Guest post by Steven Goddard
From The Washington Post :
According to the University of Illinois, Antarctic sea ice area is nearly 30% above normal and the anomaly has reached 1,000,000 km2. You could almost fit Texas and California (or 250 Rhode Islands) inside Antarctica’s excess sea ice.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
According to NSIDC, over the last 30 years Antarctic sea ice extent has been growing at a rate of nearly 5% per decade, and set a record maximum last year.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/s_plot.png
And as you can see in the NSIDC image below, some Emperor Penguins have an extra long walk to their nesting ground – due to excess ice in the Weddell Sea and around West Antarctica.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_daily_extent.png
Well fed polar explorers, dressed properly for the cold climate
Sadly though, biologists using computer models have forecast that some Penguins are headed for extinction due to loss of Antarctic sea ice. Maybe that gives the males something to think about as they huddle in -70C weather all winter long, trying to keep from freezing to death or dropping their eggs. I suggest a Catlin-like expedition to the South Pole for biologists.
Male Emperor Penguins huddling to stay warm
The 30% excess of ice has not been widely reported, but there has been lots of talk in the press the last couple of days about ice breaking off the Wilkins Ice Shelf – the broken area being about one pixel in the NSIDC image above. Looking at the Wilkins picture below, I’m having a very tough time seeing any evidence of melting around the fractures, or any evidence of water pooling on the surface. Normally, such fractures are caused by tensile or shear stress, likely due to a change in currents. Ice melts from the edges towards the center, and that ice is very thick – up to 200 metres. Blaming the clean fractures seen below on warming and melting seems highly questionable – at best. I suggest bringing some actual structural and mechanical engineers into the discussion – how’s that for a novel idea in the AGW world?
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WilkinsIceSheet/images/wilkins_aerial_photo_bas.jpg
Meanwhile in the Arctic, sea ice area is about 500,000 km2 below normal, which means that global sea ice area (Arctic + Antarctic) is about 500,000 km2 above normal. You could fit Dr. Hansen’s home state of Pennsylvania plus Al Gore’s home state of Tennessee plus Gordon Brown’s Scotland plus Dorothy’s Kansas inside the excess global sea ice area. Sounds like a real global meltdown, doesn’t it?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
Perhaps we should be worried – about those poor penguins struggling across an extra 200 miles of ice.
Early fall in Antarctica at the link below. i monitored this periodically during our winter, their summer, it warmed up to zero once, was below zero the rest of the time.
http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/NZSP.html
Temperature -88 F (-67 C)
Windchill -119 F (-84 C)
Two questions.
If the Antarctic ice keeps increasing at the current rate, how long will it be before the whole world is covered in ice?
Why is it ok for Al Gore to take a short term trend and extrapolate it ad absurdum but hen I do it it just sounds silly?
This is probably a stupid question, but it is based on the definition of “sea ice”. For instance, this shelf that people are talking about breaking off –is it still “sea ice” before it breaks off? Is it “sea ice” only after it breaks off? I’m just wondering if “Anarctic sea ice” increases when a shelf breaks off the continent and goes on walk about?
Whenever I hear Algore or one of his acolytes doing their best Cassandra imitation on the impending disappearance of ice in the Arctic, I’m always left with the same question. So what? From a quick scan of the graphs it appears to me that, between the Arctic and Antarctic, the planet has been losing and recreating an area of sea ice about 3 times the size of the continental United States every year and probably has been since long before we were paying any attention to it. Since this is occurring in a climate that the AGW crowd seem convinced is the best of all possible worlds, what exactly is the nature of the tragedy that will befall us in the unlikely chance that that range expands by another 10%. I know the polar bears might be forced to amend their dietary preferences, but if that’s the only problem, we could organize daily airdrops of those Wagyu steaks Obama’s so fond of, to tide them over until the refreeze, for a microscopic fraction of what they’re proposing to spend to forcibly ween us off the evil demon carbon.
Geo, I think “sea ice” is just that- ice that forms at sea. Just because it’s physically connected to nearby land doesn’t keep it from being sea ice. If you look at the satellite data it’s pretty clear. However, I defer to others with more detailed knowledge of the topic.
There is a lot of disharmony between those evidently more informed about AGW who post on this site – and the media reports. One of the things that sceptics fail to understand is why those more knowledgable in AGW don’t set the media types straight when they release all these AP stories and such that make it sound like the ice is almost gone NOW. Reminds me of when muslims will try to tell you that we have a misunderstanding of their religion and they don’t want to see the Western world destroyed. Well, okay then, don’t tell me – TELL YOUR MULLAHS THAT!!
1. The Arctic Ocean is surrounded mostly by land. The Antarctic continent is surrounded entirely by water. 2. The Arctic receives some warmth from ocean currents. The Antarctic is protected from them by the circumpolar Westerly winds. 3. Global Warming is expected to be greater in the northern hemisphere, due to its greater land mass. 4. Global temperatures continue to rise, despite the continuing cold in East Antarctica. And with continuing worries about the ice breaking up on the Antarctic Peninsula, and maybe in West Antarctica.
Either we have less ice or more and either it is getting cooler or warmer what are the facts?
Although the March anomaly was very high last year the actual maximum area turned out to be lower than average come September
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
So we went from a below average maximum in 2008 to an average minima in 2009, following the high anomaly last March. So I am not sure expressions such as “Antartic putting on ice” in this context actually means that much. Once again it seems to boil down to whether you put more weighting on maxima/minima or the average over the year.
An interesting topic though.
Regards
Andy
hotrod (18:09:38) :
Your thermo haline circulation questions make me wonder about tides.
Tides are not just surface phenomena. Does anybody have links of how much tides stir waters? They move water at the rate of over x km a minute all the way, from the bottom to the top twice a day. When obstacles are encounter there is turbulance and outflow and changes of height from 40cm to over 10 meters. The ocean floors are full of obstacles that do not come up to land but could mix the waters by the turbulance created by the tides. What happens when the tides hit the thermohaline streams?
One more differential equation for synchronized chaos.
Looks very much like the only thing that is melting fast is the AGW believers credibility?
The media giants like CNN & the BBC will never reveal this information to the masses, thank heavens for the new media eh? opperating on a shoestring with few insider contacts the new media exposes the lies and propaganda, can you imagine if the MSM/dead tree press had the field all to themselves?
“the lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the population from the consequences of that lie” The person who said this was an expert in the art of propaganda, it seems his expertise has not gone unoticed by those who wish to control our destiny.
To Matti Virtanen :
Sea Ice cracks are perfectly normal and have been going on ever since Sea Ice first formed on the Earth. Due to wind pressure, water movement, including currents and tides, and collisions of one section of sea ice with another. It would be highly unusual and something to worry about if cracks were to stop. Polar studies and the study of Paleoclimatology is very interesting.
ScienceDaily (Apr. 9, 2009) — Though greenhouse gases are invariably at the center of discussions about global climate change, new NASA research suggests that much of the atmospheric warming observed in the Arctic since 1976 may be due to changes in tiny airborne particles called aerosols.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090408164413.htm
Just a thougth on the first chart. It clearly shows the Antartic ice starting to increase in the 3rd week of February. Isn’t this very early? If I think of terms of the cycle in the Northern Hemisphere, that would be the equivalent of ice beginning to form in August.
Question for Francis…
1) Why did the arctic ice melt in the 1930s?
2) Why are the Argo buoys showing ocean heat content trending down while the Arctic is melting… (see Pielke comments on Josh Willis observations and Hansons ocean heat content predictions)
???
I am Swiss. My parents used to ski on the glacier from the Jungfrau Joch down to the Rhone valley train station.
Now take a train from Geneva down the Rhone valley and see the debris left of the glacier that the tourist guide will tell you about.
George E. Smith (16:30:31) :
To which I might add,
If the science is settled, we should stop funding the research.
After all, the science of Kepler is settled, is it not? We don’t have to fund research into that question. Same for Newton’s stuff. Einstein’s.
So, we should cut off the funding for computer models of the climate because the science is settled. Let’s fund something else.
Zeke Hausfather: February, the month of the castastrophic sensor failure, which was led up to by the sensor degrading onboard the satellite.
The 3rd week of February, after the failed sensor was discovered and the correction made. Was the data corrected, or did they just stop collecting the failed data?
The odd thing is that sea ice extent has been increasing at the same time that Antarctic temperatures have been increasing. Totally counter-intuitive! (The Antarctic sea is apparently increasing in temperature by 0.17ºC per decade compared to a global average of 0.1ºC per decade.).
This interesting article provides an explanation of how this can be so.
I guess that the phenomonon described will, to some degree, via albedo increase, be a negative feedback on air coastal Antarctic air temperature. This means that it will be reducing the degree of warming compared to that which the Antarctic that would otherwise be occurring.
Obviously, the proposed mechanism would reach a limit at some threshold temperature, and sea-ice would begin to trend down.
It will be interesting to see what further research reveals that threshold temperature to be.
Here’s an animation of the shelf’s edge breaking. Most of the shelf is off to the right and still solidly attached to the continent.
The narrow “bridge is between the main shelf and the island in the upper left.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/07/images/080714-ice-shelf-photo_PiN.gif
And a map of the peninsula where Wilkins is
http://www.visitandlearn.co.uk/Portals/0/frostbites/Wilkins%20Ice%20shelf%20-%20map.jpg
Why is it ok for Al Gore to take a short term trend and extrapolate it ad absurdum but hen I do it it just sounds silly?
The paper that the web article I refer to above summarises is Increasing Antarctic Sea Ice under Warming Atmospheric and Oceanic Conditions, Zhang, 2007, Journal of Climate Volume: 20 Issue: 11 Pages: 2515-2529 (2Mb pdf file).
(Beware: Zhang attempts to quantify the proposed phenomenon using a form of scientific methodology that is known affect global warming sceptics like salt does snails.)
Climate models are failing. The alarming climate predictions are not coming true. It’s all about to blow up in the AGW’s faces soon…….that’s why they are grasping at thin air with news articles like this one.
Hanson’s 1988 predictions are linked below, look how BAD he did.
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/8569/hanson1988.jpg
Global temperatures are below all three of his scenarios. You don’t have to be very smart to see Hanson can’t model the global climate. So why are any other ‘newer’ models any more accurate??
The answer is, “Yes”. It’s called natural variability, and there’s zero evidence that we’re seeing anything but that.