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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Papertiger
Actually the title “climate czar” would be more accurate if it was changed to “Minister of Propaganda”.
What else could one call it? Does anyone really believe that a few persons are able to bring the forces of nature under control, and stabilise our climate so that it is always warm and cuddly? Talk about folly.
This Schwarzenegger dude has been in Fantasyland too long. The guy can no longer discern between fiction and reality. Would someone please write him and tell him this not an audition for a hero role in a sci-fi flick.
Last night I made the mistake of watching the first episode of Planet Earth: The biography.
The author made the claim that the reason the earth was at all inhabitable billions of years ago, when the sun was 30% less bright than it is today, was because of CO2 in the atmosphere. (No mention of the half dozen other factors that have been discussed here.)
In a further effort to prove the power of CO2, he pointed to Mars and Venus. Mars, he declared, is cold because it doesn’t have enough CO2, and Venus is hot because it has too much.
I stopped watching at that point, and I won’t be bothering with the rest of the episodes.
My recollection is that Mars has an atmosphere about 1% as dense as the Earth’s. It’s also almost mostly CO2. If that is the case, the Mars actually does have about as much CO2 as does the earth. It’s all the other gasses that are missing.
Paul Clatk,
I love your website. I’m not sure what you intend to use the data for, but I could guess.
I think if you added annual average sea ice to your plots, it would be yet another very interesting feature.
Just an idea!
JP
I’ve been hearing lots about ocean acidification lately.
Long time lurker. Great site.
NASA is spinning the solar minimum:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/11jul_solarcycleupdate.htm
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
Shows that there is nearly 1 million MORE square KM of sea ice in the arctic this day than on the same day last year. Then the AGW’s complain that it is thin, one year old ice…Well DUH…it was WATER last year…how is it supposed to be older ice?
I note that the Russians announced they were abandoning an ‘ice station’ early, due to Global Warming. Seems their ice floe has started to shrink. Guess everybody is on the bandwagon.
I think the thickness of the ice would play a major role in how fast it melts.
The Cubs and White Sox are still in first place. If that continues, all climate bets are off. Ice Age for certain, as hell will have frozen over.
Pierre, Vincent,
I posted the most recent anomally (july 08, which I think is the current month). I was busy this weekend and thought that the curve explained itself; which was a mistake. The plot shows that this year’s loss is diverging from last year’s. A few weeks ago when the curves were closer, the predictions of an impending massive melt made their way into the papers. I think the latest variance curve that I posted (reposted below) shows a growing deivation from last years “record melt”.
Arctic Sea Ice Comparison
This should mean more ice for my Mojitos, right?
Dear Anthony Watt
The Arctic is above the recent years ice levels, yes it is, but don’t forget that the last few years were well below average of the last decades.
And, in the last months you talked much of the Antarctic and solar cycle, well, take a look to what is happening right now in south pole. Look at the positive temperature anomalies and the actual decline trend in the ice cover in south hemisphere. And there is winter now… and solar cycle 24 still far.
I suspect that if this trend continue you have something less to talk in the next months 😉
REPLY: Oh darn, the trends aren’t continuing, the southern hemisphere has record sea ice extent.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
This shows that there is nearly 1 million MORE square KM of sea ice in the arctic today than last year.
– Anthony Watts
Paul Clark – This website updates the daily sea ice extent figures each evening (10:00 pm Eastern).
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
The daily sea ice data back to 2002 is also included in a nice readable Excel/CSV spreadsheet.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/plot.csv
Woodfortrees,
IARC-JAXA provides daily sea ice extent data in csv spreadsheet form. You could easily calculate monthly data from that.
Data of Sea Ice Extent
Click on “Data Download”.
Maybe someone could answer a somewhat related question for me. If the glaciers, snow and ice are melting like “they” are saying at the poles and across the globe, and knowing that global temps haven’t gone up in the last ten years (in fact have gone slightly down), and knowing that ice and snow reflect sunlight, helping to cool the planet (I don’t know the actual impact) shouldn’t we have sped up with warming? I mean, taking it by itself, less snow and ice would mean less reflecting, which would mean exponential melting and warming right? Yet it hasn’t happened, despite their claims that we’ve had record melting everywhere. Thanks for any answers and or corrections.
All of this is B.S.! The Earth, over time, cools and warms. Stop believing propaganda!
lane,
I read that this weekend. What happens if SS24 hasn’t started by September, then the length of SS23 will be outside 1 std dev from the mean (SS23 is 140 months long – longest of the past 150 years and 1 std dev is 142 months)? I wonder how they’ll spin that? I think the fact that SS23 is so close to exceeding the 1STDDev line is noteworthy in itself.
@lane
Having traded a few emails with Hathaway, I can tell you he is a strong supporter of the conveyor belt model and by gum, that model predicts a strong cycle 24, so it is gonna be a strong cycle 24. Like Hansen, many public scientists have staked reputations on their predictions and hold out until the last minute. Unlike Hansen, I doubt Hathaway is adjusting the sun spot numbers.
I would like to make a commentary here as a native of Idaho. Do you posters know that tornadoes can and do occur in the mountainous north of Idaho? We have been getting either confirmed tornadoes or visual evidence of funnel clouds since the late 1980s. Up and until then, Idaho, especially in the Panhandle was never really known for tornadic activity. For such severe weather to occur in this part of the state, and we get tornadoes at least once a year or tornado like conditions at least once a year, means that there is climate change. I will also add, that being a native of Idaho, and esp. of the panhandle of the region, I have seen “record snow falls” and “record cold” but that the last “record snow fall” that we had where snow levels in the valleys were 5 feet or better, we did not have a “record cold” to go with it. IE subzero weather. That was back in 1968/1969. As far as I know, where I live in Dalton Gardens, Idaho; we did not have any subzero temps in January to April though we had a lingering winter during the same time period. So, while you guys are gloating over how the greenies got it wrong on “climate change” we who live in the weather corridors of the nation have seen:
disastrous flooding.
tornado outbreaks occurring in January and February.
record heat waves and high pressure zones on the east coast that kept storms backed up from the northwest to the midwest and pummeling the midwest in particular with “100 year floods.”
a Santa Ana style wind that rolled through the Inland northwest last week that picked up blazes in Washington state and caused a lot of damage depending where you were in the region.
As someone who has seen weather taking bizarre turns in the state where I live, I wouldn’t discount too quickly the facts of climate change.
By the way, looks like there is a lot less ice on the North Pole than existed in prior years. Looks like a lot of bare ground around the edges of that “non melting” ice.
jeh 15
So, history started when?
The house I’m livingin now sits on the site where it’s predecessor was blown away by a Tornado in 1895. We’ve had rough weather recently, while we had relatively mild weather during the 70’s and 80’s.
Cycles.
“JP
I’ve been hearing lots about ocean acidification lately.”
I’ve been hearing about ocean acidification for almost a decade. The stories come and go, almost like an oscillation. When I read the first story I was quite alarmed. Something had to be done. Of course, it was. The story was shelved, and oceanic acidification became just one of a number of tools in the AGW tool belt.
Now that raw temperatures are not quite doing their thing, we are lectured on a daily basis about melting glaciers worldwide, shrinking polar icecaps, droughts/floods, blah, blah, blah… Many reporters don’t even make citations anymore. In the science journals there is so much hemming and hawing over models that if the dire warnings fail to pass, the scientists can always blame the programming and go trolling for more bucks.
In my humble opinion the polar icecaps are melting because there is an excess amount of deep ocean heat which has circulated from the equator. This heat content came from decades of El Ninoesque climate (otherwise known as a postive PDO). Eventually the NH will cool down as the oceans exhaust 30 years of stored heat. I bet if we had satellite data going back 2 centuries, we would find a few autumns with no polar ice.
As someone who has seen weather taking bizarre turns in the state where I live, I wouldn’t discount too quickly the facts of climate change. And just what might those “facts” be, Jeh15? Yes, climate changes. Continually. We know. The question is, is it caused by man, though? No, it isn’t. And that’s a fact worth considering on your part.
@jeh15
One of the problems with climate change is that is slow. The nice sunny dry area one lives in now may very well have been damp and cloudy 50 yrs ago. Human memory is often too short to experience the swings of climate in any meaningful way.
No one wish extreme weather on anyone else. But most here accept that these extreme weather events are not a product of humanity. Which of course is opposite what many of the greens are trying to convince people to believe. The real danger of the actions of the greens is their denial of the variability of the climate and the subsequent failure to prepare for other possible extremes.
Suppose we all prepared for ‘global warming’, spending billions to stop it and then discover that the earth is entering a deep cooling cycle. This possibility exists in the coming decades. What is your growing season length now? What will happen if it is cut in half for a decade or more? If you think food prices are high now because of bio-fuels, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
And what about those billions spend on unquestioningly defeating global warming? Would they not be better spent on feeding the world? Providing safe drinking water? Fighting disease?
The glee you frown upon is not one of the misery cause by extreme weather such as you experience, but the relief that this hoax is failing about and world can avoid wasting its resources fighting a ghost.
Climate change happens. Man has nothing to do with it. Some of us just live in the wrong place when the weather patterns shift. Some of us don’t.
Personally, I would prefer a warm, high CO2 world over a cold CO2 free world. It would be a much nicer place in which to live on the whole. Sadly, I don’t think we are headed that way.
By the way, looks like there is a lot less ice on the North Poll than existed in prior years. You’ve missed the point entirely, Jeh15. Did you even read the article? The rate of melting has slowed so that is far behind last years’, making the alarmist cries of a possible ice-free North Pole this year look ridiculous (which indeed all of their claims are). As for the North Poll, I hadn’t heard of that – was it a poll of polar bears?
Interestingly, the Pacific was in a thermal maximum state during much of the 1990s, then began to cough and sputter, ending up in what appears to be negative PDO territory since last year. It would not be a major stretch to surmise that there was a delayed impact of this in the Western Arctic Basin – that is, until this year, we may have reached a sort of “tipping point” in the direction of more ice. Meanwhile, the Atlantic has also been warm for years, and of course, you can see that expressed in the ice levels along the Arctic shores of Europe. This is not rocket science.
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Jeh15,