Arctic Sea Ice Increases at Record Rate

I am sorry it has taken a little while to check the archives.
I am only too aware of the tendency of scientists to discount historical record upon one pretext or another where it does not agree with currently fashionable scientific beliefs.
For instance when I was young, a long time ago, the eyewitness accounts of the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii where much discounted by vulcanologists even though their predecessors of fifty years before based much of their wok on Pliny. It was not until they could see on film what happened beneath hydrogen bombs that they began to change their views back again: and the very accurate records of the Mount St. Helens eruption convinced them that those ancient eye witness accounts were, within their limits, very accurate indeed.
It happens that we have detailed recorded data on the sea ice extent in the Arctic going back the 1750’s from the records of the British and Russian Admiralities. The Russians were interested because they lacked a warm water port, the British by the possibilities that the Northwest Passage might open giving access to the Pacific and beyond with all the possibilities of trade that offered.
Early navigation was fairly primitive and did not normally extend beyond coastal waters although the Polynesians crossed the Pacific. Regular and reasonably safe ocean voyages did not become possible until technology developed new types of instruments and ships, notably the Chinese Junk and the Viking Longship.
We do not know whether the Chinese reached the Arctic ocean or whether the Vikings explored the Northwest Passage: the only written accounts of these voyages were not contemporary so they may be legendary.
But they were so powerful and important that the British went on looking for the Northwest passage until cheap steam navigation made it largely irrelevant.
We do know from contemporary accounts that the Vikings reached and began to settle Greenland at the same time as native American did so from the other side as it were: and that the two fought each other with raids and battles until both were driven out presumably by increasing cold.
For instance we know from contemporary written accounts that the Vikings began to abandon their settlements in Greenland from about 1200 onwards because as one writer observed the world is turning colder: and we also know that by 1250 the sea ice had advanced so far south that the Viking Shipmasters on passage from Iceland to Greenland were forced to sail much further south than before and so the voyages took much longer and required increased quantities of stores.
Form the 1750’s the data is much more reliable and whilst to modern eyes the measuring methods are rudimentary and the gaps in the observations quite large it does form a continuous record from which we may deduce the following:
A] That the Arctic ice has been in slow but steady retreat for over two hundred years. From that it is reasonable to assume that there has been a gradual warming of the Arctic regions. We do not know why or how.
B] That the extent of the sea ice can fluctuate with remarkable speed year on year but that overall, despite a trend of gradual but steady decline, it shows alternate phases of growth and retreat with each phase typically lasting between thirty and forty years. Again we do not why or how.
So I hope the above is clear. And when I said the current observations are nothing to get excited about I meant it.
But everyone is excited of course not least because some proponents of an elaborate supposition, I hesitate to call it a theory, about the climate hold it up as proof of their assertions. Ho hum.
Moreover modern technology alllows us to observe the ice extent from day to day in almost real time: and modern computer power permits us to perform complex statistical analyses at the touch of a button.
Nothing wrong with all of this, it is a wonderful advance in technology although sometimes I am a little bit nostalgic about the days when we did it with a slipstick.
And of course today information is more widely and quickly available than ever before, again on balance a good thing I think. So many people are very interested in this topic and eager to contribute their happenceworth.
Again the wider the debate the better and if you think such debate in the groves of academe is serious, indeed grave and stately all I can say I is you have never seen just how poisonous academic disputes and politics can be.
Oh and if you fondly imagine that somehow detailed statistical analysis of some limited sample of events the mechanism of which you know little or nothing can detect whether the event is significant, random or cyclical and thus predict what is going to happen do drop me a line. I have a wonderful investment product I would like to sell you.
Think of how much money you could make using it by gambling on climate change as advocated above.
Kindest Regards.

a jones (13:22:26) :
All I can say is bravo. Extremely concise, and well-reasoned. I’ve saved a copy of it for inspiration purposes.

Well I mean captured/life-sequestered Carbon, of course. Like I said. I make pictures, not clearly reasoned posts.

George E Smith says:

So Steven Chu is Nobel Prize Laureate; just like Al Gore, and a physicist;

Not at all. Steven Chu has a real Nobel Prize. Gore has one of the pretend prizes that were not established by Alfred Nobel.
In my book that makes Chu much more worthy of my respect, even though I think he is mistaken and simply following the herd on the AGW issue.

DJ I am still awaiting your review of basic sea ice behavior with testable mechanisms. The noaa web sites you have in your posts indicate warming and ice melt. No one here disagrees with that. But your web sites do not state this is because of CO2 or soot. In fact, in several instances the jet stream and wind patterns on ice packing and melt are proffered as reasonable mechanisms.
I have spent study time to look into sea ice behavior. I am waiting for your feedback on what you have studied.

quoting P Folkens
“recent anthropological work in northern Greenland have revealed Eskimo settlements and ancient sea shores that show a sea level more than a meter higher 800-1000 years ago compared with now.”
Does this imply that 800-1000 years ago the sea level was a metre higher evrywhere?
How does this compare with the Roman harbours on the south coast of England (of 2000 years ago), I was told as a child that silting had caused them to be now inland or strangely elevated ?
Sorry – could be a totally silly red herring.

attn Nic Lonsdale
Not at all it is a perfectly proper question and I will attempt to answer it to the best of my ability.
In theory sea level should be constant around the globe, but until recently this idea was the subject of great dispute until the cutting of the Suez canal between two seas showed it was essentially correct.
But the sea is subject to waves and mean sea level is affected in the short term, days, weeks or months, by the winds which can pile up water in enormous quantities, and by the local pressure of the atmosphere which can depress or increase the level significantly for years or more.
Similarly you might imagine that the ripples in water or the waves in which you paddle which can grow into mighty breakers are local events but even the tides themselves are waves driven by the gravitational forces of the heavenly bodies and the rotation of the earth. Although close to the equator they travel at around a thousand miles an hour you do not perceive them as a wave, merely a local rise and fall in sea level. Moreover they do not affect seas largely closed off from the oceans such as the Baltic where the tidal range is a few inches. Whereas off the West Coast of Ireland it is tens of feet.
So measuring mean sea level is a hard thing to do and up until now the best method we have are tidal gauges, But these have only been around for a couple of hundred years. Moreover they are subject to the fact that the land can and does rise or fall, over hundreds of years.
Within the limitations we have of measuring mean sea level we can, with a reasonable degree of certainty estimate it has been rising by about 2 mm a year for the last thousand years: in the last twenty years we have had satellite date some of which suggest this may have increased to 3mm a year but it is not clear whether this is true, or due to errors in measurement or local barometric effects.
Similarly due to their geology the East and South coasts of England suffer from relatively rapid rates of erosion, deposition and sinkage. Within the last six hundred years once great ports such as Dunwich or Rye have been left high and dry but this has little or nothing to do with mean sea levels.
If mean sea level continues to rise at the current rate we might expect it to be between two and three hundred mm higher by the end of the century.
So I hope this answers your question.
Kindest Regards.

Pamela Gray
‘One thing is for sure. If summer melt ever returns to normal and ice build-up remains at the current pace, we should see lots of above average Arctic sea ice year round. It therefor appears reasonable to hypothesize that Arctic sea ice buildup depends not on the winter season, but on the summer season. ‘
I suspect that there must be a natural limit to arctic ice area simply because it doesn’t stay dark for so very long once you get out of the Arctic Circle, hence limiting summer ice latitudes pretty permanently short of extreme cooling.
Volume, however, I tend to agree with you. Key there is getting the measurement mechanisms set up. I think various projects are looking to start doing that now – monitoring that for 100 years will be very helpful.
40 year wind cycles: I suspect you will find a lot of 25 – 70 year cycles operating through multiple climatic parameters – I had a look at NCDC annual data for precipitation and temperature for US and there are clear cycles operating across those lengths in some, but by no means all US states. These overlap:
e.g.
California 1910 – 1975 cold; 1980 onwards hot.
Washington 1920 – 1985 cold; 1985 onwards warm.
Colorado 1903 – 1930 cold; 1931 – 1960 warm; 1964 – 1990 cold; 1990 onwards warm.
Florida 1960 – 1988 cold; 1989 onwards warm.
Minnesota 1912 – 1939 dry; 1977 to present wet.
Pennsylvania 1900 – 1930 dry; 1970 to present wet.
That’s a very crude first pass data examination.

Perhaps it is simply the halocline or layer of fresh water from the previous thawing. Since sea ice is low in salt the resulting melt water floats above the saltier sea water slowly absorbing salt. Since salt depresses the freezing point the fresher water freezes at a higher temperature and results in more ice at higher temperatures . One would expect to see more “sea “ice for awhile , then taper off if warming continues and temperatues rise .