounding the measurment of warming by satellite.
Concerns about global cooling
continued. Swedish scientist
Rutger Sernander also forecasted
a new ice age. He headed a
Swedish committee of scientists
studying āclimatic developmentā
in the Scandinavian country.
According to the LA Times on
April 6, 1924, he claimed there
was āscientific ground for believingā
that the conditions āwhen all
winds will bring snow, the sun
cannot prevail against the clouds,
and three winters will come in
one, with no summer between,ā
had already begun.
That ice age talk cooled in the
early 1930s. But The Atlantic in
1932 puffed the last blast of Arctic
air in the article āThis Cold, Cold
World.ā Author W. J. Humphries
compared the state of the earth to
the state of the world before other
ice ages. He wrote āIf these things
be true, it is evident, therefore
that we must be just teetering on
an ice age.ā
Concluding the article he noted
the uncertainty of such things, but
closed with āwe do know that the
climatic gait of this our world is
insecure and unsteady, teetering,
indeed, on an ice age, however
near or distant the inevitable fall.ā
Oh my, yes, it can only be delayed a few years by the lack of Solar Activity, this gospel
of Inevitable Warming by Hansen, and the rotten ice proves it.
For if the edge of the Arctic Ice Pack is frothed by churning seas in that small area visited
by Barber, then the whole pack must be full of bubbles.
Scrubbing bubbles.
He viewed it from an ice breaker? He viewed broken ice *from an ice breaker*?
Well now, who could have predicted that.
So has the amount of rotten ice increased? When did it reach its minimum before increasing? When was the previous year of maximum rotten ice? If rotten ice melts is that a good thing or a bad thing?
More complete and utter rubbish. Though what else would you expect from Briffa’s brother š
This is what passes for science now.
Some guy, sea ice expert, riding an ice breaker sees what he thinks is something suspicious about the breaking ice and ponders that it could be causing a misrepresentation of the satellite sea ice talley. But only the recent sea ice talley?
Suppose he simply didn’t perceive it accurately?
Suppose areas of multi-year sea ice have always looked like that when being broken apart?
Suppose he is just another bozo making up things like other bozos have?
It’s too late now. It’s circulated the web and became science.
He’s “widely shared his prejudice and it’s turned into an irresistible authority”.
I ran across this guy and his rotten ice story last week on a Haloscan blog and for crying out loud, there’s people accepting it as conclusive and thanking him for his work?
What work? Making a video for his tall tale to be told?
This is not about truth.
This is not about science.
This is not about belief.
This is about money.
Now does it make sense?
Is he a member of the Catlin 2 team ? Or maybe he’s a member of Briffa’s Yamal team and he found one, rotten piece of ice – the most influential, rotten piece of sea ice in the world. Or just maybe, the whole Catlin team and and associates are rotten and aren’t that influential.
I watch ‘Deadliest catch’ on TV and have not yet heard those guy’s who fish the Bering sea moan about lack of Ice or global warming.
Brave lads.
vboring ‘ 10.44:
‘I imagine rotten ice refers to ice with cavities. Cavities allow meltwater to run through and can lead to sudden melting of large surface areas that previously looked solid from above.
I though this was only a ground ice issue, though. Not sea ice.’
Same here – I recall the expression ‘rotten ice’ being used by mountaineers having to choose routes over glaciers and ice hangs very carefully depending on the time of day, because the warmth of the sun, as during daylight hours, can make ice go rotten, i.e. one can’t walk on it or climb it, and the ice axes and crampons won’t hold.
That’s why they get up to a very very early start … like, in the middle of the night.
Rotten?
Yeah!:
Decayed, decaying, bad, bad-smelling, corroded, corrupt, crumbled, crumbling, decomposed, decomposing, disgusting, disintegrated, disintegrating, fecal, feculent, festering, fetid, foul, gross, infected, loathsome, loud, mephitic, moldering, moldy, noisome, noxious, offensive, overripe, perished, polluted, purulent, pustular, putrescent, putrid, putrified, rancid, rank, rotting, smelling, sour, spoiled, stale, stinking, strong, tainted, touched, unsound….climate change “science”.
It’s old and it’s rotten, the langoliers are coming
Having ice fished over the course of my life I am well aware of rotten ice. To me that means ice which lacks its hardness, most easily experience just before ice out in spring. It becomes spongy when walked upon. Think of it as ice with osteoporosis.
That rotten ice just isn’t going away!
darwin wrote: “If the satellites have been ādupedā ā¦ then how we we be sure that previous satellite measurements were correct?”
Because the rotten ice “divergence problem” only occurs in years that show recovery, specifically this year when it was noticed and corrected thus, because a recovery did not fit with overwhelming evidence of Global Warming, just as the Argo Buoy network was corrected when cooling was noticed.
“Correcting Ocean Cooling”: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php
There actually is such a term. Rotten ice is ice in the process of disintegrating. And so of course it is the normal state of ice at the edge of the icecap at the end of the melting season, and always has been. It sure as hell isn’t rotten now.
As so often it is instructive to read about Nansen’s experiences on the Fram expedition. In 1895 after his failure to reach the North Pole he and a comrade was sledging southward in order to reach Franz Josephs land before winter. By midsummer the ice was completely impassable and they had to lay still on a more solid ice floe for a month until the ice had melted enough so they could continue in their kayaks. And remember this was at about 82 degrees latitude during the tail end of the Little Ice Age.
From that picture of David Barber above, he could do with a few less rotten hamburgers. Might help him think better.
While it seems fishy to identify ice with qualitative factors, it does make sense that ice with holes in it would melt faster next summer. Of course, I doubt that this ‘rotten’ ice is a new thing in the Arctic, so:
1) What percent of the ice are we talking about?
2) How long is this ice supposed to be contributing to duping satellites?
3) Isn’t rotten ice surviving ice? Does this mean that more surviving ice is now something to watch out for?
4) Do the holes in ice fill up with anything? Say… ice?
5) Wouldn’t rotten ice mean that since (2009 > 2008 > 2007), we have more and more rotten ice about? Why doesn’t rotten ice melt like they expect it too?
Sorry “to” not “too”. Personal peeve of mine, and I can’t believe I just did it myself.
Rotter – deemed to be despicable or contemptible
This rotten ice is playing fair – the way it keeps fooling those poor satellites.
The ice is moving to Europe (forecast for Germany):
http://www.thelocal.de/society/20091214-23933.html
nice polar bear in the slide show behind the rotten ice guru …
It must be true. According to TVNZ breakfast news, Al Gore has just said that there will be no Arctic ice in five years (or something).
Bartender!ā¦ā¦this ice is rotten! WhooooWeā¦ my bar stool
feels like itās going 13 knots.
Previous topic;
“Steve Oregon (09:55:27) :
Whatās going on?
Iād like to know whatās going on at RealClimate?”
We really need something like this to challenge RealClimate.
Tool to Break the Divide of the Left Right Paradigm.
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/118836
Seems to me that a few of the bloggers here should have been in Copenhagen to ask these questions on camera to the purveyor of rotten news…..
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat through presentations over the last 20 years by Joey Comiso or Don Cavalieri on how they classify sea ice. One thing that is obvious is that there is some percentage of mis-classification that goes with any ice cover/type retrieval effort…it’s unavoidable.
If someone goes out in a boat, it is not surprising that what they see around them is going to be different from a 30×30 km satellite footprint, especially when the whole footprint can be misdiagnosed. Most (but not all) of these mis-classification errors are averaged out over the entire Arctic Ocean.
It stands to reason that the ice must be rotten, all of it.
I mean, it’s well past it’s thaw by date, isn’t it!
The Arctic Sea Ice is not just rotten, it’s denialist. There’s no other way to say it.
O/T
Head of IPCC conflict of interest.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100019821/climategate-with-business-interests-like-these-are-we-really-sure-dr-rajendra-pachauri-is-fit-to-head-the-ipcc/
Solar wind has remained excessively low for a while now.
Solar wind
speed: 284.9 km/sec
density: 4.4 protons/cm3
http://spaceweather.com/
@ Jeff (11:27:46) :
nice polar bear in the slide show behind the rotten ice guru ā¦
Too bad he didn’t get off the ship to shake hands. Polar bears are the only bears that stalk and eat humans as food. From his picture, he would make a dinner for quite a few of them.
Right. So if the satellite signature of multi-year and so-called “rotten” sea ice is so similar, how much validity can the older (70’s) satellite photos have? Is there actual measurement data from on-site? And what is the research on this “thin” rotten ice that also happens to be 8 feet thick? Has this ice existed before? Is it part of a natural recovery? Did they mess the recovery up by plowing through it? I think this only confuses things, it doesn’t seem to support either hypothesis yet. Oh, there are so many questions!
I only have a B.A., will somebody clue me in?
So, whys it called an “ice age”?
“Because-of -all-the Ice!”
My, things certainly got a whole lot chillier in here…..
Im starting to get seriously fatigued with all this hysterical global warming codswallop!
What i want most of all is another ice age, just to shut these fools up with.
Roy Spencer (11:31:28) :
Am I mistaken when I assume that rotten ice is ice that survived the melt season and now has flaws in it?
It would seem that more ice surviving long enough to become rotten is a good thing, yes?
A couple of comments after listening to that video:
1. He says he has NEVER encountered such ice before in all his 20 years. Now is that due to lack of sufficient ice experience, (on the “ground” so to speak or on the sea if you will), or is that sort of sea ice very rare?
2. He says that the satellite information was different to that on the ground. It would have been useful to present satellite sea ice concentration snaps of that area, with his photos on the “ground”. I wonder if someone here could do that?
Dr Spencers explanation above might explain any discrepancies.
Does a beard make one deceitful, or do dissemblers acquire beards?
Its just a trend that I have noticed.
The ice is going to be gone in 5 years, according to Al Gore. Because of human activity, specifically, carbon emissions. So what does Al Gore do? Jumps on a jet and flies to Copenhagen to scream the sky is falling. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here using very little carbon. What is wrong with this picture?
Jim B in Canada (10:08:51) :
So now more ice is actually less ice,
global cooling is global warming and
the people who scream repent world is going to end! are now the sane ones.
They have no idea of what genuine repentance is if it means starving people “to save the earth”.
I have read nearly the entire Bible and find that it opposes centralized power ( see 1 Samuel 8) but have yet to find “Thou shall not burn carbon”. I also read that it condemns fraud, theft and oppression of the poor, the basis of our current money and banking system.
Isn’t it obvious? Rotten ice comes from too many conservatives and Sarah Palin lovers up in Alaska that are simply too close to the Artic ice. I know it is all Sarah’s fault somehow, probably all the laundry detergent she is using washing her million $ wardrobe which leaks into the environment.
“Ix-nay on the otten-ray.”
— Young Frankenstein
Dave F (11:24:50) :
Sorry ātoā not ātooā. Personal peeve of mine, and I canāt believe I just did it myself.
Don’t feel two bad.
The Anchorage Daily News is owned by McClatchy and has a very pronounced liberal bias. They do very little of their own reporting up here.
Patrick M; A most execelent summary of the situation.
The Ice is Going to Break – The Dead Zone
PS those Cryosphere snaps left me thunderstruck for a second. Why cant americans learn how to write their dates logically? The day comes before the month then the year
In his article Barber said that the ice breaker he was on ploughed through the ice with ease “And could have carried on right to the pole if we’d had time”
Sure it could have David, very convincing.
While talking pure crap from his bottom
David said that the ice was all rotten
The license of a poet
Is enough, and we know it
To trump the science method long forgotten
Recent studies of the ice show dangerously high levels of dihydrous oxide. See: http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html for details about this uniquitous hazard.
I’m an avid reader of the blog but I’ve never commented. What amazes me is that the agw alarmists use 30 years of ice cover data as primary evidence that Arctic sea ice is vanishing, when it’s clear to everyone that the record started during a cold period (the late 1970s) and are now going even farther and claiming sea ice loss has created a fundamentally new weather/climate pattern in the Arctic region (http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1398). There is 0 proof that what’s happening with sea ice is unprecedented when the means of comparison is a 30 year satellite record and before that, unreliable ship reports. It’s akin to claiming the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was unprecedented when it’s entirely possible that the number of storms that year was surpassed during let’s say at some point in the 1930s, when our observation capabilities were not even remotely close to where they are now.
I like the way you write your headliners !
Kind regards
The ice-man from Greenland
now this appears to be a paper that should not pass peer review without major corrections if at all.
evidence from much more extensive and quantifiable measurements tell the opposite both regarding sea ice thickness and polar bear populations
Someone needs to tell the alarmists, IT’S JUST A MOVIE.
Looking at those satellite images I also have to wonder what this does for all those claims about the North West passage being open for shipping. Accepted you might get an ice breaker through but the 2009 coverage loooks pretty solid as far as I can see.
“”2008 had a smaller minimum, probably, than 2007,” Gore said, alluding to work led by California-based researcher Wieslaw Maslowski.”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iNMr-lIQQXC_pQ7Vs4nsdv4cYz8Q
Ā§.-)
In one word……Gore..some!
Rotten ice is less robust and it’s a travesty that it is.
Pristine natural pure and sacred ice becomes toxic, rotten, befouled and profane ice under the interrogation of thrusting, oppressive, imperialistic, western satellite technology… don’t cha know…
Question: Do ice-breakers try to navigate by looking for where there is thinner, broken ice?
I suspect David Barber is making up porkies and asking us to simply believe him. If satellites can be fooled by rotten ice then land thermometers can be fooled by UHI effect. Remember Catlin and Polar 5 coming up with different conclusions about sea ice thickness.
How else is David supposed to pay for his next trip in order to do further research. Imagine if he came back from the expediction and said the ice was not rotten and was recovering nicely. This would be like a turkey voting for Christmas.
Dr. Spencer , thanks . As has been pointed out above , that part of the Arctic is probably ice free , or close to it , in September . His paper would have been meaningful had he referenced ice measurements in the same area from some time in the past instead of merely saying that the satellite measurements had misled him .
Re the all-to-human suggestion that Barber needs his funding renewed: I think that this cartoon sums it all up neatly….
Is the AT premature?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/climategate_tko_in_copenhagen.html
Sure would be nice.
Anyhow, snow is the forecast for Denmark Thursday.
Signs of a warming planet, no matter how many you can muster, do not prove the cause.
Wow… this is silly… they found thin ice in September… big surprise. I’m sure that they covered a lot of area at 13 knots. At that speed I’m sure they could get a representative sample of the whole Arctic… if they were out there for a couple of years.
I’ve also noticed that Hudson Bay is way behind in freezing this year. I’m sure there have been some nice snow squalls downwind of the bay since it turned cold in the last week or so. I think there will be a large increase in the ice cover as some of that -51 (F) air from Edmonton gets blown over the water. Actually, the blowing is probably part of the problem… it’s probably been so windy that the water is moving too much to freeze.
It’s another story from the “weather, not climate” department… Edmonton International Airport was -51 F Sunday morning and -43 this morning. Only a few degrees off from their all-time record low temperature.
Rosemary Meling “I think this only confuses things, it doesnāt seem to support either hypothesis yet. Oh, there are so many questions!”
Rosemary-at least you are asking questions rather than having assumed all the answers to fit your politics..
I wonder if the earth being millions of degrees just a few kilometers down has any impact on sea ice.
Just for the record, is “rotten ice” a scientific term ?
If true, this would have serious implications for ice measurements stretching back for 30 years. If the measurements are skewed, then perhaps the entire sea ice record will require adjustment. To turn the tables, maybe there was not as much ice during peak periods as previously estimated.
Saint Gore again:
Gore: Polar ice may vanish in 5-7 years
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091214/ap_on_sc/climate_gore
Of course ice and snow gets “rotten” before it melts. Anyone who’s tried skiing too late in spring knows that.
The sea ice on the north pole in 1959 looks pretty rotten too:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/26/ice-at-the-north-pole-in-1958-not-so-thick/
This beggars belief.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6803921/Copenhagen-climate-summit-Tony-Blair-calls-on-world-leaders-to-get-moving.html
Roy Spencer (11:31:28) :
So there are bubbles of sea water that don’t freeze in the ice. Upon being upended by passing ships or fierce winds, the unfrozen sea water runs out, leaving ice with holes in it.
I see the same phenomenon at work on land.
Nothing new there.
We might check to see if Mr. Barbers’ ship of passage through the ice was on a frequent-icebreaker route while we are at it.
But I agree with you, more rotten ice surviving is a good thing, if Arctic Sea Ice survival is indeed a problem.
I think you guys should give these ice researchers a break, it is not impossible that the satellites can be fooled.
I was drinking a few beers with the AMSR-E , (we call him Akky) at a bar near my house last Tuesday.
We had also ordered dinner and were eagerly awaiting its arrival.
Anyway, as the conversation drifted in and out between girls (Akky’s got a thing for Russian satellites), sports, and phenomenology, this homeless guy comes in and walks straight up to Akky.
Homeless guy: I have an offer you canāt refuse.
Akky (sits up and getting loud): Donāt go threatening me you homeless sleazebag.
Homeless guy: No, no you donāt understand, I have something you need.
Akky: And what could that possibly be?
Homeless guy: I have these magic beans. Seriously, these beans are magic.
Akky is already plastered, so this is enough to convince him to listen. Our food arrives at this point and I start to eat my burger. Akky is transfixed by the homeless guy.
Akky: Magic, really?
Homeless guy: Yeah
Akky: I want them. How much?
Homeless guy: Do you have a cow?
Akky: Crap no, wait how about this burger?
Homeless guy: Umā¦ok that will do.
Homeless guy gives Akky five kidney beans and leaves with a steaming half pound Utah burger.
Me: Dude you are a sucker.
Akky: Shut up loser. I have magic beans.
Akky puts the beans in his pocket and drunkenly falls off his barstool hitting his head on the floor.
I help Akky up and get an ice compress for his head. Akky in a daze yells to no one in particular.
Akky: Where did all this ice come from? It’s everywhere!
So you see, perhaps this study is on to something, I know from personal experience that AMSR-E can be one gullible sucker.
Maximum snow depth in continental USA has been steadily growing
http://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/nsa/
Sep 14, 2004 27.15′
Sep 14, 2005 37′
Sep 14, 2006 18′
Sep 14, 2007 34.5′
Sep 14, 2008 49′
Sep 14, 2009 61′
Of course the extra 43′ of snow depth since 2006 is all “rotten” snow.
For German readers:
ARD (Germany’s BBC) now seeding scepticism!
Quite a critical piece. Encouraging! If Germany goes sceptical on climate change, then it’s over.
Well it has been so warm in the Arctic lately, the ice has gotten too warm and has spoiled. It will really be an unpleasant task to gather up and dispose of all that rotten ice.
iirc Antarctic sea ice this year was at the highest recorded level since satellite data initiated in 1979
I thought it might be interesting to run the two ice cover photos through a blink comparison. There’s a nice piece of free software that permits this at http://www.thefalseprophet.co.uk/wwa/Blink-Comparator-Setup.Exe.
Turns out that you get a nice illustration of the change that’s pretty convincing. Someone so inclined could probably generate a nice little movie. (I suppose some enterprising person’s done that though.)
Rotten ice is the common term (at least in Scandinavia) for ice in the first stage of melting in spring when pores and holes begin to form. The ice may be 20-30 cm thick but it can not carry any weight.
Information of different kind of ice is given in the link below. It is in Swedish so it probably not of much help but the term “rotten ice” is defined at the end of the page.
http://www.smhi.se/kunskapsbanken/oceanografi/is-till-havs-1.4105
David Barber is a shameless activist paid $40million CAD for leading a research project on Arctic Sea-ice. Last year he “predicted” that the ice would disappear fast. So he needed to be proven right in order to continue to get funding:
But his game is up.
Since artic sea ice development is linked to atmospheric conditions see NSIDC Nov. 3, 2009 statement “Conditions in context
In the fall, cold conditions and polar darkness return to the Arctic. As is typical for this time of year, ice growth was brisk in October, growing at an average 96,000 square kilometers per day (37,000 square miles per day).
However, the growth rate slowed for a time in early October, coinciding with strong winds from the south over central Siberia. The winds helped prevent ice from forming along the Siberian coast. At the end of the month, extensive areas of open water regions were still present in the northernmost North Atlantic, and north of Alaska. The ice edge was north of both Svalbard and Franz Josef Land” and “Declining sea ice extent and Arctic storms
A new study by Ian Simmonds and Kevin Keay, at the University of Melbourne in Australia, finds connections between the decline in September sea ice extent and the characteristics of Arctic storms. As ice extent has decreased, Arctic storms have shown a tendency to become more intense, especially in the last few years. The study suggests that low September ice extent, with extensive areas of open water, provides more energy to autumn storms, allowing them to become stronger. The stronger storms also help to break up the ice.
Related research at NSIDC reveals that when September ice extent is unusually low, precipitation linked to Arctic storms tends to be greater than when September ice extent is unusually high (Figure 5). Climate scientists are interested in these studies, because increased autumn snowfall could have effects on both sea ice and permafrost in the Arctic.”
So when David Barber pretends:
“āIt caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multiyear sea ice ā the whole world thought it was multiyear sea ice,ā said Dr. Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.”
He is either incompetent or a liar.
And that October 2009 was the third coldest October on record for the North American continent, the strength of polar air masses meant also that exceptional amount of warm air advection reached the polar region in the return path area where the freezing was delayed. These zones included the Beaufort sea where David Barber went in November.
There was no way he and his team could find anything but thin new ice there, especially at that time after the October conditions.
There is another amazing satellite video shoing the dislocation and the response of arctic sea ice to the atmospheric condition but i can’t find the link. Those who think the sea ice is static are grossly mistaken.
Barber is disingenuous at best and misleading. The journalists are too ignorant to corner him.
If he went unknowingly expecting solid ice he was incompetent at understanding meteorology. If he went knowing that only rotten ice would be found, then he is a liar and a manipulating activist. In any case, Dr Barber has been exposed.
Just by looking at this guy I CAN TELL YOU HE IS LYING….and even if he isn’t how does one transect tell us about the entire arctic sea…
Also what about the recent Polar-5 survey carried out by Alfred Wegener Institure and the University of Alberta…Ice transect…here are the details…flown using an EM unit as opposed to David Barber sticking his head out of the porthole..
“Another focal point of the campaign were large-scale measurements of ice thickness in the inner Arctic, which were conducted in close collaboration of the Alfred Wegener Institute together with the University of Alberta. An ice-thickness sensor, the so-called EM-Bird, was put into operation under a plane for the first time ever. To conduct the measurements, Polar 5 dragged the sensor which was attached to a steel cable of eighty metres length in a height of twenty metres over the ice cover. Multiple flights northwards from various stations showed an ice thickness between 2.5 (two years old ice in the vicinity of the North Pole) and 4 metres (perennial ice in Canadian offshore regions). All in all, the ice was somewhat thicker than during the last years in the same regions, which leads to the conclusion that Arctic ice cover recovers temporarily. The researchers found the thickest ice with a thickness of 15 metres along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island……
“never” observing that kind of ice before is either complete BS, or he is very susceptible to self-delusion.
“Rotten Ice” is refering to the ice that has a much higher percentage of air pockets in it.
To give an example: When you freeze water to make the old fashion square ice cubes the center of the cube is a whitish color because the air was pushed to the center as the water froze from the outside in. The center still has the air pockets because the rest of the water froze before all the air could be squeezed out. As that ice cube melts the outside melts first which leaves the air pockets in the center. If the cube is refrozen before the melting reaches the center then as it freezes more air is trapped and the encased volume of air pockets increases.
When that cube of ice melts and it reaches the air saturated region, then it melts much faster than the “solid” ice that does not contain any air pockets. It takes a great deal of pressure to get rid of the air pockets and make the kind of ice found in ice shelves and glacier ice. You can easily test this at home and see for yourself. Make a cube of ice with the solid outer ice encasing the air pocket saturated inner ice. Break it in half and place it in water. You will see that the air saturated portion of the ice melts much faster than the solid part of the ice.
You can have much more ice yet have a much higher percentage of “Rotten Ice”, “Lower Density Ice”, “LdI”, that does melt much faster. The sensors of the satelite cannot “see” that type of ice.
While I am sure that the good doctor is overstating the problem because he hasn’t really seen how much of that type of ice there really is, he did see something that no one else had really paid attention to. He should be commended for his astute observations. His theory that it makes any real difference leaves a lot to be desired.
Scene: Conference call, NSIDC offices, early December 2009
āOk, this climate-gate thing is killing us. Any ideas?ā
āYa, Iām wondering what would history have been like had they named it the Water-Change Complex.ā
āCan you be serious for just one phone call?ā
āWell, we seem to be getting some traction with the just-look-at-the-ice approach.ā
āI agree ice is great. Nobody ever sees the poles. Most people have never even seen a glacier..ā
āExcept those cool, calving pictures. Blggggggghhhā¦ā {pause} āSorry.ā
āWhat about this city-sized iceberg hitting Australia?ā
āMmmm, I donāt know. Icebergs near Syndey, in summer, doesnāt anybody think that looks, umm, worse for us?ā
āWeāve got another cannibal Polar Bear report!ā
āCarnage! Excellent. Letās get that one out there. Any pictures?ā
āOh, gore and all.ā
āGore was there?ā
āNo, blood and guts.ā
āQuick heads up, the Inuit are saying itās normal and weāre ignorant.ā
āIgnorant my GRANTS! Headlines, itās all about headlines. Whatās wrong with these people, too many snowmobile fumes? What else?ā
āIāve got this friend who last summer was on an icebreaker up by Tuktoyuktuk, and…ā
āYou broke up there. Where?ā
āTuktoyuktuk.ā
āAre you on a cell?ā
āIn the Beaufort! He was on this icebreaker telling me about all this first-year ice.ā
āWoah! Weāre getting burned on that first-year ice thing. I mean, it keeps freezing back! People are catching on, itās all first year ice at some point. We tried āoldā ice, āyoungā ice, āthinā ice. Those Catlin knuckleheads, they were the nail in that coffin.ā
āYep! People say ice is ice.ā
āExactly! I say we stick to single-point data slices, truncated graph scales, and cherry-picked months.ā
āI knew a guy who patrolled on those icebreakers. Months out at sea. He said the food was rotten.ā
āDo you mind? Can you focus?ā
āHey did someone say ārottenā? You may have something there. What if we call some of the ice rotten?ā
āOooo, wait a minute, I like it, ārotten ice.ā You canāt count itās age, track it, measure it. Itās all perceived quality. How rotten is rotten?ā
āAnd you know, we get this to work, we can do all kinds of non-rotten ice trends going back centuries.ā
āEven better than tree rings! All right people, letās make ārottenā ice float.ā {sparse laughter}
āAnd youāre always criticizing me. Focus! Be Serious!ā
āI guess Iām just not as creative. By the way, what have you been typing?ā
āMeeting minutes. I was going to email them to everyone.ā
āMinutes? Email? Are you crazy?ā
Roy Spencer (11:31:28) ,
That implies that “rotten” isn’t an arbitrary word, but actually has some sort of definition. Am I correct? Is there some sort of system of ice taxonomy that we need to be aware of?
Absent knowledge about some sort of real meaning, talking about “rotten” ice sounds like talking about “dirty” air. It conjures images and invokes disgust, but it doesn’t actually mean anything.
Let us not forget the German study reported on WUWT here. They German-led international team measured ice-thickness (Eisdicken in German) flying across the Arctic using a DC-3 and towing an airborne sounder twenty meters above the ice surface. The results surprised the researchers. The ice was much thicker than expected: “Normally, ice is newly formed after two years, over two meters thick. āHere were Eisdicken [ice-thickness] up to four meters,ā said a spokesman of Bremerhavenās Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.”
And where and when did they measure the ice. According to their route (seen here: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/polar5_route.jpg)
they appear to have passed the Beaufort Sea abou the 17th- 18th April 2009.
One should also note that the ice area (CryosphereToday) showed roughly zero anomaly for the Beaufort Sea during April (maximum extent) but reached its nadir in August/September when the anomaly was -0.1 million sq km (relatively insignificant in absolute terms, but in relative terms ca 50%.) Today the Beufort Sea is once again covered to the same extent as during the average for the 1979 -2000 period (zero anomaly).
Hardly surprising that one would find “rotten ice” during the August/September period in that area.
Al Gore a few minutes ago in Copenhagen . . predicts an ice free summer in the Arctic “within 5-7 years”
Way to go Al, way to go.
It is a bit disturbing that people get space in the media with almost any alarming “climate” message.
The Arctic Ice is for the time being about 12 millon km2 and – not far from 20 times the size of France. To say anything general about the sea ice in such a large area requires another observation method than a boat trip. But the journalists seems to work according to “if you check the story, you loose the story”.
Today the largest Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has a fascinating story:
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=no&u=http://www.aftenposten.no/klima/article3422276.ece
Al Gore:
āScientists accused in the climate debate is often to exaggerate. The fact is that in most cases it is the opposite. They are fundamentally conservative.ā
Glaciers melted faster in 1940’s says new study:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iOEB1v8qRQaMGu_fAIW_eSvKSGyw
OK, I looked up the wiki on “rotten ice”. Basically means contaminated ice that is weaker and can’t hold as much weight due to air or impurities between ice crystals. OK, I can buy that.
But if there is more of it at point Z then their was at point A, does this still not imply colder sustained temperatures? Refreezing of previously thawed ice? whether or not the polar bears habitat has been disrupted isn’t the issue here. It is whether or not it has gotten colder or warmer the past few years. This is just an issue to play to bleeding hearts and distract from the core debate. Oh, I forgot, there is no debate and the decline is supposed to be hidden.
Rotten ice is weather. It takes 10 years for it to become climate.
Al Gore in Aftenposten.
From: http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=no&u=http://www.aftenposten.no/klima/article3422276.ece
Aftenposten.no met Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore just before he and Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr StĆøre presented the report “Melting ice and snow – a call for action” on climate change summit today.
– We’re used to that crisis occurs acutely, and can to some extent relate to it. Climate change comes gradually, and the effects are long after emissions. It is abstract for many, and people and politicians think we have a lot of time. Unfortunately, there is an illusion, “says Al Gore to aftenposten.no.
Gore says he is not surprised by the conclusions of the report documenting the previous scenarios of melting ice in the world is greatly underestimated and that sea levels this century may rise more than twice as much as the IPCC said in 2007.
– Very worrying
– I was aware of how serious the situation is in our work. The most frightening is that it is now about to be scientific consensus that it is on a net ice loss in Antarctica. We thought that it would take decades before we would reach this tipping point, “he says
– It is very worrying. And the world’s politicians do not understand the scope of what is now happening.
– In addition to Antarctica is the very rapid warming and melting in the Arctic in the summer worrying. This means that the risk of rapid thawing of permafrost increases. Previously, science has believed that there is sufficient carbon in the permafrost to a doubling of CO 2 level in the atmosphere. New science shows that the potential is twice as big, “said Al Gore.
– No exaggeration
– Tells the report that the criticism against you and the IPCC to exaggerate the error?
– Of course. Scientists are often accused to exaggerate in the climate debate. The fact is that in most cases it is the opposite. They are fundamentally conservative.
– Do you think your report could help to get Obama’s climate through the Senate?
– I hope it will help. I will do my best, and send a copy to all members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, “said Gore.
– Only a few votes remain of getting the report adopted. Unfortunately, carbon lobby has even in the modern United States too much power.
I suggest this “rotten” ice be named “Hamlet Ice”…. to freeze or not to freeze, that is the question, since the real rot is in Denmark.
Bush actually had a “brilliant idea” for once a couple of years back
a “real” solution
“Climate change is real and it demands a real solution,” Bush said.
rbateman (10:36:47) :
“Captain MacMillan left … to determine whether there is beginning another ‘ice age,’ as the advance of glaciers in the last 70 years would seem to indicate.” Then on Sept. 18, 1924, The New York Times declared the threat was real, saying “MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age.”
I guess I’m repeating myself.
.
Purakanui (11:28:11) :
… Al Gore has just said that there will be no Arctic ice in five years
It is painful to know how many there are of us deniers willing to take him up on that bet.
E.M.Smith (10:03:17) “The only thing rotten here is the ārotten iceā theory. Ice does not rot.”
I assure you that rotten ice is a very real phenomenon. I have had the awareness-raising experience of falling through it. When people use “rotten” in this context, they do not mean rotten in the biological sense. Rotten ice is a very well-known phenomenon in areas where people’s lives depend on awareness of such things.
Note: I am not endorsing the media stunt.
Roy ….did you get my email about
Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years…
Desperate times calls for desperate measures. It is not a coincidence this study came out at the time it did. The money and power hungry eco-commies can sense their power slipping and so they have to take action. Otherwise, the new UN communism ideal will have to rely on some other deception. If the UN has to use another avenue for global communism, the eco-commies will not be members of the elite, but turnip farmers like the rest of us. These “scientists” have to take drastic steps to avoid going from hero to zero.
Like quite probably most of the visitors here I was paying fairly close attention to developments in the area of Arctic sea ice over the last several Septembers. I don’t seem to recall any of the satellite imagery showing much in the way of multiyear ice in the part of the Beaufort Sea where Mr. Barber went for his little sail. At the end of the melt season over at least the last three years most of the multiyear ice has ended up stacked in eastern half of the Arctic. There has indeed been a dramatic decline in the amount of ice that survives in the Arctic for more than a couple of years, but the decline has been driven by dramatic shift in the circulation patterns, notably the Beaufort Gyre and the Transpolar Drift, which occurred in 1989 and is unrelated to CO2 or AGW. I’ve cited this paper a number of times before, but since there seems to be a lot of fresh faces around in the wake of climategate I’ll offer it again
http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/research_seaiceageextent.html
This is from the commentary for the animation that accompanies it,
This animation of the age of sea ice shows:
1.) A large Beaufort Gyre which covers most of the Arctic Ocean during the 1980s, and a transpolar drift stream shifted towards the Eurasian Arctic. Older, thicker sea ice (white ice) covers about 80% of the Arctic Ocean up to 1988. The date is shown in the upper left corner.
2.) With the step to high-AO conditions in 1989, the Beaufort Gyre shrinks and is confined to the corner between Alaska and Canada. The Transpolar Drift Stream now sweeps across most of the Arctic Ocean, carrying most of the older, thicker sea ice out of the Arctic Ocean through Fram Strait (lower right). By 1990, only about 30% of the Arctic Ocean is covered by older thicker sea ice.
3.) During the high-AO years that follow (1991 and on), this younger thinner sea ice is shown to recirculated back to the Alaskan coast where extensive open water has been observed during summer.
The age of sea ice drifting towards the coast explains over 50% of the variance in summer sea ice extent (compared to less than 15% of the variance explained by the seasonal redistribution of sea ice, and advection of heat by summer winds).
Point number 3 seems most pertinent to present discussion. If you have time do watch this animation, the combination of ice age and buoy drift patterns really does make pretty clear what is happening in the Arctic.
http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/animations/Rigor&Wallace2004_AgeOfIce1979to2007.mpg
“The world must take action on climate change at Copenhagen even if the science is not correct, Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister has suggested.”
“Following the āclimategate scandalā, Mr Blair said the science may not be āas certain as its proponents allegeā.
But he said the world should act as a precaution against floods, droughts and mass extinction caused by climate change, in fact it would be āgrossly irresponsibleā not to.
I wonder what the IQ level of the average politician is?
We had better do what Blair says otherwise he will probably invade all countries/nations who do not sign the COP15 treaty and hunt down their leaders and hang them. Despite if they have “weather of mass destruction” or not.
AdderW (13:15:27) :
But he had the right frame of mind.
“What are you so worried about?”.
Maybe the entire Arctic is rotten and should be replaced .. more warming please
Well looking at those two Cryosphere 2007 and 2009 pictures for 12/09, I can see evidence of a total cosmic disaster; that will relegate sea ice to a back burner.
It is quite clear from those two photograps, that the sun has moved and is no longer in the same place in our galaxy, so it now casts a totally different sunlight pattern on earth from what it did in 2007.
If it wasn’t for the sun moving between 2007 and 2009, one could easily see that the 2009 picture clearly shows more northern hemisphere land ice than was present in 2007.
So perhaps it is that gross shift in the position of the sun in tha galaxy, that we should be worried about, and not the sea ice; the earth surface solar radiation pattern has totally changed in just two short years.
We are all in for some terrible times ahead.
“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and, in some places, the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 m showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while, at many points, well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds,”
This is NOT from David Barber’s report but a U.S. Weather Bureau report from 1922.
Mike McMillan (13:16:18) :
It bears repeating.
Cryosphere today doesn’t have any recent NH ice images after 12/9/09.
Is this normal ?
Richard (13:26:29) :
I wonder what the IQ level of the average politician is?
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but going by the fact that Obama is widely characterized as one of the most brilliant politicians we’ve ever had, I would confidently predict that if your inside the beltway in D.C. and your IQ is room temperature you are probably at least two sigma above the mean.
If AP says something, you know the opposite is true.
Cheap fodder for the AGW true believers.
Cap. of the expedition boat: “What is that smell?”
Dr. Barber: “Ah, that my friend, is the smell of rotten ice.”
Cap. of the expedition boat: “Dr. Barber, they will surely give you a Nobel price next year for this discovery.”
Rotten ice is a real qualititive measure of ice consistency and strength. It is ice that is on the verge of melting and it has holes in and it does melt faster than solid compressed ice. BUT, This is exactly the sort of ice that I would expect to see at the edges of the ice sheet (going several miles in) in September, especially in areas that Ice Breakers can navigate.
The point is, there were millions of square kilometres more ice this September than there was 2007, Rotten or otherwise.
I fail to see what is so surprising about rotten (melting) ice in September? It ALWAYS melts in September!
I don’t know how much these chicken warmist can continue non-stop generation of hysteria by running around crowing that the globe is warming. I’m just hoping that payers of the world gets wise on the game. Clearly there’s plenty of money to change hands, but that’s all part of the con. Don’t get conned.
[snip – offtopic]
Just a reminder that the met office said it was partly the wind wot dun it:
“Analysis of the 2007 summer sea-ice minimum has subsequently shown that this was due, in part, to unusual weather patterns. Arctic weather systems are highly variable year-on-year and the prevailing winds can enhance, or oppose, the southward flow of ice into the Atlantic. Consequently, the sea ice has not declined every year, but has shown considerable variability ā both in extent and thickness.”(http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20091015b.html)
In 2007 the wind apparently enhanced the ice flow Alantic-wards. If the wind has opposed it this year, then that may explain the significant difference at the Bering Straits and the ice pattern in Hudson Bay.
As an aside, I suspect the unspoken objective of the mission was to follow the route taken by Pen hadow some 6 months earlier, so that they could repeat the measurements taken by Hadow, thus contributing to the robust science and showing that the ice was melting faster than previously predicted ( and for another example of climate dishonesty, the Catlin “Survey” web site still shows the straight line route to the pole – no mention that I could find of the actual route).
PS Wasn’t Hadow going to be one of the stars at Copenhagen? Does anyone know when his appearance is scheduled?
The new excuse for killing CO2
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6954527.ece
They are obviously preparing a fall back position.
What is the inuit term for “rotten” ice ?
P Wilson (10:31:53)
I think you are on the right track. What we’ve seen the last 4-5 years is “rotten cooling” where glaciers in Greenland slow greatly (since 2005), Arctic ice grows, etc. All of this rotten cooling is covering up the real warming which is building up strength in the center of the earth (up to millions of degrees now).
I’m pretty sure it’s unprecedented and much worse than we thought! Isn’t it always?
From the news report: “Indeed, through most of the journey the Amundsen sailed at an average speed of 24km/h; its open water cruising speed is about 25km/h. ”
I’d love to see them doing 14mph through sea ice, “rotten” or not!
Anthony: CORRECTION on my (12:58:25) post: (please remove my previous post)
==============
Clearly the GRL paper refers to September observations i.e. at the end of the melt season.
My initial comment referred to a story by the Canadian Press writer Chinta Puxley
Winnipeg ā The Canadian Press Published on Friday, Nov. 27, 2009 10:22PM EST that appeared in the Globe and Mail.
In it I quote “āIt caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multiyear sea ice ā the whole world thought it was multiyear sea ice,ā said Dr. Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.”
So despite being published in late November the story referred to the same September observations and not to November observations, as could be inferred from the journalist’s wording.
I therefore apologize for my mistake.
Yet the same line of thought can explain the Beaufort observations. In itself, it is quite a strange time to be “surprised” by thinner ice at this time of the year, at the maximum melt season. But the same meteorological comments about MPHs over North America can be made: looking at images from August 20 to 24, i.e. few weeks before Dr Barber’s observation one sees a large MPH extending all the way to Florida. The western advection path along Yukon is clearly shown, inducing the same regional melting and wind dislocation in the Beaufort.
Therefore I contend that Dr Barber’s observations have a simple meteorological explanation that are regionally specific. Either he knew the meteorological conditions and should have expected what he found and thus his surprise is made up, or if he did not understand that meteo conditions would influence the ice pack he found, then his competence should be re-assessed. In either cases, the GRL paper should never have passed peer review.
I Pledge Allegiance to Global Warming: British scientists sign a government loyalty oath.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703514404574587811671196406.html
The Met Office, Britain’s national weather service, “has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science” in the wake of a whistle-blower’s revelation of widespread misconduct by climate scientists, London’s Times reports:
More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the “professional integrity” of global warming research. They were responding to a round-robin request from the Met Office, which has spent four days collecting signatures. . . .
One scientist told The Times he felt under pressure to sign. “The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said.
Adderw:
The truth being stranger than fiction, that is what Tony Blair said on daytime telly.I paraphrase.
“Even without the threat of WMDs I would have still wanted Britain to invade Iraq”.
The threat of WMDs was the only reason parliament voted to go to war in Iraq and Blair knew in advance there wasn’t any.
He don’t like facts getting in the way of his agenda.
He cites frustration with journalism and also personal fatigue …
That increasing sea ice extent is really warming
Those decreasing global temperatures are just natural variability, and would be decreasing faster if not for CO2… so that’s warming too
/sarcasm off
Richard (13:38:28) :
You got a link for that? That’s great!
JonesII (12:39:28) :
Saint Gore again:
Gore: Polar ice may vanish in 5-7 years
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091214/ap_on_sc/climate_gore
That’s odd. A year ago (Dec. 13, 2008) he said the ENTIRE north polar ice cap WILL disappear in 5 years, and here he is a year later saying it MAY vanish in 5 to 7 years?
How will people know what to believe of what he says, if he keeps not only changing the content, but keeps moving the goal posts?
If this keeps up, Saint Gore may need to give up his halo.
Dave Wendt (13:44:09) : two sigma? wow! Someone told Obama he couldnt make a bigger mess of the economy than it was already in. In that sphere, at least, he has proved that yes he could.
Time Magazine has such an aura of old media decrepitude. The stranded polar bear must now be the ultimate stock image. Does no one tell them?
I found a copy of Time in a toilet a few weeks ago and tried to read a bit.
Gawd!
I also find it instructive to view the DMI arctic temperature graph in the sidebar.
If you click on that you can see not only the current year but previous years back to 1958. Clicking on each year in Arkiv allows you to easily compare summer temperatures with reference to the 1958 to 2002 average. To my untutored eye it would seem that summers have been generally below average for the last few years and then around average until the early 1990s, when there were some excursions above the average curve.
Now, I an prepared to be corrected, but it looks to me that there is very little evidence of increasing arctic temperatures from this set of measurements.
Nice Monckton video. It is a shame more people don’t look at global ice, not just arctic ice.
I’m aware this is off topic on this thread – very sorry – but had not seen any reference to this latest Google promotion and not sure where to comment.
On their search page I notice Google are now actively promoting an explore global warming with Google Earth – all the usual alarmist stuff and Al Gore. Google are now well and truly out of the closet about whose side they are on and actively promoting ‘classic’ AGW.
So the answer TanGeng looks to be for quite some time and clearly Google would not have stepped in so publically if they thought it was the losing side of the discussion.
Ah, they can say whatever they want, we will only laugh at them, and never believe a word…
Perhaps the Dr., having spent 25 years of his life examining the region, felt he was entitled to some naming rights. The Rotten Sea? It makes much more sense that way.
Just who are the denialists?
Roald Amundsen
1872-1928
āOn December 14, 1911,
Amundsen and four others stood at the South Pole, a month before Robert Scott. This expedition was an incredible masterpiece of organization. Here is the story.ā
http://www.south-pole.com/p0000101.htm
E.M.Smith (10:03:17) :
> The only thing rotten here is the ārotten iceā theory. Ice does not rot.
> There is no physical mechanism for it.
How long have you lived in California?
One example of rotten ice – consider a nice healthy icicle formed in pretty cold conditions. Solid ice, nearly clear, pretty strong, capable of kill you if you stand under the eaves while knocking icicles down.
A few days later the temperature climbs a little above freezing, and thin layer of cracks – sort of a general crazing – covers the icicle. Its strength is a lot lower, it fractures along the cracks, I suspect the crystalline structure inside the icicle is rearranging itself. Basically it’s a very different chunk of ice, a rather sorry end of a once proud decoration.
That may or may not be related to what happens to ice on ponds. While I was quite happy as a kid to walk on fresh “black ice” that that was only a couple inches thick early in the winter, the rotten ice in springtime was another story. Instead of the good solid black ice, that rotten ice holds a winter’s worth of frozen slush (white ice), layering due to water flowing into snow that weighted down the early ice, odd melting patterns, old cracks that can no longer be ignored, and other processes we probably don’t understand well.
No point in going out on rotten ice – can’t slide on it, can’t skate, so weak that I wouldn’t trust 6″ of it.
While I agree “rotten ice” is not a very scientific term, I wouldn’t be surprised to find it in places in the Arctic at the end of a melt season. Espcially in salt water which freezes very differently than fresh.
Oh – don’t go out on thin ice like I did, at least don’t unless you weigh what you did at 13 ya, are 20 feet away from anyone else, in shallow water, and know how slippery wet ice is if it does break. BTW, I never have broken through anything deeper than a puddle.
On the first really cold day with thick black ice, do go out and jump on it to trigger cracks to form and propagate away from you. It makes a really neat sound and terrifies the less bold. The ice on top shrinks and puts a huge stress on itself. Once the crack starts it propagates at a hundred feet per second of so.
Eternal Melting? An interesting blog post detailing NY Times articles that discuss arctic melting:
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/eternal_melting/
From the New York Times, 128 years of looming polar doom:
ā¢ 1881: āThis past Winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting ā¦ā
ā¢ 1932: āNEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continentsā
ā¢ 1934: āNew Evidence Supports Geologyās View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmerā
ā¢ 1937: āContinued warm weather at the Pole, melting snow and ice.ā
ā¢ 1954: āThe particular point of inquiry concerns whether the ice is melting at such a rate as to imperil low-lying coastal areas through raising the level of the sea in the near future.ā
ā¢ 1957: āU.S. Arctic Station Meltingā
ā¢ 1958: āAt present, the Arctic ice pack is melting away fast. Some estimates say that it is 40 per cent thinner and 12 per cent smaller than it was fifteen years [ago].ā
ā¢ 1959: āWill the Arctic Ocean soon be free of ice?ā
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to remember reading that last years sea ice extent didn’t all melt away this summer, and IMHO that means there’ll be a multi-layer ice for next summer to try and melt, i.e. multi-layer ice is expanding the coming year.
This is just silly. Obviously every other year has exactly the same problem.
I’m sorry but on my trip through the artic in 2007 there was way more rotten ice. And I have the data to prove it! Unfortunately, it’s covered by confidentiality agreements, which I lost. If you want the data, send me an FOIA, David Palmer of CRU is handling all these matters for me. #Si
This is no longer a scientific battle. This fight is a full propaganda war. The enemy has the upper hand because they control the mass dissemination of news. How can the rebels counter this formidable weapon? It seems all but hopeless.
The rebels must trust in the Force. The Force is truth. Truth is the ultimate weapon and we will use it to overcome the global empire of deceit. Keep up the good fight, Mr. Watts. We’re in it to the end.
Waiter- my ice is rotten. And I want a C-14 date on that Scotch.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/5261586/Nuclear-bomb-tests-help-to-identify-fake-whisky.html
@ Richard Castro (12:01:40) : If you visit the good RSS site at http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html you will note the warming of the Arctic area due to the AMO cycle. You will also note that it is beginning to fall off as the cycle goes into its downswing. A slight blip up this year due to the El Nino, but figure 8 shows the increase in the anomaly through 2005/6 and is starting to show the decrease in the anomaly as we hit the downside of the AMO cycle.
May the Gore effect be in full force later this week. I can see the headline now: “Final days of global warming conference called off due to severe blizzard conditions.”
The BBC weather report tonight is for rotten snow this Wednesday and maybe Friday.
The weather man seemed to cringe when he mentioned there might be snow !?!
It’s not that unusual at this time of year in the UK. I know. I’ve been here 70 years.
My $2000 challenge is still open to Prof Barber.
Tom Moriarty
From: http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/environment/departments/geography/staff/494.htm
Dr. Barber raised over $38M in research funding over the past 5 years.
complete text (before they pull it out from the web, as usual)
Dr. David Barber
Professor
Canada Research Chair Tier I
Arctic System Science.
Associate Dean (Research)
Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources
Director, Centre for Earth Observation Science (CEOS)
Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources
476 Wallace
474-6981
Email
Website
Courses Offered:
Climate Change
GEOG 4670 Winter Term
GEOG 7440 Winter Term Research Interests
Dr. Barber obtained his Bachelors (1981) and Masters (1987) from the University of Manitoba, and his Ph.D. (1992) in Arctic Climatology from the University of Waterloo, Ontario. He was appointed to a faculty position at the University of Manitoba in 1993 and received a Canada Research Chair in Arctic System Science in 2002. He is currently Director of the Centre for Earth Observation Science (CEOS), and Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Environment, the University of Manitoba. Dr. Barber has extensive experience in the examination of the Arctic marine environment as a āsystemā, and the effect climate change has on this system. His first Arctic field experience was in 1981 and he has conducted field experiments annually since then. His early work, with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, examined Arctic Marine Mammal habitat detection and change. His later work focused on the geophysics of snow and sea ice and in particular the response of the snow/ice system to oceanic and atmospheric forcing.. His research group has a special interest in the coupling between physical and biological marine systems in the Arctic and in the use of Earth Observation technologies in the study of ocean-sea ice-atmosphere (OSA) processes.
Dr. Barber has published over 100 articles in the peer reviewed literature pertaining to sea ice, climate change and physical-biological coupling in the Arctic marine system. He leads the largest International Polar Year (IPY) project in the world, known as the Circumpolar Flaw Lead (CFL) system study (www.ipy-cfl.ca). He is recognized internationally through scientific leadership in large network programs (e.g., NOW, CASES, ArcticNet, the Amundsen, and CFL), as an invited member of several Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) national committees (e.g., NSERC GSC 09; NSERC IPY, NSERC northern supplements, etc), international committees (GEWEX, IAPP, CNC-SCOR, IARC, etc) and invitations to national and international science meetings (e.g., American Geophysical Union (AGU), Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS), American Meteorological Society (AMS), American Society for Limnology and Oceanography (Spain), IMPACTS (Russia), European Space Agency (ESA, Italy), Arctic Frontiers (Norway), etc). Dr. Barber supervised to completion: 5 honours theses; 10 MSc theses; 9 PhD dissertations and 6 postdoctoral fellows. He currently supervises 7 MSc students; 11 PhD students, 4 post doctoral fellows and 9 full time research staff. Dr. Barber raised over $38M in research funding over the past 5 years.
Major Research Projects
In addition to his university teaching and administrative commitments, Dr Barber has established the Community Based Monitoring Program (CBM) which links several Inuit communities to measurement and monitoring of sea ice and climate change related variables in the Western High Arctic and Hudson Bay. He was also instrumental in establishing the āSchools on Boardā program, which outreaches Arctic Marine science to high school students and teachers aboard the Canadian Research Icebreaker Amundsen. In recognition of his commitment to environmental research and education he received the RH award in Physical Sciences from the University of Manitoba and has been nominated for the NSERC Steacie Award. Dr. Barber is regularly asked to present to media (TV, radio and print), to policy bodies (Senate committee hearings, policy workshops, Canadian Arctic Sovereignty, ADM committees, etc.) and industry (oil companies, hydroelectric utilities, marine shipping) regarding climate change and the Arctic.
Recent Publications
Galley, R, B.J. Hwang. D. Barber, E. Key and J.K. Ehn. 2007. On the spatial and Temporal variability of Sea Ice in the CASES Study Region: 1980 ā 2004. Journal of Geophysical Research. In Press (Marchā08).
Ehn, J.K. T. N. Papakyriakou, D. G. Barber. Inference of optical properties from radiation profiles within melting sea ice. Journal of Geophysical Research. In Press (Janā08).
Langlois, A., T. Fisico, D. G. Barber and T.N. Papakyriakou. The response of snow thermophysical processes to the passage of a polar low-pressure system and itās impact on in situ passive microwave radiometry: A case study. Journal of Geophysical Research. 113, C03S04, doi:10.1029/2007JC004197.
Trembley, J.E, K.Simpson, J. Martin, L. Miller, Y. Gratton, D. Barber and N. Price. Vertical stability and the annual dynamics of nutrients and chlorophyll fluorescence in the coastal, southeast Beaufort Sea. Journal of Geophysical Research. VOL. 113, C07S90, doi:10.1029/2007JC004547
Hwang, B. J., and D. G. Barber, 2008. On the impact of ice emissivity on ice temperature retrieval using passive microwave radiance data. Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 5(3):doi:10.1109/LGRS.2008.917266
Langlois, A. and D. G. Barber. Passive Microwave Remote Sensing of Seasonal Snow Covered Sea Ice. Progress in Physical Geography. 31(6), 539-573, doi: 10.1177/0309133307087082
Jin, X., J. Hanesiak and D. Barber. Time series of daily-averaged cloud fractions over landfast first year sea ice from multiple data sources. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. DOI: 10.1175/2007JAMC1472.1. vol (46)1818-1827.
:
If there was much rotten ice, this summer’s Northwest Passage ships should have gotten across in a few days without trouble. Nope, they had trouble. Also the Catlin wanderers should have reported a lot of crumbling ice (not wet feet because they traveled during the end of winter), but they didn’t.
Ice rotting? They make it sound like some new bacillus or fungus has been spawned.
Okay, ‘fess up. Which one of you has been messing around in the lab? š®
http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110002693763/en
I have a couple business ideas for young people with sufficient go-ahead sprit.
1. Make a most wanted ClimateGate deck of cards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most-wanted_Iraqi_playing_cards
2. Setup a server that downloads and presents raw and processed ARGO data real-time.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/argo/latest_data.html#compressed
Should be sufficient of $ here I guessā¦
[self_snip]
Hummhh, whatsrottenwiththat, rotten science or rotten scientists.
[/self_snip]
@operator, if my expression is too strong, do as the tags advise.
Jeez, somehow this times I’m remebering the 2nd Doors LP, and it’s lead
song, ‘Strange People’, ‘People are strange’.
Really, you can’t made this up. Simply too strange.
If I follow the scenario, as it developed over the last fifteen years,
next possibly will be, NxOx and SxOx and for shure SxHxOx will be
the next targets. Train not to fart, or you will be catalysatored, by law.
Which possibly means, you have a pipe, connected to your poor backa$$,
equipped with an remotely readen fartometer (measure is up to you,
fart/mile, fart/hour, fart/x/smell).
Somehow, now I understand the phrase ‘ You have to become really mad,
to still stay sane’. Never, never liked that one. But hey, I still can learn.
KlausB
Purakanui (11:28:11) :
ā¦ Al Gore has just said that there will be no Arctic ice in five years
It is painful to know how many there are of us deniers willing to take him up on that bet.
You see they will claim that it’s all rotten ice and there is no actual “real ice” in the arctic anymore, so you will lose in an international court where the UN is in charge of the proceedings.
From Dr. Barber’s Report –
“In September 2009 we observed a much different sea icescape in the Southern Beaufort Sea than anticipated, based on remotely sensed products. Radarsat derived ice charts predicted 7 to 9 tenths multi-year (MY) or thick first-year (FY) sea ice throughout most of the Southern Beaufort Sea in the deep water of the Canada Basin.”
So, at the end of the summer melt (September) in the Southern Beaufort Sea (home of the Beaufort Gyre, which breaks up pack ice), Dr. Barber did not find Multi-year ice or thick First year ice. I wonder why? Maybe because he went to an area that would not have much multi-year ice at the time of the year before new ice really begins to form.
But they did find first year ice that was starting to form around fragments of multi-year ice, which is about what I would expect to find in the South Beaufort Sea around September.
Roy Spencer (13:02:09) :
āneverā observing that kind of ice before is either complete BS, or he is very susceptible to self-delusion.”
Deluded to the extent that he can’t recall ever seeing rotten ice indicates something closer to a psychosis. He may be “seeing” all kinds of things.
Just look at how childish Omaba’s Youth are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDubnFU3BXE , as reply to Lord Monckton’s comments yesterday!
Richard
There was a very similar Arctic report for the period around 1820.
Tonyb
Re chainpin (13:07:15) :
Glaciers melted faster in 1940ās says new study:
Thanks for the link chainpin. I am in communication with Swiss center for glaciers, asking now for temperature and precipitation data over the 20th century. I have made a chart of ratio between advancing/retreating glaciers in Switzerland versus Atlantic multidecadal oscillation:
http://www.letka13.sk/~jurinko/swiss_glaciers_vs_AMO.gif
Conclusions from the study a re a bit funny. First, they admit that glaciers were melting faster in 40ties than today, but they must add that “the pace at which the Alpine glaciers are currently melting is unusual, plus the fact that this sharp decline has been unabated for 25 years now”. But the even sharper decline in 40ties was longer – from 30ties to 60ties – and it has not been not years of decline now, but 22. So, nothing unusual.
Imagine the panic, when glaciers start inevitably to grow in near future. I will update the chart after New Year, when the 2009 data will be available.
Polar Scientists are sounding the alarm
So, we have the “dernier cri” on rotten ice from bush pilots and Eskimo nomenclature. If any of the pilots were old pilots and the Eskimo word is well documented, what else do we need to know?
The scientific gentleman saw rotten ice. He just “forgot” to mention the dates.
What a load! Did he tour the entire Arctic circle? How many measurements did he make?
Of course, when ice extant is low, that’s the sign of the ‘pocolype. When it comes back, ice thickness is important. Doesn’t the MSM notice that the goalposts keep moving around? Don’t they compare past statements with new statements?
A bit off topic but what caused this, would it be climate change, no wonder the warmers don`t like the company of archaeologists.
In 2000, a major archaeological discovery made by a team led by paleontologist Paul Sereno opened a window onto the āGreen Sahara,ā a moment of time that spanned 10,000 to 5,000 years ago.
Called Gobero after the local Tuareg name for the area, the discovery revealed a suite of closely-spaced archaeological sites preserved in two kinds of settingsāpaleodune and paleolake deposits. These sites document a 5,000-year-long drama of changing climate and changing cultures.
http://www.projectexploration.org/greensahara/AboutGobero_GoberoStory.aspx
http://climate4you.com/ClimateAndLandscapes.htm
This is science not the rubbish we are being spoon fed.
Another norwegian boffin professor here:
“Thinks that land and sea will rise about as much”
I think that his predictions are as accurate as anyone elses…
helvio (15:01:33) :
Just look at how childish Omabaās Youth are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDubnFU3BXE , as reply to Lord Moncktonās comments yesterday!”
Excellent. Monckton says the “oceans are sitting on something called rock”, perhaps playing to the level of the crowd, and one of the kids rolls her eyes and whispers “bull****” at the camera. Maybe she was taken out of context, or just got took for a ride. Remember, these kids are the scientists of tomorrow.
Good Old Veggie Pachauri has said that there is NO definitive proof that man-made Carbon Dioxide emissions are causing global warming/climate change, in a CNN inteerview, so why do the wackos persist in their fraudulent efforts to spread the wealth of the poor to the rich through taxation?.
COP 15 is just a stop along the way to serfdom based on – as has been said – rotten science.
The AGW saga in polluted with Mann-made pseudo-science.
I have the same problem. Whenever I’m looking down at the ground the bottom lens of my glasses makes everything “mushy”. It’s terrible!
To paraphrase Frank Zappa:
The ice isn’t dead. It just smells funny.
That newspaper report AdderW (15:08:30) refers to is a real load of b-t:
“Apparently, the process in recent years has been speeded up dramatically. Only the emission of ice from the famous glacier in Ilulissat in Greenland drain six to eight percent of the ice sheet annually, says Associate Professor Jorgen Peter Steffensen of the Niels Bohr Institute.”
(and yes, I have checked the danish version, the translation is correct)
Now if that was true, the sea level would be rising about 2 feet per year, from that glacier alone!
Actually what the Illulissat glacier does is to drain the ice from about 6 to 8 percent of the total area of the ice-sheet, as it has been doing ever since the last ice-age. Either the journalist or the professor must be a complete idiot.
I remember something of the opposite earlier this year when one of the northwest passage boats had satellite data showing clear sailing, then proceeding to sail into ice they had to be pulled out of by icebreaker.
a slightly better translation of the norwegian paper than the Google one:
For some reason JAXA has taken down the arctic ice extent data for the 11th, 12th, and 13th. I logged in to see the change from yesterday, and discovered that three days had gone missing, and there is no update showing today’s data. Odd. I’ve followed the JAXA site for a couple of years and can’t recall them ever taking down data before.
Now guys if you really want to have a chuckle, read this:
Clayton H. Riddell
Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources
At University of Manitoba…
So who is Clayton Riddell?
Check Wikipedia!
Clayton (Clay) H. Riddell is the founder, president and CEO of Calgary, Alberta based Paramount Resources. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Geology from the University of Manitoba. He also is part owner of the Calgary Flames and high-end Calgary restaurant Catch.
According to the Canadian Business Magazine’s 2006 Rich 100 list, Clay Riddell is the 13th wealthiest person in Canada.
Riddell was a president of the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists and Chair of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
The Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources at the University of Manitoba is named in Riddell’s honour. It was the university that suggested the name for the new faculty, not Riddell. Riddell donated $10-million in order to create an endowment fund for the faculty. The faculty combines the Department of Environment and Geography, the Department of Geological Sciences and the Natural Resources Institute.
In 2008, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.[1]
Also owns Paramount Energy Trust, Trilogy Energy Trust, and MGM energy.
So BIG OIL Money is OK: As for Calgary oilmen’s retired or not, it seems the guilt ridden crowd among the richest of them is already buying indulgences either by supporting the prima Donna Dr Keith here at U of C and the “journalists” and other “environmentalists” that discuss their treks in the arctic, or by inviting the very IPCC scientist who cannot explain the lack of warming -courtesy of CLIMATEGATE emails- or by having environmental campus buildings named after them: Big Oil is not that bad for some of the most rabid AGW researchers in the country… perhaps they should also mention this indirect funding in their peer reviewed papers!
Richard111 (14:37:13) : The BBC weather report tonight is for rotten snow this Wednesday and maybe Friday.
The weather man seemed to cringe when he mentioned there might be snow !?!
Wouldnt you if had always argued with your elder brother that santa claus existed and then had to narrate to him how you caught your dad laying out the presents under the tree.
Clive (10:09:44) :
Think Mansbridge will do a interview with Steve McIntrye or Mitchell Taylor? Never live to see it.
Went to CBC to put a request in for Steve though.
http://www.cbc.ca/mansbridge/contact.html
Maybe all the Canucks here can put a litte pressure on and I might live to see it!!
New study: Arctic ice is rotten (Anchorage Daily News)
====
Funny you should mention the ADN. Locals know it by 3 different names:
the daily snooze
the daily worker
sacramento’s best newspaper
it is always biased, and quoting it is generally a waste of everyone’s brain cells. BTW, Anchorage is about 700 miles south of the Arctic Ocean. ADN reporters can see winter ice floes in Cook Inlet, but they aren’t going to see anything above the Arctic Circle unless they catch a flight.
NickB. (14:10:07) : Richard (13:38:28) :
You got a link for that?
I do. Its actually from right here in WUWT, though I got it and copied it from elsewhere. But doing a search right now – here’s what I found:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/16/you-ask-i-provide-november-2nd-1922-arctic-ocean-getting-warm-seals-vanish-and-icebergs-melt/
Anthony – you have to put an edit function on these comments for the typo and spelling challenged!!
That should be Steve McIntyre and ” a little pressure”
“Rotten ice” eh?
It rings a bell. UK visitors will surely recall “The wrong kind of snow”, from 1991.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/4434770/Snow-Britain-Wrong-kind-of-snow-strikes-again.html
I just find it amusing when so many people, so called experts all have their own idea on what is going on with melting glaciers and sea levels rising. The predictions are now estimated to be between 1.5mm and several meters plus.
No concensus there either.
It does not mean that I agree with the predictions. A chrystal ball would serve them better I think.
I have no problem with all the reporting of the climate changing – but I do cringe when someone tries to connect anything happening to the climate to an increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
New parent to child proverb: “Do not eat rotten or yellow snow.”
Perhaps we need to send an expedition to examine all that “rotten ice”. How about sending some “rotten” scientists? Carlin 2? That towed array must be fixed by now.
Richard111 (14:37:13) : PS if its cold and chilly there in the antipodes, its not particularly warm here in NZ, though we are supposed to be in Summer. There is a glorious sun today but it hasnt quite got rid of our winter of discontent.
Someone tell me the definition of “scientist”, I think it changed when I was not looking.
Seems to be anyone that can buy a cruise ticket.
Ladle Rat Rotten Hut
Richard (16:25:59) :
TY sir!
nigel jones (16:26:49) :
The “wrong snow” – is that like putting on “the wrong trousers”?
Ba-da-dum!
@latitude
Science, according to a very respectable source, it might even be somewhat peer reviewed, has this to say on that topic:
I think that covers it.
We should not forget the danger of cornered rats, an while I consider it unfair to compare the warmists with rats (I have known some smart and friendly rats) thete rats are well and truly cornered and their snouts are finding the gravy train leaving without them, they will get very nasty indeed, take care and prod with a very long stick!
I was a bit quick there, “scientist“. Same eminent source.
“David Barber found that wasnāt the case after he viewed the ice firsthand this September FROM AN ICE BREAKER travelling through the southern Beaufort Sea.”
(my caps)
I wonder if he is aware that there is a near direct correlation in the number of active ICE BREAKERS and the loss of ice that they are claim.
In order to get rotten ice you first start with rotten water. Of course it’s rotten. That’s what happens after a deluge of dead polar bears falling from the sky. And don’t forget those dead baby seals and cute little kittens š
Are climate related scientists who are being paid with tax dollars required to disclose their personal carbon credit investment portfolios?
LOL, Gore busted yet again
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6956783.ece
…In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: āThese figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.ā
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
āItās unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,ā Dr Maslowski said. āI would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.ā
Mr Goreās office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a āballpark figureā several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore…
Another side effect of climate change.
Climate makes scientists become related to other scientists.
Youāre all going to “rot” in hell for not believing. You climategate heathens…Algod is going to strike you down with lightning, (Does lightning rot too???)
Steve Hempell … “Think Mansbridge will do a interview with Steve McIntrye or Mitchell Taylor? Never live to see it.”
Good one Steve … not snowball’s chance in hell. Once upon a time, I use to like Peter M. He is a puppet and can’t jeopardize his million-dollar salary. So he does what the ecoweenie producers want him to do.
BTW … Thanks for the Mansbridge link. Will use it. Do you have one for Rex as well?
You know what’s going to be funny? Seeing these idiots in 20 years and they will still be beaking off about the Arctic melting at unprecedented rates.
Mind you, everyone will have forgotten how wrong they all were, won’t they? āŗ I’ve not forgotten what IPCC said about sea levels in 1992.
Steve…you will get a kick out of this…(posted in another thread earlier) ā» ā» What an idiot.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2006/10/20/skihills-warming.html
THEN read this ā» ā»
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Whistler+Blackcomb+sets+November+snow+record/2290797/story.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3a+canwest%2fF259+(Vancouver+Sun+-+News+%2f+Vancouver
‘Rotten Ice’ sounds like desperation. Everything seems to be falling apart for the ‘warm-mongers’. ManMadeGlobalWarming has been a classic bubble, but it looks like it is bursting. Most of the public believed in it because it was presented as ‘fact’ by the news services, but the CRU emails opened the chink of doubt. Copenhagen seems to be heading for complete failure, and the unusually cold weather in the US can’t be helping.
Also Obama’s ‘cap and trade’, and the EPA’s outlawing of CO2, will be concentrating the public’s mind : if in the middle of a recession, with unemployment in the US at over 17%, you introduce policies to close down manufacturing it will not go down well unless the reasons are 100% valid and extremely urgent.
If, as here in the UK, CO2 created to produce goods abroad is not counted, the policy means that closing manufacturing in the US and moving it to China or similar will make you a ‘Good Guy’ environmentalist!
I gather there are elections in the US next year, best of luck to any politician supporting Obama’s views on climate!
PS. It will be amusing if the kids from Copenhagen can’t get back home due to the weather. I assume they don’t drive so they will be dependent on public transport.
Richard (11:57:40) :
PS those Cryosphere snaps left me thunderstruck for a second. Why cant americans learn how to write their dates logically? The day comes before the month then the year
The “American” date format more closely resembles our speech, where first is specified the object (group) then part of the object (subgroup or item), like how instead of saying “door of the car” we would say “car door,” or instead of “the crystals of sodium chloride” it would be “the sodium chloride crystals.” This is also in agreement with biological classifications which run large to small, thus “homo sapiens” instead of “sapiens homo,” for example.
It also lends itself well to the naming of computer files by date, as one would be more likely to scan a directory for files for a month than for the occurrence of a numbered day throughout a year. Thus with month first “03xx.dat” for the March files is quick to mark and copy, while hunting down all the “xx03.dat” files would be less so. The reverse of the European system, a year-month-day format, is even more convenient, as “20090306.dat” would nicely auto-arrange in a single directory with the other similar files.
Note we will be keeping “the 4th of July” as that is recognized as a designation rather than a mere date. There is about as much chance of getting us to call it otherwise as there is of getting people to talk about their “party at night right before the first of January.”
What global warming?
Does that really matter to anyone on this subject? Ice is ice. Just frozen water. It still absorbed ~334000 J/kg to refreeze whether the ice froze fast, slow, with air bubbles or not, hard and clear or in layered due to frothy waves. Meaningless.
The ice (any form) has recovered. Don’t let irrelevant mumble sidetrack you on the search for the truth in science.
Ric Werme (14:28:35) :
I like your first-hand description of various states-of-ice, learned from simply being a boy who did dangerous things, (and likely having a good angel watching over you.) Sometimes I think it is a wonder any boys survive, but most do.
I had some learning experiences on sea ice on the coast of Maine during the very cold winters of 1976-77 and 1977-78. In 1976-77 the ice was especially thick, over six feet thick at its most, however the top two feet were made up of snow that was wet and heavy enough to push the ice down, and cause water to well up through cracks and turn it to slush, which then froze. This upper ice was inferior, and when the spring thaw came the upper ice seemed to turn back to slush. You could walk through slush that was nearly over the tops of your gum boots, with the ice beneath still sound.
However the problem was knowing where that lower ice remained, because it seemed to melt from the bottom up, due to being washed by tidal currents. From above you only saw a flat area of white slush. Underneath there might be two feet of solid ice, where currents were weak, or mere inches of ice, where currents were stronger. (In narrow places, where the twelve foot tides rushed in and out between the shore and islands, the salt water never froze, even in the most extreme cold.)
The closest I came to killing myself was by nearly walking into a place where the ice had utterly melted away from beneath, and there was nothing but floating slush. I was walking at night, and something made me stop, and I flexed my knees, and all the ice around me made a strange squealing noise, so I turned around and headed back the way I came.
A few days later the ice seemed to vanish all at once, leaving nothing but scattered bergs. I assume that, just before the ice-out, a large amount of the harbor-ice had melted from beneath and little remained but floating slush. Once the disintegration began there was little sturdy ice to hold it back. However the sturdy ice that remained was very strong, and we could make boyish rafts out of surprisingly small chunks, and pole them about the mud flats at high tide. Even a piece that was 4 by 8 feet could hold you up. (We never ventured where the poles couldn’t touch the bottom, for we knew we’d get carried away by the currents.)
At any rate, there seemed to be two types of ice. One type swiftly became “rotten” slush in the spring, while a second type remained solid and was the sort of ice which can travel miles and sink Titanics. The first type had its origins in the upper third of the icepack, and the second type had its origins in the lower two-thirds.
I think Dr. David Barber needs some extra funding, so he can hire the likes of you and I to come along on his next trip, to tell him whether the ice he observes is truly “rotten” or not. From what I gathered, reading the blogs of fellows attempting the Northwest Passage last summer, the ice you run into up there is hard, even when it is many small chunks, and isn’t truly “rotten.”
Hmmm. Maybe that’s why Dr. Barber traveled in an icebreaker.
I am beginning to wonder: have none of you ever been on a frozen lake as spring approached?
The ice near shore becomes ‘rotten’ due to partial thawing and thinning? So does the majority of the ice on that lake as melting progresses. Much hiking experience and even snowmobile expeditions into early spring revealed all this decades ago now …
I have seen pollywogs (tadpoles) literally hatch and exist near the stumps and shoreline on inland lakes when the ice had been thick that year and melting occured near and around anything *not* ice in nature that would absorb IR and visible energy directly from the sun.
(Place this in the category of observational as opposed to anecdotal.)
.
.
Did anyone check Recovery.ice to see how much Ice was saved or created?
They might also want to see if the Sea has too much Dihydrogen Monoxide in it. The peer reviewed science shows that there may be a decline in that chemical compound, and the charts are now going to be revised to hide the decline of Dihydrogen Monoxide. Not sure what the extra square miles of beaches will be used for though. Perhaps the deniers can just take a well deserved vacation.
Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a widespread unregulated compound, and may soon join Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen on the Rotten Threatening Chemical list. See this for details: http://www.dhmo.org/
Large quantities of DHMO can also be found in rotten ice, and might be the root cause of Dr. Barber’s statements. Perhaps there was too much of it even found in his office?
An addition to my post above.
What really irks me is a statement on science with no science backup. What’s the density and thickness of the mult-year ice Dr. Barber mentions. How many years in the multi-year ice. What is the thickness and density of the new ice. Etc, etc. No real science. Just more scares and what seems to be propoganda.
To me logically, the Arctic Sea after a historic melt at the top of a warming period would refreeze exactly as he descibed as temperatures return to normal.
Anyone have some thoughts along this line?
Dr. Barber, will you add some science measurements to your claims?
Bob Boulton (18:00:59) :
If, as here in the UK, CO2 created to produce goods abroad is not counted, the policy means that closing manufacturing in the US and moving it to China or similar will make you a āGood Guyā environmentalist!
Doesn’t seem to do the bottom line much harm either … the para starting .. As Booker reported, what has been great for Tataās bottom line has not been so good for useful for the 1700 workers who recently lost their jobs…
PS. It will be amusing if the kids from Copenhagen canāt get back home due to the weather. I assume they donāt drive so they will be dependent on public transport.
Looking at the weather for the end of the week they might just get something “rotten” from the Arctic – shame really.
The only thing that makes ice rotten seem to be the beholder of the ice, and I was almost pondering this bs all friggin day, but instead I came up with a different type of explanation to the dreaded green house troll, err, effect.
Disregarding every other planet in the solar system, pretty much due to the fact that each planet is an individual planet and so no planet is alike, I focused my mighty grey little trolls solely on earth.
Imagine that.
What’s the most abundant troll in the atmosphere, that also exist in the soil and you to actually, and is rather soluble in water when coupled to other types of hobnobs?
This little troll absorbs electromagnetic wavelength in the extreme ultra violet range, i.e. the neighbor is x-ray at this extreme wavelength.
When the ozone shield is on the up and up this little troll gets less to absorb.
Of course one of these trolls on its own won’t get too excited to produce that much heat.
But then again they do produce heat.
Imagine that of one million trolls in the atmosphere the co2-troll comes in with about 380 to my little troll with “his” 779 999 friends.
Unless each co2-troll can fart heat that is more than 2050 times hotter then my troll with friends can, they can’t effectively join the green house effect and so can’t even be blamed for “rotten ice”.
If one has to blame any type of troll for the absurd “rotten ice” it is the ozone-troll, especially around the poles, on this here little planet.
Wayne, donāt kid yourself; you wouldnāt know the difference between scientific truth and pure nonsense even if you actually tried to work it out. I canāt always do that either, but I do know that youāve completely ignored density in your brilliant analysis. But youāre not alone; no one here is doing any searching for scientific truth. That actually requires rigour and hard analysis. And Iāve yet to see any hint of that going on here.
About dates, the most logical format is detailed in ISO 8601which is used in many sensible parts of Europe (itās logical because it follows the big-endian standard used with numbers). The Brits should be using that as well (they have signed it into law via EU) but they have never been very good with standards so itāll probably take a while until they catch on. Luckily, theyāre not as bad as the U.S.A for which there is no hope.
David Barber’s “rotten ice” is simply a version of “hide the decline”, as in “hide the ice”; and the MSM buys it.
Record low here today, -32.6Ā°C
Two points. First, whether the satellites are fooled by rotten ice or not, unless the satellites have changed then everything is relevant, and so we have more ice, rotten or not than previous years.
Second, once the IPCC has settled on a cap ‘n tax to bank role their new one world socialist government what do all these ‘scientists’ think they’ll be needed for. The science is settled, the scientists are redundant going forward. Welcome to the unemployment line losers.
“Former Vice President Al Gore told the conference that new data suggests a 75 percent chance the entire Arctic polar ice cap may disappear in the summertime as soon as five to seven years from now.”
Weasel words to replace earlier claims that the polar ice will be gone in 5 years? No data posted by the major ice cap monitoring databases comes close to supporting such a claim.
Oh…wait. I forgot that Obama said science will reclaim its rightful place…
OK, we always hear about how temperature affects Arctic ice, but never hear about how the monster ice breakers are affecting the ice. With the Arctic temps not showing much warming in recorded history, it seems that either, ice loss is a normal and natural process, or maybe some other man-type activity is having a significant effect.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/09/arctic-temperatures-what-hockey-stick/
Opps, I almost forgot; with the latest massaging of the temp records, the Arctic data probably now shows appropriate warming!
Stephen
Clive (17:57:24) :
For Rex you might try here:
http://www.cbc.ca/checkup/contactus.html or
here at CBC’s contact page (where it is very likely to be ignored)
http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/about/contact/
I live about 1 3/4 hours North of Whistler. It is -20 Deg C right now and more snow for Whistler on the way. Well you never know what the snow will be like 2 months from now. I had some concerns about the El Nino conditions. Will have to see if the conditions strengthens. It is a real stretch that there would be NO natural snow. Too much snow might be a problem too. The mountains are a little higher than the village!!
What he really meant to say was “That rotten ice, it just isn’t melting away like we said it would! Now nobody will believe us!”
I read this site and others like it almost daily. From what I read, many of you are far more knowledgable than I regarding this “science”.
I know this is off topic, but something that bugs me immensely is the discussion of world temperature rise. The claims that the surface temps have risen 0.5 deg. C over the past X years means nothing to me.
Since the temperature rise, I assume a drybulb temperature, without knowing the simultaneous wet bulb temperature (in my estimation) means absolutely nothing in terms of heat (enthalpy – BTU/lb. dry air).
In other words, even if the dry bulb temperature rise over the past X years is correct, why is it significant if the surface HEAT is not known?
To anyone familiar with psychrometrics explain this to me?
If someone chooses to field this question of mine, please let me know at tkette@bex.net. I would love to hear an informed response.
Thanks,
Terry Kette
@hans
You must have missed my mention of density, in my second post. That of course, if we’re going to get very scientific, would be a critical parameter. (Although we don’t have the room here in a blog). But at least I can tell your thinking at science level. My point was vague stories as Dr. Barber’s with no backup data is just a story. The trust of authority in climate science is tempoarily (I hope) gone.
Maybe it’s just freezer burned…
Ralph
I don’t know about the “deceitful” bit, but I ” acquired” my beard in May of 1973
(at Beardz R us). But I dissemble
So let’s get this right, in the spring we get various people posting on here (Sadlov for example) suggesting that the melt is over-estimated by satellite detection because of melt-ponds on the ice surface. However, here we have a well documented study comparing satellite and radar measurements of the ice with in situ measurements illustrating a bias in favor of solid ice in the fall. In the latter case we have almost everyone on here attempting to ridicule the study, interesting!
Rotten ice is described and pictured in this U.S. Army Corps of Engineers document, “OMNI ice codes” .
www2.mvr.usace.army.mil/WaterControl/Districts/MVR/presentations/OMNI_ICE_Manual.ppt
See slides 18 and 19
Larry
Another official reference to rotten ice.
http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/forecaster_handbooks/SeaIce/Handbook%20for%20Sea%20Ice%20Analysis%20and%20Forecasting.01.pdf
Also if I recall correctly in the book “call of the wild” (or one of those arctic adventure classics)rotten ice and its hazard to the dog teams crossing rivers is mentioned. As I recall the comment, they mention that late in the spring what looks to be sound thick ice on the rivers and lakes transforms into a weak form of ice composed of vertical needles of ice crystals that do not adhere to each other well (much like shown in slide 18 in the OMNI ppt.) These are serious hazards to the dog teams as they may find that a route that they used routinely for months suddenly has a trap door collapse under the team in what appears to be sound ice.
Larry
Bruce Cobb (14:11:17) :
JonesII (12:39:28) :
Saint Gore again:
Gore: Polar ice may vanish in 5-7 years
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091214/ap_on_sc/climate_gore
Thatās odd. A year ago (Dec. 13, 2008) he said the ENTIRE north polar ice cap WILL disappear in 5 years, and here he is a year later saying it MAY vanish in 5 to 7 years?
Actually he said ‘may well be gone in 5 years’ so I don’t see the problem.
How will people know what to believe of what he says, if he keeps not only changing the content, but keeps moving the goal posts?
He doesn’t, people like you keep misquoting him!
@Caleb & Larry:
Thanks for some real examples of different ice forms. Really, interesting. I had similar boyhood experiences. Lake freezes deep. Warms, breaks into large chunks. Next cold front. Refreezes the chunks together but not as deep. Very dangerous ice! Can break through it with a canoe let alone an icebreaker!
But the fallacy of the topic of arctic ice is flawed; you need to accurately know the mass of the ice. Sea ice EXTENT is but one parameter. Ice thickness and density in 2D are the missing parameters and would currently be next to impossible to know, except roughly. For as Larry mentioned vertical ice shards with water between can throw huge inaccuracies into such measurements. We are speaking of the heat (joules) it will take to totally melt this arctic ice. Like taking an Earth sized strainer, placing all of the ice in the Arctic sea and squeezing all water out and weighing it. Then such comments being thrown would have some true scientific meaning. But mankind can only roughly estimate. And if the estimates are shaded by agenda, they are meaningless.
Without accurate ice MASS, such statements I read regularly need to be taken with some big grains of salt.
Here is a plausible explanation for what has actually been happening in the Arctic in recent years. It describes the Arctic Dipole, and reads like proper science.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1398
Especially gratifying is the absence of any mention of CO2, evil mankind or fluffy Polar Bears.
You know, what really p*sses me off is that the likes of Hansen and the Team and their worldwide acolytes are fully aware of the real causes of such variability in the Arctic and elsewhere, yet they continue to utter glib sound bites that put mankind and plant food at the centre of anything mildly unusual in the way of weather/climate.
At best that is disingenuous; more likely it’s hypocritical; most probably it’s profoundly dishonest; at the limit – which is where they always go to – it is effectively fraudulent. That is why they have so easily found allies among politicians, the acknowledged experts in trite phrases based on little learning but calculated to resonate in the electorate.
I fear the only way to counter them in communicating the truth with the unscientific majority of the public is not to get too heavily into the science – that hurts people’s brains and makes them switch off.
My local MP in Sydney is Tony Abbott, who has recently become Leader of the Opposition, largely on the basis of opposing the Government’s sneaky attempt to impose an expensive ETS system (= tax) on us, and in which he succeeded, denying the PM a trophy that he was so desperate to take to Copenhagen to impress the grown-ups with. The said Tony Abbott is on record as having said recently in public something along the lines of, “This man-made global warming thing is crap.”
Now that’s the kind of message any Australian can understand. And we are not alone in this.
Of course, there is such a thing as rotten ice and of course, Mr. Barber has seen it many times in 25 years of researching Arctic ice, even if he does only do a two-week trip a year. So, like Roy Spencer, I don’t see why he says he’s never seen it before.
His conceptual schematic looks like large fragments of multi-year ice. He says the edges are rounded. That means they’ve been around for a while and haven’t disintegrated further. He calls it a conglomerate, which is not accurate, partly because it’s only one fragment thick at any point and in September there was only a 2 inch skin of new ice over the top. By now, it will be looking a lot more like conglomerate, with a matrix of new ice cementing it all together and nobody will be cruising through it at 23 knots next year.
He’s obviously got a point to make; he can’t resist preaching about down-welling IR, though I note he didn’t measure up-welling LW at all.
He says: “Values of down-welling longwave ranged from 307 ā 313 W mP2P illustrating the important role of the longwave flux to surface warming.”
Ric Werme (14:28:35) :
E.M.Smith (10:03:17) :
> The only thing rotten here is the ārotten iceā theory. Ice does not rot.
> There is no physical mechanism for it.
How long have you lived in California?
My whole life. Never heard ‘rotten’ applied to ice, despite years of skiing and lots of time spent in Tahoe show and ice. Must be a regional thing. Dad was from Iowa. Spent some time there and in Texas. Lots of ‘oral history’ about Iowa winter. Again, never had “rotten” applied to ice. Just biological stuff (and human morality: deals, scoundrels, etc.)
Yes, I’m familiar with snow and ice weakening as it melts. But rotten?…
(Then again, we use “snuck” and not “sneaked” and “crufty” is common too.)
http://www.idniyra.org/articles/ice_grain.htm
“Water ice freezes into crystal families called grains. The melting takes place between the grain boundaries of the ice. The melting point of water is slightly lower at the grain boundary because the crystal structure is less perfect there.”
In the Yukon, the lake-ice honeycombs in the Spring and we always called it rotten.
Phil. (21:46:59) : Actually he (Al Gore) said āmay well be gone in 5 yearsā so I donāt see the problem.
The problem is it may well not be gone in 5 years.
..people like you keep misquoting him
Like “I havenāt read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old.” ? or “The interior of the Earth is extremely hot a few million degrees”? (to be fair he didnt say Celsius or Fahrenheit so we’ll grant him Fahrenheit)
He also gave the impression that you could drill down 2 kms anywhere and run a turbine off the heat from that depth. Maybe for a (rather expensive) science fair project, but to solve our energy problems? I dont think so.
There are many things that he doesnt actually say but he gives the impression of some terrible imminent danger, like showing London or the statue of liberty under water. The fact is the message deceives.
“But youāre not alone; no one here is doing any searching for scientific truth. That actually requires rigour and hard analysis. And Iāve yet to see any hint of that going on here.”
Actually science doesn’t always require rigour or analysis. There’s a couple of Nobel prizes awarded basically for getting lucky (background cosmic radiation they weren’t looking for, Fleming and penicillin). Others awarded for massive insight, regardless of analysis (Einstein, recalling what he actually won it for, which wasn’t relativity).
But anyway, science is about prediction, reproduce-ability and fitting with better known data. It is therefore quite easy to falsify bad science when it fails to predict accurately, be reproduce the same result or make sense in terms of what we already know.
Say I allege that the cause of global warming is the alignment of the planets (i.e. Astrology). I bet you can discard that without any rigorous analysis. Actually I bet you discard that without any analysis at all. Because you know that it has no predictive value and contradicts all physics.
Likewise [snip] don’t have to come up with a better theory for GW. Really, we don’t. We can merely point out the IMO fatal flaws in the CO2 concept and stop there. I know it’s not fair that we don’t have to do the same rigorous analysis as the ones who want to prove it, but that’s science for you.
If the ice was too “rotten” for the polar bear to walk on, how did it get out there?
Over at the Greenbang Blog, they say that: āRottenā sea ice creates false impression of Arctic recovery
What they meant by that was, “That dirty, rotten, increasing sea ice is ruining the false impression we’re trying to create about the Arctic’s recovery.”
David Barber seems to be tteading on thin ice.
Phil. (20:48:34) :
So letās get this right, in the spring we get various people posting on here (Sadlov for example) suggesting that the melt is over-estimated by satellite detection because of melt-ponds on the ice surface. However, here we have a well documented study comparing satellite and radar measurements of the ice with in situ measurements illustrating a bias in favor of solid ice in the fall. In the latter case we have almost everyone on here attempting to ridicule the study, interesting!
At least here, as you pointed out, it is an assortment of people offering up contradictory opinions. Mr. Barber seems entirely capable of handling that task all by himself. He spends most of his introductory briefing us on the what we need to know about the recent history of the Arctic ice, liberally peppering his presentation with nice precise measurement derived from satellite data and then spends the rest of the paper trying to prove that the satellites can’t be trusted. He is nice enough to offer us a nice clue to the solution of the quandary of the bad match between satellite projections and reality though.
” Canadian Ice Service (CIS) digital ice charts were employed for real-time planning of station locations and sailing routes during the cruise. CIS digital ice charts are based on expert manual interpretation of Radarsat-1 data (the primary data source since 1996), NOAA-AVHRR and Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) data and in situ aerial and marine surveys. They include total sea ice concentration and partial concentrations by type. ”
While the erratic performance of the satellites throughout the year should cause any reasonable person to be cautious of placing too much confidence in any of their data output, they might also have reason to wonder just how expertly that “expert manual interpretation” was performed in constructing Mr. Barber’s ice charts. That being said i actually agree with many of his points. I posted several comments last winter questioning the ability of the satellites to determine ice age and have often expressed the view that the age of the ice in the Arctic has declined dramatically since the 80’s. Of course, I tend toward the view that the decline is mostly unrelated to AGW, see my post above for elaboration on that point.
Dave Wendt (13:21:54) :
One wonders how “rotten” the arctic ice was during that Medieval Warming Period the CRU “Hockey Team” tried so hard to get rid of.
Given that Greenland was actually green at the time (hence the name), the Vikings may have actually sailed an ice-free open sea at that time – at least in the summer.
What is rotten here is the trashy agenda-driven pseudoscience, the GIGO computer models, and the croaking evil toads that run the International Banking Cartels and who fund the AGW parasites through their interlocking foundations, and now want to tax the GDP of every nation on Earth, tax every financial transaction world-wide, and tax many other things including the very breath of every individual.
Anthropogenic Global Warming is simply their latest vehicle for advancing their Malthusian population reduction agenda – we “Useless Eaters” emit too much carbon, you see. The Earth would be so much better off if most of us died – or were never born in the first place.
Anthony
That’s getting a little to close to Gavins little jokes about Yamal!
There appears to be an error in the article. The text cites the Anchorage Daily News, but the URL links to the Alaska Dispatch – the two publications are not the same.
What’s going on with IARC-JAXA? It is now five days since they posted arctic ice data. Actually, they posted the data as of 12/13, but subsequently took down the data for 12/11, 12/12, and 12/13, and have not posted since.
I hate freezer burned rotten ice, it ruins the drink. What is the solution? Melt it down and freeze new ice. Happens every year.
What good is the peer-review process when your peers all think the same way? If the mob boss is on trial and the jury is packed with mobsters, he is going to get off.
They need to discredit the emerging notion that there really is no such thing as “multi year ice” and that instead, ice “obducts” and shortens via compressive stress to become more indurated and resistant to melting. Also, of course, the morphing of snow deposited on top into ice especially at the equatorward edges of the pack (where moisture is more available). What I have described explains how we went from a low slightly greater than long term average areal distribution over only a couple or three years multiple times in history. The pack can shape shift quickly and does so by “going vertical” – obduction, shortening, ridging – all of these behaviors reduce areal distribution and thicken. By throwing out this “rotten ice” notion they divert attention from the behaviors I’ve described.
from a low TO A slightly greater than long term average …
Thanks for all those remaining true to science, when the science we are using has been turned into politics.
Also, yes, humans are major polluters and we must clean that up, but that does not equate making billionaires out of thin air (the FEDS job), reducing crops and creating food shortages, and losing control to a UN global gov–the UN is totally a machine dedicated to one thing… world gov control no matter, as we have seen with vaccines, food programs, AGW…etc.
What if all those billions were actually used to force polluters to actually clean up the messes they are making on our planet? How many billions were spent on air travel alone for these fraudsters? Makes me sick.
Now, I hope everyone will question our gov, and make damn sure the UN is NOT being used any longer for our policy making. Don’t play the D/R, L/C game, because if not AGW, they are up to something else. Hopefully eyes will be open and the fraud, and easy ride over us, the commoners who can’t live without tyrants, will END… about time.
Check out this clown… what planet is this one on? I can’t make a post because I am NOT invited. Can someone please destroy this man… or at least wake him up from his dream state. I think he must be in bed with al gore and repeating the nonsense coming from the gores dream.
Confidence In Science Of Global Warming Grows Despite ‘Climate-gate’
By David Moulton
Director of Climate Change Policy, The Wilderness Society
http://copenhagen.nationaljournal.com/2009/12/confidence-in-the-science-of-g.php
Whenever I hear something that I think is climate BS, I flip the scenario around and see if I could use the statement the other way. I.E. If we were in a prolonged period of global cooling and the alarmism was that we were heading into another ice age — and the trend was, for a long time, Arctic sea ice growth, and the past 3 years had shown a sudden melting after many years of ice growth. Could you imagine the alarmists scientists and media in this alternate universe saying “Yes, the artic ice has stopped its growth trend over the last few years, but the ice that remains is very thick, solid, high quality ice so we remain confident that the prediction for more years of ice growth remains a threat.” I could very much envision that.
I think if you can do this with any alarmist statement that comes out, then the statement can be considered reactionary to what has happened and not a predictor of things to come.
I hope that no one brings any of that rotten ice down here to the southern hemisphere. Help! Our ice needs vaccination.
Here in the land where all the women are strong and the children are above average, we know all about ‘rotten ice’. That’s how idiots lose their fishing shacks and SUVs.
Moderator: Can something be done to remove the sensitivity of the damned “Tab” key? I hit it by accident and my posting-in-progress vanished.
I was saying that I may be too late in posting for most readers to see this message, but…..Dr. Barber was interviewed on the CBC radio science show Quirks and Quarks in late November. He may be heard via:
http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/09-10/qq-2009-11-28.html
I listened with interest. I believe that he said that where the icebreaker was travelling was normally thick ice. Whether this meant only that the ice mass had drifted away under wind or not I don’t know. But I filed away his interview as information to be listened to.
IanM
KDK (08:25:29) :
“Confidence In Science Of Global Warming Grows Despite āClimate-gateā
By David Moulton
Director of Climate Change Policy, The Wilderness Society”
This is rather odd, Moulton is the Director of Climate Change Policy AND Conservation Funding.
He’s a democratic lawyer activist:
http://wilderness.org/about-us/experts/david-moulton
kadaka (18:02:40) :
Richard (11:57:40) :
PS those Cryosphere snaps left me thunderstruck for a second. Why cant americans learn how to write their dates logically? The day comes before the month then the year
The āAmericanā date format more closely resembles our speech, where first is specified the object (group) then part of the object (subgroup or item), like how instead of saying ādoor of the carā we would say ācar door,ā or instead of āthe crystals of sodium chlorideā it would be āthe sodium chloride crystals.ā This is also in agreement with biological classifications which run large to small, thus āhomo sapiensā instead of āsapiens homo,ā for example.
Those examples are misleading. In this case the group is year and the subgroups month and day. To be logical then would you say 2009, December the 16th?
Mooloo (01:07:16) :
I understand what you’re saying, but go look at RC – they have been winning the conversation DESPITE their inability to predict anything, despite not being falsifiable. We are debating with people who do not respect the basic tenants of good science:
“1.) It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theoryāif we look for confirmations.
2.) Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theoryāan event which would have refuted the theory.
3.) Every “good” scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4.) A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5.) Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability; some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6.) Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of “corroborating evidence.”)
7.) Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirersāfor example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by re-interpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a “conventionalist twist” or a “conventionalist stratagem.”)”
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/Critical_thinking/Science_pseudo_falsifiability.html
If we think the instrument records are bogus, skewed group-think products, then to really stick a fork in it, we need to come up with an alternative product. Absolutely nothing against the great work by Anthony et al on the Surface Stations project, but… it will only go so far and the BS artists at RealClimate will dismiss it outright as they have with other legitimate critiques like M&M and the Wegman Report of Mann’s Hockey Stick. They will continue to point to all the incestuous research based on their invalidated methods as “corroborating evidence” and continue to make the ridiculous claim that even if the method is wrong the results are right so everything’s ok.
Without an alternate and superior product to challenge them, this crap will NEVER end
UK MOD has produced a presentaion which I have yet to see claiming that sea ice thickness has reduced by 45 % since 1971 this based on sonar measurements made by nuclear subs yes we do have them and they do under ice operations
Paulus
I’m just guessing here, but a beer-swigging, educated, liberal, mouthy, redheaded Irish woman who suffers fools only if they be under her boots, would not be on the invitation list over at the nopenhogan.nationaljournal?
[don’t combine Copenhagen bashing with religion bashing ~ ctm]
I remembered this article at NASA:
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/quikscat-20071001.html
that explained the 2007 low arctic ice extent was primarily due to unusual wind patterns rather than any warming.
“Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,” he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.
vboring (10:44:35) :
I imagine rotten ice refers to ice with cavities.
Maybe we need an Arctic Ice dentist.
counter evidence–
video with sound-
This past August(2009)
the Canadian icebreaker
was used to break old multiyear ice ahead
the USA icebreaker Healy–
no mention is made of “rotten ICe”-
just a path of lots of freshly broken big chunks
of icebreaker broken multiyear old sea ice
in a solid expanse of omultiyear old sea ice—
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cutterhealy/3872152298/in/photostream/
Melt ponds on multiyear ice-
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cutterhealy/3812337687/in/set-72157622404060250/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cutterhealy/3862554261/in/set-72157622404060250/
Since it is now minus 30 C in the Arctic, all that
ice is now refrozen and not very likely to be “rotten”
unless there is a volcano erupting beneath it.
http://www.ogimet.com/cgi-bin/gsynop?zona=artico&base=bluem&proy=orto&ano=2009&mes=12&day=17&hora=00&vtn=Tn&enviar=Ver
And if anyone knows someone that has taken or is taking a cruise on one of those
russian nuke icebreakers,
it would be interesting to see what their videos are showing–
There must be literally hundreds of videos taken this summer and fall on
icebreakedrs by tourists.
Icebreakers commence this
year’s battle against
Great Lakes ice
(not so rotten and not so warm)
http://www.sooeveningnews.com/news/x1669486610/U-S-Coast-Guard-begins-breaking-ice
http://www.military.com/news/article/coast-guard-news/new-york-cgc-to-deploy-for-ice-breaking.html
http://www.76fsa.org/cgta/history.htm
Currently 80 thousand square km per day
arctic sea ice increase–
http://solarcycle24com.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=globalwarming&action=display&thread=346&page=150#37764
Finally had a chance to read through the study and look at the video. Interesting spin from one to the other.
The prime conclusions of the paper were that areas that show up on satellite images as thicker ice were not fully verified by actual observation. Some sights were much lower than indicated, others had thick, multi-year ice. Kudos to Barber for doing field work, and raising some interesting questions as to why radar images were different that observations.
There was a subtle, but big leap from the paper to the video, however. While there were no historical trend comparisons in the paper, suddenly Barber claims that this shows a decline of multi-year ice and implies a thinner and more fragile ice cap. Of course, the media gobbled this up and sexed up the headlines further.
The results: More science by press release, several stories for lazy journalists, and of course, more funding for Dr. Barber.
QUESTION from a newbie:
Could “rotten ice” serve as a sort of nucleus for eventually “non-rotten ice”?
What is the physics? In other words, if new ice keeps forming over the honeycombed ice, does the interior “rot” keep disintegrating within the newly forming shell, causing it to break and agglomerate new denser ice masses? Or does the interior “rot” somehow fill up and become refreshed, and integrated more strongly into the dominant new shell?
I need a micro course in ice-formation physics here. Any takers?
Robert Kernodle