Guest Post by Steven Goddard
The Catlin Arctic Survey has generated quite a bit of discussion, more because of the difficulties they have faced than because of the scientific merit of their expedition. Their home page is covered with testimonials about the importance of measuring “ice decline” and raising “climate change awareness.”
Normally a scientific experiment will start out with a neutral approach, where the conclusions are derived from the data, rather than arriving at conclusions prior to attempting to collect data. The appearance of presumption presented on their web site that they are measuring “ice decline,” could easily be interpreted to be putting the cart before the horse.
It is also difficult to understand how they could be measuring “ice decline” from a single set of data points taken at minus 40C, measured over an eight week period.
Are they going to come back next year and measure again? Not likely, and even if they did the ice would not be in the same place next year – as it is blown around by the wind. There is little question that the ice will continue to thicken over the next few weeks, as it normally does not start to melt near the pole until late June or early July. Fortunately we do have an objective and consistently reliable data source to work with, from that same region.
The US Army keeps a set of buoys on the ice which continuously monitor ice thickness, temperature and location year round. These buoys maintain themselves with a minimum of trauma, twittering, publicity, rescue expeditions and frostbite – and are normally able to provide more than one year of data.
The Google Earth map below shows the attempted Catlin route in green markers, and the Army buoys in yellow. The buoys are marked with approximate thickness of the ice, which I estimated based on the water depth where the temperature rapidly drops below the freezing point of seawater (minus 2C.)
As an example, I estimated the thickness at buoy 2007J as 3.5 metres, based on the graph below. Above -350 cm, the water temperature drops off quickly below -2C, which means that it is frozen.
http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/buoy_plots/2007J.gif
All five buoys show water temperatures indicating ice thickness in the range of 3-4 metres. Catlin is attempting to take another 10,000 or so measurements on the shifting, moving ice they are trying to travel across. While that data may be useful in understanding the local behaviour of the ice, it likely will provide little information about long-term ice trends, unless the same measurements are taken on a consistent basis over many years. You can also see in the 2007J graph above that the ice has thickened at least half a metre since March, 2008.
In most fields of science, that is considered an increase rather than a “decline.”
From the Army web site:
Data policy: We encourage the use of all data on this web site. Please reference any data use as:
Perovich, D.K., J.A. Richter-Menge, B. Elder, K. Claffey, and C. Polashenski, Observing and understanding climate change: Monitoring the mass balance, motion, and thickness of Arctic sea ice, http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/
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While the publicity stunt goes forward in the Arctic, there is a another expedition under way in the Antarctic:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gnQ9kfWprsv2UfJHcqCZ6VJ6FfsQD972FNM80
Interesting account of difficulties of _serious_ scientific research. Although the article closes with the obligatory speculation on global warming….
Here is a curious news item regarding ice on the Great Lakes that seems to fly in the face of recent events.
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2009Mar23/0,4670,SCIGreatLakesLessIce,00.html
Does this make sense to any one when just a few days ago we were discussing the fact that lake ice was much higher than recently and Lake Michigan was nearly frozen over?
You’d think that the near freeze over would at least be mentioned in a story like this if the reporter had a clue or was remotely interested in giving a straight forward analysis of the current ice conditions on the lakes.
Larry
I work for a government agency. We are about to get a pile of money to study carbon neutral fuels that will reduce the AGW, so of course all the scientists “support” AGW on a professional level, yet we all doubt AGW is real, why, the claims of are unreal. The variations in the measurement coupled with the uncertainty make no sense. As a scientist whose job it is to measure things I can not believe the degree of accuracy that the AGW advocates are claiming for the measurements preformed. I will ask some simple questions. When is the last time all of the thousands of thermometers have had their ice points checked much less a calibration. What happens to the data after an expensive expedition and you find flaws in you collecting techniques? Do you mine the junk data for gems or do tell the sponsor, oops, sorry I just wasted 50 million dollars? When citing a soucre, have you really examed the data or do you just assume the conclusion are true? This type of citing has lead to an inbred circular proof. Take for example the acidification of the oceans, you will see thousands of articles citing the “fact” that the ocean is increasing in pH. There will be a reference to the 1751 levels. The 1751 level is a calculation preformed Mark Z. Jacobson from Stanford as found in JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 110 D07302 on an assumed CO2 level to validate his models. I can hear them now “Heck I have two points that agree for the historical data, hence the future predictions must be true, now fund my research….”
I do have to say I feel a little sorry for the guys freezing on the Ice. They actually believed that an artic warming meant that it was warm. They should have read about Franklin’s expeditions in the 1800’s.
Allan 22 40 11
I also work for a govt agency and am equally aghast at the precision given to sea level rises. There is little real world evidence of any noticeable increase let alone one on the scale imagined by the IPCC.
I frequently complain in this forum of the reliance we place on the concept of global temperatures, let alone our believing we have enough objective evidence to parse it to fractions of a degree back to 1850.
Tonyb
There is this from the National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090406-sea-ice-younger.html
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Arctic ice continued its decline this winter, with hearty old ice increasingly being replaced with quick-to-melt young ice, according to a new report by NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
This winter’s maximum Arctic sea ice extent was 5.85 million square miles (15,150,000 square kilometers)—about 278,000 square miles (720,000 square kilometers) less than the Arctic average between 1979 and 2000.
“That’s a loss about the size of the state of Texas,” said Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.
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How does the layman make sense of all the conflicting claims?