10/17/2007 5,663,125 square kilometers
10/17/2008 7,436,406 square kilometers
Δice = 1,773,281 sqkm or 31.3% more than last year
Source data here: http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/plot.csv (Excel file)
UPDATE 10/22: The trend has entered the point where last year’s recovery started to get closer to previous years, and the Δice is now about 21%
You’ve probably heard by now how this new story circulating this week claims “record warmth” and that we are in the peak time of melting. Meanwhile, “back at the ranch”, sea ice extent continues a steady upward climb as shown above.
Scientists Counter Latest Arctic ‘Record’ Warmth Claims as ‘Pseudoscience’ – Comprehensive Arctic Data Round Up – October 17, 2008
Claim: Newspaper article claims Arctic Temps Peak in November – Claims Arctic offers ‘early warning signs’ – McClatchy Newspapers – October 16, 2008
Excerpt: Temperatures in the Arctic last fall hit an all-time high – more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Centigrade) above normal – and remain almost as high this year, an international team of scientists reported Thursday. “The year 2007 was the warmest year on record in the Arctic,” said Jackie Richter-Menge, a climate expert at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H, and editor of the latest annual Arctic Report Card. “These are dynamic and dramatic times in the Arctic,” she said. “The outlook isn’t good.” Arctic temperatures naturally peak in October and November, after sea ice shrinks during the summer. […] Scientists say these changes in the Arctic are early warning signs of what may be coming for the rest of the world’s climate.
Arctic Reality Check: Why isn’t the cooling Antarctic considered ‘an indicator of what might happen to the rest of the world?’
By Climate Scientist Dr. Ben Herman, past director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and former Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona is a member of both the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth’s Executive Committee and the Committee on Global Change.
Herman Excerpt: First of all, the Arctic sea ice is at its minimum in September, not October or November as the scientists in the McClatchy article states. As Arctic ice experts, they certainly should have known this. Another point is that the Arctic temperatures do not “naturally peak in October or November”. They peak in mid August generally. Also the article states that since the world’s climates are interconnected, what happens in the Arctic may be an indicator of what will happen in the rest of the world. How about what happens in the Antarctic then? Since its ice area has been increasing, is this also an indicator of what might happen in the rest of the world?
See the full article: Vast majority of Antarctica has cooled over the past 50 years and ice coverage has grown to record levels
Reality Check # 2: ‘This is pseudoscience’ – By German scientist Ernst-Georg Beck, a biologist Rebuts Arctic Reports – October 17, 2008
Excerpt: The annual report issued by researchers at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other experts is the latest to paint a dire picture of the impact of climate change in the Arctic. […] The real averaged temperatures of the whole Arctic circle (70-90 N) can be found in the same data base used by NOAA (CRU, Phil Jones): The graph shows a strong Arctic warming during 1918 and 1960, stronger than today with a rise of about + 4°C up to 1938. Referencing only a rise since 1960 we got the illusion of a dramatic rise in modern times. Conclusion: The news item:” Arctic air temperatures climb to record levels” is selective science and wrong because the Arctic Ocean ( covering an area of more than 50% of the Arctic circle) has been left unconsidered. The NOAA study summarizes: „5°C record levels in temperature in autumn”, presents the averaged temperatures only on land stations and discusses melting sea ice as a cause! This is pseudoscience. In contrast the current Arctic warming mimics the 1920s-1940s event, as a recent study from the Ohio State University reveals. The scientists recognized from using weather station records, maps and photos from the past century that temperatures in Greenland had warmed in the 1920s at rates equivalent to the recent past.
See these articles:
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/grnlndice.htm
http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/wcmsmimefiles/Arctic_102008e_824.pdf
Get the facts on Arctic ice conditions below:
Latest Arctic Info: Updated October 17, 2008
Update: Arctic sea ice now 28.7% higher than this date last year – still climbing – October 15, 2008
Excerpt: A difference of: 1,576,563 square kilometers, now in fairness, 2008 was a leap year, so to avoid that criticism, the value of 6,857,188 square kilometers can be used which is the 10/13/08 value, for a difference of 1,369,532 sq km. Still not too shabby at 24.9 %. The one day gain between 10/13/08 and 10/14/08 of 3.8% is also quite impressive. […] Watch the red line as it progresses. So far we are back to above 2005 levels, and 28.7% (or 24.9% depending on how you want to look at it) ahead of last year at this time. That’s quite a jump, basically a 3x gain, since the minimum of 9% over 2007 set on September 16th. Read about that here. Go nature! There is no mention of this on the National Snow and Ice Data Center sea ice news webpage, which has been trumpeting every loss and low for the past two years…not a peep. You’d think this would be big news. Perhaps the embarrassment of not having an ice free north pole in 2008, which was sparked by press comments made by Dr. Mark Serreze there and speculation on their own website, has made them unresponsive in this case.
Alert: National Ice Center says satellites interpreting Arctic ice as open water! – By Andrew Revkin – NY Times Dot Earth Blog – September 6, 2008
Excerpt: And one of the groups focusing most closely on possible Arctic shipping lanes, the National Ice Center operated by the Navy and Commerce Department, says flatly that the satellites are misreading conditions in many spots and that there is too much ice in a critical spot along the Russian coast (highlighted in the smaller image above) to allow anything but ice-hardened ships to get through. In an e-mail message Wednesday, Sean R. Helfrich, a scientist at the ice center, said that ponds of meltwater pooling on sea ice could fool certain satellite-borne instruments into interpreting ice as open water, “suggesting areas that have substantial ice cover as being sea-ice free.” The highlighted area is probably still impassible ice, including large amounts of thick old floes, he said. I sent the note to an array of sea-ice experts, and many, including Mark Serreze at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, concurred.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/06/confirmation-of-open-water-circling-north-pole/
National Weather Service: SEA ICE ADVISORY FOR ARCTIC WATERS AS WATER TEMPS DROP 8° IN 2008 – September 22, 2008
Excerpt: SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES ALONG THE ALASKA CHUKCHI AND BEAUFORT SEA COASTS ARE 2 TO 8 DEGREES CELSIUS COLDER THIS YEAR THAN AT THE SAME TIME LAST YEAR. […] SIGNIFICANT ICE WILL BEGIN DEVELOPING ALONG THE ALASKA COAST NORTH OF 70N WITHIN THE NEXT 10 TO 14 DAYS.
http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/marfcst.php?fcst=FZAK80PAFC
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Monckton’s website with Ted’s polar bears ref seems to be down or intermittent – too many responses to his Open Letter? (that is still available at American Thinker)
What fooled you, Lucy, is the excellence of the parody. If Hansen, Gore, and Suzuki were honest men, that is precisely what they should be saying, because it’s the truth. I can’t fault you much for being fooled by the truth.
==============================================
Yeah, it’s a joke; read the comments. I ran right on over ‘Pepper Misty Leaf’.
========================
Looks like the levelling off may have started. I see yesterday’s delta has dropped back slightly to 29.8%. Still a significant and welcome recovery from last year’s record-shattering low, however let us bear in mind that there are only 8 years in this dataset and all of them bar 2007 and 2005 show more ice on this date.
I presume I’m not the only one who can see that the retractions article is fabricated. http://cjunk.blogspot.com/2008/10/warmists-and-msm-retract-predictions.html
We don’t have to lie to advance the cause of true science.
People, the site quoting Hansen & Gore “saying they exaggerated” was an attempt at satire. NOT real quotes.
Harold Ambler (09:06:05) :
” I presume I’m not the only one who can see that the retractions article is fabricated. http://cjunk.blogspot.com/2008/10/warmists-and-msm-retract-predictions.html
We don’t have to lie to advance the cause of true science.”
I thought the article was excellent.
Surely you know the fable of Bizarro World…
” Concept
In the Bizarro world of “Htrae” (“Earth” spelled backwards), society is ruled by the Bizarro Code which states “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!”.
“In one episode, for example, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling Bizarro bonds: “Guaranteed to lose money for you”. ”
“Later, the mayor appoints Bizarro No. 1 to investigate a crime, “Because you are stupider than the entire Bizarro police force put together”. This is intended and taken as a great compliment.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarro_World
The excellent article at Celestial Junk shows what WOULD happen on Earth.
But as we live in Bizarro World on planet Htrae, the opposite in fact is what is happening.
“Us believe Al Gore!
“Us believe Global Warming!
” Less there is evidence, more us believe! “
What patterns can we see in 6 to 7 curves? As several have noticed, there is a consistent glitch at the start of June. All the curves are tightly bunched in Dec and from mid-Apr to mid-Jun.
Looking at the mavericks first, we have 2003 high in spring high in fall, 2008 high in spring low in fall, 2007 low in spring low in fall, 2006 low in spring hi in fall, and 2004 avg in spring high(avg) in fall, 2005 low in spring a bit low in fall.
There isn’t enough data here to prove anything, but this does seem to show that the max ice extent predicts nothing about the min ice extent.
Going the other way, fall to spring, it looks like hi-hi, hi-avg, hi-avg, lo(avg)-lo, hi-lo, lo-hi. This is quite well balanced, so again there is no predictive power.
John-X (10:01:36) Yes, I agree it was Prime Parody. And it has become bizarre to believe in the CO2=AGW paradigm in the face of rising CO2 and falling temperatures. When will it ever end?
===========================================
Lucy,
I believe the Gore, Hansen and Suzuki “good news” is not, but it sure would have made my day. Even if its not true, maybe the statements will form some good talking points for them to parrot.
Ric Werme (07:20:16) :
I agree, but i was focused on the fun over the attention paid to the movement of the squiggly line.
[…] Arctic sea ice NOT melting? Another reason not to believe the hype. Anthony Watts has a roundup of […]
Anthony, I was going to forward that “NewScience” article to you with a WTF sticky on it. Given what everyone else was reporting, I was stunned that someone would come out with this claim. I guess I shouldn’t be.
Anyway, bravo for setting the record straight, though your efforts won’t stop Rolling Stone from publishing it.
I should have read the “article” to its conclusion. What took me in was the seeming acceptance of it here on WUWT by several posters.
XQ (08:02:37) :
Yeah, it’s very sad. I’ve subscribed continuously since 1969 and they are responsible for keeping me current in several fields. The first place I read about AIDS was in Science News, and that was weeks before it was called AIDS.
At least one of the recent articles was due to the annual meeting of The Society of Environmental Journalists which turns out to be a stunningly pro-AGW organization. Janet Raloff, SN’s environment reporter, is an active member and supporter.
I don’t think there’s anything I can do to straighten out the SEJ, but I’ve been trying to add comments to better balance Raloff’s blog entries and stories.
I wrote up a nice comment for one of the recent stories, but it evaporated when I submitted it. I think it took me so long that my login session expired and I haven’t had the energy to go back and write it again. For all its warts, WordPress generally doesn’t lose my stuff….
I suggested to them that this would be a great time for a two-page story titled “Where Have all the Sunspots Gone?” and got a reply back saying that the longer stories are now coming from free-lance writers and that they’d be happy to look over my resume.
I don’t have time to do as good a job as I expect from SN, actually, I don’t have time, period. I may just go ahead and do it anyway. At least I know two solar scientists I can interview. Yay WUWT.
It’s amazing to find that so many people want to hear the global warming is not happening and will find any excuse to back up their prejudice.
Some climate scientists think there is hope that the human race will take the right actions to avoids its own demise ….a nice quote I heard was ” we can’t be that stupid”. But looking at the comments on this forum I really wonder ….
Climate changes for a many complex reasons and the results can be draconian ( ice ages or deserts…) . Why play with this sleeping monster by deliberately destabilising the composition of the atmosphere .
Words about ‘it isn’t a problem’ will count for nothing when change comes ‘
There is a lot we don’t know … but I know that in my local environment my world is warmer and a few hundred years ago a relative froze to death trying to find the North West Passage.
I suppose, from what I read here, that I should be so relieved that we have nothing to worry about. In fact, one might even argue what a shame last year’s ice minimum wasn’t even LOWER, so that when you do the calculations, the recent percentage increase in the ice could have been even more convincing!! That would’ve shown those ‘Global Warmists’, wouldn’t it. Wow!!!!
Just suppose last year there had been, like, only a few square kilometres of Arctic ice left? Then you could have claimed a several millions per cent. increase this year so far, which presumably, by the logic of the posts here, must mean we are rushing to a new ice age, to get us all in the big freeze in just a year or two! Wake up World … we’re all going to die of cold in 2011!
Or maybe not. Maybe what we are actually seeing from year to year is a non-linear response to forcing of a complex system, rather as one gets if heating a solution and a precipitate in a test tube: the mixture ‘bumps’ periodically, so sometimes you get steam and bubbles, and sometimes you get a load of gunk shooting out of the end of the tube. (I’m assuming some of you will remember this well enough from the chemistry you did at school). Overall, however, the mixture in the tube is heating up, regardless. Similarly, the Arctic ice is generally, over a course of years, thinning and melting, sometimes spreading out and breaking up as it does so, sometimes being moved by the wind because it is so much thinner, sometimes seeming to recover a bit one year, losing a bit the next, and so on; the general trend, however, is not one we should be pleased with or complacent about, and there’s plenty of well appraised physics that suggests things are going the same way in other parts of the world, too.
Maybe a more physics-based analogy would be the difference between boiling and bubbles. If you put a pan of water on the gas to heat up, there isn’t a physicist alive who’ll be able to tell you where all the bubbles will form, or when, or in what number and size. That said, the stuff is going to warm up, and eventually should boil. Likewise, just because we can’t predict exactly how the ice is going to melt, or exactly how and where the extra retained heat from increased CO2 is going to be made manifest in the world, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
So, what do you want to rely on? A ‘bump’ in the system? That this convincingly counters everything else, and we should start investing for a long term dividend from a bunch of fur coat and lined glove factories?
Boiling versus bubbles, guys, boiling versus bubbles …
Looking for the prediction of an ice-free North Pole, I come across this statement of Mark Serreze:
“t’s a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen in autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole”
From Al Gore and the IPCC I could not find such a claim. Is that true? Did I miss something? And does a “50-50 bet” count as a “prediction” on this blog?
PeteM (12:54:55) :
Don’t worry about it! 90% of the posts here come from a computer program written by the few true skeptics. Al Gore says they’re as scarce as Flat Earth Society members, so clearly their computers have to be taking up the slack.
An alternative possibility is that Al was wrong, but that would raise the possibility that his movie is wrong too.
-Etaoin Shrdlu
Nick O, PeteM: The problem here is that temperatures have gone down over the last decade in spite of a 4% increase in atmospheric CO2 (or from 2001, if you prefer to skip the 1998-2000 El Nino/La Nina). And coincidentally with the PDO flip, they have dropped rather sharply over the last 18 months.
Six ocean/atmospheric cycles steadily switched from cold to warm phases from 1976 – 2001. The temperature rose. Now the PDO has gone cold and the AMO and AO seem to be shifting cold. The temperature has gone down, and sharply. It is now right around the average of the last 30 years.
That alone should provide some relief.
Two other items have emerged. The IPCC grossly overestimated Sea level rise (and has had to revise its 2007 figures), and data from Aqua Satellite has falsified the CO2 positive feedback equation.
Therefore you may be relieved that global warming is unlikely to destroy up to one half world economic growth.
You now need only worry that the Kyoto protocols or measures urged by the Stern Review will destroy up to half of world economic growth.
(And if, like me, you are poor, be VERY worried.)
-Etaoin Shrdlu
Isn’t he registered to vote in Ohio? #B^1
Anne (13:49:31) :
It’s a prediction, but with ass fully covered. Given that the melt became nowhere close to the Noth Pole and didn’t exceed 2007’s minimum extent, I’d say it’s okay to call it a prediction that didn’t verify.
It’s not in the IPCC documents because the last IPCC report came out before the prediction.
If you go to the top of this page and enter NSIDC in the search box you’ll find many references to the prediction.
[…] Story here: Ice Reality Check […]
PeteM (12:54:55) :
“Climate changes for a many complex reasons and the results can be draconian ( ice ages or deserts…) . Why play with this sleeping monster by deliberately destabilising the composition of the atmosphere . ”
That sounds like the precautionary principle. That was my position in the 1990’s, until I delved further over the last 3-4 years and I came to the conclusion that there is no good evidence for it. Its like a big shell game. Personally I believe that it is even worse than a shell game.
Don’t forget though, that a lack of concern about CO2, in no way means there is a lack of concern over pollution (the real kind), or energy security, or diversification of sources, or poverty. In fact I would suggest that many who are concerned about CO2 are in fact more concerned in a real and practical sense about those other issues and are therefore extremely frustrated that the CO2 reduction actions will limit our ability to address those things.
All this denilalist talk is pure crap!!!
[REPLY: Why hadn’t I thought of that before? That’s it; I’m convinced. We appreciate your input.~Evan]