There has been a great deal of speculation about the possibility that the arctic sea ice could, at the worst case, melt entirely, or more realistic, possibly break the record sea ice melt set last year.
Judge for yourself. This photo with 1 kilometer/pixel resolution was taken yesterday July 12th at 17:05 UTC:
Click for full size image – link to original source image is here
Note that the image above has been rotated, and the annotation for date/time added to make it easier to present here. There is some cloud cover, but if you look carefully, you can determine what is cloud cover and what is sea ice.
Here is the area covered by the AQUA/MODIS satellite on this photo:
The North Pole is visible in the satellite image, and I’ve marked it on the image with a “N” and crosshair.
Now compare to a similar photo from ten days ago:
Image rotated- click for source image.
I’d say we have a ways to go yet before the sea ice melts completely.
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Thanks for this. I had a very disturbing conversation with a niece last week. She is in high school and the indoctrination she is getting in the classroom is beyond belief. She was incredulous when I disputed her statement that “all the ice is melting.”
When I stated some facts and pointed to some references like this one she asked with astonishment; “But the teachers wouldn’t teach us something that is just wrong?” I could not answer that.
The postscript from her amused mother, my sister, was pragmatic; “Uncle Dean might be right but you can’t answer that way in school, or you won’t pass your exams.”
I do have experience interpreting photos from space. That’s a whole lotta ice up there. If I were going to do a detailed study I would want better imagery, as well as IR and SAR. But going just from visible I would say that the dream of an open northwest passage is not quite ready yet.
I will be flying over this area in 30 days, I will try to get some good imagery.
A simple but honest question. Have the gloom and doomer greenies every gotten an apocalyptic prediction right.
I think you just answered your own question. If they had, there would have been an apocalypse and you wouldn’t need to ask the question in the first place.
shouldn’t sea-ice be a traling other climate parameters by a few years ?
2008 started with what was left from previous years and we have large 1 year ice areas.
even if ocean temperatures continue to decrease, we may see less ice left just for the still thinner ice.
it may take a few more cooler years or wind and ocean current conditons that do not support melting like last year to reverse the trend.
Side Note: Bob Tisdale has some interesting grahps today under the lead-line: The Correlation Between Temperature and Precipitation: Can’t Find One
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/
Dean McAskil notes: “Uncle Dean might be right but you can’t answer that way in school, or you won’t pass your exams.”
I find that quite shocking.
Wyatt,
Not very up to date. For those betting we’re gonna reach last year’s lows, you’d better be hoping for a mjor arctic heat wave. Similar to Leon’s link:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Still it’s gotten and has been quite warm in Siberia: http://www.findlocalweather.com/weather_maps/temperature_north_asia.html
The big race to be Energy Czar
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11710.html
Personally I think Gore will bump out Arnold.
Wyatt A: needs to be updated to mid-July 08. Will look very different.
(1 million Km2 plus over 2007)
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
“Have the doom and gloom greenies ever gotten a prediction right? The problem is the idiots there have abandoned science and this shows up worst over AGW – I’ve failed to wake up Transition Towns so far; Greenpeace ex-campaigner-scientist Peter Taylor is now not welcome because of his non-AGW status; etc. But this does NOT mean that all their stuff is wrong. We do have a population issue; elephants, tigers, and other animals – and plants too – have been going extinct or close to extinction. But not, of course, polar bears.
“A pic worth 1000 words” – recently I found a graph of the NP sea ice cover annual fluctuation over about the last 25 years and it simply goes up, down, up, down, from around 16K sq km to 24K sq km, while annual variation is peanuts in comparison. But what really matters longterm is not ABSOLUTE amounts but ANOMALIES IN TREND when you’ve allowed for ocean and wind – this surely shows the solar/GCR correlation fastest. Can anyone supply that URL here?
I’m not a formally-trained scientist but six months ago Al Gore woke me up; three months ago I did a U-turn in the science. I know this has happened to many others like me and I can thank Al for getting me concerned enough to study the science, even if I was rather noisy about it from the other direction first …….. h’m!
As I mentioned a week or so ago, chances are only 8% that last year’s lows will be reached – that according to one German institute. (IN ENGLISH):
http://www.awi.de/de/forschung/fachbereiche/klimawissenschaften/mitteilungen/arctic_sea_ice_in_summer_2008_an_outlook/
Off topic: The HadCRUt anomaly for June is 0.314. There also a few minor changes to recent months. http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/monthly
The average for the first six months of this year is 0.247, the moving yearly average 0.295. The last 135 months of HadCRUt data in a spreadsheet give very slight downward slope, so according to ordinary least squares there is no warming trend on HadCRUt anomalies since April 1997.
Roger,
That’s just how I have to advise my son (who is sceptical all by himself ie. without any prompting from me).
The orthodoxy here in the Land of Oz is hard-over AGW – and we are about to have an emission trading scheme so we can “lead the way”……
I think that the timing of this blog post is just about right. It’s a useful counterweight to the media’s ice-free-Arctic stories that appear around this time of year. And I like the restrained language – compare this with the all-too usual journalistic speculation about the entire Arctic Circle being open water before 2— (insert whichever year you think will have maximum psychological effect.)
Gosselin: Personally I think Gore will bump out Arnold.
That’s a toss up for which would be worse.
There’s a story by AP reporter Scott Lindlaw which perfectly reflects what happens when the Climate Change lobby buys off the media…
Heavy rains complicate Calif. firefighting efforts …
water falling from the skys measured in inches is supposed to in no way help fighting forest fires. Only in climate change media could you hope to find this sort of thicket of shutes and ladders Rube Goldbergian pretzel like spin of what would normally be considered outstandingly great news.
Any thinking person can spot the contorted logic employed by this propagandistic hack, but the majority audience for this cowflop of a story don’t live in California so they won’t know that onshore flow of cold ocean air is the 100% best news that Cali firefighters could get.
[snip – libelous statement there, tone it down please – Anthony]
Patrick Hadley (03:42:24) :
Can you advise where the 0.247 comes from as I am having difficulty with the average for 2008.
Hadley give it as 0.246 (almost the same as yours) but taking the monthly figures we have
Jan 0.054
Feb 0.192
Mar 0.445
Apr 0.254
May 0.278
Jun 0.314
which gives an average of 0.256
On last season of Deadliest Catch, where they fish for crab. The entire harbor (in the Alleutian Islands) was iced over and nearly crushed one of the fishing boats. Other boats had to hastily pull their equipment out of the water as ice advanced faster than anyone expected. Since this is on the Discovery Channel (which is alway pimping Green this Gree that) Im suprised they didnt ask the crews what they thought about the Global Warming crises and they were using sledge hammers to knock several inches of ice off their boats to prevent them from rolling over and sinking.
>Isn’t the temperature of the ice also important?
Wouldn’t a colder winter cause not only more ice but colder ice?
It seems to me that colder ice would at least delay the initial melt.
Is the power transfer due to albedo so different that other factors are secondary?
All such factors weigh in. But albedo is critical to the positive feedback loops. It’s one of the critical rows of dominoes in the IPCC equation.
For that matter, it works in reverse. If it weren’t for increased albedo during Milankovitch cycles we wouldn’t have positive feedback loops leading to ice ages.
(To put it another way, it’s not just the angle of the dangle, it’s the motion of the ocean.)
This enitre “waiting for Godot” mentality has become quite boring. It is now big entertainment for those in the AGW camp to write stories, publish studies and generally fill the airways with tripe concerning the melting ice cap(s). The same thing occured in 2005-2006 concerning tropical cyclones, and when Mother Nature refused to cooperate, that faucet was shut-off quickly and a new faucet was turned on -namely the melting artic ice cap (or whatever they call it these days). So now from May through September the world must stop all activity as the Alarmists wait and hope against hope that for just a few hours the Northwest Passage might open up. One can just imagine the headlines on Drudge. In the meantime, scientists at the cryosphere and other insititutions will adjust the ice coverage and worry over the thinness of the ice, and perhaps a few oceanographers could say the Gulfstream is weakening and the sea levels are rising 100,000 times faster than the IPCC forecasted.
Most people forget this was all brought about when surface temp anomalies didn’t do what they’re suppose to do (flattened or went negative), and the next El Nino event is still at least a year out. How can an Alarmist alarm people with flat graphs, mild summers, and cold winters? For not even Hansen has the nerve to blame the California fires and drought on AGW (however, I wouldn’t put it past him saying that AGW causes more extreme La Ninas).
If the next El Nino fails to materialize by next summer, look for some other phenomena (maybe coral bleaching) that will be used to hammer the masses. The folks at Hadely, NASA, and the UN are a very persistent bunch and barring any rapid drop in global temperatures can keep the narrative going until something like El Nino gives them a boost.
Does anyone know of a source of regularly updated, simple monthly time-series data for sea ice extent? NSIDC provide lots of pretty pictures and huge gridded datasets but I can’t currently find anything I can easily plug into woodfortrees.org.
I know this has happened to many others like me and I can thank Al for getting me concerned enough to study the science, even if I was rather noisy about it from the other direction first …….. h’m!
We early adopters just luuurve a body who comes to scoff and stays to pray. But beware. The true believers reserve their worst efforts for the apostate. I’d be careful walking through classroom doors and past dorm windows. The Low Library steps and University Plaza may no longer be considered friendly territory . . .
What percent of the year do the poles lose heat from open water (until frozen over)? My guess is that polar open water rate of emissivity to insolation is better than even, with more emissivity than insolation.
And if the ice pack has been progressively decimated mostly by soot (which blackens deeply as the layers melt), when the ice (and evidence) falls into the sea, wouldn’t the ice recovery pick up?
Oh, that and the ozone hole (both natural and manmade) would have a greater impact on polar temperatures if there’s sufficient surface ozone to warm from UV-B.
“I find that quite shocking.”
I’m guessing that you don’t have kids in school. Public schools these days more resemble indoctrination centers, than they do institutes of learning.
REPLY: As a fromer school board member in a California Public School District, I can vouch for that. Even the textbook system is rigged to prevent choosing an alternate of the “approved list” – Anthony
Thank you for the correction OldJim, I was giving the average of the last seven months by mistake – and not making one of the new changes to past data -when I gave that figure.
Assuming I have made no more errors (and the frequent revising of past results does make things difficult), I find that averaging the four main global anomalies (UAH, RSS, GISS, HADCRU) to make a single monthly anomaly shows no warming trend using ordinary least squares, irrespective of which month you choose to start, from August 2000 onwards. In fact one can “cherry pick” as far back as September 1997 and combine the 520 monthly results since then into 130 monthly average anomalies, to see that there is no warming trend on OLS analysis.
Lucy Skywalker writes:
“We do have a population issue;”
Actually, we don’t.