By Steve Goddard and Anthony Watts
If you zoom in far enough, most anything looks scary, like this picture of a human head louse.
But when you look at it in the scale of our normal experience, not so much.
Be it lice or ice, the scale of presentation matters.
There is often criticism of cherry picking when it comes to time scales of climate data. In the case of satellite sea ice data presentation, both time scale and vertical scale are magnified. There’s only about 30 years of satellite ice data, whereas Arctic sea ice has been around for millions of years. Vertical scale is magnified to show the smallest fluctuations. Willis Eschenbach made and excellent point about scale when he comparatively demonstrated the scale of ice melt in Greenland in his essay: On Being the Wrong Size. When compared to the bulk volume of ice, the current Greenland melt is statistically insignificant.
There has been a lot of talk about commercial shipping opportunities through the “soon to be ice free” Arctic. These are normally based on highly magnified graphs published by organisations like NSIDC, similar to the one below.
A different view emerges when you take the raw data from NSIDC’s web site and plot it on graphs with a more appropriate vertical scale. Done that way, the downwards trend for April ice is 0.039 million km²/year.
The surprise of scale?
When you calculate the slope, it suggests that April sea ice extent won’t reach zero until the year 2385.
Oh, that can’t be right. How about May? May will be ice free in the year 2404, only 394 years from now. (The US is 234 years old. Copernicus was placed on the “Catholic Forbidden index” 394 years ago.)
June will be ice free in the year 2296.
July will be ice free by the year 2151.
August will be ice free by the year 2103
September will be ice free by the year 2065. (Note that September 2009 was right on the trend line.)
All of the data and plots are available here in this Google online spreadsheet.
September is the minimum and ice starts to freeze up again. No chance of an ice free Arctic in October. But something must be wrong. The experts said that the Arctic would be ice free by 2008, and that it would be ice free by 2013.
“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. “So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.” “In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly”
NSIDC director, Dr. Mark Serreze also says this in this 5/20/10 Globe and Mail article:
“We are going to lose the summer sea-ice cover. We can’t go back.”
Dr. Serreze is still on the ‘death spiral’. He hasn’t changed his tune.
While skeptics see cycles, by saying “we can’t go back” Dr. Serreze apparently assumes the linear trend will continue to zero.
You can see from the graphs above how ridiculous those claims are. Even if the current trends continue, there is no reason to expect an ice free Arctic anytime in the next 50 years. And even more interesting to me is the fact that September, 2007 was really not that interesting. It was only 1.5 standard deviations off the trend line, i.e. almost following the 30 year trend.
All of the the main Arctic ice experts underpredicted the 2009 minimum, except for WUWT – which predicted it correctly and early.
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Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts
-Richard Feynman
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That had me going for a second. I though there was a decrease in “Arctic sea lice”!
No doubt, predicing when the arctic will become ice-free in late summer is difficult and full of uncertainty. The main question for this post is whether the decline in ice will stay linear.
My part of the US midwest is expecting highs in the mid 80s (°F) all week. Warm, but perhaps not too extreme for spring. However, I was really surprised by the posting of R. Gates (4:57 pm, May 23) in the previous post on arctic ice. Gates linked to the forecast for Venetie, Alaska, which above the arctic circle, where predicted highs for the next week range from 78-85 °F. Spring temps in the 80s in May must be a little unusual above the arctic circle. Vinetie is inland, so coastal areas will undoubtably be cooler. Still, I would not want to bet on such a steady, gradual and linear melting of ice.
Here is the forecast for a town in central Alaska:
http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstraveler/tenday/99781?par=Google&site=earth.google.com&promo=0&cm_ven=bd_select&cm_cat=Google&cm_pla=earth.google.com&cm_ite=map
Isn’t this a moot point, I read on here that sea ice is recovering, so all these trendlines will eventually go flat and then slope upwards, no?
I also predicted a smaller ice melt season for 08 and 09 ( the accuweather.com pro site has my archives). This year I have a major ice melt season forecasted though, even as global temps turn rapidly down. But dont fool yourself, this will be almost back to the 2007 min before its over this year. However a major recovery will occur in the coming two years so the min in 11 and 12 will be a greater extent than 09. NH ice is in a recovery, but in a herky jerk one step down , 2 steps up fashion. The real turn in this will come in 10-15 years when the AMO joins the PDO with cyclical cold in tandem.
JB
JB says:
May 24, 2010 at 3:38 am
“Isn’t this a moot point, I read on here that sea ice is recovering, so all these trendlines will eventually go flat and then slope upwards, no?”
Yep, as like most things in nature, one can expect to see a sine wave eventually.
Joe,
Thanks. Your forecast is noted and bookmarked.
James, how long before we see that sine wave? 2 years, 5 years, 30 more years?
I think a couple ice free or at least passable months along the Northwest Passage would be a good thing, saving saving many tons of bunker oil for our shipping companies.
I’ve never been a fan of polar bears anyway.
BillD…a couple things: the NWS forecast for that part of Alaska is about 10 degrees cooler than what you have linked on weather.com. I have noticed that weather.com comes up with interpolated data to produce their forecasts which in many cases are way off the mark. Furthermore, Venetie, Alaska is NOT representative of the entire arctic, where much lower 500 mb heights can be seen across areas north of Alaska this week, and even across western and southwestern Alaska (remember it’s a big, big state).
Now before we get all blasé about these long, long projections of meltdown: won’t somebody think of our children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children? Also, we must remember that if previous (alarmist) trends are anything to go by, then we can safely assume that before too long it will be considered to be “worse than we thought” and that we’ll soon have to be worrying about our children’s children’s children’s children’s children. We must act NOW! And by “we” I mean “you” and by “act” I mean “pay.”
I am very afraid. What if this “cyclical” downturn reverses and the cycle goes back to an upward climb?
I live in the Canadian Shield. I don’t want to be under 3 km of ice (just too much pressure to bear…)
Won’t somebody get hot for a warmer, kinder world?
Won’t somebody think of the chilled wren?
😉
Joe Bastardi:
“The real turn in this will come in 10-15 years when the AMO joins the PDO with cyclical cold in tandem.”
So we’ll have to put up with alarmist bleatings for another 10-15 years? Groan!
I can’t tell how much wind and currents shape extent of the ice. It sure looks like next winter will be cold. Last fall Edmonton Alberta had 46 below zero. It really shows us when they complained of balmy weather in Vancouver, it was not widespread.
So the IPCC is correct expecting the Arctic to be Summer ice free some time after 2050.
@Joe Kirklin Bastardi says:
May 24, 2010 at 3:48 am
I too predicted the last two cold winters. There should be a lot of ice melt by this Autumn, I would expect global temps to rise this year. The AO is theoretically positive till 2035, exceptions like last winter though, are of a greater magnitude than the cycle itself. The next two winters coming, I don`t see getting particularly cold till February, so ice build up will not be so much. 2012/13 winter looks mild, but 2014/16/17/18/20 winters are looking hard.
It´s the same with global temperatures, where the Y axis is always shown in 0.1 degrees increments, being really a straight line as in the present case, where any small increase in ice extent will straighten the curve.
Meanwhile, in Central Ontario, we have been basking in an abnormal warm trend since February. Most of the low pressures systems and storms are forced lower and away to the coast. Low 30 degree celcius for the next 3 days.
This is the same system that reaches to Greenland. Last week we had 2 nights of minus 6 degrees celcius which killed off some of the crops growing early.
Seems to me that the oscillating trends are getting more wild and closer in fluctuations.
I think 2007 was anomalous, and that’s why we are going to get an unprecedented (in the satellite age) 3 years in a row of minimum extent growth.
I’m still sitting on 6.0-6.2M for minimum this year. The concentrations in the central core are still holding up very well compared to any previous year you look at since 1980 for this date (tho 2009 is not availabe at Cryosphere to look at because of an issue they had last spring/summer). It’s the central core that actually matters for minimum, because that’s the only place ice survives past minimum in any great quantity. There are large swaths of the core that are still north of 80% concentration that were below 80% in 2006-2008 (for instance).
BillD says:
May 24, 2010 at 3:35 am
Your link was to the weather channel (click on the monthly data, their software can’t handle days without a sunrise – having written software to compute such info, their errors are amusing).
The NWS says:
Monday…Partly cloudy. Isolated afternoon thunderstorms west of beaver. Highs 70 to 75. Northeast winds 10 to 20 mph.
Monday Night…Partly cloudy. Isolated evening thunderstorms west of beaver. Lows near 45. Northeast winds 10 to 15 mph.
Tuesday…Mostly sunny. Highs around 75. Northeast winds 10 to 15 mph.
Wednesday…Mostly sunny. Highs near 75.
Thursday…Mostly sunny. Highs near 75.
Friday…Mostly sunny. Highs near 80.
Saturday…Mostly sunny. Highs near 75.
http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?zoneid=AKZ220
I don’t have time to hunt down records for the area this morning.
Is Arctic “ice extent” a measure of the surface area covered by ice, regardless of the ice’s depth, and therefore not a measure of the total amount of ice ? If so, what the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School said seems reasonable:
“In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly”
I would agree, since I have observed that a thin sheet of ice covering a pond can disappear quickly while a thick sheet takes a while to disappear.
I would agree with the continued gradual melting implied in the above graphs (e.g., June will be ice free in the year 2296) if the “ice extent” measure accounts for the depth or thickness of Arctic ice. If it doesn’t, the ice could be gone much sooner than the graphs imply.
While summers might see little or no Arctic ice in the future, I would expect the ice to be back in Winter , although thinner and possibly allowing navigation by ships during more months.
beware the graph that does not show a zero at the x or y axis
As a parent who has suffered through the ongoing lice epidemic in eastern secondary schools, I can tell you that head lice are terrifying – at any scale.
In the posting titled: “WUWT Arctic Sea Ice News #6”, there was an interesting comment from commieBob who said, “The ice melts from the bottom up. Very roughly, it takes a certain air temperature to maintain a certain thickness of ice”. He continued that from March to May the “ice went from more than six feet to around two feet but you couldn’t tell it from the top of the ice.”
If his statements are correct, then I think that rather than the area of ice, the volume of the ice could be a better measurement of annual variation of temperature. However, I don’t see any data or discussion of measurements of the thickness of the ice over the entire area of the arctic.
Why do scientists feel like they have to give these predictions in the first place?
There is not one single person with one single active brain cell that would believe any of it.
chance of rain tomorrow – 50%
25 named hurricanes this year
human population will be X by year X…………..