Polar Albedo Feedback

Its amazing to me how many people thing the Antarctic is melting on of my favorite ways of tweaking my pro AGW coworkers is to leave the Cryosphere 30 day video running on my computer. 🙂
JG

information for you..
Snow in Vegas??
Praise Al Gore!!!
I’m so happy that most of the world has listened to him because we now see the end of global warming. All of Al Gore’s hard work has paid off. Why, things have gotten so good that global warming has completely reversed itself and it is now snowing in Las Vegas.
And just so you don’t think it is only Sin City that has been wonderfully blessed by Al Gore’s pious efforts, it has snowed in Houston, New Orleans, and Mississippi. (OK, technically it was only sleet in Mississippi).
The world has been told for the last few years that we are all going to be drowning under the antarctic ice melt, but this year is the coldest year in the last decade. Of course a look at the graph shows a scary comparison between the last 2 decades and the 1800’s. Well, there was this little thing called the “little ice age” that ended in the 1800’s, which caused lower than average temperatures.

Is this what happened last year when the ice extent was so great? Could it be that the ocean cycles are contributing to the cold? — John M Reynolds

The Antarctic ice won’t stay its pristine, high albedo white once hundreds of camera crews arrive and start stomping about on it as they strive to video a bit of ice melting.
OT, but it does look from the NCEP anomaly map that the much discussed Siberian hot spot has turned into a thermal black hole. Over 20C below the 1985/1996 average. Brrr.

CNN Meteorologist: Manmade Global Warming Theory ‘Arrogant’

The story is that ice reflects solar energy back to space but the reflection isn’t 100%. With snow on the ice, the reflection is even less. Build a snow fort and see how much light comes through.
A point that gets ignored is that when first year sea ice melts a lot of the thermal energy used to melt the ice actually comes from the sea water, not the air.
What I find perplexing is the difference in all the different graphs that show sea temps and anomalies. They just don’t correlate.
Minus 30 C this morning.

To what extent is cooling in the Antarctic reflected in the Northern Hemisphere temperatures?

Global Warming Is Caused by Computers
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2008/12/global-warming-is-caused-by-computers.html
“In particular, a few computers at NASA’s Goddard Institute seem to be having a disproportionate effect on global warming. Anthony Watt takes a cut at an analysis I have tried myself several times, comparing raw USHCN temperature data to the final adjusted values delivered from that data by the NASA computers. My attempt at this compared the USHCN adjusted to raw for the entire US:”
“Many of the adjustments are quite necessary, such as time of observation adjustments, adjustments for changing equipment, and adjustments for changing site locations and/or urbanization. However, all of these adjustments are educated guesses. Some, like the time of observation adjustment, probably are decent guesses. Some, like site location adjustments, are terrible (as demonstrated at surfacestations.org).”
“The point is that finding a temperature change signal over time with current technologies is a measurement subject to a lot of noise. We are looking for a signal on the order of magnitude of 0.5C where adjustments to individual raw instrument values might be 2-3C. It is a very low signal-noise environment, and one that is inherently subject to biases (researches who expect to find a lot of warming will, not surprisingly, adjust a lot of measurements higher).”
“Warming has occurred in the 20th century. The exact number is unclear, but we have much better data via satellites now that have shown a warming trend since 1979, though that trend is lower than the one that results from surface temperature measurements with all these discretionary adjustments.”

(OT) Is anybody nervous about President-Elect Obama’s choices of John Holden as Director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy and Jane Lubchenko as Director of NOAA?
On the surface, it seems that they might not be willing to consider the opposing viewpoint that man’s influence on global climate might be overstated and/or minimal; especially John Holden. Perhaps some of the visitors to this website are more familiar with their academic credentials and personal philosophies than I am.

Of course when they say Global….. They just mean the little office where the climate scientists are.
It’s a whole world in itself……. apparently.

Arghh, this was today’s story on Obama’s science advisers –
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28325294/
WASHINGTON – U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Saturday named Harvard physicist John Holdren and marine biologist Jane Lubchenco to top science posts, signaling a change from Bush administration policies on global warming that were criticized for putting politics over science.
Both Holdren and Lubchenco are leading experts on climate change who have advocated forceful government response. Holdren will become Obama’s science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Lubchenco will lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees ocean and atmospheric studies and does much of the government’s research on global warming.

“Basil (08:56:01) :
Steve,
What would be your response to a charge of “cherry picking” here, in using a one day map, as opposed, say, to what we see in a 365 day map like you see here?
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/map/images/rnl/sfctmpmer_365a.rnl.html
Note the red across Antartica.
Jeez, Basil! A MERCATOR PROJECTION map for polar data? Do you even have a clue, when you’re being hosed? Back away from the edge!

Hansen’s 1984 paper about expected warming of Antarctica (fig 2-4) predicted significant warming in the Antarctic, which was basically symmetrical with the Arctic.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/effects/downloads/Challenge_chapter2.pdf
The discussion below is fairly typical of how the press reports about Antarctica.
Climate change has struck Antarctica particularly hard, and the continent has not lost any of its strange appeal to those stricken by wanderlust. Worryingly, Antarctica’s atmosphere is actually the fastest-warming place in the world: Although rapid warming at the surface of Antarctica has been well-documented, even more rapid increases in mean temperature have been recorded at altitudes much higher above the continent. What’s more, it is the largest warming of its kind found anywhere on Earth.
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004763.html

OT: Using SESC sunspot numbers since June, we hit 500 spotless days.
Further to my http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/13/this-is-what-passes-for-a-sunspot-these-days/#comment-40519 comment, I started with the, “Adding up every daily blank sun for the past three years, we find that the current solar minimum has had 362 spotless days (as of June 30, 2008).” quote from the http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/08/13/spotless-days-400-and-counting/ post. I found the SESC numbers as tracked by the NOAA in their http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/indices/old_indices/ directory. From the DSD.txt files, I get the following data:
July gives 3/31 — That is there were only three days with sunspot numbers
August gives 0/31
September gives 3/30
October gives 11/31
November gives 14/30
December gives 3/19 days so far
That gives a total so far for this half of the year: 34/172
362 + 172 – 34 = 500
That gives us 500 spotless days in the past 3 years for the transition between solar cycle 23 and solar cycle 24. For 2008, their data has 235 spotless days so far for 2008. We are now only 34 days to the next milestone.
John M Reynolds

Re Ed Scott (09:59:11) :
It has long seemed to me quite ludicrous to try to take an average of the earth’s temperature in the way that we do now that we have so much computing power, yet no matter how we do it there will always be biases and inaccuracies.
Scientists currently take the average of data from geographically spread sites and plot it on a temporal axis, looking for trends. This necessitates many of the adjustments such as time of day etc.
If instead we were to plot the data from each station on a temporal axis, making only site-specific adjustments and calculate the trends, then average only the geographically spread trends…. how much difference would this make. Quite a lot I suspect.
Of course there will always be the problem with the actual number and spread of stations, such as the abundance across the inhabited world and the paucity in sparsely inhabited regions such as Siberia, and the Poles.
How do GISS, HADCRUT etc. adjust for area? (i.e. 10 stations in a state vs 10 stations in a continent) and has anyone taken issue with it?

Basil (08:56:01) :
Basil
A Mercator projection widely distorts the relative area of the poles and gives a false perception of the amount of global change to the uninformed user. What is actually a spot (the North/South Pole) is stretched out to the circumference of the world. The often used Robinson projection (National Geographic Society) is a little better but perhaps something like the Waterman projection with a separate representation of the Antarctic would provide a more truthful overview.
Regards
Michael

To Basil (08:56:01) : ‘cherry picking’
Basil, you point ou to surface temperatures at Antarctica. How many meteoroligical stations are there representing 10 million km2?
Looking at http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
I find a 0.3 Celsius below average temperature for the last eleven months.

Tropical ice will have a much greater impact on albedo than polar ice will. What has the ice been doing in the Andes the last couple of years?

Mary Hinge:
The data I am looking at shows that the ice area anomaly has indeed dropped the past couple of weeks but the ice is still greater than the past two years.

The cryosphere site shows a continuous increase in Arctic sea ice area while the ijis site showed a decline and is still below what it was two weeks ago. Cryosphere shows over 800,000 sq. Km during that time while IJIS shows a decline of about 100,000 sq. km..
As for heat loss 15% sea ice coverage means 85% open water. Unless the sun is high then that open water is going to be radiating/conducting thermal energy into the atmosphere and into space.

Dear PeteM,
I’ve spent 35 plus years in the area of biological research and forestry, and I can unequivocally assure you that there have been NO significant changes indicating the world was warming. I challenge the conclusions of your unnamed, ‘expert’ relative. Tell him or her that I am willing to debate them on that point in this forum or any other.

Steven (or Anthony)
There is an easy way to prove or disprove greenhouse warming
Just compare temperature with OLR!
Greenhouse warming works by trapping longwave energy, therefor OLR should decrease as temp increases and increase when temp decreases.
The opposite occurs if warming is caused by shortwave (Cloud albedo) forcing.
The OLR will increase as temp increases and decrease as temp decreases!
If you haven’t checked the satellite record of clouds it shows a 2-3% decrease in clouds!
cheers

Oh my yes, I do remember my days in chem lab. Putting water into a test tube, warming it over a Bunsen burner, and watching the ice form within the test tube . . . but wait, that isn’t what happened at all, now is it?
I am still waiting for when these forecasters can predict the temperature or weather 10 days hence, let along 30-50 years hence. The “global warming” models haven’t made a single prediction that was accurate in the least to date. Garbage program, garbage output.
How many times does a fortune teller have to tell you a wrong fortune before you figure out that the fortune teller is a fraud?

PeteM
“I’ve spent the afternoon enjoying a few (alcoholic) beverages with a relative who has spent 20 plus years in the area of biological research and foresty. When I asked then about whether there were significant changes indicating the world was warming (in line with MMGW) his unequivocal answer was yes.”
Just what evidence was offered during your imbibing that global warming is man-made other than exchanging anecdotes “over a few?” Global warming is only man-made in the sense that Algore/UN/IPCC/Pachauri have created it with bogus computer models and irrelevent anecdotes.
“But the idea that on average the world isn’t going to change due to increasing the concentrations of CO2 has any impact is really taking a step too far…..”
I have been searvhing for the data that shows that anthropogenic CO2 has any significant effect on the base temperature of the Earth, if there is such thing as a base temperature of the Earth other than averaging (guesstimating) the temperatures from regional and local climates. The CO2 concentration in parts per million is said to be increasing at a current rate of 2.18 ppm (Mauna Loa) and only 0.436 ppm is due to anjthropogenic sources (the DOE ratio of natural to man-made CO2 was 5.76 to 1 up to the year 2000). The idea that the total yearly increase in CO2 is due to man kind, certainly is a step to far.

Neven,
I would make the argument that so far Antarctic ice gain has had a larger effect on the radiation budget of the earth, than has ice loss in the Arctic.
The reasons for this are:
1. Antarctic ice positive anomalies have occurred during times of year when the sun is high in the sky near the solstice (such as today) whereas Arctic negative anomalies peak near the equinox in September. Once the sun sets for the autumn in the Arctic, the absence of ice has no meaningful albedo effect. Thus the Arctic anomalies are less important to the radiation budget of the earth.
2. Antarctic sea ice is at higher latitudes than Arctic ice, so the sun over the Antarctic ice is up higher in the sky. This compounds the effect from 1. The “missing” ice in the Arctic is at very higher latitudes and the sun is lower, so the amount of solar radiation which can be absorbed is also reduced. Once again, this causes Antarctic ice gain to have a more significant effect on the earth’s radiation budget than does Arctic ice loss.
I’d like to point out again that Hansen predicted major albedo loss for Antarctica (Fig 2-4) and people who claim otherwise are perhaps misinformed.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/effects/downloads/Challenge_chapter2.pdf

PeteM (12:25:56) :
“… you are repeatedly hearing a particular sceptical point of view on this forum . Very few comments here challange this view or express a view outside of that philosophy .”
Very observant of you. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that challengers can’t support their views and either go away or stay quiet.
“…a relative who has spent 20 plus years in the area of biological research and foresty. When I asked then about whether there were significant changes indicating the world was warming (in line with MMGW) his unequivocal answer was yes.”
Did the biologist say “in line with MMGW” or was that you? Given that the earth has most certainly warmed a bit that would be in line with any theory that predicts warming. It would also be in line with a theory that says that the Earth warms because of Intra Planetary Friction Induced by Solar- Andromedan Teleconnection Wars (IPFIS-ATW).

Patrick
John P.’s address to the AAAS tells us who he is and for what he stands – social engineering. We have the prospect of seeing environmentalism up close and really personal as a primary policy of the incoming administration.
Obama’s Science Advisor [Yuval Levin]
“It looks like president-elect Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor. Holdren is a professor of environmental policy at Harvard and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As Ron Bailey points out, he has been an activist on the ecological left and no friend of free markets. Perhaps more striking is his activism well beyond his own academic specialty, arguing, for instance, that scientists have a responsibility to advance the cause of the elimination of all nuclear weapons and seeking controls on population growth.”
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS:
Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being
John P. Holdren*
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5862/424 (This links to the transcript of a very long speech)
“The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is not about the advancement of science just for science’s sake. Rather, as indicated by the Association’s motto, “Advancing Science, Serving Society,” it is about advancing science in the context of a desire to improve the human condition. This mission necessarily entails attention to the social as well as natural sciences; attention to the embodiment of science in technology through engineering; and attention to the processes by which understandings from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and engineering influence–or fail to influence–public policy. All of these long-standing preoccupations of the AAAS are integral to the theme of the 2007 Annual Meeting and of this essay, “Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being.”

The Arctic as a whole is not below average. Only certain areas that are within known warm currents are below average. Other areas are above average. To state that the Arctic ice is behaving as predicted by GW models is an unfounded leap from the model to observations without understanding the nature of Arctic currents, winds, and fresh water sources.

Sorry, one more correction. I meant to say –
2. Antarctic sea ice is at lowerlatitudes than Arctic ice,

Well, no wonder the media’s focus is on the Arctic sea ice. The Antarctic sea ice doesn’t present the same foreboding image. Remember, it’s not about science but image with which to promote the AGW political movement.
Same way they play melting glacier stories. Focus on the fact they’re melting and the possible loss of the melt run-off but say little or nothing about the fact that the ground uncovered is littered with remnants of forests from several thousand years ago or man-made artifacts. All from a period well after the end of the last major ice age. To seriously consider such facts would suggest that current warming is not unusual but just another warm episode in a recurring cyle of such events.

By the way, NOAA has posted record low temperatures in Hell as of Dec. 16th. Records go back about 2000 years plus a few.

So a day is an issue but 20 years isnt? So are you saying that the current doom and gloom by the AGW crowd for 100 years in the future should be ignored because its too far out and highly unpredictable! – therefore we should not make policy decisions on it either! Oh and what model did predict the current cooling – none – even Hansens cover all bases attempt still was way off, as for most on here we trust natural cycles of the sun and earth as opposed to agenda driven hypothesis.

John Philip:
Go to Reacclimate to talk with all the global climate modlers that you would want to. That is where I learned last year that they could pull out some GCMs that did not show antartic warming. If I recall properly in IPCC AR4 the average of the models showed warming at both poles. Of course MR Gavin advised the world at that time that the only accurate model was the one that showed what They wanted it to at any time all the others are wrong. I must say that you have been doing a very good job of twisting fact. Ring that bell!

>Polar Vortex is increasing and this is thinning and spreading the sea ice?
Thompson, Solomon and Gillet have published extensively on this. A science literature search will turn up many papers (try annular mode, antarctic oscillation), or alternatively read the IPCC reports. This work goes back nearly 10 years, and is explains why the MSU shows a broad cooling trend at high southern latitudes. It also explains the massive warming of the Antarctic Peninsula (which lies north of the polar trough).
Given that this is not new, why is it not know to the sceptical experts here?
BTW Arctic sea ice is important for albedo because it survives (or at least used to) through summer. The Antarctic ice melts almost entirely in summer.

“” david (23:55:17) :
>Polar Vortex is increasing and this is thinning and spreading the sea ice?
Thompson, Solomon and Gillet have published extensively on this. A science literature search will turn up many papers (try annular mode, antarctic oscillation), or alternatively read the IPCC reports. This work goes back nearly 10 years, and is explains why the MSU shows a broad cooling trend at high southern latitudes. It also explains the massive warming of the Antarctic Peninsula (which lies north of the polar trough). “”
David,
I can’t say that I understand any of what you just said, since I haven’t read anything about the Antarctic, since the Scott expedition.
But surely there must be some less esoteric way to explain the warming of the Antarctic peninsula.
For example, on all the maps I’ve seen, most of the Antarctic Peninsula where the Larsen B ice shelf was before it broke up, lies north of the Antarctic circle, which means that part never sees 24 hour darkness, so there is available sunshine every day.
Also , just to the north of the Antarctic Peninsula lies a big land mass called South America, and every day, the south Pacific and Atlantic oceans slosh back and forth through that narrow gap, including a lot of fairly tropica surface waters that propagate down there from the equatorial regions. Indeed that westward flow out of the Atlantic, bores straight in on the Larsen B ice shelf; ansd since those waters are exceedingly rough by anybody’s standards, you get a lot of water driven under those ice shelves by wave action which constantly stresses the ifloating ice sheets.
So to me it is a miracle that they don’t break up all the time.
All that noise about the more recent wilkin Ice shelf that broke off a piece, never said word one about the adjacent piece of that ice shelf, that borke up around 50 years ago, and has grown back again like they always do.
To me, there’s no mystery about Antarctic peninsula warming; other than the mystery of why it is as cold as it is, sticking right up there above the Antarctic circle into the warmish (relatively) southern ocean..
But I’m not a skeptic expert (either one of those things) so I can’t answer yourt question on why those folks don’t know about all this.

Pamela Gray (15:35:33) :
The Arctic as a whole is not below average.

Sorry Pamela you are totally wrong, even one of the posters above acknowledges it is 10% lower than average, it is also much thinner so this summers melt could certainly be well above average.

“Nasa ducks dive under Greenland ice”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7780200.stm
and vanish

Correction, Baffin Sea. I apologize to any Baffin’s I may have insulted by not editing my post before I posted it.

Woops–Negative PDO

Received by e-mail from Dr. Walt Meiers at NSIDC
“Hi Steven,
Thanks. A couple thoughts.
The albedo of course does have an effect on the solar radiation. However, the relative impact is smaller in Antarctica than in the Arctic. There are two reasons. First, the sea ice is mostly first-year, or seasonal, ice – ice that grows and melts each summer. So while the albedo may speed up or slow down the melt, ultimately, you end up with a relatively small ice pack by the end of summer. Second, the sea ice edge is governed substantially by the location of the polar front – where the col Antarctic regime meets the warmer mid-latitude ocean waters and atmosphere. The location of this front really dominates how far the ice edge grows or retreats. There is also the effect of ocean heat, which is more important in the Antarctic. The cooler temperatures may be related somewhat to the presence of sea ice, but it’s a complex system. It’s probably more likely, due to the issues above, that the cause and effect are reversed: the cooler temperatures are helping to keep the ice around.
On another note in regards to temperatures. First, there has been warming in parts of the Antarctic, most notably the Peninsula region. I just saw a talk yesterday at the AGU meeting that indicated that all of West Antarctica has warmed over the past several decades and even East Antarctica may have warmed a bit. Now, it may be cooler at the moment, but it’s really the long-term trends that count. Long-term trends are generally fairly small in Antarctica (with the exception of the Peninsula’s large warming trend) and there is cooling in at least some of the higher elevation areas of East Antarctica. These trends are not inconsistent with climate model projections which show a delayed and slower warming trend than much of the rest of the globe due to the unique geography of Antarctica. Some of the early climate models did indicate there should be greater warming than is seen in Antarctica, but as models have improved, that is no longer the case.
walt”

Basil (05:21:32) :
“…
What’s with the judgmental animosity here? It was a simple question, in good faith…
Fair enough, you have my apology. And I will add to the cherry-picking (without distortion), citing Paul Ward’s:
http://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/science/global_warming.htm
Note: these graphics are also pre-“disappeared” copies (referring to):
Steven Goddard (08:14:57) :
“…
BTW – NASA “disappeared” their Antarctic cooling map sometime during the last couple of weeks.”
We’ll see if the primary source agencies continue to disappear good graphics, while continuing (or worse, increasing) the use of high distortion graphics…

Here are other NASA graphic showing Antarctic interior temperatures, that I could quickly find:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=7839
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8239
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8423 (high distortion)
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6502 (THERE IT IS!)

Mary Hinge
From Cryosphere Today
Bering Sea – average
Chukchi Sea – average
Arctic Basin – average
E Siberian Sea – average
Laptev Sea – average
Kara Sea – below average
Barents Sea – below average
Greenland Sea area – below Average
Baffin/Newfoundland – slightly below average
Hudson Bay – above average
Beaufont Sea – average
All of the areas that are below average sit in the warm oceanic incoming current. Jet stream patterns also push this soft edge around, sometimes compacting it towards the pole and sometimes pushing it out of the Arctic area. It stands to reason that one may make an educated guess that warm currents and jet stream patterns are keeping these few areas below average. If the entire Arctic area was warm, there would be signs of slower ice in areas that sit in the cold oceanic current. But there isn’t any evidence of this. The Arctic ice area is not one homogeneous area and to think of it as such is simplistic thinking, not scientific thinking.
Even if these other areas that are average or above average show variability from one month to the next, after the ice buildup season is well on its way, sea ice responds to oceanic current temperatures and jet stream patterns far quicker than they do to atmospheric temperature changes. A relative air temperature heat wave just softens the ice along with the warm current the ice sits in, enough so that it can be pushed and shoved into warmer waters or compacted into the cold ice edge. After the ice begins to melt in the Spring, its shape and extent is also much more sensitive to ocean termps and jet stream patterns than it is to day to day atmospheric temps. Many times, the ice doesn’t melt in the Arctic, it is pushed out and melted away from the Arctic. This past melt season experienced strong outward current flow and jet stream forces that sent the ice packing into a tropical vacation, relatively speaking, where it melting away like Frosty the Snowman.

Steven,
Thanks again for replying and thanks for copying Walt Meier’s mail here (I thoroughly enjoyed the sets of questions he answered here previously).
Sorry if I ask silly questions, I really am a nitwit when it comes to climate science. FYI I consider myself alarmed (not only because of AGW) rather than alarmist.
I think it is safe to say that an ice free North Pole in September would have little impact on the earth’s SW radiation balance, because there is essentially no incoming SW radiation. The sun is only a few degrees above the horizon, and well below the critical angle of air over water.
Would the impact on the climate also be small though? My gut says this Arctic amplification-thing could be stirring things up quite considerably if kept up. Especially if even only 10% of the whole permafrost-methane-clathrate story is true.
No doubt climate modelers have backfitted their theories to match observational evidence. yet we still hear an astonishing myriad of contradictory information from official sources. Antarctica is warming, Antarctica is cooling, ocean currents are warming Antarctica, ocean currents are cooling Antarctica, the WAIS is going to collapse, etc.
I’ll take your word on that, don’t know too much about Antarctica or WAIS (except for the ‘Katabatic’ documentary I mentioned). My interest at the moment goes out to the Arctic.
Does the spectacular swing to the right this past week mean anything? Like another data mistake or something else? I’m not reading anything about it at RC or here or Tamino. One would think both ‘alarmists’ and ‘delayers’ (I don’t like to think in groups) would be on to this thing?

Cheers Graeme (and Pamela) for the info.
No big deal then and not a mistake either. I’m very curious as to what next summer’s melting season will look like. I hope it’s all a natural cycle, though I’m not convinced yet. I think the coming years in the Arctic, more than anything else, could be quite decisive on the general perception of AGW.

Arctic Sea Ice: An Engineer’s Question
Why is a ice-free Arctic Ocean a bad thing? No answer for that one, but let me ask another: Which surface reflects the most solar energy, open sea or pack ice?
Before you answer, remember that the sun is NEVER more than 23.5-degrees above the horizon. Solar radiation is going to hit whatever surface exists in the Arctic at an acute (grazing) angle; therefore, 1) the radiation is far from vertical incidence (less heat per unit of surface area); and 2) hitting water at an acute angle means the reflection back into space is much higher than it would be for a near-vertical incidence.
The point is that solar radiation cannot cause polar heating. The heat has to come from somewhere else. Atmospheric and marine currents are the only transport mechanisms available to cause heating or cooling at the poles. The expansion of ice in the Antarctic (where there is no ocean under the ice) would lead to the deduction that marine circulation is the main cause of Arctic ice coverage variations. Why can’t the “experts” figure that out?

Pamela Gray (12:49:52) :
Hi Pamela,
I take your point about regional variations in the Arctic but to get a holistic picture you have to use values instead of a basic description. The warm ocean current point is valid, you have to remember these are anomolous variations so the immediate inference is that the ocean currents are warmer than usual. I would also agree to get a better understanding you need to look at areas in isolation, this is just common sense, but you can’t use that as an excuse to ignore the fact that the Arctic ice sheet is now at its lowest extent recorded for this time of year and all indications are for low ice extent next summer.
Do you remember the earlier posts about the ‘unprecedented freezing’, Anthony mentioned it at least four times using this as the reference http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png.
He obviously thinks it is very important (it is now a permanent link on the right)

Mary, once again I have to restate that the Arctic ice sheet is not one thing. It is several. The extent of the sheet is average, above average, or below average depending on the area. It currently is all three. So you cannot say accurately that, “…the ice sheet is now at its lowest extent recorded for this time of year”. The overall extent graph is not an accurate measure of ice extent because this kind of graph consistently hides the fact that the Arctic sheet behaves differently depending on specific areas. You would be just as wrong if you decided to average Washington, Oregon, and California into one averaged temperature data set. It is misleading to say the least, and meant to drive an agenda at worst.

Bill Brown,
You might want to consider that Antarctica currently has sea ice at close to 60 degrees latitude. The sun is actually at an angle in excess of 50 degrees above the horizon right now at those locations, so the albedo is quite important in calculating the SW energy balance.

Pamela,
I agree with you that the overall extent graph doesn’t tell the whole story, but does that mean it’s meaningless? I think the analogy you mention about averaging temperatures in Washington, Oregon and California is flawed in the sense that the Arctic regions are interconnected and together form a huge ice mass at the height of winter. Besides it’s not about an average, but an accumulation of the ice extent of all Arctic regions. Your analogy would seem to pertain more to the averaging of Arctic and Antarctic ice (ie saying that it’s alright for the Arctic to lose more and more ice every year because the same amount of ice is growing on Antarctica) , which in my view is pretty useless.
Anyway, the whole science surrounding the Arctic ice extent and why there’s a downward trend etc. is way above my head, so all I have is a few of those graphs to look at, and the JAXA one looks prettiest. 😉
I found the swing to the right rather peculiar when compared to previous years and thought it might be a glitch of some sort. It wasn’t and the swing isn’t that peculiar either, or else people would be all over it. Whether ice extent is at an all-time (recorded) low yesterday or today is iirelevant and doesn’t mean a thing. It’s what happens in summer that counts. We’ll just have to wait and see.

A week or two ago the ASMR-E sea ice extent was equal to or greater than any of the past 6 years. Now it is less than all of the past 6 years. This is the result of the 2008 line going horizontal for that period of time. In other words there has been no change in sea ice extent during that time? Watts up with that?

It’s been exceptionally warm across the north Atlantic and north Pacific. This is where ice is failing to form – http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/climate/synop.html . Indeed the whole NH has been running very warm in recent months http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2008/nov/lo-hem-nov-pg.gif.
The Arctic Ice is in big trouble – nearly all old ice gone and new ice struggling to form.

All of the perennial ice basins are already saturated with ice.
The amount of multi-year ice next summer will be a function of winds and polar drift through this winter, but so far it appears that there will be a significant increase in the amount of multi-year ice in 2009 compared to 2008.

Mary, I was clearly referring to temperature and shorter term trends. Farmers look at temperature trends in relation to how long it will take, and how expensive it will be, to prepare a field to grow something else that can survive and even thrive in an upturn or downturn trend. Farmers have to be flexible and react rapidly since many of the things we grow are very sensitive to small temperature differences. If we don’t have a diverse bag of products and a willingness to adjust to the ups and downs of temperature changes, we rapidly go out of business.
As to your contention that Anthony’s graph was okay with me back then but not now, I can only say that I am willing to learn more about what makes that graph go up and down. And in detail. So I began a study on the Arctic and found out lots of things I didn’t know. I have a curiosity that always drives me to say, “why”. Are you willing to do the same study or do you just want to stick to your one tune?

Here are the geothermal resources of Iceland. Maybe the magma does not discriminate between land and sea.
http://www.energy.rochester.edu/is/reyk/

>The graph has turned back upwards, and is just about where it is supposed to be this time of year.
The current Arctic sea ice extent and volume is not even close to average. This is F.A.C.T.
As for volcano’s, the sea ice near Iceland is near normal… http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_extent_hires.png .

david,
Arguing with you is pointless. Sea ice extent is just about where it always is this time of year. A few days ago it was at the high end of the very narrow recent range, and today it is near the low end of the range. In a few days it will probably swing back the other way. None have any statistical significance.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png
The map you linked shows this quite clearly. Please stop the FUD.

“” E.M.Smith (21:06:09) :
George E. Smith (00:22:03) :
Justin, you have to be a little careful here. See what you excerpted about sunlight being reflected by the ice.
George, did you see the link I posted that showed O3 as being down 40% at the poles and it being a significant part of the GHG profile ( 1/3 ). Have you considered what it would mean to heat loss to have 40% less ozone? 13.3% less total GHG effect ought to do something! How does the absorption spectrum of O3 relate to that of water and CO2? You’re much better at figuring this out than I am…
I’d expect that 13% more heat loss at both poles might have something to do with our present frigid weather coming from the poles… “”
E.M. ;
Without going back and refreshing, I roughly recall you raising the issue.
It seems to me that Ozone (O3) affects warming in tw different ways.
First of all, the single biggest cause of difference between the Air mass zero solar spectrum and the air mass one spectrum, is the absorption due to Ozone.. AM0 is the spectrum outside the atmosphere; AM1 is the equatorial noonday spectrum at ground level as a result of traversing one atmosphere of air.
Now at the poles and particularly over Antarctica, you never get an AM1 spectrum, because the solar path is always oblique, so the short wavelength loss from ozone is even more severe at the poles, or the polar egions in general.
Since short wavelength UV is largely respponsible for the Atomic Oxygen that forms Ozone, then you would expect lack of Ozone production during the winter midnight, and ozone holes.
One can find papers and reports from the 50s and 60s that hint at Ozone holes long before they were actually observed as such.
In the immediate post WW-II ear, the Airforce, and NASA’s forerunner, were quite concerned with radiation hazards of high altitude flying (military); and people such as Thekaekara et al did a lot of high altitude studies of solar spectra and atmosphere for that reason. In 1969 they published what to that time was the most respected value of the solar constant before satellite measurments, at 1351 W/m^2 ( 1969 I believI graduated in 1957, and we used the value 1353 when I was in school.
But what those early papers reveal, is that the color temperature of the sun, was known to have aseasonal variation, and on top of that an eratic variation (unexplained) ; but it was believed that the cause was cseasonal and other changes in the short wavelength end of the ground level solar spectrum. I’m not aware of any specific attribution to Ozone, but in light of modern knowledge one can ifer thaqt the cause was ozone variation, and probably Ozone holes which have always been with us. No I am not going to claim the CFC thesis is bogus; butt I do think it is somewhat argumentative, but there clearly were ozone holes long before their were CFCs (but not necessarily as severe).
I can tell you as a kid growing up in New zealand, I got the worst damn sunburns at the beach or ski slopes, than I have ever experienced in california, of fishing down in Baja, Sea of Cortez.
Now that ozone absorption would lead to upper atmosphere warming by direct absorption of solar energy near the peak (out to maybe 600 nm).
Then Ozone has a well known IR absorption band from about 9-10 microns’ which is pretty near the peak of the BB spectrum,. for 15 deg C, the so-called mean global temperature. The Ozone IR band is much sharper than the CO2 band for several reasons. Ozone is a thin high altitude layer, whereas the effective CO2 is a ground level thick layer, so the4 realm of the ozone is lower density, and lower temperature, so the Doppler, and collision broadening of the intrinsic Ozone absorption line is much smaller than the CO2 band at 14.77 microns, which broadens to about 13.5-16.5 microns.
The ozone band exhibits another explainable phenomenon..
The depth of the CO2 absorption band is not much dependent on the incidence angle oof observation (form outer space), sinnce it is very nearly saturated, and supposedly has a logarithmic absorption versus CO2.
On the other hand, the depth of the Ozone dip is very dependent on angle of obliquity of obsevation, and this can readlily be understood by imagining a thin laminate of ozone in a shell around the earth, and just look geometrically, how the total layer thickness varies significantly with oblique viewing from outer space (up to 80 degrees from normal incidence.
Now with modern polar orbit satellites there is no need to make ozone measurements form oblique angles since the satellite is going to go right overhead sometime. The data I mentioned is from a quite old textbook, “The Infra-Red Handbook” which predates polar orbit satellites by many years. It is largely a military handbook for weapons designers who need to understand optical signal propagation and noise sources, for guided weaponry (side-winders and such). (no I never worked on such things; but that book if you can find it, is a gold mine of infromation valuable for climate discussions, since it has the reflectance curves for darn near any kind of terrain you want to know., and atmsopheric transmission data for any range of wavelenghts of possible military significance. it was basically developed under US Navy sponsorship by a group at U of Michigan (I believe)
But long and short of it is that I would expect Ozone to exhibit lots of effects maybe good and bad related to polar climate, and specially Antarctic. I actually returned to NZ in March of 2004, which is going into their Spring, and while out fishing in Bay of Islands (north end), I once again got a nice sunburn; so it isn’t that I just have gnarled leather skin that California doesn’t bother. Next time I’ll remember the SunBlock.

Neven,
There is no question that human activity is having an impact on Arctic ice. Hansen and others have published papers in the last few years attributing a significant part of Arctic warming to soot (as much as 94%) and the Arctic yellow ozone cloud (from pollution) is also known to be causing significant warming.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2004/2004_Hansen_Nazarenko.pdf
http://www.physorg.com/news100354399.html
The point is that there is no substantive link to CO2 and Arctic ice, and people who claim so are basing their beliefs on the idea “the models predicted it.” However, the models were wrong about the other pole, so they are really no more valuable than a coin toss.

“” E.M.Smith (21:03:58) :
As for the alleged irrefutable evidence that people caused the last century’s CO2 increase, the “smoking gun” invoked by one of my critics, Dr. Michael Mann, and his fellow fearmongers at realclimate.com, the claim is based on the idea that the normal ratio of heavy to light carbon–that is, the carbon-13 isotope to the lighter carbon-12 isotope, is roughly 1 to 90 in the atmosphere, but in plants there’s a 2 percent lower C13/C12 ratio. So, observing that C13 in the atmosphere has been declining steadily though very slightly since 1850, they claim that this is due to man’s burning of fossil fuels, which are generally believed to be derived from fossilized plant matter.
OK, so both C12 and C13 are stable and they are looking for a ‘plant’ signature in burned fuel, not a decay signature. One Small Problem… C4 metabolism plants absorb more C13 than do C3 metabolism plants. Over the last 100 years we’ve planted one heck of a lot more grasses world wide than ever before. Grasses are C4 metabolism…
Have they allowed for this? If so, how? I’m not sure how one would figure out the C4 vs C3 plant population ratio of the world, and certainly don’t see how you would figure out what it was 10,000,000 years ago. “”
So E.M. ,I’m not sure I deciphered who said what in this discussion i’ve excerpted; but it does lead me to as if you are expert in this C13/C12 isotopic business; which I gather is a biological science phenomenon. Somewhere else I saw the C3-C4 metabolism thing referenced and I confess it went in one ear and out the other and hit nothing living in between. I understand the C14 thing from my days as a nuclear/atomic physicist, and sometime student of cosmetic rays. But this bio thing is all alien to me.
But if I understand the concept, bio materials (at least some) are deficient in c13; ergo decline inC13 in the atmosphere suggests fossil fuel burning.
But that raises some probably ignorant questions in me.
Are not living plants deficient in C13; so doesn’t burning of forests and or grasslands also lead to C13 deficiency. Doesn’t biodegradation of plant materials 9rotting dead trees) also lead to C13 depletion. If in this recent period of warming, and for other reasons the total green biomass of the planet has increased (as is claimed); then doesn’t that increase in total plant matter and subsequent decay, lead to C13 depletion.
If C13 deficiency as well as C14 absence in coal deposits denotes biologiccal origins for coal deposits (no brainer and of course C13 only); is there data on isotopic abundance in petroleum deposits; that would indicate that petroleum is also a biological fossil fuel; rather than simply a liquid mineral of non-biological origin?
Now who is going to argue that increasing numbers of humans have not burnt up large quantities of biological or fossil materials that are deficient in C13; How does non-depleted carbon participate in the atmospheric carbon cycle; what is its origin, and what puts it in the atmosphere.
Then; suppose we discovered a large source of usable fossil fuel, say peroleum, and it happened to also contain a sizeable amount of Argon, which the petroleum industry decided to not extract; so as we start burning the stuff, we start enriching the argon in the atmosphere . The fact that the atmospheric argon concentration is increasing, can certaiinly be regarded as proof that we are burning some of this argon enriched petroleum; But that is a far cry from asserting, that that particular source of argon enriched carbon is selectively remaining in the atmosphere.
In other words, if primordial atmospheres contained a certain C13/C12 ratio, and then we start burnigng fuels depleted of C13, the Carbon in the atmosphere DOES NOT have to increase, in order for C13 depletion to occur; it merely points out that we have two sources (at least) of atmospheric CO2 and they have different C13 content, and our continued use of the depleted one, will continue to deplete the atsmospheric C13, even if it does not increase the total atmospheric CO2.
My carbon dioxide expert at Scripps could probably tell me, but I figure you probably can too..
I don’t see C13 or C14 depletion as being evidence of human increase in atmospheric CO2; just that we use a lot of Carbon that is deficient in both those heavy isotopes.
I also do not understand the O18/O16 temperature proxy either.
I don’t see how temperature can transmute one into the other