"Catastrophic" retreat of glaciers in Spitsbergen

This is great! If we can say it is attributed to “wind” then we should stop the insanity of building “wind” farms, right? (just kidding) I want my tax dollars back that are going to big wind AWEA because of the “scare” of global warming. We are looking at energy choices based on Gore and special interest groups, instead of SCIENCE.
Thanks for a great heads up.

The resulting increase in sea levels from this Glacier’s melting is believed to be what caused Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones’ drowning.
Remember the warmenists claim the melting is “unprecedented” then you do some research show them that this has occurred in the past and then they move the goal posts again.
Remember Dr Meier discounted this melting:
Dr. Walt Meier: No. Analysis of the temperatures does not support a cyclic explanation for the recent warming. The warming during the 1920s and 1930s was more regional in nature and focused on the Atlantic side of the Arctic (though there was warming in some other regions as well) and was most pronounced during winter. In contrast, the current warming is observed over almost the entire Arctic and is seen in all seasons. Another thing that is clear is that, the warming during the 1920s and 1930s was limited to the Arctic and lower latitude temperatures were not unusually warm. The recent warming in the Arctic, though amplified there, is part of a global trend where temperatures are rising in most regions of the earth. There are always natural variations in climate but the current warming in the Arctic is not explained by such variations.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/21/nsidc-s-dr-walt-meier-answers-10-questions/

too bad that they didn’t have satellite photos in 1934, then we would know if the last three years were unprecedented. of course, R. Gates would claim that the ice was much thicker in the good old days.

It is hard to argue with the information presented by Zubov. He was a highly trained scientist in the Soviet Arctic Research Institute. One reason we have this detailed information was because of sharing by the Allies in WWII. It is compelling evidence of extensive Arctic sea ice melt in the 1930s.
The hubris of some climate scientists is to presume that a mere 30 years of Arctic satellite data is conclusive when it may only show half of a seventy-year cycle. The relative influences of AGW vs LIA rebound and long cycles is never even entertained.

Good stuff.
The comment about amplitude of tides being increased by decreased ice resonated with me. I’m of the opinion that the “wind and tide” explanation for 2007, while genuine, stops short of recognizing that thin, rotten ice is more susceptible to that kind of thing than thicker, more concentrated ice. Call it a “positive feedback”, I guess. Look at the 2007 Cryosphere images for late spring and early summer for how that ice looked. . .

Accounts of the ice and icebergs are given in the AMA Monthly Weather Reviews for the cold period preceeding the ‘unprecedented’ melting of the 20’s – 40’s.
I have to believe that the meltists know all about the previous episode. Then, as now, they still don’t have an explanation as to the global nature of warming, long before CO2 made it’s rise.
No one will ever know.
I can hear the snickering and bellicose laughter in Moscow as they watch Western Climatology run itself onto the rocks.

Do you have a current protograph of the islands?
Nice shape for a lake, it is popular in mid February?

Well, I too want my greenbacks back …. but the object of climate change is not about climate. It’s about greenbacks and greenbacks only.
They need our attention headed one direction while trying to cope with another major problem. How to do it, use the law to rob us. Legalised robbery, that’s Cap and Trade. So why, ever thought of what caused the economies to tremble ?
Every government, has in all the ages, robbed all people.
One more as the election is comming up and it’s getting actuality, and I have seen the symptoms in the Swedish debate last week.
Every election is like an auction on stolen goods to come.

This guy is a sceptic to the sceptisism;
http://www.truthout.org/is-sun-finally-setting-climate-change-skepticism58965

Now explain this:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg
Official record stubbornly claims the ice was steady until the CO2-induced death spiral started.

It’s a pity we are not in the 1960’s, everything was blamed on the bomb.

” Dr A Burns says:
May 2, 2010 at 10:53 pm
Even Jones now admits that it has all happened before:
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V13/N16/C2.php
… that together with his admission that there has been no significant warming in 15 years seems to imply he has seen the light after being stood down and looking up.”
Full article behind pay wall. I wonder if somebody could write an article here on WUWT about this paper and its implications.

Citizen Watts appears to have gained access to a prohibited text. Guy Montag and the Fire Brigade will visit shortly…

Oops, I forgot that Mann recently discovered the Medieval Warm Period and, as Dr. Burns notes, evidently Jones has too.
Maybe climate science is actually improving by tiny steps. When the bombast finally suffocates under its own weight, will we miss it? Not me.

It might be worth adding on the “catastrophic retreat” statement that since that statement was made it is now known that most of the Svalbard glaciers are of the low frequency surge kind. Once or twice in a century they advance dramatically. The rest of the time they retreat, so retreat is the normal behaviour. So most of the time people will find that any glacier has retreated comparing with reports a couple of decades ago. The machinics are not precisely understood.
Nevertheless, most glaciers in Svalbard today have decreased even since the 1930’s. So there is a decrease in the longer timescale as well. On the other hand, it’s known that some of the glaciers are much larger today than in mediaeval times. That’s known from dating plants found beneath glaciers.

It’s worse than we thought. Again.

So predictable isn’t it? As Meier said, “it was only regional yada yada yada”
No matter how many times we slap these alarmists in the face with evidence, peer reviewed or observational, they keep raising their ugly heads un deterred.
What do we call those blow-up knock-em down thingies? Knockem down dolls i think.

The IPCC/Mann/CRU rewrite of the Earth’s temperature history was never going to stand up to scrutiny. There’s just too much evidence of natural climate variability from multiple sources. This one is in the same line as the [not] rising sea levels. The IPCC defines climate change as that part which is caused by man’s activities. So when the next ice age starts, that’s OK because it’s natural variability.
OT, but ‘Spain Pricks Solar Power Bubble as Greek Fate Looms’:
April 30 (Bloomberg) — Spain is lancing an 18 billion-euro ($24 billion) investment bubble in solar energy that has boosted public liabilities, choking off new projects as it works to cut power prices and insulate itself from Greece’s debt crisis.
…“This is necessary,” said Leon Benelbas, chairman of Atlas Capital Close Brothers investment bank in Madrid. “It’s an excessive subsidy at a time Spain has to gain competitiveness, and the cost of energy is a determining factor.”
…Spain’s fixed-price system for renewable power, which attracted more investment in solar panels in 2008 than the rest of the world put together, boosts the state’s liabilities even though they don’t show up on its balance sheet.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aW5YTcDgqGLc
I’m a real fan of solar energy as it produces some energy even if it’s raining, unlike those environmentally barbaric wind turbines which produce nothing for days on end when high pressure moves in. The problem was the subsidies which raised demand too fast and created a bubble in the price of polysilicon pushing it to nearly $500 per kilogram. Spot market pricing is expected to decline to as low as $100 per kilogram in 2010. When solar gets cheap the demand will explode. We need to get some real capitalism in here and kick out the subsidy queens and rent seekers.

There is an interesting review of “The Great Global Warming Blunder” by former senior NASA climate scientist Dr Roy Spencer in the Express today:
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/172845
***************************************************************************
“GLOBAL WARMING IS A LOAD OF HOT AIR
A scientist has come up with proof that man is not to blame for climate change
May 3, 2010
By James Delingpole
CLIMATE change has been the biggest concern for a whole generation. Now, however, a brilliant scientist has come up with proof that man is not to blame – and no problem exists.
Fill your tank with petrol, book another holiday, turn that patio heater up to 11 and breathe a deep sigh of relief: the theory that humans are responsible for global warming is as good as dead, thanks to an amazing new discovery by one of America’s top meteorologists.
In his new bestseller “The Great Global Warming Blunder”, former senior NASA climate scientist Dr Roy Spencer demonstrates that all those scary computer-modeled predictions of man-made eco-doom have been based on a fundamental misconception of how climate works. Climate change, he shows, is an almost entirely natural process on which human influence is negligible.
Of course, sceptics have been making this point for years, arguing that the quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by man are so tiny that even if they were to double there would still be no dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).
What they have been unable to answer convincingly until now, though, is the alarmists’ counterargument that CO2 emissions are exaggerated by “positive feedbacks”.
One type of positive feedback often cited by alarmists is cloud cover. When CO2 causes the world to warm, they argue, it reduces the number of clouds. Clouds are what help protect our planet from the burning heat of the sun, by reflecting solar radiation. So even if the effect on climate of CO2 is relatively small, the potential knock-on effect is vast. This is why the predictions of temperature rises made by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports are so large and terrifying.
But according to Spencer, these alarmists have got completely the wrong end of the stick. The mistake they have made is to confuse cause with effect. It’s not man-made global warming that is causing cloud cover to grow thinner, leading to a spiral of ever-rising temperatures. Rather, it’s natural variations in cloud cover that are helping to cause global warming.
The implications of this are enormous. Not only does it mean that the billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money which have been pumped into proving the connection between CO2 and climate change have been utterly wasted but it also means that the climate policy of most of the world’s leading industrial nations is based on a total lie.
According to estimates by the International Energy Agency it will cost the world at least $45trillion to deal with AGW. Under the Climate Act, Britain is committed to spending a whopping £18billion a year combatting the effects of Climate Change. Most of this will go on attempting to reduce our output of CO2 – a gas which Spencer points out is not merely harmless but positively beneficial.
“The public debate over carbon dioxide needs to be reframed. Instead of asking “By how much should we cut back our CO2 emissions?” we should ask “Is there any compelling reason to reduce CO2 emissions at all?” says Spencer, who believes, “More atmospheric carbon dioxide might be good for life on Earth.”
This doesn’t mean that Spencer is a global warming “denier”. In fact all the evidence tells him that temperatures in the past 100 years or so have risen. Where he differs from alarmists such as US environmental activist Al Gore and NASA’s fear-monger-in-chief Dr James Hansen is in his understanding of the cause. They want to blame man; Spencer says it’s down to Mother Nature.
As the world’s greatest expert on satellite temperature monitoring, Spencer has access to the most accurate climate data yet collected.What his observations have shown him is that, yes, there has definitely been 0.7ºC of global warming since the beginning of the 20th century, but that three quarters of this was caused by an entirely natural process called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).
The PDO is a shift in weather patterns over the North Pacific Ocean. It moves in cycles of around 30 years which, funnily enough, is about the length of the various periods of warming and cooling which got alarmists so worked up in the 20th century.
From the Forties to the late Seventies there was the stretch of cooling that persuaded some to believe we were on the verge of a new Ice Age. Then from the late Seventies came the heat spell which set the whole AGW bandwagon rolling.
Now we’re beginning a new PDO phase in which temperatures are set for another 30-year cooling period. This looks particularly unfortunate in the light of all the intrusive and expensive legislation – higher taxes, CO2 emissions reductions, massive wind farm building programmes – being inflicted on us in the misguided principle that we’re all in imminent danger being fried to a frazzle.
How we’ll all chuckle at the irony as we shiver to death in homes we can’t afford to heat because of the way our fuel bills have been made unaffordable by carbon emissions levies brought in to prevent global warming!
Spencer describes the junk science that has led to these policy disasters as “the greatest scientific blunder in history”. He adds: “I don’t know whether it will take two years or 20 but I predict that at some point in the future we will realise that the fear of catastrophic climate change was the worst case of mass hysteria the world has ever known.”
It is a point well made. What kind of topsy turvy world do we live in where America’s Environmental Protection Agency can declare CO2 – the naturally occurring gas on which all life depends – a pollutant?
What manner of insanity drives environmentalists, in the name of saving the planet, to want to carpet some of the most beautiful stretches of Britain’s countryside with ugly, bird-mangling, outrageously expensive and almost entirely ineffective wind turbines, such as those pictured above?
Yet if the blunder that the alarmist scientists made over the cause of “global warming” was so basic, how come nobody spotted it before? Spencer suspects some scientists did but kept quiet because AGW is “driven more by quasi-religious beliefs and financial and political motives than by an objective assessment of the science”. To keep getting funding, scientists need to support Al Gore’s “consensus” that CO2 is evil.
D oes this mean the debate is now over? Unfortunately not. Like all sceptical scientists, Spencer has had great difficulty getting any media coverage for his research because most newspapers – this one being a rare and honorable exception – are so heavily in thrall to the man-made global warming myth.
And instead of attempting to explode his theory scientifically, climate alarmists have resorted to their usual tactics of smears and personal attack. As Spencer points out, this debate has always had more to do with politics and vested interests than it does with science.
So next time you’re sitting by your patio heater and some dreary eco-bore tries to tick you off, you can now confidently reply that your “carbon footprint” makes no more difference to global warming than the Tooth Fairy.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that your Government – as do all three main parties – still believes in that Tooth Fairy. And no amount of science, however solid, looks likely to persuade them otherwise.”
***************************************************************************
This assessment is probably correct. For example, David Cameron’s father-in-law has made millions in the wind turbine racket.
David Cameron’s father-in-law is among rich landowners cashing in on Labour’s green subsidies, with a wind farm generating an estimated £3.5million a year on his country estate. Sir Reginald Sheffield, 63, who is worth at least £20million, splits the profits with the project’s developers. Around half of the income comes from a government scheme to make power companies use more renewable energy, much of it bought from private generators. It is subsidised by every household, via their electricity bills.
Sir Reginald’s eight 400ft turbines were switched on last August at Bagmoor, part of the 3,000-acre Normanby Hall estate near Scunthorpe that has been in his family since the 16th century. He plans a second development at nearby Flixborough Grange, despite fierce opposition from locals.

jorgekafkazar says:
May 2, 2010 at 10:33 pm
The provenance of the paper being in US hands since 1963 is telling.
Learned circles had to have known. Follow that paper.

The abstract from ScienceDirect shows that this is a relatively old paper and may well explain Jones statement about the Medieval Warm Period

Received 8 April 2008;
revised 21 October 2009;
accepted 3 November 2009.
Available online 25 November 2009.
Abstract
Twenty ice cores drilled in medium to high accumulation areas of the Greenland ice sheet have been used to extract seasonally resolved stable isotope records. Relationships between the seasonal stable isotope data and Greenland and Icelandic temperatures as well as atmospheric flow are investigated for the past 150–200 years. The winter season stable isotope data are found to be influenced by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and very closely related to SW Greenland temperatures. The linear correlation between the first principal component of the winter season stable isotope data and Greenland winter temperatures is 0.71 for seasonally resolved data and 0.83 for decadally filtered data. The summer season stable isotope data display higher correlations with Stykkisholmur summer temperatures and North Atlantic SST conditions than with SW Greenland temperatures. The linear correlation between Stykkisholmur summer temperatures and the first principal component of the summer season stable isotope data is 0.56, increasing to 0.66 for decadally filtered data.
Winter season stable isotope data from ice core records that reach more than 1400 years back in time suggest that the warm period that began in the 1920s raised southern Greenland temperatures to the same level as those that prevailed during the warmest intervals of the Medieval Warm Period some 900–1300 years ago. This observation is supported by a southern Greenland ice core borehole temperature inversion. As Greenland borehole temperature inversions are found to correspond better with winter stable isotope data than with summer or annual average stable isotope data it is suggested that a strong local Greenland temperature signal can be extracted from the winter stable isotope data even on centennial to millennial time scales.

So, one important question is how the Spitzbergen of the 1920-30s compares with today’s temperatures and ice levels.

Al Gore’s Weather (AGW) :
O’s Katrina: Quagmire/Disaster/Abyssmal ignOrance.
O’not-slick:
“Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” Mr. Obama insisted on April 2, two days after he announced he would allow drilling in the Atlantic Ocean from Virginia to Florida and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. “They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs; they came from the refineries on shore.”
…-
“Oil spill threatens to sink Obama’s energy plan”
“Political damage will be hard to contain, not least because the slick could shatter the President’s shaky compromise on offshore drilling”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/oil-spill-threatens-to-sink-obamas-energy-plan/article1554337/

mountainprotector says:
May 2, 2010 at 9:45 pm
This is great! If we can say it is attributed to “wind” then we should stop the insanity of building “wind” farms, right?
If anything, it means we must start harnessing the wind – and taking steps to make sure it can’t escape and run amok in the Arctic! I know people say that free-range wind is happier wind, but I think you’ll find that you can’t tell the difference between farmed wind and “wild” wind. 🙂

Well done – we can look forward to seeing this sitting at the bottom of piles of grey literature underpinning AR5.

Go Adolescent Ice, Go.
===============

Looks like the Ford Model had warming impact 80 years ago. The proof was there and we didn’t see it.
Most of the warmist claims come from the fact that everything that was not shown on tv didn’t happen.

vukcevic says:
May 3, 2010 at 2:38 am
It seems that things work like this: Sun-Ionosphere-Winds-Currents
http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/earthmag.html
The sunlight not only makes the air conduct, it also heats it causing thermo-tidal winds. These winds combine with the tidal winds caused by the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon and drive the ionospheric dynamo. This dynamo generates currents as the conducting ionosphere is driven through the Earth’s magnetic field. These current systems form two closed loops: an anti-clockwise vortex in the northern hemisphere and a clockwise vortex ..
Then, “follow the electromagnetic fields”, there is a relation:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GeoMagField.gif

“Catastrophic retreat” of Al Gore’s Weather (AGW) :
Lost in the “operational architecture on climate change”.
…-
“UN: No comprehensive climate deal this year
(AP) – 1 hour ago
KOENIGSWINTER, Germany — The United Nations chief negotiator on climate change says there will not be a comprehensive deal to fight global warming this year.
Yvo de Boer told reporters in Germany on Monday the next U.N. climate change conference in Cancun, Mexico, in December will provide a “first answer” on greenhouse gases “but it will not provide an answer that is good enough.”
The U.N. climate chief says a good outcome of Cancun would be decisions on an “operational architecture on climate change” with an actual treaty coming later.
He says he expects such an international climate treaty before the end of 2012, but even that will “not be the definitive answer to the climate change challenge.”
De Boer said earlier this year he will resign July 1.”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i9TuMrvrknh-ZXwqmZ2N-48kff3wD9FFARRO4

toby says:
May 3, 2010 at 1:40 am
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/glaciers-melt-before-our-eyes
“The glaciers in the Kongsfjorden area, where we documented the landscape during our voyage, began an almost continuous retreat around 1900. Blomstrandbreen has retreated around two kilometres in the last 80 years. Since 1960, the average retreat of the glacier has been about 35 metres per year, and even higher in the last decade.”
toby, you can’t simply use one glacier as a proxy for what is going on. Some glaciers are, in fact expanding. The point is, there is nothing at all unusual happening there.
Try this
“Blomstrandbreen might now be retreating, but on the west side of Svalbard is Friddjovbreen glacier which has advanced more than a mile in the past seven years – one of dozens of glaciers to do so.”
“Wider studies published in the Journal of Paleolimnology show that large sudden swings in temperature appear to be a consistent feature of the climate in this region, with temperatures rising and falling by as much as 2 degrees C in only a decade. Professor Humlum’s records on Svalbard show that the biggest changes took place in the 1920s, well before even the IPCC believe that man-made global warming influences could have been felt. More importantly, records show that since mild warming in the 1950s and 1960s, temperatures have been falling. Remember that the Polar Regions should see early and rapid warming since these times if man-made global warming theory is correct. They don’t, and it isn’t.”

The ClK ion washout ratio from the Lomonosovfonna ice core in Svalbard (the island group that includes Spitsbergen) reported in JGR (2006) by Aslak Grinsted et al indicates that ice melt during the period 1130-1200 was comparable to that of the 1930s, while the NaMg ratio indicates that 1130-1200 had much more melt than even the 20th c. See discussion on CA thread “Svalbaard’s Lost Decades”, at http://climateaudit.org/2009/08/17/svalbards-lost-decades/
Grinsted comments that the dating is less certain for the first century of this core, and hence it was not used in his 2009 Climate Dynamics paper “Unprecedented low twentieth century winter ice extent in the western Nordic seas since AD 1200”. However, he is looking for a precision of 5 years in order to synchronize with a treering series in the second paper, so that it still could be plenty accurate for most purposes.

Jacobshavn Glacier from 1850.
http://www.archive.org/details/SVS-3630

A moment of shock , Anthony, until I read on…. My thoughts on the article:
It is sometimes myopic
To examine a topic
Without studying context.
This may be a pretext
To reach some conclusion
That supports your illusions,
…(or in some cases, delusions.)

I am not at all surprised by this 1943 translation. The Soviet Russians were very much into arctic research during the 1920’s and 30’s. They saw the arctic sea route to Vladivostok as an important strategic asset in defending and supplying their Pacific territories, particularly during the 1930’s when their only land link to Vladivostok was threatened (and often severed) by Japanese expansion into Manchuria through which their rail line traveled.
In fact their development of arctic commerce was such that just before the outbreak of war with Germany, the Russians were escorting German merchant ships to Japan via the NE passage.

The NOAA weekly SST departures report is out this morning. The 50 – 200 meter subsurface temperatures charts are very interesting. Notice the change that has taken place between 9 March and 28 April. This should portend cooler surface temperatures across much of the Pacific.
See page 11 of the report.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf

Agent J: Let’s put it on.
Kevin Brown/K: What?
Agent J: The last suit you’ll ever wear… again.

Toby -May 3, 2010 at 1:40 am
WRT retreating glaciers, the highway between Banff and Jasper (Alberta) was built close to the nose of Athabaska Glacier in the early 1900s. Now the glacier begins close to a mile away. It’s been retreating since the mid-1800s, at least.
IanM

The AGW people will just change the date from 1943 to 2043 and claim it was sent back by an eco-time-traveler!
Problem solved!!!

BTW: Earthquake along the fault north of Spitzbergen : M 4.6, Greenland Sea
Date: Sunday, May 2, 2010 09:17:27 UTC
Sunday, May 2, 2010 10:17:27 AM at epicenter
Depth: 10.00 km (6.21 mi)

Digging the typography! Two spaces after a period. LOL

TonyB – this is extraordinary. Any other referenence to the Ipiutak people. This is mind-blowing stuff!!
Link 12: We have got this far citing instances of warming and not even mentioned the Vikings 1000 years ago…instead let’s look at another Arctic culture that thrived 1000 years before the Vikings;
From the Eskimo Times Monday, Mar. 17, 1941

Richard North comes up with great stuff so much of the time,maybe because he mistrusts the establishment. I think his blog Eureferendumblogspot.com must reading.
He knows his politics and he knows his science.

This article talks about ice conditions in the eastern Arctic. What about the western Arctic? Does anyone have any data/information about ice conditions there? Also this paper is about winter temperatures. What about the other seasons? How do their observations compare with what is happening today?

Ulric Lyons says:
May 3, 2010 at 5:02 am
20deg further north
In the figure for Warm Phase, top right of the document you link to the amount is stated as 20 % — not ‘deg’ —
This makes me wonder about what was meant as 20% seems undefined while 20 degrees of latitude is easily understood.

a dood says:
May 3, 2010 at 7:46 am
Digging the typography! Two spaces after a period. LOL
Standard practise back then. I can still hear the double-thunk of the secretaries in the typing pool double spacing at the end of a sentence even now, over fifteen years after we switched to computer based word processing. Don’t you think it makes the text easier to read? Sentences don’t run into each other, which is a real problem with some less helpful fonts and with dimming eyesight.

More receding glaciers:
http://www.archive.org/stream/comptesrendusofo00buchiala#page/n343/mode/2up
http://www.archive.org/stream/comptesrendusofo00buchiala#page/n343/mode/2up

If anyone wishes to make a backup copy of Zubov’s book, simply download the .pdf to your hard-drive and save it to http://www.scribd.com
Scribd is a great site for personal archiving, and results are searchable if you provide accurate tags. There are other archive sites popping up as well.

mountainprotector said: This is great! If we can say it is attributed to “wind” then we should stop the insanity of building “wind” farms, right? (just kidding)
You could put wind turbines around the Arctic basin. The increased surface drag would slow the winds and lessen the flushing effect.

According to the post-glacial rebound graph ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound ) the ice mass has been melting for quite some time now. There was an ice age… since it ended things have been melting. Anything different would be a return to ice age conditions. And this is a much scarier situation that a mild warming from an already warming condition.

This is not warming! May mean temperatures, records, averages Budapest 1780-2009 (hungarian)
http://www.varaljamet.eoldal.hu/oldal/climate_budapest_majus

The heart shaped lake is nice.

On recurring theme which is always interesting to me is how perceptually inept we human beings are.
Take quantum theory, for instance. (Bear with me – I’m going somewhere with this). Intuitive visualisation of the universe as described within quantum theory is largely beyond our capacity. Events and laws which the mathematics describe seem to us to be paradoxical in many ways; things have momentum but no defined position, or vice versa, for example.
Similarly, relativity is not easily visualised. Consider the “rubber sheet” description of space-time warping. Now try to visualise it in 3D. Not easy, nor is the fundamental idea very intuitive. Following on, a universe in which we can only gain information from the volume of it within our relativistic “light-cone” seems at odds with everyday experience and we can never be certain of what may be going on in the unobserved region.
I recal with a wry smile the writing of the late Douglas Adams who captured some of these limits to what we can perceive or even understand;
“Light… travels so fast that many civilisations take eons to realise it’s even travelling at all…”
Both of the above examples deal with, on the one hand, very short distances and timeframes and on the other vear large distances. The above article, and many more contemporary ones, seem to suffer from the same intuitive visualisation as I’ve outlined above only the failing is remarkable in its starkness. The author’s inability to apply reason beyond the immediate and to consider what his or her observations mean on timescales of generations or even many generations is striking. One has to wonder if this is a (possibly sub-conscious) ploy used to inflate the importance of the message and therefore render the articles with unwarranted meaning and importance. Of course, we all know that the data in these works are important in an of themselves. They are the records on which we can advance our knowledge and our science.
It is fundamental to the study of systems, in which we are subjectively involved, to make the assumption they we exist in a period and/or a location which is not unique. The repeated failure of some in climate science to observe this assumption leads to an inevitable conclusion that short trends are the harbinger of apocalypse when, in actual fact, we cannot know how extraordinary those trends really are.
We would be wiser to widen our perspective, widen our perception and derive our intuition from much-longer-term historical data ranges rather than jumping at every new anomaly which we were not expecting. This is especially true in a science based on a proxy historical record and one which has been under close study for only 40 or so years.

Glaciers – About 60% of Svalbard is glacier-covered, with many outlet glaciers terminating in the sea. In central Spitsbergen, most glaciers are comparatively small due to the dry climate
http://notendur.hi.is/oi/svalbard_geology.htm

So….if the hideous prophet wishes come true, and there is Global Warming, the increased air humidity would increase glaciers, not the other way.

timheyes
maybe you will this:
http://www.motionmountain.net/

Ric Weme, Andrew WH and Dude: Standard word processing format was and still is in many companies for two spaces after a period – some systems are set to do this automatically. I have been retired for a few years but up to 7 years ago, our engineering reports always had double spaces after the periods. For example, you can set Microsoft Office to always put two spaces after a period and do document checks for double spaces in the grammar section. Other programs have similar options.
Well, off to fix fences before the next spring snow storm.
Wayne Delbeke in (sometimes) sunny Alberta.

No one knows how regional or not regional certain conditions were during any given time. My suspicion is that, for example, the MWP might have been more widespread than some experts admit, but not aas widespread as some AGW skeptics try to paint it. It terms of regional periods of melting in the arctic– who can say? Smokey keeps talking about the N. Pole being ice free at some point in the past, to which I answer– who cares? Tell me what the rest of the arctic was like at that time, and then I might care, especially if you have data covering the 10 years before and after that time. Greenland and parts of NE Canada saw record high temps this winter because of the negative AO index, but we know that record warmth was not spread out over the whole N. Hemisphere (i.e. the snow we had in Florida). Drawing any conclusions about global climate change from old, localized, anectdotal evidence is pointless at best, and deceptive at worst.
I will be most interested in seeing how Steve Goddard spins this weeks sharper downturn in arctic sea ice. In truth, it means very little that arctic sea ice is now below 2009 for the same date, other than being a statistical point of interest, much like the March-April “bump up”. Of more interest will be where we end up in September…

When ice is thick, water under it is insulated from the atmosphere, so the Arctic Ocean is essentially continental (from an atmospheric perspective).
The most damage can be done if the timing of blasts is right. The following plot features -SOI (-Southern Oscillation Index) for AUGUST:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/-SOI_August.png
Red represents interannual -SOI (so + indicates El Nino dominance).
Black is the cumulative effect.

tonyb
If you are interested in Ipiutak, have you ever seen the the article by Froelich Rainey in the September 1942 National Geographic? It has very fine pictures of the skulls with jet-studded ivory eyes and aerial views of the town site with the mile long “avenues” with house ruins. Froelich seemed to think the population had been bigger than modern Fairbanks (which in 1942 was 3,455). I was amazed when I read this article, never having heard of this archeological site before. Do you know if this site has ever been debunked as not authentic?

Tres enjoyable!

So, in 1933 the permafrost boundary was at Semzha. It would be interesting to know where it is now.

Steve Oregon says 10:22 am
You are living in a most beautiful place. I first visited there briefly in 1956. Later, I learned to ski at Timberline, Mt Hood. What a state–Too bad most voters there are people I call idiots for voting the way they do. No wonder the news there is so biased.

I have been reading “The Last Explorer” by Simon Nasht. It is the story of Sir Hubert Wilkins the great forgotten polar explorer who was the first man to fly over the North Pole and the first to explore Antarctica by air. I quote:
“…they sailed south in search of potential landing strips on the Antarctic coast, but were continually frustrated by storms. Wilkins was amazed to record that the floating ice field had receded by almost 1000 kilometers from the previous year. Looking back on these conditions later, he told journalist Lowell Thomas, with some prescience, that he believed this ice warming to have had a long-range effect on climatic conditions throughout the world. The ice melt that southern summer year was followed by an extensive drought in the United States. Decades before the world became aware of ozone holes and global warming, Wilkins was recognizing the links between Antarctic conditions and climate change.”
The year of the expedition was 1929. Comments please.

I have said in earlier posts that the nouveau climate scientists like Dr. Hansen (an astronomer) and others jumped into what they, at the time, thought was untilled soil.
Based on Hansen’s observations that Venus is engulfed in GHG and is 800C or so he recklessly extrapolated that extreme situation to our planet and Climatology was essentially born (again) without much thought that paleoclimatologists have been studying earth’s climate from the distant past.
Being a new science, proponents wouldn’t think that a good literature search would be worthwhile. And here, sitting in the US Navy library is a book on Arctic Ice that describes and era of warming that is relatively recent and even more extreme. Since the publication of this book we have even had an alarmist scare about the impending ice age of the early 1970s.
Since knowledgeable people on the subject entered the debate, revealing such things as the MWP and the LIA, etc., the nouveau practitioners have spent all their time digging up what they could to bury these earlier studies and observations and doing “repair” research that required manipulations and emendments and amendments to sustain their early fledgling offerings. The lengths they went to and the enlisting of a gulible public all fell apart in the Climategate revelations. Now with the tide turning, only a few are sticking stubornly to their guns.
The others are engaged in revisions ever so gradually – reflating the MWP and the Roman WP and deflating the LIA slowly back to their rightful places. The 1930s have been rebounding to become the warmest decade of the last century again and more glaciers seem to be bouncing back along with arctic ice.

Re: Ulric Lyons May 4, 2010 12:14pm
My primary interest is in the integrals of the things that attract your attention. I say “some of us” acknowledging that “others of us” will place focus elsewhere within the puzzle that is certainly sizable enough to warrant variation in individual focus.
I appreciated your notes on the role of seasonality. The adjustments I’ve started making to my algorithms have already paid dividends (in terms of insight – money is another matter!)
Perhaps I should clarify that my perspective is that of an ecologist. Example: A tree might survive a summer drought or a winter cold snap in one year, but if pounded with the same scenario for a decade, the hierarchies of competitive-edge are restructured. There are a wide variety of factors constraining dominance. For any given species, there may generally be only one or a few factors that are critical in maintaining competitive-edge. That species’ opponents may be constrained in part by a different few critical factors. All of this varies over time & space. For example, a species may be restricted by different factors in different parts of its range.
All of the complexity of life on top of climate & everything else (soils, genetics, pollen & seed dispersal, migration, etc.) Landscape ecologists have had to invent deeply (& technically) philosophical frameworks for conceptualizing the extraordinarily complex multi-scale patterns found in nature. In my experience, the conceptual frameworks are not at all intuitive to new students. They struggle to get a handle on the technicalities of the different frameworks. As for the mainstream, they haven’t even heard of this stuff. But like I say: multidisciplinary, so we all have our unique combination of pieces of the overall most-fascinating puzzle. Cheers – & thanks for the notes Ulric.

Ulric Lyons wrote: “[…] we cannot do much about that […]”
Studying & understanding nature is tremendously interesting. (Engineering it is not necessarily the goal! Nonetheless, if we pave the whole planet and wreck patch-connectivity, we do impact [sometimes fatally] dispersal & migration, which are necessary for survival during sustained climate change, whether natural or not.)