Arctic Sea Ice Extent Update: still growing

I’ve been watching the graphs for weeks now waitng for the inevitable downturn. When the chart first hit 14 million km, I thought, wow, that is a solid season. Time to begin to go lower. Then……it just held there…..then it went up! The minimum this September (August ?) should be ver interesting to track.

The line isnt going down like it should. This is evidence of a coming ice age. All countries of the world must get together immediately to deal with this line not going down problem. We need to increase our CO2 production before its too late! Think of the poor tropical animals standing on their little island of palm trees amid incoming icebergs!
/sarc

geo (08:50:21) :
Check this out from last April.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/15/why-third-year-arctic-ice-will-increase-next-year/

like I said before: global warming is over. we now have to seriously look at global cooling and the consequences of that for every day life. We also need to know what the course is, projected into the future. Can we ask Easterbrook again for his current view?
Can somebody here perhaps explain to me again the exact significance of the amount of sun spots and the solar flux value that is displayed every day here on WUWT?

But surely it is all “rotten” ice (an absurd term) and shouldn’t be counted – it this keeps up you can expect some redefinition of what constitutes ice from the “death spiral” crowd, wait for it.
We’ve already had the “don’t confuse weather with climate change” excuse from the warmistas. Curiously, they did not invoke this reasoning in the great summer retreat of 2007. The warmista’s mantra of “heads I win, tails you lose” never ceases to amaze.

Henry Pool said:
“global warming is over. we now have to seriously look at global cooling…”
—-
Uh, Henry, the figures are not out yet, but March is likely to continue the trends set in January and February showing a very warm year, in fact, 2010 could very likely beat out 1998 as the warmest year on instrument record. Where do you see signs that the warming is over? Please share that data…

@geo, let’s remember your prediction in September.

Sadly the Arctic-ROOS site seems to be down.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
That’s too bad b/c they were showing ice area above mean as of 3/30. In fact, the area looked perched to break over the 1 stDev above mean.
Oh well, I guess it’s all just more evidence of climate change.

Oh dear! This proves that global warming is killing the polar bears. You see, due to the record warm January, record numbers of polar bears must be dying off. And since they’re dying off, there aren’t as many of them to cause the sea ice to tip over and capsize, and then to sink to the bottom of the sea. That’s why the sea ice extend is increasing! Duh!

How will they hide the incline?

“Other sea ice metrics such as JAXA, using a different satellite platform (AQUA) and the AMSR-E sensor agree.”
Multiple sensor errors …and all in the same direction! Who would have thought it.

Baby Oil is winning over Big Oil. I am sure the warmists must be huddling somewhere to sort out a narrative for this. Narrative used to be called SPIN.

R Gates — I still firmly believe that we’ll see an arctic sea ice minimum less than 2009 [snip]
Why is that?

R. Gates (09:07:20) :
Henry Pool said:
“global warming is over. we now have to seriously look at global cooling…”
—-
Uh, Henry, the figures are not out yet, but March is likely to continue the trends set in January and February showing a very warm year, in fact, 2010 could very likely beat out 1998 as the warmest year on instrument record. Where do you see signs that the warming is over? Please share that data…
Gosh. Can’t argue with facts regarding the rest of the year 2010…
Even so, this ‘warmest decade ever’ really hasn’t been very warm on the ground. Where, you know, crops grow, animals graze, people live and seas rise and fall. It’s not surprising that people are seeing the AGW-wing as a bunch of chicken-littles.
While these reports of cold weather – coldest it has been in a while – are anecdotal (and weather is not climate) they all add up to a world which is not warming a whole lot, and no tangeable effects on our environment.

5 years ago the experts were surprised and dismayed that the decline in Arctic ice extent was progressing much more rapidly than they predicted. “It’s worse than we thought”, they said. Now many are surprised and baffled by this late and rapid runup in extent to the 1979 – 2000 average.
Once again, just a reminder that the current state of climate science cannot predict or really explain the fluctuations we are observing in Arctic ice extent in the last 30 years. There is still so much we do not understand.
The science is so ….. not settled.

I would like to see a similar plot for area. It should be less affected by wind and more directly related to SST and OLR.

Quote – “We live in interesting times.”
Mr Watts,
I wrote and suggested today in Tips & Notes to WUWT (Przemysław Pawełczyk (07:20:06) 🙂 an idea to publish more maps/images related to interesting topics.
Having this example (Arctic Sea Ice Extent Update: still growing) I will better illustrate what I was voting for.
Arctic Ice-Cover Hyperlink Package:
1) Jet Stream Analyses
http://squall.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_norhem_00.gif
2) NHemi Surface Temperatures
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmp_01.fnl.html
3) Current Snow and Ice
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1262750/Mega-flood-triggered-Europes-big-freeze–global-warming-plunge-cold-warn-scientists.html
4) Latest Sea Surface Temperature image
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/sst/latest_sst.gif
5) N. Hemi Snow Depth (Air Force)
http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/surface/snowAFnh.gif
6) N. Hemi Snow Cover (NOAA-NESDIS)
http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/surface/snowNESDISnh.gif
7) Sea Ice Concentration
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.some.000.png
8) Sea Ice Concentration
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
9) Current Bering Sea ICe Are
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.2.html
10) Arctic Sea Ice Extent
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
11) Monthly NSIDC Ice with Buoys
http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/maps_monthly_ncepice.html
0) Bering Strait influenced ice age climate patterns worldwide
http://www2.ucar.edu/news/bering-strait-influenced-ice-age-climate-patterns-worldwide
Regards

Those Catlin fools must be still going backwards or around and around. Haven’t heard a word lately so may be they were a polar bear meal… 🙂

Hmmm. The growing ice may be putting a crimp in oil/gas exploration by the countries bordering the Arctic. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants, after all the hype about “vast reserves”?

Nansen ice extent is unavailable – I guess they can’t believe the ice extent (and, indeed, ice area itself) is still increasing so they will be making adjustments.

Somewhat on topic, I’ve just posted some reference graphs that illustrate the variations in polar land and sea surface temperatures (absolute, not anomalies) and their relative magnitudes. Nothing earth-shattering, just some visuals–graphs.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/04/polar-sea-and-land-surface-temperatures.html

Oh, come on. As were the Blizzards of 2010, this is surely a sign of Global Warming…. I mean climate change.

Arctic temps
Melting is happening in the baltic sea

It really amazes me. Whenever we have more ice it always baby ice or thin ice or new ice or first year ice. Folks, the ice is growing point made. Deal with it. Al Gore the ice hasn’t vanished as you had predicted over 5 years ago.
Also R Gates’ temps have been measured by satellite only since the late 70’s, so trying to campare our temps now vs before satellite is like trying to play basketball with a football. You can’t. Joe Bastardi has an excellant video on Accuweather titled Another Look At Global Winter Temps, where he compares the temps on GISS site vs Noaa. According to the GISS site we had no winter at all. Try telling that to people in the Southeast and Mid Atlantic states and the northeast of the U.S. Record snow and very cold winter, and last but not least, measurable snow on ground in 49 states, FLORIDA INCLUDED, that’s right 49 states in Feb.

As a geologist I don’t get concerned much when there’s a 1 degree C increase in temperature over a century. I don’t pay much attention to hysteria about bears dying or glaciers melting or islands sinking. Big deal.
But tell me there’s strong evidence for the next glacial epoch and I’ll go ballistic. Consider the ramifications–once that “Tipping Point” happens (and I believe there is indeed a glacial epoch tipping point because they’ve been found), in less than a decade Europe is under 20 feet of perennial snow/ice and counting; Northern Africa is the new Riviera. Canadians have all relocated to Mexico (hey, Spanish is easy to learn and green cards are only 100% of what$ever you’ve got); no reason for staying in the US ’cause now it has the same cold climate as pre-ice age Canada.
All major cities of the world are dredging their harbors because of drastic drops in sea level, and Arctic ice extends a thousand mile south of Iceland and far south of the Aleutians. Equatorial temperatures are up an average of 5 degrees C which intensifies all weather systems, creating some of the biggest and most destructive hurricanes and typhones seen since the last Ice Age melted into the Holocene ~10,000 years ago.
And humans (those that remain, anyway) are pining for the good old days once known as Global Warming.

I’d like to know how many climate models predicted this “breakout” upwards trend in the arctic sea ice levels. If it’s none that spells seriously bad news for all the climate models as in falsification bad news.
The end of soothsaying the future in science? That would be seriously nice.
Humans are – least we forget with all of our magical mythologies from the bronze age still in play – still great apes and as such even the best of us get caught up in belief stricken ideas. The idea of the scientific method is to have someone – anyone – catch when a scientist is being belief stricken ignoring the evidence before his eyes.
The ice evidence seems to be quite compelling… a upward thrust through the heart of climate models and the alleged AGW hypothesis debilitating them and showing them for what they are not good at, predicting Nature.
Climate scientists saying that their hypothesis can’t explain what is going on in Nature is tantamount to admitting that their hypotheses has been falsified.
Questions.
So the question is how many climate models predicted this breakout?
Did any even predict the probability of such a breakout?
Do the climate models even consider more than the hypothesis they are built to prove?

R. Gates (11:17:53) :
Oceantwo said:
“…they all add up to a world which is not warming a whole lot, and no tangeable effects on our environment.”
———–
Tell that to the people of Newtok, AK:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/04/24/climate.change.eskimos/index.html
But, again, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, and “these are not the droids you’re looking for…”
Keep watching Faux News and all will be well…
——————————–
Reply:
So every piece of weather that comes along is evidence of Global Warming…er,… I mean Climate Change? I’d say it is evidence of climate, but not particularly beneficial to your argument when such things as floods, drought, tornatoes, hurricanes, etc. etc. have been common fare on this earth since way, way before history was written.
Global Warming/Climate Change uses Katrina as their poster storm, but they hide the facts. Katrina was only a category 3 storm; it was lack of proper preparation due to weakened and substandard man-made dikes that made it such a disaster. Likewise, AGW theorists takes something normal–climate–and embellishes it beyond rational justification by pointing to storms that are pretty ordinary too. That man happens to be impacted by such weather phenomena is nothing new.

jorgekafkazar:
“High atmospheric temperatures reveal heat on the way out of the system, not what the system is like. You can’t judge just by what’s coming out.”
_____________
True enough, but AGW is about the energy balance of the earth, and now matter how you want to play with energy flow, increased GHG change the energy balance of earth (thankfully, or we’d all be frozen), and not all the energy of the troposphere is on its way out, in fact, GHG guarantee that exactly that is NOT the case, as they absorb and then re-transmit energy in all directions, back to the ground and into space. We know that the straosphere has been cooling over the past 20 years, (as predicted by AGW models) and this is exactly because more energy is being absorbed and then retransmitted in the troposphere.

What kind of a year is it?
As I’m sitting here, with only 36 days of measured snowfall in April since 1913, I now have 2.5″ of snow.
9 of of those 36 days (25%) were above trace.
2 of those days (the 2nd and 3rd of April, 1928) had more than today so far. The day is just now 1/2 over. In a few minutes, I’ll beat all but the 2nd of April, 1928, which had 6″.
That’s what kind of a year it has been.
The trendpipes froze and the models are bluescreened.

Touching the 1979-2000 average line, or close to it, for a day or two does not mean the summer melt minimum sea ice extent cannot still be third lowest, or lowest, since 1979:
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20090504_Figure2.png
Late April, so close…
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20091005_Figure2.png
Still way below two std dev from the average.
Unusual (recently), thin ice in the Bering Sea in April does not necessarily mean a high Arctic sea ice extent in September.
But if you’re hoping for a return to “average” Arctic patterns,
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/nsidc_n_stddev_timeseries_040110.png
you might as well celebrate with a drink tonight 🙂

I saw another term for the ice yesterday. It was called “stagnant ice” instead of rotten ice. LOL

Anyone else notice that in the early days the land masks were wrong and they were counting ice on land as sea ice?
DaveE.

R. Gates (11:52:03) :
“First, in regards to the arctic: Regardless of whether you like the colors chosen or how the map is projected, data show that we’ve seen warming in the arctic, more so than any other region of the earth over the past 30 years. Not only do the data support this, but ground evidence does as well with permafrost melting, etc.”
No, sorry R. Gates, data do not support this. Look here, no increase in summer max temps since 1958:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Summertime temps are the only ones having any (limited) effect at all with respect to melting of ice and permafrost. Do you have a credible source for permafrost melting? (Watch out for nonsensical alarmist assertions of death spirals and evaporating tundra.)
Re. sea ice minimum for 2010, please give a number to make the competition more interesting.

Cam_S (12:39:11) :
“It is not the end of global warming,” said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder.
Researcher says sea ice growth a fluke outcome
Which one, the flatfish or the liver parasite?

JAN,
Northern hemisphere sea ice minimum this year will be approximately -1.5 million sq. km. This appears to be the trend and a likely with the disappearance of the El Nino this year.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png

Jan,
First, think we need to agree on which data set we’ll use. But using IJIS, I’d put this years minimum in the 4.5 million sq. km range. Below 2008 & 2009, but not at the 2007 level.
I see a big melt from the Atlantic & Siberian side later in the summer.

“This is weather,” said Serreze. “Don’t conflate this with climate.”
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100401/sea_ice_100401/20100401?hub=SciTech
So when it melts it’s climate change but when it freezes it’s weather.
Well that makes perfect sense and perfectly good climate science as done by Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. with no apparent bias towards a pet hypothesis there.
Of course it’s weather, all climate change is weather as “climate change” is just a mathematical averaging of WEATHER over the longer term of 10 to 30 years. In other words you can’t have “climate change” without weather actually happening in the objective reality of Nature. It takes weather for the climate to change, or the falsification of data, that tends to change the climate of science too. As math is an abstraction thus weather averaged into climate is an abstraction. Weather is what is real.

Today, according to Mr. Serreze, I had the most weather in 82 years.
That’s 3+” of snow. Record was 82 years ago, 6″, for the entire month of April.
The day is not over yet.
Having has 24 years of snowless April’s from 1975 to 1999, and having 5 April’s with snow since then, plus 7 before 1975, I’d say that regional warming ended here 11 years ago. Seems to me we’re headed in the opposite direction, in full natural defiance of the climate models. Poor anomalous Rhode Island, I feel your pain as I scrape the deck.
How trendy is that?

The NSIDC comment is predictable … maybe they will have to hide the Arctic data from the front page of their web site, the same way they hide the Antarctic ?
“March 3, 2010
In February, Arctic sea ice extent continued to track below the average…”

pwl said:
“…all climate change is weather as “climate change” is just a mathematical averaging of WEATHER over the longer term of 10 to 30 years…”
_______
I don’t think so. Climate change may been SEEN in the mathematical averaging of the weather over long periods of time, but that’s not what climate change IS. Climate change is a fundamental shift in energy balances, transfers, and energy circulation patterns bewteen sun, atmosphere, oceans, and land. Climate change is all about energy. It may be reflected in weather patterns, but it is not just some averaging of weather patterns. The reason why AGWT is so enticing is that it has a real physical basis to be potentially correct based on energy patterns and the very well known physics of GH gases and their behavior related to energy in the troposphere.

JAN (13:33:43) :
R. Gates (11:52:03) :
No, sorry R. Gates, data do not support this. Look here, no increase in summer max temps since 1958:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Summertime temps are the only ones having any (limited) effect at all with respect to melting of ice and permafrost.
First, Summer is generally about June 21 to Sept 23 (varies slightly, year to year). This is Day 172 to 266:
http://www.vpcalendar.net/Julian_Date.html
So, that little ‘mountain peak’ above the melt line includes some Spring temperatures, too.
Second, the graphs you point out are for “the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel“:
http://clasticdetritus.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/arctic-svalbard-map.jpg
Do you see the 80° N latitude circle ? Second from the inner 85° N circle.
The Arctic is all the area above 66.5619° N, by definition (slightly above Iceland, there to the east of Greenland).
However, I think a lot of the sites that give “Arctic sea ice extent” actually use the colloquial “Arctic”, including places like the Bering Sea, Sea of Okhotsk, Hudson Bay, and the east coasts of Labrador (Canada) and southern Greenland, all of which are way below 66.5619° N.
When the NSIDC says “Arctic Sea Ice Extent”:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
I think they are including all those non-Arctic places I mentioned:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_bm_conc.png
So, when a year like 2009 shows this temperature profile for above the 80° N latitude circle (click on Arkiv, year 2009):
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
I would imagine a curve similar to the red one (above the green “mean” curve from 1958 to 2002 data for most of the year) gets shifted way up for places like the Bering Sea and the Hudson Bay.
And the almost three extra 5° latitute circles in the Arctic:
http://clasticdetritus.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/arctic-svalbard-map.jpg

Having said that the only “update” I see is their actual image.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png

Gaia damn youse peoples!!! I hope that the prophet algore sequesters you along side of your demon carbon dioxides for the rest of eternity. Youse guys continues to profane the holiest of the holy warming up of the almighty gaia with youse blasphemies and hersheys. Perish youse all to an oil company someplace.

I have always found one observation very, very strange indeed. Why aren’t the alarmists happy when they see from their own alarmist websites that the Arctic sea ice extent is now at the 1979 – 2000 average?????? I would be sad if AGW was clearly being measured and observed as it could adversly affect my children’s futures; but they should be happy if AGW is shown to be false.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
Is it because they have a hidden agenda?
[REPLY – One of the advantages of being an “optimist” (aside from nearly always being right) is that you can root for yourself being right with a clear conscience. In any event, Optimism is the new Realism. ~ Evan]

Boy, Serreze just isn’t going to lose his story line no matter what. 2007 was evidence that things were worse than we thought, but 2010 is just weather.
Maybe they’re both just weather, Mark. Maybe you’re back onto the downward path you thought you had pre-2007 and things aren’t “worse than we thought”, but merely as bad as we thought.
But, no, things must always be worse than we thought. . .
I like the current extent, no question –but I like a whole lot better how compact Cryosphere Today is showing that extent to be. It’s high and it’s compact –this is goodness.

Tom Wiita (15:29:57) :
First, the name of that chart is:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2008.jpg
Second, the date on the file is:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/
[IMG] seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg 14-Oct-2008 23:35 668K
[IMG] seasonal.extent.1900-2008.jpg 14-Oct-2008 23:34 668K
(Looks like they somehow have the exact same chart named twice, and copied into the same directory. Try it, you can see the same chart with either name)
So, the chart was created 14-Oct-2008, that’s why you can see data for winter, spring and summer 2008, but not autumn (Oct-Nov-Dec) or for the full year 2008.
Third, yes they could have updated the chart in 2009, but this is a University – maybe the guy who made that chart graduated, and they forgot to document the script that generated it, or they lost the script/program, or the computer it was running on died, whatever. Unlike NASA, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ( http://uiuc.edu ) has no obligation to provide the public with nice graphs and explanations of their research. They are doing it probably to teach the students something, and getting their name out there in the competitive world of University recruitment.
But I guess if you ask nicely, they might find someone to update the chart…
Fourth, if they wanted to “freeze” the chart at its most dramatic, they wouldn’t include 2008 data, those little upticks at the end of 3 of the lines.
Did you know the Mosaic web browser was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign beginning in late 1992 ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
They didn’t have to provide that for free, either.

R.Gates “To me, the change in the arctic and antarctic are my “acid test’ as to whether or not AGW is happening or not. ”
Aren’t you slightly tired of rehashing the same AGW truisms? It is the way you pose the problem that leads you to the same conclusions, the conclusions AGW scientists want by activism and sometimes by believing their own bad science.
Yet serious informed observations do not lead to the same conclusions. unless you belive in averaging temperatures, the convenient way to twist the debate, the Arctic is not “warming”: some areas do warm while others do cool (source ACIA). The same in Antarctica where only the WAP is warming while Eastern Antarctica is slightly cooling or stable. Therefore, both polar areas warmings are regional. Indeed I find CO2 very discriminating…
Explanation resides in warm air advections corridors, highlighting a dynamic warming. This can be easily demonstrated through atmospheric pressure evolution of anticyclones, frequency of depressions and increasing low pressure of depressions over the past 50 years.
You’d appreciate the fact that since climatic models and their proponents enjoy wading into meteorological event predictions -heatwaves, droughts, floods, rains etc…- it is only logical that what went for the goose went for the gander, and thus meteorological understanding care to validate or not the scenarii of climate models and their underlying Laws of Physics abuse.

I have recently learned that the ice coverage in the Artic is NOT an indicator of AGW anymore (which is happening faster than predicted and we MUST act now).

Antonio San (17:21:46) :
Do you believe that if the Sun suddenly got 1 w/m^2 brighter at the surface of the Earth (annual mean) the planet’s climate would not change ?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/Fig4.gif
Do you know how the Milankovitch cycles cause Ice Ages ?
What if the Sun got 2 w/m^2 brighter ? Still think the Arctic would not “warm” ?
How about 3 w/m^2 ? At what point does the “explanation resides in warm air advections corridors” reasoning get tossed out the window because of a systemic change to the climate system ?
At what point would you agree that the “average temperature” of the planet has gone up ? When the entire cryosphere has melted ?
I don’t see many unqualified people complaining about the “foolish” attempt to find a Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider, but it seems that a large fraction of the English speaking world fancy themselves climatologists because they’ve seen plenty of weather.

A bit OT but related to items unreported by mainstream media:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100031404/climategate-the-parliamentary-cover-up/

The Death Sprial of Arctic sea ice
BBC – 21 September 2007
Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the NSIDC

“”We’re on a strong spiral of decline; some would say a death spiral. I wouldn’t go that far but we’re certainly on a fast track. We know there is natural variability but the magnitude of change is too great to be caused by natural variability alone.””
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7006640.stm

More death!

“No matter where we stand at the end of the melt season it’s just reinforcing this notion that Arctic ice is in its death spiral,” said Mark Serreze, a scientist at the center. The Arctic could be free of summer ice by 2030, Serreze said by telephone.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2745499020080827

More spiral!

“The ice is in a “death spiral” and may disappear in the summers within a couple of decades, according to Mark Serreze, an Arctic climate expert at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/09/080917-sea-ice.html

————-
The spiral seems to have gone nuts! WUWT?

If one look at and compare the ice from december to december, and june to june, for each year between 1978/79 and 2009/10, not much has actually happened.
As long as the ice extent, and area, in december and june the following year, isn’t changing much compared to say 1978/79, it doesn’t really matter how much ice there is in march nor how little in september.
Anyways compared to 1978/79, at the rate we’re going at now on the slightly down path, and assuming 1978/79 was any kind of normal, we’re loosing about, ruffly, 1 mil sq km ice per 30 years in the northern hemisphere, and in the AGW linear reality, we’re talking 300 years for the sea ice in the arctic to finally give and for once clear the area. :p

@1DandyTroll (19:04:52) :
December and June are irrelevant tho. If we had daily volume data instead of extent data, that would leap out, IMO, and what you (rightly) note as a cluster at those dates would no longer be a cluster. Alas, we don’t have a long daily tail of volume data, so out of necessity we must argue extent to have a long enough “tail” to make it a worthwhile discussion to have. Frankly, I don’t even consider the extent data tail to be a long enough –I would be much more comfortable about the meaningfullness of the extent data if it went back to the early 1940s.
But extent as a (very imperfect) metric means what you really need to be interested in is maximum, minimum, and compactness (the percentage colors at Cryosphere Today) at both.

“Of course it’s weather, all climate change is weather as “climate change” is just a mathematical averaging of WEATHER over the longer term of 10 to 30 years. In other words you can’t have “climate change” without weather actually happening in the objective reality of Nature. It takes weather for the climate to change, or the falsification of data, that tends to change the climate of science too. As math is an abstraction thus weather averaged into climate is an abstraction. Weather is what is real.” – Peter
“I don’t think so. Climate change may been SEEN in the mathematical averaging of the weather over long periods of time, but that’s not what climate change IS. Climate change is a fundamental shift in energy balances, transfers, and energy circulation patterns between sun, atmosphere, oceans, and land. Climate change is all about energy. It may be reflected in weather patterns, but it is not just some averaging of weather patterns. The reason why AGWT is so enticing is that it has a real physical basis to be potentially correct based on energy patterns and the very well known physics of GH gases and their behavior related to energy in the troposphere.” – R.Gates.
R. Gates, yes we all know that climate has multiple definitions. However without the abstractions of mathematics and statistics used in the alleged science of climate science that does abstract 10 to 30 year periods into “historical climate” and “climate baselines” the alleged climate patterns of the alleged AGW hypothesis attributed to man could not be found.
You can’t actually have climate without math. Weather is what is real.
Weather is what is happening now, and now, and now, and now…. minute by minute, day by day… averaged, chopped, diced and sliced by mathematics in an attempt by humans to find patterns.
The mechanisms of the “climate” are also part of it. However the claims of those alleging man made climate change is based entirely in the sketchy mathematics of averaged weather and bizarre statistical games played such as using one thermometer for 1,200km diameter of terrain, hiding the divergence of tree ring from temperature data because if it were known it would falsify the entire notion of using tree ring data, playing with hockey sticks, interpolating to fabricate data out of thin air, hiding data, etc….
Change the math and there is no problem.
Change it again and the problem intensifies.
It’s all taking place in an abstract statistical mathematical place that has little connection to the real world. Even the alleged hard part of the alleged climate science can’t be trusted due to manipulations of raw data – so much for it being a hard science.
Certainly the assumptions used for any “predictions” (better to call them soothsayings) based upon that math or their hunches are darn lousy when it comes accurately making guesses about the objective reality of Nature.
What we’ve seen time and time again is that the math and the statistics can be used to fudge their science skewing it their own way towards their alleged AGW hypothesis. That is bias, without a doubt, and bias ridden science needs to be eliminated.
I’ve wondered how movement of heat energy around the earth affects weather and later climate. The total energy in (which I doubt is being measured or accounted for correctly or fully) and the total energy radiated from the Earth (which we know isn’t being measured since ERBE stopped) affect things the most. From ERBE we know that the CO2 atmosphere models that alleged climate scientists are using are flawed and thus falsified along with their related hypotheses. ~7 times the energy radiates than they allow for. Also there are other better hypotheses – the alleged AGW hypothesis isn’t the only game in town even if supporters claim it so – such as “Ferenc Miskolczi’s Saturated Greenhouse Effect Theory: C02 Cannot Cause Any More “Global Warming”” which you can find here: http://pathstoknowledge.net/2010/01/13/ferenc-miskolczi%e2%80%99s-saturated-greenhouse-effect-theory-c02-cannot-cause-any-more-global-warming.
Mr Gates, we all can benefit from reading, watching a dedicated master of science: http://pathstoknowledge.net/2010/02/19/cargo-cult-science-a-lesson-from-richard-feynman-for-scientists-of-today-to-learn.

Jimbo (16:44:02) : “I have always found one observation very, very strange indeed. Why aren’t the alarmists happy when they see from their own alarmist websites that the Arctic sea ice extent is now at the 1979 – 2000 average?????? I would be sad if AGW was clearly being measured and observed as it could adversly affect my children’s futures; but they should be happy if AGW is shown to be false.”
==================
Damn well said!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

geo (18:33:30) :
Really? You really want to pull out 2009 in support of the dismal science
“At the end of the Arctic summer, more ice cover remained this year than during the previous record-setting low years of 2007 and 2008. However, sea ice has not recovered to previous levels. September sea ice extent was the third lowest since the start of satellite records in 1979, and the past five years have seen the five lowest ice extents in the satellite record.”
http://nsidc.org/news/press/20091005_minimumpr.html
Five lowest summer minimums, all in a row.
What did the climatologists predict ? Oh right, the Arctic summer sea ice melting more and more, until it is gone in a few decades, or perhaps sooner.
Sixteen expert academic prognosticators with their computer models churning madly. Sixteen of ‘em. You know the theory of doing that kind of thing, right?
Computer models ?
Expert academic prognosticators ?
Why not read about the actual predictions:
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2009_outlook/full_report_july.php
One was by 84 year old retired professor of atmospheric sciences, Prof. Emeritus Norman Untersteiner of Univ. of Washington.
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2009_outlook/july_report/downloads/pdf/panarctic/15_MorisonUntersteiner_JulyReport_JuneData.pdf
Try to find “International Institute of Advanced Cryospheric Sciences” on the Web. I think he’s working from his kitchen table.
Another was by an undergraduate named Gregor Halfmann as part of his Bachelor thesis in Oceanography.
Is Oceanography a dismal science now, too ?
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2009_outlook/july_report/downloads/pdf/panarctic/12_KaleschkeHalfmann_JulyReport_JuneData.pdf
He used a simple quadratic extrapolation of the September sea ice extent time series (so much for your “expert academic prognosticators with their computer models churning madly” – Gregor could have done this prediction on his little sister’s Hello Kitty calculator), but noted that the piece of data they most wanted to factor into their very short term prediction was not available:

Of all parameters the June concentration shows clearly the best statistical relation for the last two years of extreme minima.
Unfortunately, June 2009 concentration data are not yet available from IFRE-
MER due to problems with the SSM/I on the platform DMSP-F13 and the switch to DMSP-F17.

You also forgot all about error bars – do you know what they are ?
Young Gregor knows what they are – his prediction was, more precisely,
2009 September Extent:
Our forecast remains at 4.92 +/- 0.43 Million km2.
So, his prediction range went up to 5.35 million km2.
Actual September average ice extent was 5.36 million km2.
The average error bars for those predictions you gave were 0.4 million km2:
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2009_outlook/report_july.php
That puts another group of predictions right on the money.
This is who you are putting your faith in as arctic scientists giving predictions based on only the best that science has to offer in the early part of the 21st century.
This Arctic Research Consortium of the United States “July Report” probably asked for volunteer predictions at some conference, with a dozen donuts to go to the team with the closest prediction. It’s like asking a group of economists what they think the Dow will be at by the end of the year – it’s an interesting question, but nobody is going to invest money based on their off the cuff guesstimates.
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2009_outlook/july_report/downloads/pdf/panarctic/2009_seaiceoutlook_july_summary-report.pdf
The important prediction, which you are missing, is that everyone predicted:
below the 1979-2007 mean
below the Linear Trend
And they all got it right.

2010-04-02 the sea ice extent reached it’s highest ever recorded extent for this date.
1. 2010 – 14379531 km2
2. 2003 – 14335781 km2
3. 2008 – 14074844 km2
4. 2009 – 13933438 km2
3 of the 4 highest recorded extents for this date happened the last 4 years.
See:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm

Henry Pool (23:26:23) :
I am not so sure whether we should be happy about this. What are we going to do when the blue line break through the black line and continues to rise?
Wouldn’t that mean that global cooling is on its way…? …
I think after the last two winters, the vast majority of people in the Northern Hemisphere (with perhaps the exception of Eastern Canada and West Greenland) are fully aware that we have already had some global cooling.

It’s interesting that this, along with much anecdotal evidence that the 2009/10 winter was relatively cold, is occuring when the satellite data may well show 2010 as the warmest year on record by a sgnificant margin:-
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
Does the El Nino largely affect ocean temperatures, and when do we expect it to weaken?
The media seem to have lost interest is the whole global warming melodrama. After some fairly hysterical reporting of global warming in a decade when there wasn’t any, they have now dozed off when they actually have some. I’d like to see the headline “winter freeze due to global warming”.

Anu (16:01:42) :
Thanks for replying, Anu. And I do know where Svalbard is, as I live fairly close to that area. I have even been to Svalbard a couple of times, both on land and on ships in the nearby seas. It’s a very beautiful place indeed. You should go there sometime. The sea ice around Svalbard usually reaches down to the north coast at about 80N. East of Svalbard, the winter sea ice reaches farther down the coast, sometimes reaching as far south as Bear Island, a small island half way between Svalbard and the Norwegian mainland. I’ve been there, too. Usually, there are no bears on Bear Island, but sometimes bears swim over to the island from the sea ice, and occasionally even get stranded there when the ice retreats. A person on the island was killed by a stranded bear, I think about 1975.
OK, back on topic. I mostly agree with your points. My point was that the DMI graph shows no increased summer max temps since 1958 for the arctic region. Admittedly, the graphs show temps above 80N latitude. I don’t know how the temps are calculated, since there are very few thermometers up there, but I assume they use some measurements from nearby arctic locations in Svalbard, Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, and then employ some averaging and interpolation/extrapolation algorithm to arrive at their above 80N temps. Surely, the temp curve for locations between 66.5N and 80N will be raised compared to this.
Since we are talking about arctic sea ice, consisting mainly of frozen sea water, it will of course melt at temperatures between -1C and -2C. However, for minimum summer ice extent, we are mostly left with ice north of Greenland, Canada and across the Arctic Ocean above 80N. Therefore, other factors than air temps, like sea water temps, currents, and winds (like in 2007) have a big impact on summer minimum ice extent.
Another intriguing aspect of the DMI graphs, is that there seem to be much higher variability and even increased temps (?) in the seasons covered by days 0-120 and 260-365 compared to the 1958-2002 average. If there indeed is increased average temps during these seasons in later years compared to 1958-2002 ave., can that be attributed to increased atmospheric CO2? After all, winter season in the arctic is dark, with little LWR to be reradiated, compared to summer with more sunshine and more LWR from the ground. Any thoughts? Thanks.

No, enduser, you have it all wrong. The 1980-2000 trend was an aberrant anomoly. The mid 20th century cooling trend, the early 21st century cooling trend, the low ACE numbers, and now this unprecedented ice recovery prove that there is a strong correlation between increased CO2 and global cooling. We need cap and trade more than ever!
(Sorry, I couldn’t help myself)

@ geo (10:55:35) [2 Apr 2010] :
Btw, it’s April 2nd. What’s the over/under on the first puzzled “wtf is that jog every year on June 1?” post?
.
If you are referring to the sea-ice extent, follow the link to the IARC-JAXA/AMSR-E graph and info on the WUWT right sidebar, and see the 3rd para under the heading “Method for calculating sea-ice extent”:
The current version of data processing produces an erroneous blip of sea-ice extent on June 1 and October 15, which is seen in the graph of sea-ice extent as a small peak on these dates. The apparent blip arises due to switching of some parameters in the processing on those dates. The parameter switching is needed because the surface of the Arctic sea ice becomes wet in summer due to the melting of ice, drastically changing the satellite-observed signatures of sea ice. We will soon improve the processing to make the graph much smoother.
.
Hope that helps.

Andew P said
I think after the last two winters, the vast majority of people in the Northern Hemisphere (with perhaps the exception of Eastern Canada and West Greenland) are fully aware that we have already had some global cooling.
Someone else here cracked a joke about there being a relationship between increased CO2 and global cooling —
however, this might not be such a far fetched idea…
My theory might be true after all, the cooling properties of CO2 might be greater than the warming properties. The net effcect of more CO2 causes cooling, not warming….This is what I have been suspecting all along…..:
We know that CO2 has absorption in the 14-15 um range causing some warming (by re-radiating earthshine, 24 hours per day) but as shown and proved it also has a number of absorptions in the 0-5 um range causing cooling (by re-radiating sunshine). This cooling happens at all levels where the sunshine hits on the carbon dioxide same as the earthshine. The way from the bottom to the top is the same as from top to the bottom. So, my question was: how much cooling and how much warming is caused by the CO2? How was the experiment done to determine this and where are the test results? If it has not been done, why don’t we just sue the oil companies to do this research? (I am afraid that simple heat retention testing will not work here, we have to use real sunshine and real earthshine to determine the effect in W/m3 [0.04%-0.06%]CO2 /m2/24hours).
When they analysed the spectra, did they look at all the absorptions, namely also at those of CO2 in the UV – that have only been discovered recently? I also doubt that spectra analysis would work here – you have to come up with a more real time experiment.
I think especially the cooling of CO2 caused at 4.3 um might be considerable because this is where the sun’s radiation is at its hottest (on your skin). Note that the temp. on the coast on a sunny day (no wind) is always a few degrees cooler than more inland. This is due to same cooling caused by water vapor in the sun’s solar spectra – I am saying CO2 does exactly the same thing.
So what is the net effect of CO2? How dow we all know for sure that CO2 is a greenhouse gas when clearly Svante Arrhenius formula has long been proven wrong and nobody has come up with a new formula?

@OldUnixHead (04:38:49) :
I knew that, but thanks anyway. I was having fun with an annual rite of spring here at WUWT that we are about to experience again.

Phil. (04:56:04) :
Phil, I’m quite aware of the fact that the temperature of the ice won’t increase during phase change. Instead all added heat goes into the phase change. I believe I never stated otherwise.
I live in a region where we have quite a bit of snow and ice during the winter season. This winter we had quite a bit more cold, snow and ice than usual. Actually, I think this has been the longest, coldest and snowiest winter I can remember since the seventies, or sixties even. What I notice during the melt season, like now, is that the air temperature can vary quite a bit. Some days may be around 0 to 2 degrees C, others maybe 8 to 10 C. When the air temp is higher, the ice and snow melt more quickly.
Are you suggesting it works very differently in the Arctic north of 80N?

why is 2008 left off the chart?

Phil. (05:19:51) :
I just saw your most recent post after I pushed submit, and the page refreshed.
For your further information, I still have about 6 or 8 inches of compact snow all around where I live, so we are now in the middle of the melt season here.
As an illustration, here are the temperatures we are experiencing:
http://pent.no/%C3%85lesund

Is that a hockey stick I espy on the last 3 weeks of ice extent?

It’s good that the Arctic sea ice is now back to ‘normal’, although only using 1979 – 2000 as a base period is a nonsense.
In my view anything less than 100y has no meaning. Without the proper comparison data no useful conclusions can be made about what this means in terms of climate. To make matters worse, seasonal sea ice growth and decline are driven by deterministic chaos and it is impossible to know with any precision what future levels will be.
It is fun to try and guess though, and I think 2010 summer ice extent will come in larger than last year.

@ Phil. (05:19:51)
Al Gore said “There is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice free within the next five to seven years.”
The video Anthony linked to was removed from youtube but the one below hasn’t been (yet) and it is Al Gore in Copenhagen saying exactly what I quoted above.

This was very widely quoted in newspapers and took only seconds to confirm with google. Try it out sometime.

Larry Sheldon (05:59:47) :
quote – Gore said polar scientists told him Sunday that the latest data “suggest a 75 percent chance the entire polar ice cap will melt in summer within the next five to seven years.” – unquote
But you are right–I wouldn’t trust CBS either.
More likely Uncle Albert told them polar *bears* had told him that, and CBS didn’t want to look completely ridiculous…
In the interest of full disclosure, my latest data suggest a 75% chance a camel will jump out of my desk drawer within the next five to seven years.

That was some pretty impressive wriggling there Phil. Worthy of Al Gore and the other fellows who engage in that non-political science type stuff. Perhaps they removed it as it was inconvenient. It is certainly inconvenient that you could not explain what he really meant by ” The Artic ice cap will be gone in 5 years”. I do not see any other way to interpret what was said. You never did answer my post on the other Artic sea ice extent thread, either. Typical.

@ Henry Pool (09:02:04)
Sunspot chart on right is there because there is a strongly suspected relationship between solar magnetic field strength and global warming/cooling. Sunspots are a proxy for magnetic field strength and astronomers have been recording the number of them sporadically beginning in the year 1600 and continuously beginning in 1750.
This latest sunspot cycle, which reached its nadir last year, was the lowest in a hundred years and, probably not coincidentally, the northern hemisphere had a harsh winter.
The evident relationship is hypothetically driven by high altitude cloud formation. When the sun’s magnetic field is strong it deflects more cosmic rays (high energy particles originating outside our solar system) and when weaker it deflects fewer. These particles upon impact with the upper atmosphere cause a cascade of events that have been shown in laboratory simulations to result in greater formation of clouds. Thin high altitude clouds reflect a portion of sunlight directly back out into space.
The relationship can be seen as long as sunspots have been counted and the notorious Little Ice Age in Europe circa 1650 coincided with dearth of sunspots called the Maunder Minimum.
Probably not coincidentally the number of sunspots has been about 50% higher than normal from 1960 through 2000.
It appears to the casual observer that solar magnetic field strength can drive the average global temperature at least a couple degrees in either direction.
Complicating this is the fact that cosmic ray strength also varies due to both predictable (star density in region of galaxy that solar system is traversing) and unpredictably like when a star in our neck of the woods goes supernova.

“Henry Pool (04:57:56) :
[…]
how much cooling and how much warming is caused by the CO2? How was the experiment done to determine this and where are the test results?”
There were measurements taken under a program called TIGR, looking up and down from an aircraft with a spectrometer if i understand correctly. These measurements NASA offered for analysis to researchers. Ferenc Miskolczi has done such an analysis during contract work for NASA.
Please take a look at these slides, specifically slide 69. SU is surface upward radiation, OLR is outgoing radiation (leaving the troposphere upwards i think, but it’s explained in the earlier slides, e.g. slide 32 – here, confusingly, SU is called SG).
http://miskolczi.webs.com/ZM_v10_eng.pdf
Maybe this can help you with your question.

Given the situation in the rest of the political sphere–I’ll take the bet on the camel.

Based on IJIS data, the N. Hemisphere arctic sea ice pack likely saw it’s annual winter peak on March 31st at 14,407,344 sq. km. My guess is, we’ll shave about 10,000,000 sq. km off that to reach the summer minimum in mid-Sept. at around 4,500,000 sq. km. Look for big melting from the Siberian side and Atlantic side.

One last little quip about this little March “bump” upward in Arctic sea ice. We may indeed see the first positive arctic sea ice anomaly since 2004, and this is significant in the short term, as it breaks a 6 year drought in positive anomalies. However, it is only significant in the longer term if it continues in the longer term. If the arctic sea ice quickly dips back down into a negative anomaly range, and then we see a summer sea ice minimum below 2009’s minimum, (around what I’m predicting of 4,500,000 sq. km), then this March “bump” upward will become insignifcant, as the longer term trend of lower year-to-year arctic sea ice will continue.
My guess is that 2008, 2009, and perhpas even this little bump award in March 2010 arctic sea ice are still the result to varying degrees of effects from:
1) The long deep solar minimum (now ended)
2) The La Nina of 2008-2009 (now ended)
3) The mutliple extreme negative AO index (and related shifts in winds, currents) of winter 2010.
Now that all these short term effects have ened, the longer term forcing of CO2 can once more be the dominant signal, and 2010 will likely be the warmest year on instrument record. (unless a large Iceland volcano decides to get nasty)
Based on Jan., Feb, and soon March’s global temperature data, 2010 is indeed shaping up to be very warm.

Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice
source: Cryosphere Today
04/01/10: -.189 1979-2008 mean [13.660 million sq. km]
04/03/10: -.132 [13.700]
04/03/10: -.090 [13.732]
Increasing at a rate of approximately 30,000 sq. km a day. It must be due to manmade cooling.
NASA Earth Observatory
Aerosols & Climate Change”
“Aerosols tend to have a cooling effect on the Earth’s surface by reflecting the Sun’s light back into Space.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Aerosols/
Related Articles:
“Changing Our Weather One Smokestack at a Time”

sorry, second value s/b 04/02/10: -.132 [13.700]

Thats a good article… would use it and link back.

Phil. (10:16:46) said:

Tenuc (06:55:56) :
“It’s good that the Arctic sea ice is now back to ‘normal’, although only using 1979 – 2000 as a base period is a nonsense.”
Better than Roy Spencer’s 79-98!

Is that because Roy is a Christian? (Note, I am an atheist.)
It seems utter nonsense to defend the use of less data than we have on the basis that someone else used even less. (I do assume that the claim that A is better than B is a defence of A).

R. Gates (09:39:49) :
Don’t we shave 10,000,000 off every year and if it only melts to 4,500,000, isn’t that a positive trend based on the last 3 seasons?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.area.arctic.png

Willis Eschenbach (12:23:18) :
Decreased ice in the Arctic is causing warmer temperatures. Open water and heat released from seawater freezing is driving temperatures up in late summer through winter.

Thanks Willis Eschenbach, I’ve been trying to find data to compare seasons and wasn’t able to find it.
Questions:
– (0°C) or 273.15K is the freezing point of water so based on this data, the (I’m assuming air) temperature difference is unlikely to have much effect on the surface of sea ice?
– the end unit 360 doesn’t align with beginning unit 0-1; shouldn’t it since this red line is a 15 year average?
Thanks,
John

Henry@ Dave Springer
So what you are saying is that more spots means more solar magnetic field coming from the sun, eventually translating in less cloudformation and more heat on the floor. I got that, I just did not remember anymore which way it was with those spots. thanks.
But do you know what a normal average is for these spots- and if yes, perhaps we could also start a line somehwere with zero and then we can see if things are going up or down? Or is it actually possible to measure the solar magnetic field and put this in one of those zero lines?? going back to as far as we have measurements.
I wonder if you are familiar with the predicted alignment where the sun comes right in line with the middle (center) of the Milky way. The exact alignment is predicted for 2012. I gather that if we are already more or less aligned with the centre and I suppose that there are not too many stars there, so a lot less GCR will come to earth? What do you think?

Willis Eschenbach (12:23:18) :
Thank you Willis, that is very illustrative of what I was saying.
“What does all of this mean? Well … um … er …”
I think that Phil. indirectly has offered a plausible explanation to why the days 120 to 260 show so little variance and no anomaly compared to 1958-2002 average. If I understand Phils reasoning correctly, he is implying that when the surface air temps exceed the melting point, the ice starts to melt from above, and any added heat in the air from either CO2 re-radiation or otherwise, will go into the phase change process of melting ice, thereby reducing variability and limiting further rise of air temps. In the absence of a warm ocean nearby, the summer max temps in the Arctic above 80N therefore will not rise much above the melting point of ice until most all ice has melted.

Anu (10:48:24) :
“p.s. Svalbard sounds beautiful. I haven’t been to the Arctic, or ever seen the Northern Lights, but it’s on my To Do list :-)”
Let me know when you are coming over, and I will treat you to a CO2 saturated Arctic Ice Beer.

Look, lets get this straight. The Arctic refusing to comply with accepted climate change models is just not acceptable in todays scientific community. Can I suggest that if this nonsense continues we send ice breakers into the Arctic spraying hot water on all sides until the ice sees sense and resorts to it’s predicted behaviours. We must ensure that climate change models are not embarrassed by such thoughtless behaviours by the environment.
yours etc.
Angry of LLangoed.

BREAKING NEWS North Pole could be ice free this summer
Norwegian climate scientists are now virtually certain that the ice in the Arctic is lost. During the summer the North Pole will be ice free. Warmer ocean leads to melting far faster than scientists previously believed. Now action is required.
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=no&u=http://www.dagsavisen.no/innenriks/article348948.ece
(2007)

Alan S (15:54:12) :
‘Scientists warn’. Serreze give some areas colder, some areas warmer in a zero-sum game excuse for a reason.
It’s colder in your house because your stove is being used.
There is no evidence right now for a warmer than normal or colder than normal according to the DMI 80N temp. It’s right where it should be. And that does not explain what’s going on up there.
It certainly does not give any creedence to Mr. Serreze’s explanation.

R Gates, your reference to a deep solar minimum causing ice recovery belies a weakness in your theory. Mathematically, your solar theory cannot explain ice behavior of the past two years nor this little March blip (too little solar ice-melting potential variation at the pole combined with too much ice retention).
The past two years of weather pattern variation and Arctic current data has shown a decided change in the parameters that lead to ice flush in the Arctic basin which has prevented what we know as the June through August Flush. These parameters have also explained ice compaction and ice thickness. The Sun has nothing to do with it.
Please explain the retention of ice based on the most significant factors: weather and current pattern variation (pressure gradients, wind patterns, and oceanic Arctic current SST).
If you want to argue that these Arctic parameters have temporarily overwhelmed the increasing global warming threat, fine. But at least show some understanding of weather interacting with the Arctic system.