Sea Ice News Volume 3 number 13 – 2012 Arctic sea ice minimum reached, it's all gain from here

It’s not CO2 which caused the lowest minimum of the Arctic ice pack this year but the warm AMO! Once the AMO turns negative, and it will, every thing will return to “normal.”

Reblogged this on Tigerland888 News Archive: Assembled Articles, Reports, Essays By Chase Kyla Hunter and commented:
Rapid melting of arctic sea ice presents a whole new plethora of problems no one had counted on needing to address, including a re-assessment of US national security issues related to the appearance [ quite suddenly ] of a new ocean to police to the farthest north of North America.

Who ever summarizes the different measures of ice cover (or volume), please also include a mention of the smoothing method and timing (# of days and whether mid point timing or trailing average).

At 3.41 million sq km, that means that in the ARCUS forecasting contest, everybody missed the forecast mark
Yes, while some nonscientists have been predicting cycles and recovery, the experts have been predicting ice decline. But real ice has been going down much faster than even most of the experts (except Maslowski) thought it would. Not a good sign.

Just a look at the temperature of the ice coming out of winter could be additional condition to see less ice (sealess ice) come today. ???

Chris4692 says:
September 19, 2012 at 10:55 am
Looking at just the chart, it could be the minimum, but it looks to me to that it could also be just a wiggle. Do you have other information that leads you to make the call?

Look at the DMI temperatures here http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php and in the sidebar sea ice page http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
The temperatures appear to be dropping albeit a little later than normal. With temperatures below 270K and dropping and rapidly reducing insolation there should be no more melting. Although potentially another severe storm could force more ice out of the Arctic ocean area.

Roy, can you find a link for that story? I’ve seen occasional similar reports from Greenland, but haven’t come across that one. TIA.

“I’ll trade you a guest post on WUWT for making good on your promise of NSIDC “eventually” publishing your daily data like JAXA and other sea ice monitoring outlets do.”
Thanks, that was very funny. Looking forward to Dr. Meier’s guest post. It’s always nice to read someone who knows what he’s talking about on WUWT.

BA says:
September 19, 2012 at 11:11 am
At 3.41 million sq km, that means that in the ARCUS forecasting contest, everybody missed the forecast mark
Yes, while some nonscientists have been predicting cycles and recovery, the experts have been predicting ice decline. But real ice has been going down much faster than even most of the experts (except Maslowski) thought it would. Not a good sign.
*
Watch this space.

We haven’t been measuring global cycles long enough to know for sure what is normal over say 1000 years.

Anthony,
You didn’t post it above, but it’s worth noting that ARCUS called for late summer update after the NSIDC Sea Ice Extent dropped to record levels in mid-August. The breakdown of the handful of responses can be found here (sorry, I don’t know the html tag for an image). Of those, I would say 3 of them were spot-on (we were still projecting from a month out) and the Meier et al contribution was reasonably close.
(Since someone will be quick to notice, yes, mine was the worst. But I did say in the write-up that I thought the results were too high. And I’d said from the beginning that 2012 would be at or below previous records.)

NORSEX and DMI show an even more pronounced “recovery” (see the sea ice page). Don’t know why large chunks of perfectly good ocean being covered with pretty much useless ice is called a “recovery”, but I think the arctic circle temps from DMI are even more interesting. As several people have pointed out, the absence of ice mean an awful lot of energy being dissipated that would otherwise have been trapped under the ice. So, initially I would expect warmer than average air temps, and once the heat from the water has been exhausted, a precipitous decline. Too early to tell, but have a look at arctic circle temps from DMI:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php

Richard deSousa on September 19, 2012 at 10:11 am
It’s not CO2 which caused the lowest minimum of the Arctic ice pack this year but the warm AMO! Once the AMO turns negative, and it will, every thing will return to “normal.”
————
So how do you know that the AMO is especially warm and why is it especially warm?

BA says:
September 19, 2012 at 12:49 pm
Jimbo says
Take a look at the death spiral in Antarctica.
=============================================
I don’t think anybody has predicted a death spiral already in Antarctica, especially not in winter. Have they?
============================================================
Wrong, the climate models did, as well as James Hansen.

Crispin in Waterloo;
Water has a very high emissivity so it is going to freeze very rapidly but once there is nice white ice on top, that consideration is largely gone.
>>>>>>>>>
Fresh water yes, salt water no. Salt water bodies have to cool to the freezing point from top to bottom before ice can form. So, once you’re talking about open water, that’s a lot of heat the ocean has to give up to start forming ice again.

Arctic sea ice has been steadily receding for many years. What is not often mentioned is that the water temperature in the Fram Strait [east coast off Greenland] has warmed by ≈3.5ºC over the past century.
Once again, CO2 has nothing to do with Arctic ice cover. Nothing. Ocean currents shift over time, and they get warmer and cooler. Naturally. And since global warming amounts to only 0.8ºC, then other regions of the planet must be commensurately colder.

D. J. Hawkins says:
September 19, 2012 at 10:23 am

I don’t believe the open water will have aborbed much in the way of incoming energy due to the high effective albedo as a result of the angle of incidence.

There are several papers by Kato and Loeb that look at this issue, sadly behind paywalls. But you can see from the figures available that the albedo of open sea water is always significantly lower than ice, even at high latitudes.
Sure, heat will be re-radiated upwards, into the atmosphere and eventually out into space. But that heat (which in its travels creates water vapor and higher air temperatures) would never have been absorbed at all in the alternative, ice covered scenario. In this sense I disagree with David M. Hoffer, who wrote:

As several people have pointed out, the absence of ice mean an awful lot of energy being dissipated that would otherwise have been trapped under the ice.

No, the absence of ice means the absorption of heat that otherwise would not have been absorbed at all. The alternative is that the ice would never have melted at all, as in earlier years in the satellite record. The incoming radiation of late August and early September would have been reflected out to space immediately, not captured, held, and gradually re-radiated.
And why aren’t we discussing the IMS sea ice chart? Wasn’t there a post on this blog just a little while ago holding up that chart as the gold standard?

dvunkannon;
In this sense I disagree with David M. Hoffer, who wrote:
As several people have pointed out, the absence of ice mean an awful lot of energy being dissipated that would otherwise have been trapped under the ice.
No, the absence of ice means the absorption of heat that otherwise would not have been absorbed at all.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are forgetting that the sun has a high angle of incidence this time of year for only a brief part of the day. The rest of the time the angle of incidence is rather low, and water reflects the bulk of the insolation at low angles of incidence, even more than snow and ice. Catch the sunset reflecting off of water and it is blinding. Not so much with snow and ice. Plus the days are getting shorter, so night time hours will soon exceed day time hours. As for absorption and re-radiation, uhm…. from what? Ozone concentrations are beginning to collapse (as they do every year at this time), and at surface temps of zero C or less, the amount of atmospheric water vapour is almost nil. CO2? Not enough to matter by comparison, not to mention that with all that cold water suddenly exposed to the atmosphere, CO2 is being sucked out of it like mad.
So, not much heat being absorbed from the sun, plenty being radiated out, and much if it with a free pass to outer space.

William says:
September 19, 2012 at 11:16 am
“http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0612/0612145v1.pdf
The Antarctic climate anomaly and galactic cosmic rays By, Henrik Svensmark
Contradictory trends in temperature in Antarctica and the rest of the world, which are evident on timescales from millennia to decades, provide a strong clue to what drives climate change. The southern continent is distinguished by its isolation and by its unusual response to changes in cloud cover. While the rest of the global surface is (on balance) cooled by clouds, they have a warming effect on high-albedo snowfields[5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10].”
From prior posts as well, I’m starting to recognize your name as one of the most informative posters here.
Good link. Indeed. (And, for example, in http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/6000/6502/antarctic_temps.AVH1982-2004.jpg , one can see a sharp contrast between the GCR and cloud-driven temperature change over Antarctic snow/ice whiter than even the clouds versus over the lower-albedo surrounding ocean right nearby; for later years and more globally, the prime cause of the false divergence in cloud cover trends from the ISCCP at Hansen’s GISS versus cloud cover trends from other sources and that expected from GCR trends is noted at http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/further-attempt-to-falsify-the-svensmark-hypothesis/ ).
——————-
If anyone has not seen some paramount graphs noted in a prior thread:
The actual picture of arctic ice extent from the 1970s to now in annual trends less misleading than single months alone:
http://www.webcitation.org/6AKKakUIo
showing how, in annual averages (not a single month post-storm), recent years are comparable to the mid-1990s in arctic ice extent
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif
showing how the mid-1990s had less warm arctic temperatures than reached in the 1930s
Plots from http://nwpi.krc.karelia.ru/e/climas/Ice/Ice_no_sat/XX_Arctic.htm include the following of August ice extent in the Siberian arctic basin from the 1920s through the end of the 20th century, with once again the decline in the latter time period being just rather similar to when it went down more than a half-century ago (before later up again during the 1960s – early 1970s era of the global cooling scare, which occurred for a reason):
http://nwpi.krc.karelia.ru/e/climas/Ice/Ice_no_sat/fig2.gif

James Abbott says:
“And before anyone says it – yes the antarctic sea ice is behaving differently – accepted.”
Not accepted. How many times do we have to post the evidence? Arctic ice has receded more than at present at various times during the Holocene. That is a fact, based on empirical data and eyewitness observations. In other words, based on scientific evidence.
Next, your first link says:
The potential sources of this discrepancy include: observational uncertainty, physical model limitations and vigorous natural climate variability.
That is far from scientific evidence. In fact, the authors admit they do not have scientific evidence, which consists of raw data and verifiable, testable scientific observations. So that link does not support your argument.
Your second link says nothing whatever about anthropogenic CO2, which was my comment that you responded to. That is known as moving the goal posts, AKA: a straw man, or red herring fallacy.
You also argue against basic thermodynamics when you apparently claim that warming in one region is not offset by cooling in one or more other regions. And of course you disregard the fact that the Antarctic is cooling, and also adding ice mass.
Finally, what is the problem, exactly, with an ice-free Arctic? The benefits are clear: lower shipping costs and more easily recoverable energy sources. All the wild-eyed arm waving over Arctic sea ice is because every other prediction made by the alarmist cult has been falsified.
• • •
johnpetroff says:
“Thank you for admitting warming is occurring. Was that so hard?”
“Admitting”? You condescending know-it-all. My clearly stated position since WUWT began is that the planet is recovering [warming] from the Little Ice Age. It is warming naturally. There may be a small amount of warming due to CO2, but it is so minuscule that it can be disregarded for all practical purposes.
Temperature has a far greater effect on CO2 than vice-versa. The effect of CO2 [which I think exists] is so small that it is not measurable. Thus, no time, money or effort is needed to address CO2 emissions — which are entirely beneficial, and harmless.
Next, Wood For Trees is a data base that is accepted by everyone on both sides of the debate. Well, everyone except you. You are just hoping to find something wrong with the CO2/T relationship, but it just isn’t there. CO2 continues to rise. But temperature does not follow, as was universally predicted by the alarmist crowd. They were wrong, as usual.
Finally, NOAA’s use of a zero baseline chart is done deliberately to fool the eye into believing that global warming is accelerating. If they used a trend chart like this…
http://oi56.tinypic.com/2reh021.jpg
…it would show that the long term trend [the green trend line] remains unchanged, despite the large rise in CO2. The natural global warming since the LIA is the same whether CO2 is high or low. But the truth would spoil their alarming narrative, so they use a zero baseline chart to fool the credulous.

James Abbott says:
September 19, 2012 at 4:20 pm
“Variations in ocean currents do not alone explain the observed arctic melt. A common sceptic error is to use black and white arguments that exclude multi-forcing mechanisms.”
This is the funniest and hypocritical post I have seen in a long time. Let me correct it to reflect reality:
“Increases in Co2 do not explain the observed Arctic melt. A common warmist error is to use black and white arguments that exclude multi-forcing mechanisms.”

A couple of days ago I notice the average temperature above 80°N dipped sharply below 0°C. That signalled to me the ice extent upturn probably was beginning.
With more open ocean well above 80°N, with temperatures much colder than average available, the ice extent could rapidly rebound. Nothing new in that; we should expect it. More interesting is the date of the minimum. That seems to have returned to the old average, and suggests the north may be starting on path back from the low ice extent levels of the recent past.
The unusual stormy weather this year makes the anomaly more anomalous, and perhaps less meaningful in terms of global warming. However, we all know warmistas will glom onto anything that supports the cause, regardless of scientific merit.

I said,
I don’t think anybody has predicted a death spiral already in Antarctica, especially not in winter. Have they?
David said,
Wrong, the climate models did, as well as James Hansen.
Am I wrong, or are you faking it? Show me where “the climate models” or James Hansen predicted there would be “a death spiral already in Antarctica,” especially in winter.

At 3.41 million sq km, that means that in the ARCUS forecasting contest, everybody missed the forecast mark:

That is the daily lowest extent. The ARCUS forecasts are for the whole month of September.
Even so, it is virtually certain that the lowest of the predictions made in August will still be higher than the September average. But this year there was a late entry in the ARCUS forecasts:

On 27 August we posted an announcement to the SIO mailing list for updates or subjective estimates for the daily minimum for September. Asking for a ‘daily’ minimum is different than the September monthly value that we normally compare against, so we got a mix of interpretations. In either case, below is the distribution graph of responses.

Forecasts for daily minimum were as follows;
NOAA-FOCI / Wetzler………….. 3.3
Beitsch et al………………………. 3.4
Morison…………………………….. 3.5
Meier et al ………………………… 3.7
Folkerts…………………………….. 3.8
Canadian Ice Service………….. 3.9
Zhang and Lindsay……………… 3.9
Netweather.tv……………………… 4.3
Naval Research Laboratory….. 4.4
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2012/august/update
Anthony, did you get the announcement? Just curious.

Remember those pictures in books of the ice caps of Mars? When the north would expand, the south would recede and vice versa. I’ll be damned if I can find pictures of that using google.

@James Abbott:
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. Please don’t assume however that all sceptics are trying to explain this phenomenon away. A lot of us have no problem accepting that the world has warmed recently. What we are mostly sceptical about is how much, the attribution of cause, and the prediction of catastrophe.
The low sea ice this year certainly has my attention. That is a massive continent sized hunk of ice that has gone MIA. I will be very interested in seeing what the effects of this change are likely to be. Higher snowfall in areas at high latitudes this winter looks likely for example.
Where I mostly strongly disagree with you is in your confident statement that this phenomenon is definitely global warming driven. I am very sceptical about that claim. What is clear is that the arctic and the surrounding land areas at high latitude have shown warming much greater than that observed anywhere else on the planet. Greenhouse gas theory actually predicts greater warming at the equator. If you want to claim arctic warming as a symptom of global warming you need to propose a mechanism by which the additional heat of global warming is channeled predominantly to the arctic (as opposed to the antarctic). The trouble as I see it is that it is very hard to propose a mechanism to do this that DEPENDS on global warming. Almost all such mechanisms will work equally well as an explanation for arctic heat quite independent of global warming.
For example warm ocean currents provide one possible mechanism for channelling global heat into the arctic. The trouble is that while warm arctic currents could carry heat up to the arctic quite nicely, one is left struggling to conjure up an explanation for why a slight increase in the overall global greenhouse effect should trigger such currents. And since climate is chaotic you cannot rule out the possibility that changes in these currents are simply a natural periodic variation unobserved until now because our arctic data doesn’t go back far enough.
Similarly a change in wind patterns triggered by global warming blowing ice out of the arctic might be another possible mechanism for channelling the heat up there (it channels the cold out of there which is basically the same thing). But once again such a change in wind patterns could be a periodic natural phenomenon unobserved up to now and that would explain the warming quite independently of CO2.
What makes this difficult is that the observed changes in temperature in the rest of the world are so tiny. To make the explanation work you need this tiny change to initiate a massive heat engine of some kind pumping heat into the arctic from all around the globe. I can’t see how that might work. That is why I am so sceptical. And if you could get it to work, I hope you realise that the very existence of such a powerful and exquisitely sensitive mechanism for pumping heat around the place would be absolutely devastating to the possibility of getting global climate models accurate enough to predict anything.
Yes the arctic is warmer than it has been for 30 years. Yes there are record low levels of ice up there right now. I’d like to know what the likely consequences of that are, what might happen if the trend continues, and I’m open to explanations of cause and possible mechnisms. I note your explanation (CO2 is to blame). As an explanation it seems flawed. The chain from your presumed cause to the observed effect seems to be broken in such a fundamental way that I don’t believe it can be easily repaired.

There are many possible reasons for such low summer sea-ice extents.This is what I suspect is happening.
1. Low winter solar activity leads to a large sea-ice formation.(more heat has escaped during the winter)
2. More sea-ice formation by its nature increases winter deep water formation
3. This water is slowly replaced by an increased North Atlantic drift.Increased upwelling occurs in a band across the lower latitute Atlantic quite visible on sst charts by mid february.Coupled ocean atmosphere affects from this cooler band alters European winter weather.
4. This increased THC in the Atlantic/artic is further increased by an increasingly active antarctic which due to its increased winter sea-ice formation should also add to total THC.
5. This increased THC pushes north leading to a greater arctic summer sea-ice melt.
Interestingly arctic ocean heat content is not increasing (the extra heat is escaping to space during winter), but the North Atlantic heat content is falling(draining into the arctic).See Tisdale OHC up till Dec. 2011.
It seams almost counter-intuitive to me that an increased winter arctic sea-ice build should lead to an increased summer melt but I blame an increased THC, which is also draining the North Atlantic OHC.

Bruce: It seams almost counter-intuitive to me that an increased winter arctic sea-ice build should lead to an increased summer melt
There does seems to be increased variation in recent year. Back at the beginning of the record things were smoother “sine” waves during the year. Now there is more rapid melting AND more rapid freezing.
This would seem to be a logical result of thinner ice coverage over a proportion of Arctic. So it’s not the increased winter build-up that is causeing the summer melting but both effects are due to ice area being more volatile since ice is thinner.
There is a core area of thicker ice that draws a line under all this.

“…3,41 km2 sea-ice …” should read “… 3,41 million km2 sea-ice…” – my mistake

Dr. Meier is making the news:

Arctic ice shrinks to all-time low; half 1980 size
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a critical climate indicator showing an ever warming world, the amount of ice in the Arctic Ocean shrank to an all-time low this year, obliterating old records.
The ice cap at the North Pole measured 1.32 million square miles on Sunday. That’s 18 percent smaller than the previous record of 1.61 million square miles set in 2007, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. Records go back to 1979 based on satellite tracking.
“On top of that, we’re smashing a record that smashed a record,” said data center scientist Walt Meier. Sea ice shrank in 2007 to levels 22 percent below the previous record of 2005.
Ice in the Arctic melts in summer and grows in winter, and it started growing again on Monday. In the 1980s, Meier said, summer sea ice would cover an area slightly smaller than the Lower 48 states. Now it is about half that.
Man-made global warming has melted more sea ice and made it thinner over the last couple decades with it getting much more extreme this year, surprisingly so, said snow and ice data center director Mark Serreze.
“Recently the loss of summer ice has accelerated and the six lowest September ice extents have all been in the past six years,” Serreze said. “I think that’s quite remarkable.”
Serreze said except for one strong storm that contributed to the ice loss, this summer melt was more from the steady effects of day-to-day global warming. But he and others say the polar regions are where the globe first sees the signs of climate change. . .

http://news.yahoo.com/arctic-ice-shrinks-time-low-half-1980-size-175242723.html
“The polar regions”—but nothing about Antarctica in this story.
/Mr Lynn

BA,
read this from the Warmists at Skeptical Science.

Over the Earth’s history, there are times where atmospheric CO2 is higher than current levels. Intriguingly, the planet experienced widespread regions of glaciation during some of those periods. Does this contradict the warming effect of CO2? No, for one simple reason. CO2 is not the only driver of climate…………………….Atmospheric CO2 levels have reached spectacular values in the deep past, possibly topping over 5000 ppm.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=77

This is heresy!!!! But consistent with climate models. 😉

@jorge, David M Hoffer
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011JD015804.shtml
Figure 2
The albedo of open sea water is always below all other lines. The albedo of clouds over open water is lower than the albedo of clouds over ice (clean or dirty).
The appeal to our own experience is unfortunately non-scientific. The blinding nature of a reflection of the sun off of water vs. ice is subjective. There are confounding circumstances, such as the rest of our filed of vision being filled with light from other reflecting snow/ice vs the surface of the water being darker than the sun’s reflection. Do we remember events six months apart accurately, and how do we compare my recollections and yours? These are the kind of reasons that appeals to experience and common sense cannot be set against scientific research.
David, I think clouds can form even over cold surfaces, and there is a small difference in the freezing temperature of seawater and pure water. The plain fact is that if you look at any of the sea ice graphs they don’t return to near average conditions until November, so for several months there is about 2 million sq km of open water that can put water vapor into the atmosphere where before there was none. There might be a direct effect on the following winter’s weather (Warm Arctic, Cold Continents) but for now I think we are just getting thinner and thinner ice, which melts more quickly in the next summer.

James Abbot: The mean surface temperature (Land-Ocean) has indeed risen by about 0.8C over the last century and…
While this is the popular consensus on both sides of the fence, the statement is scientifically indefensible. There is way too much noise in the various temperature measuring technologies employed over the last 100 years, and way too much fiddling with what data there is to resolve to less than a degree, and even a degree change is suspect. At best, its an anecdotal observation that has yet to be resolved and won’t be resolved in anyone’s lifetime here. We can’t teleport technology back in time, and we haven’t establish trend monitors with any kind of usable, applicable universality on a global scale. And we’re trying to draw short term conclusions on phenomena that have cycles that occur in 10**x periods. Gigo.
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
September 19, 2012 at 1:35 pm
On 9/19/2012 8:34 AM, Anthony wrote: I think we’ve reached the turning point for Arctic Sea ice today, do you concur? Anthony, who responded with: Yep: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Hmmm….I immediately wondered if another cyclonic storm or other wind event could drive it lower, and I see this on the NSIDC page:
“Please note that this is a preliminary announcement. Changing winds could still push ice floes together, reducing ice extent further.”
Hang on… Extent is extent. Are we talking about the actual extent of ice cover, or are we talking about the extent of ice cover over a narrowly defined geographic area? Ice extent measure has no resolution below presnece or absence? Huh?

@davidmhoffer
>>Water has a very high emissivity so it is going to freeze very rapidly but once there is nice white ice on top, that consideration is largely gone.
>Fresh water yes, salt water no. Salt water bodies have to cool to the freezing point from top to bottom before ice can form. So, once you’re talking about open water, that’s a lot of heat the ocean has to give up to start forming ice again.
I understand your point howeverI am pretty sure water freezes on top long before it is colder underneath. Don’t be surprised if the re-freeze rate exceeds other years. The formation of freshwater ice on the surface takes place immediately enough heating ceases, from above or below. The cooling by radiation and evaporation is continuous, all year. The air picks up moisture if it is not particularly cold, or is chilled by the air from convection (a bit), or if by radiation into the dark, almost moisture-free sky. Obviously CO2 has virtually nothing to do with it in terms of ‘slowing down the cooling’ as the effect is miniscule.
The freezing water expells 100% 0f its CO2 as you noted later. I am happy to see someone other than me picking up on this sorta major and ignored phenomenon. As the sea freezes, the CO2 is expelled over a vast area. You can calculate the mass of CO2 involved by using 320 ppm (mass) and the mass of ice. If the ice volume increases very rapidly this year, the CO2 level should go up faster than normal. Let’s see. Warmists will blame this on anthropogenic emissions, rationalists will observe it arises from the sea, not because they are warming, but because they are freezing! Kinda puts a new perspective on it, doesn’t it!
Something worth looking at in light of the big storm and added melting this year is the cooling effect of broken-up ice. The ice melts not by absorbing lots of solar energy but by floating in warm water. It is warmer below than on top as ice is a pretty good insulator and captures radiant heat from below (water radiates omnidirectionally all the time, or course). If the ocean did not warm to a higher temperature this summer than before, what does that tell us? If the water was cooler in toto that shows the cooling effect of the rapid melt of the ice. It means it will refreeze even faster than usual. As I posted before, watch the refreeze rate, take the first derivative and learn.
Re the general circulation models that predicted polar warming as a major and preliminary sign of AGW: This has been falsified. The models predicted that both poles would warm. They are supposed to warm equally. There is no warming in Antarctica. The warming in the Arctic has been happening for more than 150 years and is nothing new. The ‘predicted’ polar warming is not happening according the the predicted method, that is, that CO2 would warm the atmosphere and this would lead to warmer air temperatures which would melt the ice at both poles. As this is not taking place, the models must be wrong in a major way.
Frankly I see no reason why the poles should warm first if the CO2 idea is correct – the mid-troposphere should warm first and that is not happening either – perhaps that is what is wrong in the models. Who knows. They have never predicted anything correctly yet. Currently the globe is cooling and they didn’t get that right.
In review, we have no net heat increase in the Arctic Ocean, we have no increase in the sea surface temperature, we have an increase in ice thickness over the entire interior of Greenland and colder conditions with increasing ice over nearly all of Antarctica. The CO2 goes up when the ice expells it, seasonally. That is not what the models said would happen. Far from it. Polar Amplification is BS thought up after the fact. The ‘fact’ that is was thought up after, is the absence of any equatorial mid-tropospheric hot spot, the first and primary claim of a greenhouse effect. Refer to Al Gore’s movie for the claim. No model foresaw the low ice level this year because they have no year-to-year predictive abililty. Next year, if there is a new record ice extent on the high side, they will say it was predicted by the GCM’s. It will be more BS thought up after the facts are in. Same old, same old.

Climate reason says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/19/sea-ice-news-volume-3-number-13-2012-arctc-sea-ice-minimum-reached-its-all-gain-from-here/#comment-1082586
Henry says:
Thank you, Tony. I have saved that reference. We will come back to it,
in about 2 decades or so…

Jimbo says,
BA,
read this from the Warmists at Skeptical Science.
Over the Earth’s history, there are times where atmospheric CO2 is higher than current levels. Intriguingly, the planet experienced widespread regions of glaciation during some of those periods. Does this contradict the warming effect of CO2? No, for one simple reason. CO2 is not the only driver of climate…………………….Atmospheric CO2 levels have reached spectacular values in the deep past, possibly topping over 5000 ppm.
This is heresy!!!! But consistent with climate models. 😉
I did go over and read the skeptical science piece. I can’t judge the science but see nothing heretical about it (where did you get that?). Of course “CO2 is not the only driver of climate.” I would be quite skeptical if any scientists had said that CO2 *is* the only driver of climate, looking back 440 million years when the solar output was 4% lower. Can you quote scientists who actually said it was?
For my part, I hadn’t even mentioned CO2.

Jimbo says:
BA says:
September 20, 2012 at 12:24 pm
……………………………
I did go over and read the skeptical science piece. I can’t judge the science but see nothing heretical about it (where did you get that?). Of course “CO2 is not the only driver of climate.” I would be quite skeptical if any scientists had said that CO2 *is* the only driver of climate, looking back 440 million years when the solar output was 4% lower. Can you quote scientists who actually said it was?
Do you like stating the obvious? Now let’s move one step up again. Would you be skeptical of scientists who say that Co2 is now the main driver of climate?
Sometimes I state the obvious because people miss it, like you just did. I asked where you got “heretical” … no answer. I asked if you could quote scientists who actually said that CO2 is the only driver of climate, looking back 440 million years … no answer. Earlier on this thread I asked which scientist had predicted a death spiral in antarctic winter ice already, and caught a bunch of flak for asking that question … but no answer.
Yet you see no problem that at lower ppm co2 IS the main driver of climate yet at 5,0000ppm its not the main driver of climate?????? CAN YOU SEE THE PROBLEM?????
What I didn’t say, despite your emotional SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS, is anything about
“the main driver of climate.” Although I see no problem, and apparently the real scientists don’t either, in thinking that when you find temperatures different, you look for what else is different to explain that. If the sun’s output was 4% lower over tens of millions of years, then since that’s the source of just about all our heat it seems reasonable to figure it might explain why things were cold regardless of what CO2 was doing at the time. Maybe without all that CO2 it would have been much colder; I haven’t done the math — have you? On the other hand if you look at a short time period when the sun’s output has not varied so much, then something non-solar, perhaps CO2, should explain the difference.

” David L. Hagen says:
September 19, 2012 at 10:38 am
COntrast: Antarctic Ice Area Sets Another Record – NSIDC Is Silent
Posted on September 16, 2012
Day 258 ice area in Antarctica is the highest ever for the date, and the fifth highest daily value on record.
Antarctic ice area is more than one million km^2 larger than the highest value ever recorded in the Arctic. By definition, excess ice has more impact on the climate than missing ice, because it occurs at lower latitudes where the sun is less oblique. There is no sun at the North Pole now, but lots of sun shining on the excess Antarctic ice at 70S.”
First I should point our that the average altitude/elevation of the Sun at 70N latitude is approximately the same as at 70S latitude for this time of year, around 20 degrees at noon. Secondly, the reflectance of open water at low solar altitudes even at say 10 degrees is very low even for direct radiation even for calm water (see for example http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%281954%29011%3C0283%3AAOWRW%3E2.0.CO%3B2). In the case of diffuse radiation, which dominates on non clear days, the reflectance as a function of solar elevation is nearly constant. Thirdly, the area of open water in the Arctic now is approximately 4 million square kilometers below the 1979 to 2000 average. This is 4 times the 1 million square kilometers referred to above. Fourthly, the fact remains that sea ice extent around Antarctica goes to 0 during the summer months and has done so for a very long time (as opposed to the sea ice in the Arctic during the Summer/Fall). So the increase in ice extent at this time of the year has little impact on the Earth’s heat balance compared to the excess heat that is absorbed in the Summer/Fall in the Arctic with its record low ice extent (which has happened in just a few decades).
I would like to see the moderator of this site provide some editorial “balance” on the site concerning the “demise” of the Arctic sea ice, which is clearly going to have a major impact on the heat balance on this planet.

Box of Rocks says.

“Heat lost to space from open Arctic water is vastly under-rated by the Warmists.”

You have checked the literature and can confirm this assertion? I remember when people were saying climate scientsts don’t consider the effect of the sun/water vapour/land albedo changes etc etc.

Ice is primarily an insulator.

Primarily? You don’t think the albedo changes might have a significant contribution?
Open water is highly absorptive of insolation, ice is highly reflective. Heat loss from the ocean would be strongest in darkness (Arctic winter), and heat absorption strongest during the day (Arctic summer). The decline in sea ice cover is much greater during the summer months than the winter months. Therefore the loss of Arctic sea ice contributes more to warming than cooling. Furthermore, Arctic temperatures are increasing faster in winter than summer (according to all records, including the satellite record), so our naive expectation that the oceans will cool the Arctic in winter isn’t panning out.
Conclusion: Heat lost to space from open Arctic water is greatly overrated by some skeptics.

Arctic college class-room wall map showing late-summer sea ice extent for 1970 very similar to present except there was slightly more ice off east Siberian coast.

BA says:
September 20, 2012 at 4:09 pm……………..

So now the Sun is the main driver of climate? Or is it co2 at 390ppm? Or is it something else?
It’s now a simple choice so enough of the ducking and diving.

W. Falicoff says:
September 20, 2012 at 5:44 pm
“I would like to see the moderator of this site provide some editorial “balance” on the site concerning the “demise” of the Arctic sea ice, which is clearly going to have a major impact on the heat balance on this planet.”
IOW, everybody who is bringing up other reasons for melt, evidence that this has happened before, and the other end of the planet should just shut up. I am looking at the evidence which supports my assertion and that’s all you should look at. The moderators at the echo chambers that I frequent delete comments like this so we get a balanced view.
Just hammering free speech into the ground.
I’m not even going to stoop to using your last name to direct you.

Think my post on the latest MASIE extent might have gone to the spam filter – dunno why.
Anyway, it seems “all gain from here” might have ben premature. The latest figure is the lowest yet. Here are the last 18 days, 17 of them below 4 million square kms.
4027497.41
3935061.38
3863517.58
3773682.77
3686199.43
3596055.18
3697579.39
3604995.96
3548738.23
3456695.22
3487628.4
3529012.32
3452809.48
3398785.21
3520791.45
3544682.16
3438433.28
3368882.08
Usual caveat for near-real time data – the last value (or values) could be adjusted as more information comes to hand.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02186/masie_extent_sqkm.csv

Richard deSousa,
It’s not CO2 which caused the lowest minimum of the Arctic ice pack this year but the warm AMO! Once the AMO turns negative, and it will, every thing will return to “normal.”
This is a load of global-warming-denialist-rubbish.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amo_timeseries_1856-present.svg
If that were true, then the extents should have been low also in the 1950’s , but they weren’t:
http://nsidc.org/icelights/files/2010/11/mean_anomaly_1953-2010.png
PWNED!

And I am still waiting for scientific evidence proving that CO2 causes global warming. It may. But without evidence it is merely a conjecture.

Conjecture? Tyndall demonstrated that CO2 is a greenhouse gas in laboratory experiments in the mid 1850s. Countless lab experiments since then, in high school and universities, have demonstrated the radiatively absorptive properties of CO2. A great amount of work has gone into determining which frequencies of the radiation spectra are absorbed by CO2 and other gases (like water vapour, ozone, methane etc). It is an empirical fact that increasing the amount of CO2 in a volume of air in the lab will, all other things being equal, warm it.This is not conjecture, it is empirical fact. The evidence that CO2 can cause global warming is stark.
Rather, one has to concoct, or extemporise, more complex arguments to explain how CO2 can not warm the atmosphere, considering its capacity to absorb (and re-emit) radiation.

Barry says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/19/sea-ice-news-volume-3-number-13-2012-arctc-sea-ice-minimum-reached-its-all-gain-from-here/#comment-1085922
Henry says
Come on Barry! we had this argument before. D.Boehm is right. I also could not find any proof that the net effect of more CO2 is that of warming rather than cooling. The closed box experiments alone are not enough to prove that the warming effect is greater than the cooling effect.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2011/08/11/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011/
(please study the arguments made there if you want to learn something)
Either way, the (arctic) ice will all freeze back, whether you want to believe it or not,
You don’t have to worry about a thing. Just keep your pants on.
My data set shows we are on a cycle, on an a-c wave, with wavelength 88 years consisting of 44 years warming and 44 years cooling. According to my calculations, within this cycle we are now already 17 years on the cooling part. Remember: this is energy-in which is not the same as energy out. There is (quite) some lag between these two. If you count 88 years back from today we are now at the same point as 1924. There is a plus or minus 2 years that I will allow for errors. That means we could be at about the same point as reported in this newspaper from November 1922:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/16/you-ask-i-provide-november-2nd-1922-arctic-ocean-getting-warm-seals-vanish-and-icebergs-melt/
please read the actual newspaper report. Does it sound familiar?
Now please. Have patience. It will take at least 2 decades for all the ice to come back, as it did, from 1922-1945. For those of you who cannot stand the cold (like me): buy some extra warm cloths. Winter in 2013 and 2014 in the NH is going to be bad. Very bad. This is because the acceleration of cooling is still very high.

Finally, the planet itself shows the true cause and effect:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.25/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958
CO2 changes follow temperature changes.

And this is what happens during ice age transitions.
But your ‘analysis’ does not address the cause/effect of CO2 rise/temps from industrial emissions. Having essentially removed the trend in your graph, the strongest effect remaining is the ENSO fluctuation, which DOES influence CO2 on short time scales.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1985Metic..20..437K
You’ve shown that ENSO causes short-term fluctuations in CO2 levels, which has been known for more than 20 years. But ENSO fluctuates on interannual time scales and cannot be responsible for the rise in CO2 over the last century or so. Therefore temps cannot be said to be leading CO2 on that time frame.
We know for a fact that the recent 40% rise in atmospheric CO2 is almost entirely anthropogenic in origin. Your argument seems to seek to deny that.

barry says:
You’ve shown that ENSO causes short-term fluctuations in CO2 levels…
I have shown empirical scientific evidence. You have given your conjecture.
Evidence trumps.
…ENSO fluctuates on interannual time scales and cannot be responsible for the rise in CO2 over the last century or so. Therefore temps cannot be said to be leading CO2 on that time frame.
Wrong. That is exactly what I am saying. CO2 lags temperature on all time scales out to hundreds of millennia. I would have posted the CO2/Temp relationship farther back, but the WFT database only goes back to 1958. If you have a graph supporting your belief, which goes back a century or more, post it here. Scientific evidence only, please, not some globaloney high priest’s pal reviewed model based conjecture. Next:
We know for a fact that the recent 40% rise in atmospheric CO2 is almost entirely anthropogenic in origin. Your argument seems to seek to deny that.
Labeling someone a denier takes the place of thinking, and of scientific evidence.
CO2 has risen. So what? It is clearly not having the effect that you believe it should have. You are in the position of arguing with reality. Not credible. When there is a divergence between models and reality, the planet is right, not the models. I am simply agreeing with Planet Earth, while you are disagreeing.

barry,
I provided empirical evidence based on real data. All you provided was your evidence-free conjecture, which is contradicted by Planet Earth.
I agree that the rise in CO2 is due to fossil fuel combustion. So what? There hasn’t been any global warming for at least fifteen years. Thus, your belief system is being falsified by the planet.
And the null hypothesis has never been falsified… unlike your conjecture.

barry,
You can keep disputing the empirical evidence provided by Planet Earth. But your misplaced belief in catastrophic AGW is not supported by any scientific evidence.
Believe in empirical facts, barry. Not in baseless conjectures. Believe in the null hypothesis. If you do, you won’t go wrong.

I am however confident that we are near a lowest point on arctic ice and that from next year and the following two decades ice in the arctic will grow back.

Hello Henry,
I well remember here the chorus of “recovery” that accompanied the 2008 minimum after the record-breaking 2007 minimum, and which crescendoed in 2009 when the minimum was even greater than 2008. Back then, a lot of people here were convinced we’d turned the corner.
I don’t think I’ve seen one person acknowledge their hastiness now that the previous record has been smashed, and the downward trend has not only continued each year, but steepened with each year.
So here you are making a prediction. You expect recovery to begin “from next year.”
What would it take in terms of the coming years’ sea ice extent to make you rethink your position? Would a new record minimum be enough? If not, what? Is there anything I could hold you to?

Henry@barry
I have come a long way from absolutely believing Al Gore’s “an Inconvenient truth” to where I am now, realizing that very few people have identified the precise cycles of warming and cooling, and what (chemical) reactions in the upper atmosphere drives them.
Suffice to say that I think man has little or no influence on climate. Heat drives up CO2, not man.
Contrary to most scientists in this field I looked at maxima as the variable rather than average temps.
According to my data set, maxima started dropping in 1995. From the curve of dropping maxima, (cooling), I learned that it is an ac-wave and the best sine wave I could get for it is for a wavelength of 88 years, consisting of 44 years warming and 44 years warming. That means “warming” started in 1951, just about the same time as when man (or is that Mann) learned to measure CO2 in Hawaii.
However, those studying SST’s seem to believe in a 60 years cycle. 16 + 1995 =2011. So I would have expected the minimum of (arctic) ice at 2011. It is now 2012. Let me give myself a 2 years error margin. That means I think ice (in the arctic) could still drop a bit further until 2013. After that, ice will come back, until at least 1995+44=2039
if it does not work out that way, plus or minus 1 year, you can call me a bad statistician. OK?

if it does not work out that way, plus or minus 1 year, you can call me a bad statistician. OK?

You mean you will never change your opinion, you will reckon in any event that you got the numbers wrong? No possibility of falsification, then?
If there is another record minimum after 2014, I will suggest to you that you are not a bad statistician, but that your premises need revisiting. How’s that?

Sorry Barry
small mistake here
I learned that it is an ac-wave and the best sine wave I could get for it is for a wavelength of 88 years, consisting of 44 years warming and 44 years warming.
That should read
I learned that it is an ac-wave and the best sine wave I could get for it is for a wavelength of 88 years, consisting of 44 years warming and 44 years cooling.

barry says
You mean you will never change your opinion, you will reckon in any event that you got the numbers wrong? No possibility of falsification, then?
Henry says
I measure (or others did for me), compile the results\ acc. to relevant sampling technigues, and the end result, provided it gives me a near to 100% correlation, is what makes me draw my conclusions….
If you understand stats you would know that it is an exact science, based on probability theory.

Francois?, ……….. lol.

I have seen a number of replies in the past that criticize AGW believers, or alarmists as they are referred to here, for not being willing to consider evidence that contravenes AGW. Yet I see the exact same behavior here. The Arctic ice extent dropped to half it’s 1979-2000 average, and was 900,000 km2 below the figure for 2011. Yet based on the reader comments here, it’s not particularly noteworthy, and in no way has caused any questioning of the position held by AGW skeptics.

A number of reasons for that Chris.
Appears to have varied considerably over the past – what is so magical about the 1979-2000 average.
The decline is at least partially due to storm activity, combined with the fact that the measurement of ice technique says that anything below 15% is classed as no ice. So ice more dispersed rather than melted. Expect a rapid refreeze.
Air temperatures over Arctic not remarkable this year so ice “disappearance” not due directly to global warming.
Carbon particles affect albedo and can speed surface melt – anthropogenic melting but not global warming. Surface melt can also contribute to reduced ice extent reporting
Do you have any explanation as to why the ice extent has declined so rapidly in the last month or so despite unremarkable temperature conditions, especially given that global warming has not increased catastrophically lately (in fact never).

Peter,
As I understand it, satellite data on the Arctic extent became available in 1979, it is for that reason that comparisons of that period are used. If you have evidence that the ice extent was smaller than what we are seeing this year in years prior to 1979, let me know the source and I’ll look at it. I agree that the severe storm this year caused increased ice loss – but that is in turn partially due to the almost complete disappearance of multi year ice due to prior warming! One article I read said the ratio used to be 80/20 multi year/new, and now it is almost the reversal of that. Thin ice will of course be far more susceptible to breaking up in a storm than thick ice.
You say: Air temperatures over Arctic not remarkable this year so ice “disappearance” not due directly to global warming. What’s your source for this point? Here is what NOAA says in their Arctic Report Card: “In 2011, annual near-surface air temperatures over much of the ocean were approximately +1.5 °C greater than the 1981-2010 baseline period and land temperatures were also above their baseline values. This continued a decade-long warm-bias of the Arctic relative to mid-latitudes.” In another section of the web site, they graph the increase in the Arctic surface air temperature (SAT) since 1900 – it has gone up by about 1.5C. See http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/temperature_clouds.html for the graph.
So to answer your last question, this year’s substantially increased melt is a combination of continuing increase in the Arctic SAT (leading to less and less multiyear ice) exacerbated by a severe storm, which broke up already weakened ice.
Regarding carbon particles and albedo, please explain why carbon particles would cause increases in yearly ice loss. At the outer edges of the ice where it melts each year, the ice reforms, so there will not be carbon buildup on the surface. In the inner regions where multiyear ice occurs, there is snowfall each winter which will cover last year’s carbon, rendering it irrelevant to albedo effects for the following summer.

HenryP,
I’ve already read this article. I didn’t see any mention of the size of the Arctic extent then, so how do you know that it was less than what we are experiencing now? There may have been a warming trend then, perhaps due to the Gulf Stream taking a northward detour for several years, but that is far different than a steady decline over a 30 year period. Here is a paper (not a newspaper, but scientific publication) that states that today’s warming is greater than anything we have seen in the last 1450 years: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7374/full/nature10581.html
Also, I see postings over and over again that imply that since the earth has had warm periods in the past, that somehow negates AGW. Specifically why is that so? That’s like saying that because we’ve had lightning caused forest fires in the past, that man cannot cause forest fires. It makes absolutely no sense. Climate scientists do not say that only man can cause global warming, what they say is that after you subtract out the known natural effects on climate (orbital changes, solar cycles, volcanoes, the Gulf Stream current, etc) it is clear that there is an increase in temperature happening relating to CO2.

Henry, the article I posted for you explains: “Here we use a network of high-resolution terrestrial proxies from the circum-Arctic region to reconstruct past extents of summer sea ice, and show that—although extensive uncertainties remain, especially before the sixteenth century—both the duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years.”
And in any case, once again, I’m not sure how that is relevant. To me the proper question is: Is the earth’s warming going to cause more adverse impacts than positive? If the answer is yes, we should take action.

Chris says
Here we use a network of high-resolution terrestrial proxies from the circum-Arctic region to reconstruct past extents of summer sea ice,
Henry asks
what proxies? Other than anecdotal, what do we have, in arctic ice extent, for the past? I would like to know? (but I m not going to pay for that BS – you pay for it and then you tell me)
A few of my (Dutch) ancestors like Willem Barentz were convinced that a northern passage must have existed in the past, (i.e. before they lived, @ ca. 1500 AD) , hence they lost their live(s) trying to find it.
A northern passage would be great for the oil and gas industry up there, as well as for shipping things faster from certain places around the globe. But based on my calculations it is not going to happen. I would not bet a cent on that. I analysed the results from 47 weather stations balanced by latitude and 70/30 on sea/ inland (I figured longitude is not important). Unlike your so-called climate scientists who are all looking at means, I decided to look at maxima (as well).
Here are my end results on that, i.e. the change in degrees C or K per annum:
data are: 0.036 from 1974 (38 yrs), 0.029 from 1980 (32 yrs), 0.014 from 1990 (22 years) and -0.016 from 2000 (12 years)
Now just take the trouble to plot these results of the drop of maxima against time (= deceleration of warming) and tell me what you get?
If you have the scientific back round to figure out what these results mean you will eventually come to know:
Global warming and global cooling is on a natural cycle, of ca. 88 years, (Gleissberg?), of which 44 years is warming and 44 years is cooling, looking at energy-in. (remember: that is not the same as energy out)
I think there are only a few people who figured out what mechanisms in the upper atmospheres drive it.
Either way, you do not have to worry about it anymore, nor do you have to worry about driving a car or using a bit more electricity, because (you think) it will change the weather, because that just ain’t so.

HenryP,
With all respect, saying been there, done that does not pass muster as a scientific review and disproving of peer reviewed research. If you wish to write a paper and submit it for peer review, the please do so and post a link. You refer to an 88 year cycle, on another WUWT article a reader says there is a 35 year cycle, and yet another says a 5 year cycle. What all 3 conjectures have in common is no published research to back up their hypothesis. That’s the first step to gaining broader acceptance of your theories.

@chris:
I’ve been reading the newer sea ice thread and missed your comment to me.
First, that link is not sufficient testable, falsifiable evidence. Cloud cover is changing, which skews the data points. Both specific and relative humidity are decreasing, which would tend to provide more IR transparency. But more importantly, I can show beyond any doubt that rising CO2 has no measurable effect on global temperature, and why the “carbon” scare is a false alarm:
We will start with a very long time period; about three and a half centuries. Let’s look at the natural global warming trend:
http://i35.tinypic.com/2db1d89.jpg
As we see, the long term trend is the same, whether CO2 is low or high. That is confirmed in this Wood For Trees chart. The naturally rising global temperature trend since the LIA has remained within its long term parameters. There is no acceleration in global warming; it is on the same trend line that it was on before the start of the industrial revolution, thus falsifying the CO2=CAGW conjecture.
The fact that CO2 has no measurable effect on global temperature is confirmed here. Notice that the two warming episodes — again, one when CO2 was low, and the other when CO2 was high — show conclusively that any effect from CO2 is so minuscule that it is not even measurable, since the rising temperature trends are exactly the same.
Empirical measurements also show conclusively that CO2 follows temperature on all time scales, from decades to hundreds of millennia.
That proves that the alarmist crowd has cause and effect reversed. Temperature changes cause CO2 changes; not vice-versa. There is no empirical, testable scientific evidence showing that rising CO2 causes rising temperatures (if you disagree, post a chart showing that changes in CO2 precede temperature changes). The false belief that CO2 leads temperature is based on an entirely coincidental, short-term correlation, which is now breaking down. There has been no global warming for 15 years, while CO2 has risen steadily. (I should point out that CO2 may cause an insignificant temperature rise; that is not ruled out by the logic of this argument. But since the effect is too minuscule to measure, it can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes).
Finally, the planet is starved of harmless, beneficial CO2. More is better. With added CO2 the biosphere will thrive, and there will be no global harm or damage. The “carbon” scare is a false alarm.
Using verifiable scientific facts based on empirical evidence, it is demonstrated here that CO2 has no measurable effect on temperature. None. The rising temperature trend since the LIA remains the same, whether CO2 is low or high. There are no testable measurements showing otherwise. Therefore, CO2 does not have the claimed effect.
The reason that the alarmist crowd cannot get anything right is because they are fixated on the false and disproven presumption that measurable temperature change is driven by CO2 — when, in fact, exactly the opposite is true.