One of the common misconceptions pushed in the media is that Arctic sea ice simply “melts in place”. Much of this is due to the constant hammering of the AGW meme that the “warming in the Arctic” is the primary cause. Here is one of my favorite misconception lines from this WIRED Science article:
With arctic sea ice melting like ice cubes in soda, scientists want to protect a region they say will someday be the sole remaining frozen bastion of a disappearing world.
It is not difficult to imagine how many would think that Arctic ice is “melting like ice cubes in soda” when you see temperature anomaly maps like this one from GISS:
GISTEMP 11-12-08 – Click for larger image
The public (and sometime the media too) often mistakes these for “absolute” temperature and the colors give the impression of a “toasty” area around the arctic, when in fact the temperatures there are mostly below the freezing point. In contrast to that what looks like a heat wave in the Arctic, we have this NASA JPL study that suggests winds may play a key role in pushing Arctic sea ice into lower latitudes where it melts. The author suggests winds may be the dominant factor in the 2007 record low ice extent:
Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. “Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,” he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.
Interestingly we can now watch this actually happen thanks to an animation of AMSER-E satellite 89Ghz sounder images. Koji Shimada of JAMSTEC (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology ). See the animation below (note- size is 7.1 MB, this may take awhile to fully load):
If you want more detail, a full sized Video animation is available here as a flash video or here as an AVI file (highest quality 7.3 MB) A hat tip to WUWT commenter Bill and to Thomas Homer-Dixon for this video.
What is interesting about this video is that you can watch sea ice being flushed out of the Arctic sea and pushed along Greenland’s east coast, where it then finds its way into warmer waters and melts. Also note how in the lower right, in the Beaufort sea, older multiyear ice gets fractured and broken up as winds and currents stress it.
While indeed we can watch some of the Arctic sea “melt in place” during this animation in the fall of 2007, we can also see that winds and currents are a signifcant contributor to breaking up the sea ice and transporting it to warmer latitudes.
What an excellent animation. It is often difficult to piece together general flows of both water and ice from static illustrations.
Hi M. Yates,
Errr, I actually don’t see what you’re trying to point at… What is the point in looking at a situation where there were no emission to “prove” emissions have no effect?
Let’s take a simple example. If you pour tons of acid on Muir woods, it will disappear. Now, one can easily show that sequoia already disappeared in the past, without the need to put acid on it. Does that mean the acid has no effect?
Mike Bryant (04:04:47) :
In the quoted text regarding a Foucault Pendulum the part that says “This would be especially clear if one marked the position of the line of swing in the morning and had the pendulum knocking down pegs arranged in a ring at the center.”
Usually the setup has small figures of some sort such as light weight bowling pin shaped figures in a circle at a distance away from the center of the display. Near the maximum extent of the ball’s swing – just as it is about to reverse directions, it can gently knock over one of the pins, as the pin moves into position via the rotating Earth.
The Encyclopedia Smithsonian seem just a little confusing on the above.
Jack Green (06:23:19) :
Sorry Jack but from the link you gave I can’t find the view that bears are increasing. I see statements that spin the facts and surround them in fog so that they can ensure continued funding for their organisation for a few years to come.
Arn,
It looks like the Beaufort Gyre is the Foucault Pendulum at the top of the earth…
Mike.
http://nsidc.org/seaice/processes/circulation.html
Speaking of education, with the proliferation of TV networks, it seems that these posts make excellent screenplays for a real education in climate. Can you imagine a weekly program that brings the truth of many of these otherwise little-known subjects? Now can you imagine that series with the all the beautiful and awe-inspiring images and sounds that we have come to expect from Discovery ot TWC? Now can you imagine that earthly majesty covered without bias? I can hardly believe that no one has pitched this to some network somewhere…
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/report07/ocean.html
The circulation of the sea ice cover and ocean surface layer are closely coupled and are primarily wind-driven (Proshutinsky and Johnson, 1997).
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF13/1373.html
Ice floes–huge hunks of sea ice that bump into one another for years before currents spit them to lower latitudes–cover the ocean like a layer of plastic film on a tub of water.
Clearly the use of colors in temp graphs, hockey stick like projections, falsifying and erasing historic climate data and events, adjustments and alarmist climate reporting is all part of the disinformation strategy.
What is new here?
chad (23:38:11):
One of the common misconceptions pushed by skeptics is that the 2007 minimum was just a load of wind.
It’s not a misconception. Wind is determinant even for the load of CO2 upwelling from deep ocean to the atmosphere:
J. R. Toggweiler. Shifting Westerlies. Science. Vol. 323, No. 5920, pp. 1434-1435. 13 March 2009.
From the article:
If there was a response to higher CO2 back then, it paled in comparison (Talking about the past 50 years of “warming”).
I suggest the reading of the whole article, so you could see how some things escape to biased peer review and cannot be flawed.
The resemblence of the JAMSTEC image to clouds in a weather system is striking.
What a great video. Not only for the motion of the ice, and the forces of its demise, but the aforementioned perception of the earth spinning beneath the water too. It must take unusual conditions for the ice to maintain a great extent, like an ice age. But wait, glaciation of the NH is normal some 90% of the time in the past 500Ky. On a longer time scale, it is unusual to have a NH ice cap at all. Aron, I was struck as well by that comment, it is in Anthony’s new post 4/15.
Steve: it’s not “my graph”, but the 1995 IPCC predictions. Of course you can find similar projections in the IPCC 2000 and IPCC 2007 reports, but showing that we’re actually at the temperature predicted 16 years ago is a nice thing, IMO.
Sometimes the temperature is above the projection (el nino 98), sometimes it is less than the linear trend (la nina 2008), but overall the underlying trend is there.
Thanks for the video, it enhances understanding, especially the negative AO.
Of course it is “unprecidented”.
Set your time frame short enough and everything is unprecidented.
The Northwest passage has been open in the past and will be in the future. If Gray and Klotzbach are correct, in another 40+ years, after the PDO turns warm for a while, there may be a lot less ice at the Pole. For a while.
http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2009.pdf
Sums up Gray’s research rather well.
John F. Hultquist (08:17:05) :
You are correct the words ARE confusing so here is a youtube video af a Foucault Pendulum:
Not very exciting but it is illustrative…
Mike
Hey, wattaya know, the oceans are cooling.
Then there’s this from a couple of years ago:
I like that obligatory final sentence in that last paragraph required to remain “politically correct” while the rest of the article pretty much says that it is a load of hooey.
The Arctic Sea Ice is a very small part of the climate system of earth.
Can anyone here imagine that the GCMs are capable of capturing even a tiny bit of the complexity and chaos of the Arctic Sea Ice in summer?
NSIDC graph seems to be about two weeks from hitting the 1979-2000 average at current trends.
Flanagan: I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on time frames.
1990-2007: .22c/decade
1995-2009: .11c/decade
2000-2009: 0.0c/decade
Which one matches IPCC projections?
AR4 predicted .1c/decade if CO2 stayed at 2000 levels, and .2c/decade with annual increases (next 2 decades). CO2 is rising FASTER than expected, and there is 0 change in global temperature since 2000. It better warm up fast for this decade (2000-2009) to hit the .2c increase the IPCC report projects.
From Wiki: “The growth rate of global emissions after 2000 has been about 3%, while the growth rates under these emissions scenarios is between 1.4% and 3.4%. This has attracted attention and could be evidence that these scenarios are too conservative.”
AR4 doesn’t mention El Ninos, La Ninas, or the PDO in it’s report. So far this decade, temperatures have followed the negative PDO.
The Arctic sea ice anomaly had a lot to do with increased warm Pacific water flowing in through the Bering Strait into the Chukchi Sea coupled with the unusual wind pattern. See: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/RS_ArcticIce_2007.htm
Flanagan wrote:
Steve: it’s not “my graph”, but the 1995 IPCC predictions. Of course you can find similar projections in the IPCC 2000 and IPCC 2007 reports, but showing that we’re actually at the temperature predicted 16 years ago is a nice thing, IMO.
However, if you take out the GISS data, the trend would be flat from 2001
GISS data updated on 1/13/09 states that all GHGs together cause 0.035w/m^2 (remember, CO2is a very minute part of this) of warming.
They are also kind enough to show that solar irradiance is down from 2003 levels by a full watt/m^2
Anyone want to tell me that the CO2 is causing climate change?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/Fig4.gif
Oh, and GISS also says that temperatures lag solar forcing by 2-3 years, and thus we can expect 2-3 years of cooler temperatures.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
Yeah, it’s so great to make a climatologic trend over 9 years… Ever been to a geophysics/statistics lecture? Or ever heard of high frequency noise?
In order to get a statistically consistent trend, the error/trend ratio must be sufficiently low. If you try to do a trend over 9 years, or even 10 years, the error will be as mage as the trend itself, in other words this all means nothing… For what I remember, 15 years is typically the lowest bound.
Geo-engineering, John Holdren, Global cooling, Sunspots, Dust
Playing God with the Weather Will Outdo Mother Nature’s Worst Nightmares
By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, April 13, 2009
Actions without thought or concern for the consequences are the pattern of the day as political agendas trump facts or logic. Consider the dangerous and baseless proposal to offset global warming by adding particulates to the atmosphere. It was in the news as a strategy, albeit a last resort, from a member of the Obama administration.
Many factors cause climate change, but only a few are considered in the current scientific debate and most are based on estimated or inadequate data. Even fewer factors or data are part of the political debate including how the amount and nature of aerosols in the atmosphere affect the amount of solar energy at the surface and in the atmosphere. The proposal to add particulates to offset warming is the environmental equivalent of adding to the debt to get out of debt, only worse. Despite this politicians demonstrate their lack of knowledge of the science by proposing to play God. Maybe they should wait until there is enough space debris to block the sun and cause cooling.