Guest post by Steven Goddard
In past years, NSIDC has referred to “declining multi-year ice” as the problem which the Arctic faces. Mark Serreze at NSIDC forecast a possible “Ice Free North Pole” in 2008, based on the fact that it had only first year ice. This year, multi-year ice has increased and NSIDC is now referring to declining “2+ year old” ice as the problem. Note the missing age group (2 year old ice) in the paragraph below from their latest press release .
First-year ice in particular is thinner and more prone to melting away than thicker, older, multi-year ice. This year, ice older than two years accounted for less than 10% of the ice cover at the end of February. From 1981 through 2000, such older ice made up an average of 30% of the total sea ice cover at this time of the year.
Due to the record minimum in 2007, it goes without saying that there isn’t a lot of three year old ice in 2009. Maybe next year they can raise the bar to 3+ year old ice, as the multi-year ice ages one more year?
Multi-year ice has increased from 2008, up to nearly 25%. Compare multi-year ice vs. last year’s map below – upper right corner.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/040708.html
The press has picked up on the 10% figure, based on the new higher standard NSIDC has set.
Ice older than two years once accounted for some 30 to 40 percent of the Arctic’s wintertime cover and made up 25 percent as recently as 2007.
But last year it represented only 14 percent of the maximum. This year the figure fell to 10 percent.
Note too that ice extent is nearly back to normal and has not declined significantly from the winter maximum.
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I respect Dr. Meier as a Cryosphere Scientist. What I have difficulty with is his “correlation” with facts not in evidence, such as man-made global warming and the greenhouse “effect.” If such an “effect” does indeed exist, it is an atmospheric effect. The analogy is closer to the Earth being in a vacuum rather than in a greenhouse.
The clincher is in his admitting that he cannot prove the correlative link.
————————————————————-
Scientist Links Melting Polar Ice to Greenhouse Effect but His Group’s Own Research Shows Otherwise
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=46203
A scientist who tracks levels of ice and snow in the Arctic Ocean told CNSNews.com Monday that there is a “correlation” between the receding ice in the Arctic Sea and man-made global warming caused by the greenhouse effect.
But Dr. Walter Meier, a cryosphere scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., admits he can’t prove that the link is cause-and-effect.
So what was causing global warming 700 years ago?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/06/arctic-sea-ice-warning
Ed Scott (13:54:19) :
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is responsible for providing the hobgoblin of global warming.
Well, what can you expect from an organization that is ‘not functioning properly’ ….
IPCC ‘not functioning properly’, claims new report
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/31/ipcc-police-complaints-investigation
sorry, wrong IPCC. I shall read things more closely in the future….
From the Catlin site:
“In Washington, where NASA held its media briefing, scientists who track Arctic sea ice cover from space announced that this winter had the fifth-lowest maximum ice extent on record. The six lowest maximum events since satellite monitoring began in 1979 have all occurred in the past six years.”
To my simplistic mind, if the ice melt was accelerating each year, then each new year would deliver a measurement of the “lowest maximum ice extent”. If this is the fifth lowest, and the six lowest were in the last six years, then the implication is that the ice extent is INCREASING over the last six years.
Um… so, how does one define “thin” when speaking about arctice sea ice that is meters thick? What constitutes “thin”?
I am going to take great pleasure in laughing at the NSIDC folks in May and June as the 1st year ice fails to melt at the alarming rate they are predicting. The polar area is staying colder this spring and that will greatly slow the melt rate. So far, all of the melting has been near Nova Scotia and in the sea of Okhotsk, which has nothing to do with the arctic basin…
NSIDC: “How vulnerable is the ice cover as we go into the summer melt season? To answer this question, scientists also need information about ice thickness. Indications of winter ice thickness, commonly derived from ice age estimates, reveal that the ice is thinner than average”
In short:
Indications derived from estimates.
Meaning:
We have no information about the true ice thickness and no measured data.
I start to appreciate the Catlin crew and their work. I will be keen to see their measured data. (If they can make the same trip every year, in the same position and at the same time of the year for the next 10 or so).
Thanks for posting this. I had exactly the same thoughts but was busy at work and couldn’t do anything about.
Thanks for calling out the knavery.
What was that TV show where one of the hotel staff characters announced “De-ice, de-ice” every time a jet landed? Oh, never mind.
I read a story today in Wall St Journal about the “decline in multi-year ice” discussed above and what jumped out at me was the blithe assurance that the satellite survey was accurately measuring not only the area of ice but its thickness, to arrive at a volume estimate. What kind of satellite instrumentation is reading the surface of the ice, and the lower border of the ice where it floats on the underlying water? What kind of roughness factor is there in that gemisch, so that a reading of “smooth” ice in one location is not over-applied to the entire surface (which I believe is both very uneven and constantly shifting to create more or at least different levels of roughness as leads open and close, and pressure ridges form and disappear)? How many measurements are in fact made by the satellites and how well do their estimates correlate with the ground truth of area, and certainly of thicknesss? From this excellent blog it’s my impression that thickness measures are few and far between; may (because roughness is so variable) not be representative of much; may (because the ice is always drifting hither and yon) ditto not be representative of much. Sorry to be so confused but I am trying to get a clear and coherent picture of this entity called “Arctic Ice” and right now it’s too variable: by time, by location, by changing and imprecise methods of measurement. Help?
Thanks for this post. I read in The Times yesterday that there was great concern that Arctic sea ice was the 5th lowest on record. Since the record began in 1979, I assumed that being 5th lowest out of 30 wasn’t really worth becomming to agitated about. Surely if sea ice were decreasing year on year as they claim, it should be claiming the record every year?
Did you all catch THIS at the very end of the article? :
” . . . This winter, some second-year ice survived the 2008 melt season only to be pushed out of the Arctic by strong winter winds. . . . since the end of September 2008, 390,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles) of second-year ice and 190,000 square kilometers (73,000 square miles) of older (more than two years old) ice moved out of the Arctic.”
Doesn’t this indicate that it’s a mechanical shoving rather than rising temperatures that’s caused the old ice to disappear?
The animation at the tail-end shows it all.
Joesph: And the current ice area is 28% over the 1979-2000 average for this date.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
Odd that this does not make the news. Very odd.
Steven Goddard (14:36:51)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/06/arctic-sea-ice-warning
What’s interesting about this link is the video showing the loss of “old” ice. If you watch the progression, there is little disappearance of old ice within the Arctic basin and a tremendous outflow into the straight between Greenland and Iceland where it presumably melts in warmer waters. There seems to be a bigger influence of currents rather than atmospheric convection in this graphic. What would be interesting is what these currents are and has it changed in the recent past and what the future projections might be.
If it is currents, what could mitigation strategy of lower CO2 possibly achieve to change the currents?
Ron de Haan (14:28:02) :
“Who wants to be represented by a Government of liars, frauds and cheats.”
Maybe we always have, Ron, but in times past, the newspapers weren’t part of the government cabal. Now we have even more persuasive media formats, and a more ignorant electorate. No checks-and-balances, no pursuit of truth, and most of all, no more statesmen, just political hacks from any party.
I miss Everett Dirksen.
RE: Ron de Haan (14:28:02) :
**I don’t know if any of you has watched CNN today.
There was an extensive report about the collapse of the ice bridge followed by Hillary Clinton stating the effects of Global Warming in the Antarctic region were so obvious now that we had to act immediately.
NSIDC feeding from the same trough keeps the hoax about the melting arctic alive.**
Expect to see any ice breaking off as news if the Arctic ice continues to increase.
Reality check: Isn’t this what you would expect for the end of the sun’s modern maxima? Since it ended in late 2005, the Arctic now has about 30 years to rebuild multi-year ice. I wonder when the multi year ice will cross back over the mid point. For the very first time, we have the instruments in space, and we should be able to measure that time point, I would guess probably within the next 20 years.
Do they have any satellite data for the last 1000 years? ^_^ I would assume that it would show how the volume of multi-year ice came and went, and clarify where we are in that cycle.
30 years seems like a real short period to try and make observation conclusions from. Note the record keeping started in 1979. And note that the media only uses the part ‘on record’. Context is everything with dealing with alarmism.
I think they will strongly “resist” any new data that will show more than likely that NH ice will be on its way back to normal this or next year. Actually ALL “revisions” of BOTH NH and SH ice data have been to exagerate the melting. Fortunately, records have been kept of these changes
http://mikelm.blogspot.com/2007/09/left-image-was-downloaded-from.html
Anyone out there who observes this “phenomenom” is invited to post there to keep the B####ds honest as they say LOL
At this site:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/satellite/index.uk.php
Choose “Arctic Ocean” on the pull down menu under “Geographical Domain”
Then compare the Sea Ice to the picture at CT here:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
Now, why is there such a discrepancy?
You’re too generous. Raise the bar to 3+ year old ice? As I commented yesterday on the Mt. Redoubt post, “This AP story ( http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D97D27280&show_article=1&catnum=0 ) is based on a discussion on the NSIDC website ( http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ ). It seems illustrative of confirmation bias. In the past the stories were all about first year ice and how fragile it is. Now, after a year in which it the sea ice recovered a bit, it seems we are being told that it’s even two-year-old ice that’s fragile. What’s next? Ice that’s less than 5 years old is in danger? Anything to keep on message about melting ice and the doomsday that awaits.
The other question is about the profession of journalism — or rather, the distorted caricature that passes as journalism these days. Why wasn’t the change in message used in the NSIDC posting noticed and questioned? Even if a journalist is convinced about AGW, he should still be questioning; that’s his job, not advocacy for his personal beliefs.
Arn,
The Arctic always loses a lot of ice to wind blowing towards the North Atlantic – that is why there is never much ice more than five years old.
“So what was causing global warming 700 years ago?”
That would be the medieval warm period. Actually, it appears that climate has been in a general cooling trend with each warm period a little cooler than the preceding one. Roman warm period warmer than Medieval warm period, for example. Or put another way, it appears that for the past 2000 years we don’t quite recover as much from each cooling period.
Alex (14:01:10) :
The only change I could see is that they slid the SC-24 maximum back a month (from Jan to Feb 2013), and lowered it by two-tenths of a spot. The thing that jumps out though is a change in the 95% and 5% confidence lines, from this:
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e7/niteowl496/ssn_predict_2009_03.png
to this:
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e7/niteowl496/ssn_predict_2009_03.png
The Marshall website does say that “As the cycle progresses, the prediction process switches over to giving more weight to the fitting of the monthly values to the cycle shape function. At this phase of cycle 24 we now give little weight to the curve-fitting technique of Hathaway, Wilson, and Reichmann Solar Physics 151, 177 (1994). That technique currently gives highly uncertain (but small) values.”
I don’t pretend to understand the details of how the “cycle shape function” differs from the “curve-fitting technique”, but they appear pretty confident that Cycle 24 is far enough along to make the change now. That is, if the minimum was indeed in 11/2008 like they’ve predicted.
Henry Phipps (15:55:21) : I miss Everett Dirksen.
So do I. !!!
Sorry, second graph should have been this:
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e7/niteowl496/ssn_predict_2009_04.png