10/31 NEWS: See updated graphs here
UPDATED: 10/22/08 The new images below are even closer
Watching arctic sea ice rebound this year has been exciting, more so since a few predictions and expeditions predicated on a record low sea ice this past summer failed miserably. I’ve spent a lot of time this month looking at the graph of sea ice extent from the IARC-JAXA website, which plots satellite derived sea-ice extent. However, there is another website that also plots the same satellite derived data, the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center of Bergen Norway, and they have an added bonus: a standard deviation shaded area. For those that don’t know what standard deviation is, here is a brief explanation from Wiki
…standard deviation remains the most common measure of statistical dispersion, measuring how widely spread the values in a data set are. If many data points are close to the mean, then the standard deviation is small; if many data points are far from the mean, then the standard deviation is large. If all data values are equal, then the standard deviation is zero.
In a nutshell, you could say that any data point that falls within the standard deviation area would be considered “within normal variances” for the data set. That said, current sea ice extent and area data endpoints (red line) are both approaching the edge of the standard deviation (gray shading) for both data sets. Here is sea ice area:
Click for a larger image
And here is sea ice extent:
Click for a larger image
Extent has a bit further to go than area, and of course it is possible that the slope will flatten and it may not reach the SD gray area. It’s also possible it may continue on the current trend line. Only nature knows for certain. A complete presentation from Nansen is on this page which is well worth bookmarking.
What I find particularly interesting is the graph comparing the 2008, 2007, and 2006 sea ice extent. It appears 2008 extent has already bested 2006 extent:
with a hat tip to commenter Patrick Henry
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Since H2O is the most powerful ‘greenhouse’ gas, can we look forward to water’s being declared a pollutant?
Perhaps the whole biosphere is a pollutant. The planet would be way cool without it.
@Arthur Glass (06:39:24) :
Water already is a pollutant.
More at: http://www.dhmo.org
😉
Rich, I think that to call the suffering and grief that goes along with such a procedure as you mentioned above (they are rare and issues surrounding such a procedure are always serious if not critical), “polluting”, says more about you than the mother and her physician. In my humble opinion, to bring it up here was unmanly and callous. If it was meant to gather like souls around your sentiments about weather or climate, it falls way short of our focus on data and scientific discussions. There was a time when such topics were not shared in mixed audiences.
“…we know significant quantities of CO2 is being introduced into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels .”
We certainly know fairly well the volume of CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels, but what the significance might be of such a miniscule change, best measured by the molecule, is, pun intended, ‘up in the air’.
Of course, according to Chaos theory, even a miniscule change on a micro level of magnitude can produce significant changes up the scale. CO2 constitutes something on the order of .003% of the atmosphere by volume, but the planet would be lifeless without that minisculity.
Which leads me to wonder what the lower threshold of CO2 might be, beneath which life of any complexity on the surface of the earth would be impossible.
Dee Norris
I think that the most serious and reliable newspaaper out of New York would be interested in that site.
http://www.theonion.com/content/index
Arthur Glass (06:59:11) :
The Onion now has Global Distribution and hopefully they can spread the word about the dangers of DHMO vapor as an atmospheric pollutant. Hopefully, they will also cover the dangers of man-made solar cooling.
“I do agree that the planet is overcrowded.’
Especially with ants! Don’t ants constitute something like 20 % of the mass of the biosphere?
Actually it’s old CO2 being brought back into the system. Fossil fuels are all natural.
[…] the planet’s climate is warming, has recovered so quickly from its summer lows that it is just a hair below the “normal” […]
PeteM,
How then can you be sure that the current apparent increase in CO2 doesn’t mark, and is being caused by, the end of one of your ‘equilibrium periods’?
It’s said that fossil fuels contribute around 8% yearly to the total CO2 cycle, and around half of that, or 4%, is absorbed by natural sinks. This implies that, before fossil fuels, the natural sinks absorbed around 4% more than the natural sources produced. Hardly long-term stability there. And, if carbon sinks have grown by 4% over the last 150 years, why should they suddenly stop growing?
Yes, we do we know that quite large quantities of CO2 are being emitted into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, but I would suggest that the effect of that is insignificant within the system. For instance, geological records show that CO2 levels have been orders of magnitude higher than at present for long periods, and that life flourished during those periods, and there’s little evidence that temperatures were significantly higher.
Arthur Glass,
I understand that plant life would struggle severely at below 200ppm, and probably become extinct at levels at or below around half of present levels.
PeteM (various) :
Hypothesis;
The relatively smooth sinusoidal upward “trend” in the Mauna Loa CO2 product is a marker for the natural “breathing” of the oceans and biosphere as a response to seasonal variation in their temperatures, in the main. (As a monthly data set it may lack the granularity that could highlight the 2ppmv of “additional” CO2 that humanity currently adds to the output side of the total flux in recent years but nearly all published climate products suffer from this deficiency)
If mankind’s additional CO2 had a substantial influence it could appear in this record during the NH winter increase in fuel usage.
Attempts to show that we are creating a problem with our CO2 output would need to produce evidence that the burning of the total fossil fuel reserve, raising atmospheric CO2 to maybe 3 times its current level and the subsequent 300 times smaller decrease in the alkalinity of the oceans, can beat the historical records of both during periods when the planet has successfully supported oxygen breathing carbon-based lifeforms.
There will be no rush to fund such research.
Live long and prosper.
Arthur Glass: “Especially with ants! Don’t ants constitute something like 20 % of the mass of the biosphere?”
Well, humans are seriously outnumbered by other animals and, as I understand it, insects outweigh animals.
And as for the microbes…
Does you know if anybody is tracking the darkness (i.e., emmissivity) of the arctic ice, year to year, region to region, and how that correlates to melting? It seems this would be technologically easy through the satellite images, but I’ve not seen anything published.
I’ve read speculation, and some verifying calculations, that soot, particularly the vast amount coming from China, is darkening the ice, accelerating summer melting, delaying fall growth. This seems like a very plausible hypothesis. But is anyone you know of trying to quantify and correlate?
Walter Dnes (14:30:02) :
Data from the IJIS web site at http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/plot.csv indicates that 2008 ice extent has now moved up into 3rd place for Oct 22nd, behind 2002 and 2003. 2008 is just barely ahead of 2004, 2005, and 2006, and way ahead of 2007. It’s a bit hard to see on the graph, because the lines for 2004/2005/2006/2008 are so close.
I’m not sure where you got this from but if you download their datafile today you get:
2008 8.18
2007 6.94
2006 8.36
2005 8.23
2004 8.13
2003 8.57
2002 8.59
[…] October 2008 Possibly Set for Record Sea Ice Extent Increase Rate 24 10 2008 What is the reason behind the fact that “[Arctic] sea ice area [is] approaching the edge of normal standard deviation“? […]
Phil,
The Arctic ROOS site has 2008 extent way ahead of 2006. Is that because of the differing algorithms?
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
Phil
I find 8,114 for 2005 (23.10) and 8,243 for 2006 (24.10), so 2008 is really ahead of 2004, 2005 and 2007as of October 23.
Probably Walter Dnes did not compensate for leap-years, thing are so close now that this one-day difference would put 2008 ahead of 2006 as well.
” Mary Hinge
“As discussed in previous threads the MWP was in all probability not a global event” ”
Well Mary, that was what Michael Mann claimed when he first produced his infamous “hockey Stick” graph, showing that both the MWP, and the LIA were missing from his “reconstruction”.
I highly recommend Mary, that you dig out the very first publication of MM’s Hockey stick graph; which I think was in an early IPCC report. There emblazened across the top of that very well know drawing are two little words; “Northern Hemisphere.”
OOoops !! It seems tha t Michael Mann’s “hockey stick”, by his own admission, was a local phenomenon; and not at all a global event.
Of course once someone whispered in his ear, those offecnding words were expurgated out of the later publications. But every now and then, in places like the LA Times, one can find a newsprint copy of that damaging first graph. Try searching the LA times for 2006, and see if you can find the same copy I have.
Well I’ll make it easy for you: it’s on page A12, Friday, June 23 2006, right under the article on how Viagra helps high altitude athletes.
Check it out Mary. The LA times says that references to colors have been removed since it is a B&W paper, and the IPCC copy was in color, and it cites IPCC and National Academy of Sciences, as sources for the story.
Mike Bryant (10:43:05) :
Phil,
The Arctic ROOS site has 2008 extent way ahead of 2006. Is that because of the differing algorithms?
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
Probably a factor, also they are using a lower resolution data source, SSMI 15×13 km , versus AMSR-E 6×4 km & Cosimo’s algorithm. They are also both smoothed, again with different algorithms.
Flanagan: “No deity ever declared some time period to be the absolute reference. But in a decreasing time series, comparing with the moving average is not a measure of the decrease rate but rather of the decrease acceleration. Which is obviously not the same.”
Doesn’t answer the simple question of who declared that the period 1979-2000 is what we should use as the “standard”, “normal”, “average” or what ever label you want to put on it. It is simply an arbitrary period chosen to slant the results in favor of AGW. Why not use the period 1986 – 2007? On second thought, why use a miniscule 21 year period at all.
Paul (09:28:42) :
At the risk of going into CLimate Audit territory, the standard deviation as shown implicitly assumes that the data is IID. That is there is no relationship between last year’s ice extent and this year’s ice extent for exmple.
Which would seem to be what happens historically:
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/prods/CVCHDCTEA/20081013000000_CVCHDCTEA_0004022599.gif
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/prods/CVCHDCTWA/20081013000000_CVCHDCTWA_0004022600.gif
The implication is that the grey SD area (a type of random error band if you like) is actually much wider than indicated in the diagram.
Probably not based on history, although it’s possible that in recent years the arctic has moved to a new regime of thinner ice and there is now more dependence on the previous year?
Tom in Florida (13:11:47) :
Doesn’t answer the simple question of who declared that the period 1979-2000 is what we should use as the “standard”, “normal”, “average” or what ever label you want to put on it. It is simply an arbitrary period chosen to slant the results in favor of AGW. Why not use the period 1986 – 2007? On second thought, why use a miniscule 21 year period at all.
No one did, it’s just an arbitrary reference point, like choosing the melting point of ice to be 0ºC! It doesn’t slant the data in any way, it is convenient that it was a period when the behavior didn’t change much from year to year.
By the way why is it that no-one here can spell the word ‘minuscule’?
Phil: “it’s just an arbitrary reference point, like choosing the melting point of ice to be 0ºC! ”
However the designation of the melting point of ice as 0 C doesn’t change depending on the time period you choose.
Phil: “It doesn’t slant the data in any way, it is convenient that it was a period when the behavior didn’t change much from year to year.”
I would see that differently. Just because it was a period “that didn’t change much” by no means does it make it normal or a standard to measure against, unless you clearly state that what you are measuring is simply different and that the difference doesn’t prove a thing. But this is not the case in comparing sea ice graphs. The period is used not to show a change but to show change from normal. Clearly a difference to me.
Caleb (06:39:54)
Regarding the data-set 1870-2008 found at:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/SEAICE/timeseries.1870-2008
When Amundsen navigated the Northwest Passage he was basically locked in the ice in 1904, but able to sail in 1905, however the data set shows more summer ice in 1905 than in 1904. This makes me curious about how they collected the data.
RTFD
Track back here.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/SEAICE/
I’ll save you the trouble. :-]
Go here.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/guide/Data/walsh.html
This drives me crazy. I know for fact that the polar ice is returning with a vengeance. I have seen the satellite pictures and need no further convincing. Yet somehow the MSM is still running stories about the poor polar bears that are dying off because they can’t find enough ice. I know this isn’t true but today I see another story about it. I have come to feel that the media really is far left. My extreme left co-workers keep trying to tell me it’s all in my head and just seems left because I am so right (personally I consider myself a moderate). Seeing stories like this really bothers me. Why can’t someone just take a look at what is going on before printing this clap trap?
Polar bears dying out in Russian region: expert
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081024/sc_afp/russiaenvironmentclimatewarminganimal