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
dennis ward (22:09:36) :
Sea ice area approaching the edge of normal standard deviation Oct 2008,
Do you actually believe this BBC garbage, of cause you don`t.
” Mary Hinge (04:22:14) :
George E. Smith (11:37:16) :
I refer the gentleman to my earlier answer. Look in previous posts for evidence that it was not a global event. rather than retrace my steps heres a link to good ol’ wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
You can do the rest yourself, look at high resolution proxy papers etc. ”
Well Mary, good old wiki isn’t quite as good as some people believe.
I choose to study the very extensive review of many and numerous other studies, By willie Soon, and Sallie Baliunas, in which they clearly establish the case that the preponderance of those studies clearly indicate that the MWP and the LIA were global events.
You might also have noticed that the Northern hemisphere seems to change climatically much more than the southern hemisphere does; might have something to to with the southern hemisphere being mostly ocean and the northern hemisphere being mostly land.
That pesky water seems it can’t make up its mind whether to be an atmospheric vapor GHG causing positive feedback and stopping us from being an ice block; or to become liquid or solid and create clouds that produce a strong negative feedback to stop us all from broiling.
Water is about the most efficient heating transfer medium we know of, and it does a good job of making the southern hemisphere do not much of anything, while the northern land masses cause all kinds of wild climate gyrations. Yet the south is not devoid of evidence of MWP and LIA by any means.
I recommend Soon/Baliunas over good old wiki anyday.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=10&fd=27&fy=1997&sm=10&sd=27&sy=2008
Looks pretty normal to me….
When you compare the pictures above with this:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.jpg
I think you must conclude that the anomaly graph looks rather fishy.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=02&fd=28&fy=1997&sm=02&sd=28&sy=2008
This is a very interesting comparison. I guess if you increase the area of Greenland, you automatically decrease the Arctic Sea Ice Area… and vice versa.
George E. Smith (18:47:28) :
“I recommend Soon/Baliunas over good old wiki anyday.”
Hhmmm, so you recommend 2 astrophysicists over a wide range of scentists from a wide field of earth and physical sciences. OK, lets look at the paper:
“Also, while we have given specific dates for the beginnings and ends
of these periods, the transition between them was diffuse. Finally, there were regions that showed different trends from the global average. For example, during the 1770s,one of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age in Europe, it was relatively warm in the Antarctic, and Captain Cook was able to sail further south than ships have usually been able to reach in this century.”
This illustrates one point I was trying to make that the anomolies happen at different times around the globe. We also know that the reverse happens when the southern hemisphere has been cool the northern hemisphere has been warm.
“A survey of the scientific literature shows that 79 of the 102 proxy temperature studies identified a 50-year period during the past millennium that was warmer than any 50 years in the 20th century.”
Surely if the temperatures of he last 50 years weren’t unusually warm then we would expect a lot less than 23% of the proxy studies to show the last 50 years were the warmest in the last 1000 years.
Mary Hinge (03:54:03) I’ve warned you before, wikipedia on climate is unreliable; it is not distributed intelligence on this matter, but rather the biased point of view of William Connolley and his assistant. Those two have bought the false CO2=AGW paradigm such that they can no longer evaluate the truth. I do not understand why Wikipedia allows this perversion.
And your famous 2500 IPCC scientists come down to a coterie of 50 doing the final report and a fraction of that writing the Summary for Policymakers. This whole climate catastrophe is going to be the subject of doctoral theses in the sociology and history of science for many years to come, and Naomi Oreskes will earn permanent scorn as a famous fool.
====================================
Phil. (12:55:10) It is characteristic of your willfully blind spot that you elide around the fact that this already outdated report is ballyhooed by the press as the latest thing. Hey, try being objective and unbiased for a change.
==========================================
kim (05:15:58) :
Phil. (12:55:10) It is characteristic of your willfully blind spot that you elide around the fact that this already outdated report is ballyhooed by the press as the latest thing. Hey, try being objective and unbiased for a change.
Talk about blind spot, there’s a biblical injunction about ‘first removing the beam from your own eye’! Please explain why the paper about the observed decrease in ice thickness is outdated, some science please rather than your usual nonsense. Have you even read the GRL paper?
Kim
“…see climateaudit.org for ritual auditing and ridicule of the paper.”
“…..Climate on Wiki is perverted.”
“…..the science of paleoclimatology as interpreted through tree rings is inadequate…”
“…..search through climateaudit.org for reports about Linah Ababneh’s thesis which contradicts Mann’s work desperately, and has been suppressed.”
“….These people you trust, Mary, have lost credibility in the real world…”
“….Look, this year represented an amazing turnaround and may represent the beginning of a freezing trend.”
“The failure of peer review in the field, and the paucity of effective statistics….”
“…I might add something about the integrity of some of the researchers….”
“…I do not understand why Wikipedia allows this perversion. ”
“Naomi Oreskes will earn permanent scorn as a famous fool.”
Kim, you have real problems. You are not contributing anything to this thread but seem intent on showing you have no faith in any scientific methodology that contradicts your, increasingly dated view. Try and steer yourself away fom Climateadit for a while, its obviously corrupting your rational mind.
Your last comment re. Phil is scandalous:
“It is characteristic of your willfully blind spot that you elide around the fact that this already outdated report is ballyhooed by the press as the latest thing. Hey, try being objective and unbiased for a change”
The way Phil described the process is exactly as it should be, only those who are intent on destroying the scientific method because they do not believe/support the conclusion would hold your rather strange views. How can you call it ‘outdated’ when it has only just been published?
I can only conclude you yourself do not have a scientific background as you would not be expressing these strange sentiments in this blog
Mary Hinge (05:53:21) So, nature puts a lie to your ‘latest scientific evidence’ and that is OK? I’m criticizing Phil. for defending outdated science portrayed in the popular press as the latest thing.
Now, about the scientific mindset. A scientist would re-examine assumptions in the face of evidence that contradicts his hypothesis. You demonstrate no clue that evidence is putting a lie to the projections of your inadequately parameterized models. Look, the models got the water vapor feedback to initial CO2 forcing wrong, and have built a fairy castle of disinformation on the back of that incorrect assumption and the inadequate parameterization of clouds and convection.
You can insinuate all you like, and I’ll just point to falling temperatures worldwide, dropping sea levels, a cooling phase PDO, and Arctic freezing back up, and a quiescent sun. Then your insinuations rebound on you.
===========================================
Phil. (05:44:41) Look, it should be obvious, especially to you, that thinner ice following a dramatic melt is expected. Sure, this article has appeared in the usual course of events, but what it portrays is hardly news, and the import of it has been neutered by subsequent events. Please stop ‘bitterly clinging’ to your belief that the Arctic is melting, anymore. The globe is cooling and freeze-up back to levels of thirty years ago is likely.
The ‘news’ is that Arctic ice is steadily thickening, and each year that fails to get below the previous year’s minimum ice extent will lead to thicker ice.
===================================
Mary Hinge (05:53:21) May I point out that rhetoric such as ‘corrupting your rational mind’ and ‘scandalous’ with reference to my criticism of Phil. is ad hominous and not a logically sound scientific argument? Why don’t you try refuting each point rather than painting with a wide and illogically tarred brush? That list of my quotes that you’ve prepared represents a pretty accurate portrayal of climate science today. I’ll happily discuss any one of them that you think you can refute. On your mark.
=========================================
Mary Hing:
You mean pretty much like right now, where GW isn’t global by any stretch of the imagination. Just because you take a mean temperature over many places doesn’t mean that’s a “global temperature”. Some places drop in temp while others rise, simple as that. Comparing the different places has no relevance regarding a “global temperature”.
Jeff Alberts (07:42:53) :
“You mean pretty much like right now, where GW isn’t global by any stretch of the imagination. Just because you take a mean temperature over many places doesn’t mean that’s a “global temperature”. ”
Your almost right but the ice core proxies in the post above show that the recent global warming is the first time in recent millenia to be occuring in both hemispheres though at different rates. Global warming has never been modelled to show a uniform increase across all parts of the globe at the same time. Last year was a good example of the ‘see-saw’ effect where a very warm Arctic happened at the same time as a particularly cold Antarctic.
kim (07:38:47) :
“I’ll happily discuss any one of them that you think you can refute. On your mark.”
I think you should start first, show me links/references that support your claims of lower sea levels, new Ice Age, cooling globe and how PDO cools the globe.
Thank you
@Mary Hinge (09:56:00):
Show me your links/references to empirical evidence that support further increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration will have any meaningful impact on global temperature. Please use primary material, not secondary consolidations.
Thank you.
Kim:
Roy W. Spencer, said:
>>>> A Simple Model of Natural Global Warming
As Joe D’Aleo and others have pointed out for years, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has experienced phase shifts that coincided with the major periods of warming and cooling in the 20th Century. As can be seen in the following figure, the pre-1940 warming coincided with the positive phase of the PDO; then, a slight cooling until the late 1970s coincided with a negative phase of the PDO; and finally, the warming since the 1970s has once again coincided with the positive phase of the PDO >>>>>
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Global-warming-natural-PDO.htm
FM
Mary Hinge (09:56:00) Now you are putting words into my mouth; I’ve not suggested we are headed into a ‘new Ice Age’. I’ve said that we’ll have 20-30 years of cooling from the PDO in its cooling phase and as much as a hundred years of cooling if the sun is going into a minimum, both conjectures widely supported in the literature. The UAH and RSS satellite tropospheric temperatures are dropping, the Argos buoys show oceans cooling, the Colorado University graph of TOPEX/Jason has dropping sea levels, and the PDO in its cooling phase has worldwide effect. I’ve not invented this, but you’ll have to find this stuff on your own; I’ve given you plenty of clues. Also, you maligned several of my statements in your 05:53:21 post. I have made them, now which do you want to start in to try to refute. It is sophistical to try to work around my challenge.
Thanks, Dee, there is no definitive account of how CO2 causes the temperature rise predicted by the IPCC, just the erroneous output of inadequately parameterized climate models, but you know that. Mary will find it out if she tries to satisfy your request.
==============================================
Fernando (10:44:53) Thanks, if indeed Mary Hinge has an open mind, she may learn a lot. The skeptical position is powerfully supported in the literature and each passing day of a cooling globe reinforces the message. It is the true believers in CO2=AGW who are finding the evidence for their position lacking and real empiric data damning.
=====================================
kim (07:20:59) :
Phil. (05:44:41) Look, it should be obvious, especially to you, that thinner ice following a dramatic melt is expected. Sure, this article has appeared in the usual course of events, but what it portrays is hardly news, and the import of it has been neutered by subsequent events.
What ‘subsequent events’? Winter?
Please stop ‘bitterly clinging’ to your belief that the Arctic is melting, anymore.
It’s not a ‘belief’ it’s a statement of fact based on the scientific evidence!
The ‘bitterly clinging’ in the face of evidence to the contrary is one of your traits.
The globe is cooling and freeze-up back to levels of thirty years ago is likely.
Now that’s a ‘belief’, totally unsupported by any scientific evidence
The ‘news’ is that Arctic ice is steadily thickening, and each year that fails to get below the previous year’s minimum ice extent will lead to thicker ice.
Another assertion unsupported by the facts, in fact if you’d read Giles et al. you’d find that it’s refuted there.
Phil. (10:55:07) The subsequent event was last summer’s failure to melt as much as the year before.
-The scientific evidence shows that the Arctic is freezing back up after reaching a maximum melt in the summer of 2007. Atmospheric and oceanic temperatures are falling around the world and will effect the Arctic too.
-The PDO flipped to a cooling phase suggests 30 years of cooling, which will freeze the Arctic back up, after the thirty years of warming which melted it, which was preceded by a thirty year cooling spell which froze it back up from the time earlier in the century when it was relatively melted. The action of the PDO is compelling, but not definitive, scientific evidence. It is not mere, unsupported ‘belief’.
=============================
Mary Hinge, say`s
Your almost right but the ice core proxies in the post above show that the recent global warming is the first time in recent millenia to be occuring in both hemispheres though at different rates,
You then say, Last year was a good example of the ’see-saw’ effect where a very warm Arctic happened at the same time as a particularly cold Antarctic. I would say that would leave global temps in equilibrium, take away UHI and there is no increase.
By the way you are doing a good here, anyone unsure of AGW viewing this site will be convinced it is totally flawed by your ridiculous statements that are continuously shot down by solid science and real world observations. Keep up the good work.
kim (11:57:13) :
Phil. (10:55:07) The subsequent event was last summer’s failure to melt as much as the year before.
In fact it melted more!
-The scientific evidence shows that the Arctic is freezing back up after reaching a maximum melt in the summer of 2007.
No it doesn’t where did you get that from?
Atmospheric and oceanic temperatures are falling around the world and will effect the Arctic too.
Not true, look at RSS particularly northwards of 60ºN.
-The PDO flipped to a cooling phase suggests 30 years of cooling, which will freeze the Arctic back up, after the thirty years of warming which melted it, which was preceded by a thirty year cooling spell which froze it back up from the time earlier in the century when it was relatively melted. The action of the PDO is compelling, but not definitive, scientific evidence. It is not mere, unsupported ‘belief’.
The PDO doesn’t cause cooling everywhere, in fact the N Pacific is warmer in winter during the cooling phase: http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/
Since the late 80’s there have been several short periods when the PDO index has gone negative (op. cit), it’s wish fulfillment on your part to assume that the fact that it’s gone negative now presages a long period such as that from the late 40s to the late 70s.
Phil. (13:11:07) By ice extent, last summer did not melt as much as the year before. This is the most commonly used metric. I know you are accomplished at finagling figures to make it seem as if this year’s melt was more extensive than last year, but it is sophistry, and beggars the truth.
-Last winter’s Arctic ice maximum is greater than the year before, last summer’s minimum ice extent was greater than the year before, and the freeze up this fall is ahead of the year before. That is scientific evidence.
-There does seem to be a lag before global temperatures reach the Arctic. You have not refuted that falling global temperatures will effect the Arctic.
-Oh, yes, the phase, whether cooling or warming, of the PDO seems to be strongest determinant of global temperature. Your objection about the ‘N Pacific’ does not refute my contention. It is sophistry.
========================================