NSIDC Raises The Bar

Adam from Kansas (14:14:26) :
Look at the maximum extent graph for the various suppliers in this post. Notice how CT “goes off the reservation” in 2006. Even though they come up with different amounts the deltas are consistent except for CT. I don’t trust their extent data anymore.

OFF TOPIC
I dunno about arctic ice, but there is fresh snow tonight on my lawn in Montreal, QC, Canada… 🙂
The French have a saying:
“in April, you will not uncover yourself by one thread;
in May, do as you please;
in June, dress with almost nothing”
“En avril, ne te découvre pas d’un fil ; en mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît ; en juin, tu te vêtiras d’un rien”
For the most part of my adult life, I considered this some sort silly saying, because it rhymes in the French saying. April never required too warm clothes, winter was over. But for the two last years, the saying seems to be holding again.
I wonder when that expression was first coined.

Apparently ice retreat was so extensive during the MWP that it caused an entire race of highly cold-adapted people to disappear. Read up sometime on the Dorset people and their demise. These people hunted seals with spears and did not have boats or bow and arrow technology. The Inuit and Thule entered the territory as the ice retreated and the Dorset disappeared. It was probably all a result of Viking SUVs driving around Greenland.

crosspatch (16:47:05) : “. . . Or put another way, it appears that for the past 2000 years we don’t quite recover as much from each cooling period.”
Don Easterbrook claims “The climatic fluctuations over the past few hundred years suggest ~30 year climatic cycles of global warming and cooling, on a general rising trend from the Little Ice Age cool period. ”
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~dbunny/research/global/geoev.pdf [ p. 23 ]
Note the “on a general rising trend”. He is working on a different time scale than your statement. Interesting!

This is perhaps a naive question, but…
…how exactly do you determine whether ice is 1 year old or 2 years old and what is the range of measurement error on that?
I love the psychological sleight-of-hand with the bright red and yellow colors. Its the equivalent of publishing a map of the Sahara in dark blue or purple.

Any reversal of previous trends are what, supposed to turn around overnight? Go back to normal within the blink of an eye, a white-gloved finger lightly tapped against of Ol’ St’ Nick’s nose? A jennie’s crossed arm head nod? Samantha’s magic (and charming) facial grimace? The wave of a wand? The media is clueless. And those scientists who blab to the media prematurely in order to get the next grant are to blame. May they all lose fingers and toes to frostbite. It will be a good and proper reminder of your job and how you screwed up.

Walter Meir has his own website which posts his full 18 years fo experience, mostly as an aerospace engineer, now turned climate scientist.
I was disturbed in AGAIN opening my daily paper and seeing another alarmist headline from Reuters: “Arctic Sea Ice continues to shrink”.
So I wrote Walter Meir with a fairly respectful letter about how to present data as an optimist versus a pessimist as follows:
Mr. Meir,
I am sure you are a well meaning scientist. But just like the old saying about perception: one man will see a glass half empty, and another will see it half full.
I am an engineer who works with data and numbers. I have done so for 33 years professionally, and 40 years if you count the fact that I have been designing since I was 14 years old. So I know how to present data and skew results to present results with optimism or pessimism with simple “steering” of my presentation during peer review.
Last year, the NSIDC was claiming that Arctic ice was “very fragile” because of the summer of 2007 melt down and there was such a loss of “multi-year ice”. It surprised you all at the NSIDC, when in the following winter, the ice actually recovered, despite not much “multi-year” ice in many areas from the previous summer. This recent story from April 6th says the same thing, again, in sort of an alarmist fashion.
To me, an old ice cube in my freezer, if frozen completely, is pretty much the same as a new one. And indeed, in the winter of 2007/2008, there was a surprising recovery of sorts. And this winter (2008/2009) there was even more of a recovery than last year in the Arctic. The decline was listed as -11% per decade last year, and now MAGICALLY, it is now only -2.7% per decade on your trend charts. On the other side of the Earth, the Antarctic is now trending up at +4.7% according to your monthly charts, and just a month ago it was only +2.8%.
So what did we get from you in my newspaper today, Mr. Meir ? Headline: “Arctic Ice Continues to Shrink” (Reuters). If it were me, I would have foregone the few minutes of media attention you got and you might have said: “Trend Data Shows the Arctic is Making a Fragile Recovery the Past Couple Years”. Or perhaps “Global Ice Loss Lessens”.
Conclusion Equation: Walter Meir = “Half Empty” = Supporter of the IPCC conclusions = Not an unbiased scientist.
A few days ago, I used the published NSIDC data (despite some flawed and missing numbers), to calculate the GLOBAL sea ice trend. As of last week, global ice is above the 1979-2000 “average”. Global sea ice area for the past 30 years of satellite data is trending down by only -1.1% per decade based upon the NSIDC data tables. And who knows if the trend will reverse due to the low solar activity these past years as well as ocean current circulation patterns. But there are only 30 years of 350 satellite data points out of the thousands of years the past centuries of true history of the Arctic.
We have no real long term data about ice area…and we only have sketchy records of the USS Skeet coming up in 10 places near the Arctic pole starting in the late spring in the 1950s.
And, there is my constant gripe that you folks think 1979-2000 is some holy grail of average ice area and extent. What if “average” throughout the recent centuries is more like, um say, 1999-2009? Data is the data, but the NSIDC cherry-picked the “average” as 1979-2000, as if it was the holy grail of ice averages. If I may be so bold: that is very assumption-based science = bad reporting of data. The Arctic ROOS site does not throw away nearly 30% of the data as does the NSIDC.
So, can Walter Meir put on some optimist glasses for a while and say, maybe, just maybe, the Arctic is slowly recovering from a normal melt cycle ?
Mike Strong

“It would nice to know the salinity values for sea ice by year to fully understand the implications of this subject. ”
That varies with year. The amount of salt that works out of the ice is pretty much a function of the amount of sunlight it gets. If you have an unusually cloudy summer, you get less salt worked out of the ice. Now there would be a general range of what is typical, but that will change depending on where the ice was when it aged and the conditions at that location. There is no set “2 year old ice contains X% salt” chart. It will also depend on the salinity of the water when the ice formed. The salinity of the Arctic Ocean itself varies from year to year.

NBC was hyping the latest reduction in polar sea ice Monday evening. Imagine for a moment that they are miraculously right and the Arctic ocean completely cleared of ice this summer (or sometime soon).
What do you get?
Well, at such a small at such a sun angle (<23.5deg), there is not that much solar heating, but all that new open water (and a little solar heat) adds up to an increase in water vapor feeding into the atmosphere.
More moisture in the atmosphere means there will be more clouds which reflect sunlight and shade the surface. If that moisture is precipitated in the cooler northern parts of the Eurasian and North American land masses, it will likely be in the form of snow, which increases surface reflectivity. In both cases, the result is a cooling.
I think that is called a negative feedback.
If there is a danger from an ice-free Arctic Ocean, it is that this negative feedback is a precursor to our next (overdue) Ice Age…

The IPCC not functioning properly article refers to a police organization in England as far as I can tell and has nothing to do with the IPCC climate organization. I noticed this on Icecap yesterday. I assume the automatic retrieval system for that blog simply picked up the IPCC acronym.

Well if they are going to use age as measure of anything, then I’m more worried about the age and maturity of the President of the United States of America, than the age of the sea ice 😉