The headline is a quote by Dr. Judith Curry from a David Rose article in the Sunday Mail: Stunning satellite images show summer ice cap is thicker and covers 1.7million square kilometres MORE than 2 years ago…despite Al Gore’s prediction it would be ICE-FREE by now.
![1409435267461_Image_galleryImage_polar1_JPG[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/1409435267461_image_galleryimage_polar1_jpg1.jpg?quality=83)
The speech by former US Vice-President Al Gore was apocalyptic. ‘The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,’ he said. ‘It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.’
Those comments came in 2007 as Mr Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning on climate change.
But seven years after his warning, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, far from vanishing, the Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in succession – with a surge, depending on how you measure it, of between 43 and 63 per cent since 2012.
To put it another way, an area the size of Alaska, America’s biggest state, was open water two years ago, but is again now covered by ice.
The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres.
This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.
Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometres.
The satellite images published here are taken from a further authoritative source, the University of Illinois’s Cryosphere project.
They show that as well as becoming more extensive, the ice has grown more concentrated, with the purple areas – denoting regions where the ice pack is most dense – increasing markedly.
Crucially, the ice is also thicker, and therefore more resilient to future melting. Professor Andrew Shepherd, of Leeds University, an expert in climate satellite monitoring, said yesterday: ‘It is clear from the measurements we have collected that the Arctic sea ice has experienced a significant recovery in thickness over the past year.
Indeed, and the way things are going, it looks like WUWT (and Wang) will be closer to the final September Average for Sea Ice than any of the other forecast players in the ARCUS Sea Ice prediction Network:
Click to magnify the image
Figure 1: Distribution of individual Pan-Arctic Outlook values (August Report) for September 2014 sea ice extent. Labels on the bar graph are rounded to the tenths for readability. Refer to the Individual Outlooks at the bottom of this report for the full details of individual submissions.
NSIDC shows sea ice within the +/- 2 standard deviations range, far above the year 2012:
![N_stddev_timeseries[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/n_stddev_timeseries1.png?quality=75)
The WUWT Sea Ice Page has complete details and all sorts of plots and images.
There you go, Al.
Now you know what an inconvenient truth really looks like.
Well said, well said indeed!
These guys just ignore past wrong predictions and keep on going.
The logical spin on this is that Antroproghenic Global Warming is destroying our oceans and fisheries by covering it with Ice?
So far, this simply seems to be a reversion to the mean from 1981. This should not be surprising.
When will Al be hauled before a court to explain making a public mischief? This guy needs daily hounding in the same way he accosted the public with his rants. At the very least, if he has any decency at all, he could hand back his ludicrous “Peace Prize” and start profusely apologising. I won’t be holding my breath, though; he doesn’t show any sign of being a gentleman.
Don’t hold your breath.It does not matter how wrong they are!They’ll turn around and say that with all the reg’s that were put in place & volcanoes going on that’s why the earth is now cooling. Better get your jacket & mann up!Facts mean nothing to liars.
Al did a bit of genetic engineering, cross-breeding politics with sales, birthing a freightening hybrid. In the end, Al made millions off of this clever marketing/Political hybrid.
At any rate, he sees the end of this cash cow, for him anyways, and is re-aligning his marketing and investment strategies. The snake oil salesman has to change his product when he has no new towns to plunder.
There is WAY too much money to lose in admitting what you knew to be a lie the entire time you told it.
Hello again Anything! We’ll have to stop meeting like this, or people will start to talk.
In actual fact this is what an inconvenient truth really looks like. There you go:
http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2014/09/david-roses-apocalyptic-vision-of-al-gores-nobel-lecture/
This is far more inconvenient Jim:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/ice-free-arctic-forecasts/
That seems to be largely about Wieslaw Maslowski, in which case I strongly suggest you read (and listen to) this as well:
http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2013/09/shock-news-why-isnt-the-arctic-ice-free/
Hello there Jim, or would prefer to be called Snow White?
Surely CAGW worriers must be very relieved that the Arctic ice cap is recovering. What …… they’re NOT and are mad as hell!
Bingo!
Today the LA times had an article on arctic sea ice and the fact that it was expanding sooner and greater than usual. Even though in the article sub headline they said “scientists aren’t sure how” it went on to blame it on AGW. More theories about increased winds as a result of warming being the culprit. What will it take for people to understand the scam?
The real scam is caused by Progressive Enlightenment Liberalism, I mean Progressive Socialism Policy Based Propaganda.
Yes indeed , what will it take. Even after two of the coolest northern summers on record. However the biggest change is likely ocean currents.
Goodness, Arctic ice recovering rapidly, Antarctic hitting a new record every other year. Much more of this global warming and we’ll be in an ice age.
I know. Makes me think of that old “Oh Susanna” song.
“It rain’d all night de day I left, de wedder it was dry;
The sun so hot I froze to def—Al gore,please don’t cry
(apologies to Steven Foster)
They’ll just dust off their early 1970’s warnings of the coming ice age, and win a couple more Nobel prizes.
I fully expect to see that we caused the warming that upset the balance and now we are causing a new ice age. After all they can use ego.history as a model….cold follows heat in the record . It’s mans turn to once again have caused it. I don’t understand the “self loathers”
The ice is not melting because, as you know, the heat that would be melting it has gone to the deep ocean where we can’t measure it.
Tricksey that heat, idn’t it?
LOL
What’s even more amusing is that there may be a grain of truth in that. Negative PDO/ENSO.
Well, since global warming is allegedly responsible for the Antarctic sea ice continual increase over the last 40 years (har, har), it is only logical that since the Arctic sea ice is now increasing, global warming is responsible for that too … and it was responsible for its decrease in the last few decades too … don’t ask, don’t think, just put your mind into neutral and don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
17 years and 11 months.
OH the pain.
That last front through Florida speaks volumes for August.
That doesn’t happen till October.
Just sayin, Brurr is in many futures in the CONUS.
Don’t get too hooked on RSS. But the Big Four average as flat as a pancake from 2001.
Ha! Ha! David Appel is back.
Peter, it seems that David and Al are birds of a feather, then? Perhaps Al will be able to say David reported irresponsibly seven years from now?
Just what is your version of the trend?
It sure looks like Arctic ice is well within two deviations and rapidly closing in on one standard deviation. Older thicker ice is also on the increase.
Are there some ice sheets you believe are missing?
Let’s be real. This is good news. But it remains a fact that Arctic ice is still below the 1980 – 2010 average and even moreso below the that start-point.
One must account for soot, however, and China’s economic expansion after 2000 saw a dropoff in Arctic ice. But that is only tangentially related to CO2, and China is beginning the inevitable process of affixing scrubbers. Won’t do thing one about CO2, but it could trigger a large ice recovery in and of itself.
Let’s see….. CAGW got: polar ice projections wrong, global temp projections wrong, ocean “acidification” wrong, water vapor projections wrong, severe weather projections wrong, sea level rise projections wrong, world crop projections wrong, ocean temp projections wrong, global precipitation projections wrong and they openly admit they can’t predict cloud cover and their beloved Hockey Stick is busted,
And yet political hacks and CAGW grant swindlers still expect us to take this joke seriously….
You are very succinct, Samurai.
Tell us what you really, really think Samurai. Just for the record I agree with everything you wrote. What climate science needs is a real samurai to slash through their lies. Wouldn’t hurt if he slashed a few people too.
According to the progressive Enlightenment liberalism and their “The Plan” this is just the things they payed for. Political based propaganda that can create a public feeling that we are close to the end of history.
You mean a sort of mental Cloward-Pivon point of fear, depression and despair where everyone gives up due to exhaustion?
In chad we trust.
The increase in ice seems to follow the antics of the AMO and PDO. The AMO, which is in a long-term “warm” phase for another 5-10 years, pulled off a short-term “cold” spike last spring, and even though that spike is now over you can still see the build-up of ice on the east coast of Svalbard. It is above-normal and is more than has been seen in recent tears. It gives us a clear idea of what we can expect when the AMO goes into its cold phase for keeps. What strikes me is how swiftly the arctic responds.
Meanwhile the PDO, which has entered a long term “cold” phase, has pulled off a short-term “warm” spike.
Right on cue the sea-ice, which had been increasing in the Bering Straits, began decreasing. (Interestingly Joseph D’Aleo over at Weatherbell showed a similar, brief, “warm” spike during the last cold PDO, in the late 1970’s) As soon as the PDO kicks back to its “cold” phase, we can expect to see the ice again build up in the Bering Straits.
I think it was that Bering Strait build-up that allowed the ice to get thicker north of Alaska and arctic Canada. When the PDO gets cold then the Pacific can’t flow north and take such large bites out of the ice north of Bering Strait.
In any case, the ice responds quite swiftly to the PDO and AMO, and seemingly could care less about CO2. The “Death Spiral” has been debunked. All you need to do is use your eyes and watch, and you see lots of evidence for cycles based on the oceans cycles, and very little proof that all the worry about “albedo” has much basis in fact.
One interesting thing to watch over the past year has been a cross-polar transport of lots of ice from the Laptev Sea in central Siberia to the Canadian Side. This built huge pressure ridges on the coast of the Canadian Archipelago, but left the Laptev Sea with very thin ice that swiftly melted last spring. There is now a sort of notch of open water north of the Laptev Sea towards the Pole, which creates a sea-ice deficit, which makes it all the more amazing that ice extents over-all are higher.
I wouldn’t have noticed that detail about the Laptev Sea if I had trusted the media to do truly investigative reporting. They don’t. They simply take the word of guys like Mark Serreze as being gospel, and when he says there is a “Death Spiral,” they behave like parrots. Things look very different if you trust your own lying eyes, and take advantage of the very hard work done by more honest arctic researchers, and the opportunity they give us with polar cameras, satellite views, and other fascinating information.
Just because most of us are laymen is no reason we can’t make a hobby of watching the arctic freeze up and then thaw. I think it is a worthwhile hobby. Not only does it make you smarter than most “investigative reporters,” but watching ice melt in a landscape or turquoise and silver lowers your blood pressure, after guys like Mark Serreze have made it be too high.
My notebook of arctic observations can be found at http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/arctic-sea-ice-melt-the-thaws-end/
That’s a very interesting and informative site you have there, Caleb. Thanks.
Well deserving of a wider audience.
Thanks. Hipefully readers have as much fun as I do writing.
I mean “hopefully.”
Ice is not the only thing responding to the AMO Take a gander at N.H. temperatures…
Great graph! What is also interesting is to look up the pre-1979 Danish Ice-extent records, (which Alarmists try to discredit,) and to see how swiftly the sea-ice responds to even the briefest blips and spikes in the AMO.
The AMO isn’t as regular as clockwork, and holds mysteries all its own.
I wonder if there is any history behind that up-spike around 1875. It is before Krakatoa. I’ll bet if someone did some digging they could find some interesting weather occurred at that time.
“It is above-normal and is more than has been seen in recent tears.”
Brilliant slip of the finger on that last word,I just imagined “of” at the end and a long list of names.
LOL. I was insomnia-writing before dawn, and I myself am not too brilliant at that time.
ARCticNADO! The Spiral of Death. With POLARbearVORTEX!
more bad fiction.
You call freezing the right direction?! Ice ages have been worse for humanity than climate optima. There’s nothing wrong with having trees in the Arctic region, where they used to grow.
Not to mention the mass extinctions when the Millies go south. And the mass speciation when the interglacials click in.
Right on Katherine.
What is this obsession with cold being good.
Are we so desperate for man made global warming to be disproved we are advocating cold weather.
Warm is good cold is bad.
However I must agree getting colder which it will the socialists will be proven wrong.
Hope it is not to late.
Obama is pushing the final tax on humanity.
Our air.
How does that compare to the old trick of starting the Arctic ice extents record at a cherry picked 1979. anybody who has perused AR1 knows that the satellite record began in 1973 and Arctic ice extent rose substantially to a peak in 1979 before the allegedly precipitous and apocalyptic decrease to modern extents. Trend limes depend on starting points, don’t you know?
The fundermental “problem” here appears to be the use of “trend lines” on things which are obviously cyclic. Where fourier analysis may make a lot more sense.
I’m not certain a Fourier analysis would tell us much about climate trends over such a short record for arctic ice extrent.
Robert, I’m with you.
I have asked many times for someone to explain why the northern ice cap disappearing in its entirety would be a bad thing. No one has even attempted to answer the question.
We do know the Arctic ice cap had to be smaller during the era in which there were Viking settlements in Greenland. We now have archaeological evidence showing farms with cows, wheat, barley, etc. on the western coast of Greenland. For starters http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/ers_facpub/275/?utm_source=digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu%2Fers_facpub%2F275&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages. See also http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&q=viking+settlements+greenland&hl=en&as_sdt=1,6.
At the same time the Norsemen were thriving at a time the ice pack was smaller, all of the arctic animals obviously survived this period of warmth. This includes all the seals, polar bears, arctic fox, etc.
If the Arctic ice cap were to disappear, even year round, what would be the problem?
I can see it opening up shipping short cuts, oil and gas exploration, movements of fishes to the north, etc. Indirectly, warmer climate would expand wheat belt to the north.
It’s win win for everyone.
Jack
Arctic sea ice is acting just like natural cycles would predict!!!
http://www.adn.com/article/20140802/luxury-cruise-line-plans-northwest-passage-voyage
ya gotta give us some narrative, ya can’t just be throwing links up.
Some notes from that link-
“Cost for the trip ranges from $22,755 to $120,000.”
“Crystal Serenity’s passenger capacity is 1,070 + 655 crew. The 68,000-ton ship has 13 decks, multiple pools, two tennis courts, a sushi bar, movie theater, shopping area and concert stage, among numerous other amenities.”
“An escort vessel will be traveling with the cruise ship, equipped with a helicopter”
What’s the ‘carbon footprint’ of that lot ???
“This ship has the ability to treat waste water a bit. However, it goes over the side and is perfectly legal outside of the 3 mile limit. Solid waste is legal beyond the 12 mile limit.”
How ‘green is that’ ???
Since a luxury cruise ship is essentially a hotel on a raft what could possibly go wrong. With its large superstructure relative to the hull size a cruise ship is inherently unstable. The high superstructure also provides a large wind sail. The misbegotten things would roll violently except for the stabilizers. If one of those was knocked out, say by a collision with ice, we could have another Titanic disaster.
“another Titanic disaster”
Maybe that’s what it will take to reverse the CAGW train….although they would probably spin it as ‘more proof of climate disaster’.
Looks like a recovery because it is a recovery. If it continues then it will be back to trend or even above trend. Ten more years of global cooling should cover that pretty well.
Yes, in the seven years since 2007 only one year was below that year.
Al is but a straw man for Obama who is preparing to act on climate change as if he had the vaguest of clues as to what was really happening. In all he is trying to act in concert with the UN and other countries to continue the climate hoax. Tax monies are at stake in the perpetration of this misuse of government power.
“…The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, far from vanishing, the Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in succession…”
Too bad. A reliable summer northwest passage could be quite useful. Also lots of oil & gas supposedly recoverable from the Arctic Ocean, if not for that danged ice. 🙁
Reblogged this on Norah4you's Weblog and commented:
Read ingress: The headline is a quote by Dr. Judith Curry from a David Rose article in the Sunday Mail: Stunning satellite images show summer ice cap is thicker and covers 1.7million square kilometres MORE than 2 years ago…despite Al Gore’s prediction it would be ICE-FREE by now.
Good Night CO2-believer. Facts from emperic observation always wins over computer models. Believe me, I have 44 years experience writing Systemprogram for computers….. as we said in the old days nothing comes out better than the input allow….. 🙂
🙂
It’s progressive enlightenment liberalism that is behind it with their Plan. One of the things they aim for is that the public to belive that current state of the World means the “end of history”. I am not so shure of that happening if we just adapt to what might come. However letting progressive Enlightenment liberalism control the World would be?
1/4″ of ice in a pond moves rocks.
It makes me wonder what those 6 foot thick slabs of ice in the Arctic are capable of when put in motion.
It seems that the stories told come from the survivors, oddly enough.
“It makes me wonder what those 6 foot thick slabs of ice in the Arctic are capable of when put in motion.”
Putting in motion lips mouthing baseless claims about global warming causing an increase in Arctic Sea Ice cover.