Arctic ice – a historical viewpoint

The research Griff cites is an example of confirmation bias research.
e.g. The ‘research’ cites using ships logs, oddly only some of the US Navy’s ships are listed.
There are two kinds of reports listed under each ship.
• A) One si a summary report regarding the ship’s assignments and duties. There are some brief descriptions of conditions, but the reports mostly focus on successful operations, not sea conditions.
• B) One is a series of summary ship operations, which might state regions sailed and conditions found relative to the ship’s purpose.
• • a) e.g. A ship delivering supplies around Alaska, simply states delivering supplies. no mention of ice.
• • b) e.g. A ship sent to reconnoiter while searching for signs of the Franklin expedition, actually reports rough ice conditions as passable, not passable, iced in, blocked.
• • c) e.g. A ship actually sent to perform Arctic ice surveys, reports performing the ice surveys and minor hiccups interrupting their surveys
None of the ships’ logs are the daily record of ship actions, problems, solutions, rewards, punishment.
• for the alleged research Griff cites, there are no daily ships logs entered, read, reviewed or considered.
Of special note: where the ship’s summary logs report sea and sea ice surveys, those explicit surveys are not identified nor reviewed.
The research also uses some Danish information, including historic ice charts.
• Charts that are clearly labeled, abbreviated, over the vast majority of the Arctic region, “Ice conditions unknown”.
Meaning, unknown ice conditions are assumed and captured as solid ice cover.
Then there is that lovely little NOAA/MetO/BOM trick of infilling empty spaces with “long term averages”.
I’ve always loved how those alleged record keepers fill in vacant data spaces with assumed long term averages; which they then use for smudging that average over 1200 sq. km…
As is typical of most Griff’s ‘research’ claims; they’ll be discussed for years as how science was misused, right along with Piltdown man, Lysenkoism, etc..
Confirmation bias hooey!
It is amazing how loose standards, greedy liberal arts and pseudoscience graduates, gobs of taxpayer cash coupled with totalitarian political goals can produce such shallow twisted waste of time.
Most professional activities I have been involved in, all of the personnel involved generally have some pride and ambition. Once their mistakes or laziness results are pointed out, they take steps to produce reasonably good work.
A boss of mine had a number of insightful sayings, which I assumed he picked up from his previous superiors. One of his sayings is particularly apt in climate foolishness land.
“People do what you inspect, not what you expect”.
Climate foolishness teams tend to completely ignore all but the most egregious errors. Their research stays in the sound bite spectrums of major media, where all that matters is how their conclusions come across in twitterdumb sentences.

Gareth:

“How long will it remain valid if the Arctic plays awkward and continues to shrink at a steadily decreasing rate? The trend is obviously down, and I see no indication of the fabled rebound.”

The trend stopped going down in 2006. Since then, the trend is bottom bouncing yet edging positive.
Perhaps you can explain, Gareth, your lack of perception or understanding, or perhaps a devoted religious belief.
The alarmists have been shrieking about complete ice cap loss, (both poles), for a couple of decades.
From the beginning, alarmists’ have ignored inconvenient historical observations and focused only on the decline.
Facts which you would already be aware of if you paid any attention to comments above.
Nope, Gareth comes in dropping typical alarmist floaters while simultaneously discounting actual observations and reality
Which leaves us scientific method types well convinced that Gareth and his fair weather trolls, plan to deny Arctic ice growth, forever if necessary.
Maybe Gareth will sign up for next year’s polar expeditions?

“Richard Barraclough September 23, 2016 at 11:55 am
Not this year. The Antarctic sea ice is more than 2 million sq km below the 2014 value, and at new low for the date”

New Low!!
Horrors!
Will the ignominy never end!?
Y’all are mighty amusing.
Antarctica is still well within 2 standard deviations.
It has been suggested multiple times, especially after observing similar cycles on other planets and planetoids; that polar melt freeze cycles might be in opposite cycles.
Imagine that, Antarctica 9/25/2016:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_bm_extent_hires.png
Antarctica extent 9/24/2016:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
And everything is still within normal! Even very short cycle normal.

I would suggest digging out the data from 1966 from the Nimbus AVCS data..

Yeah right. I guess you didn’t noticed that this is a non-detrended AMO graph. Do you see the straight dashed trend-line?

“AMO is a de-trended index.”

Just because you say so doesn’t make it so.
Trenberth, K. E., & Shea, D. J. (2006). Atlantic hurricanes and natural variability in 2005. Geophysical Research Letters, 33(12).
“Indices of the AMO have traditionally been based on the average SST anomaly for the North Atlantic north of the equator [Enfield et al., 2001] (Figure 1), where the SST (from HADISST [Rayner et al., 2003]) northern limit was kept at 60°N to avoid problems with sea ice changes. We use a 70-year (1901–70) base period as it covers roughly one full cycle of the AMO. The AMO is given by smoothing from a 10-year running mean [Goldenberg et al., 2001; Enfield et al., 2001] or similar low-pass filter (Figure 1). In most cases the variability has been highlighted by detrending the data [Enfield et al., 2001; McCabe et al., 2004; Sutton and Hodson, 2005; Knight et al., 2005], and a linear trend is provided in Figure 1 for reference. The index reveals a warm period from about 1930 to 1970, while cooler regimes occurred from 1902 to 1925 and 1970 to 1994. Since 1995 the AMO index has been positive and increasing.
Figure 1. Annual SST anomalies averaged over the North Atlantic (0 to 60°N, 0 to 80°W) for 1870 – 2005, relative to 1901 to 1970 (°C). The heavy line with fill depicts the AMO and is from a low-pass symmetric filter with 13 total weights and a half-power point at 16 year periods, with the end points reflected. The linear trend fit is also shown (dashed).
It is the right thing to compare to, and it shows a remarkable coincidence. So yes, you were wrong in both of your comments.