Leaving The Ice Pack Behind
Guest post by Steven Goddard
2009 Arctic ice extent has jumped into a big lead over the previous four years. Danish Meteorological Institute Ice Cover April 21, 2009
NSIDC shows Arctic extent continuing to close on the 1979-2000 mean
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
AMSR-E data shows Arctic extent extending it’s lead at a seven year high :
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png
Global sea ice continues to move up towards a twenty year high.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/iphone/images/iphone.anomaly.global.png
Meanwhile, US Energy Secretary (and Nobel Prize winner) Dr. Steven Chu warns of impending California flooding due to polar ice melt:
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago — Caribbean nations face “very, very scary” rises in sea level and intensifying hurricanes, and Florida, Louisiana and even northern California could be overrun with rising water levels due to global warming triggered by carbon-based greenhouse gases, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Saturday.
In order to highlight the “very, very scary” danger California faces, I created some frightening visualizations of what California may look like once flooded with water from Arctic ice, which – as we are told by top government officials – is melting at a record pace. If you are squeamish, look no further – this is indeed scary stuff.
Here is what the Santa Ana UHI Station may look like after being flooded :
And most frightening is what might happen to Mt. Whitney after the next Biblical flood:
If these pictures don’t scare you into buying a hybrid (or even better an aquatic car) I don’t know what will.
The two “very, very scary” situations Chu warns of:
1. Hurricanes:
Hurricanes, cyclonic storms, are not intensifying. The measure of this is done via ACE, or… Accumulated cyclone energy analysis. True for the Atlantic area 2005 tops the list at an ACE level of 248, the next year below it was 1950 at 243. However, the year following 2005; 2006 was a very low 79 and then 2007 was even lower at an ACE level of 72.
2008 tied with 1966 (a very cool year) at 145. 1998 (everyone remembers how warm 98 was) had an ACE of 182, but, 1961 (another cool year) had an ACE of 205. A similar comparison can be made with cyclonic storms in the Pacific. Hence, there is NO correlation between Global average temperatures and the intensity of hurricanes / cyclonic storms.
2. Sea levels:
During the last glacial period you could have walked on dry land crossing the Chesapeake Bay, San Fransisco Bay and Galveston Bay would have been dry, and along the coasts it would have been possible to walk out to or almost to the continental shelves. The warming from the glacial period into the interglacial (our Holocene) melted massive amounts of ice and sea levels rose. Likewise, sea levels dropped during the Little Ice Age. As temperatures warmed to a more pleasant and healthy level during the last century the sea levels once again rose slightly.
This century the sea level has been rising on an average of about 3MM +/- .4mm per year.
It appears that Obama is now hiring aliens….. extra-terrestrial aliens. Clearly…. Obama’s man Chu is not from Earth or speaking of Earth. He must be projecting events for some distant planet. Perhaps that of his origin.
2008 sea ice was looking pretty decent this time last year and then it really tanked. Will be interesting to see how the summer plays out.
@ur momisugly Steven Hill (09:51:06) :
You must not like Obama.
Malcolm: For some reason that Greenland magnetic pole expedition finds it necessary to take food from poor people. That’s rather impolite, why didn’t the newspaper report poor people’s opinions about that act?
Malcolm (08:24:28) :
“More brits.. on the ice.”
Lordy, Lordy, a physiotherapist, landscape gardner and a skipper and the Danish government is going to use their scientific evidence? Their report will probably suggest that polar bears need a back rub because of all the extra swimming.
Re: Nobel Lauriate Chu … Alfred would roll over in his grave if he knew the recent line-up of winners – Nobel was an industrialist whose work made it cheaper to produce lots of coal! Who has taken over the Nobel Committee? – I thought it had sunk the lowest when they handed out prizes to Koffi Anan for presiding over the Rwanda genocide and before that to Arafat, Peres and Rabin for Middle east peace.
Benjamin P. (10:46:12) :
Sea ice is now the highest it’s been in the past eight years. click
If you’re referring to August/September, that was due to winds, not warmth.
But… this is only first year ice. First year ice doesn’t really exist – it is just your imagination trying to convince you that AGW doesn’t exist Winston. Remember, 2+2 = 5 b/c Big Brother Al says it does.
While sea ice and other obsevations are not cooperating with AGW the brainwashing of the masses continues.
Yesterday Thom Hartman told his radio audience that if we don’t act fast on global warming earth will become uninhabitable for humans and all other living creatures.
Today, I just heard Thom instruct his audience that the Medieval Warm Period was a “local warming, limited to northern Europe and Greenland, caused by ocean currents in the Atlantic similar to an El Nino”.
Not so funny is Hartman is one of the icons of the left viewed as smarter than most.
More Humbug.
An article in today’s Telegraph (UK)04.21.09. alludes to a new book by Lord Stern, the former World Bank chief ‘ECONOMIST’.
“The greenhouse effect is simple and sound science: greenhouse gases trap heat, and humans are emitting more greenhouse gases. There will be oscillations, there will be uncertainties. But the logic of the greenhouse effect is rock solid and the long-term trends associated with the effects of human emissions are clear in the data,” he writes.
QED??
“The arguments from those who deny the science look more and more like those who denied the association between HIV and Aids or smoking and cancer.”
What is he on about??
He also says (to paraphrase) – ” that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are already at 430ppm and temps are likely to rise by 2 degrees C by the end of the Century, causing a rise in sea level. If nothing is done temps may rise by 6 degrees C and Florida and Bangladesh could disappear, and alligators survive at the north pole!!!”
Maybe warm water sharks as well!!
As methodical and empirical scientific data like the above figures -(Steven Goddard) suggests anything but global warming indeed cooling, the voices of the AGW believers grows ever more maniacally desperate.
I sense that the tide of opinion is beginning to change, – the argument is swinging the way of science and pragmatism.
Thank you Mr. Watts and Mr. Goddard.
Tom Arnold. England.
geo (10:16:30) : This is certainly all nice “so far”, but looking at previous years it’s really around the middle of June where the men start to get separated from the boys as to what the eventual yearly minimum will be, as the lines for 2005 and 2008 would suggest. Beating 2005 with a higher minimum, if not worthy of a champagne party, would at least be just cause for a beer bash.
Um, June figures ought to be known by the first weekend in July… just in time for the WUWT BBQ Party … I’m up for a beer bash (along with the burnt cow steak, the high fat macaroni salad, the baked potato covered in Real Butter and Sour Cream, the corn on the cob with more Real Butter, and some BBQ Ribs done Real Slow with smokey chips and Phils Phire Sauce …)
And remember to locate one thermometer in the grill and one just down wind… in compliance with the care shown for real surface stations…
Winds in 2007 too Smokey?
All I am saying is short term trends don’t hold much stock in my world view.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll buy high heel sandals next time I go to the beach.
Benjamin P.,
You haven’t been keeping up with the articles and posts here, have you? Yes, unusual winds in 2007, too.
And re ‘short term trends’:
“… sea ice was looking pretty decent this time last year and then it really tanked.”
That’s pretty short term, eh? But I’m sure that if sea ice were rapidly declining right about now, you’d be singing a completely different tune regarding ‘short term trends.’
It must be frustrating that the planet isn’t heating up like you want it to.
Gore and Chu acting in an SM movie?
That bit about alligators at the north pole is really quite interesting. If we ignore the fact that alligators aren’t marine animals, it is true that they are (together with the chinese alligator) the most cold-tolerant crocodylian species. The northern limit of their range in the US suggest that an annual average of approximately 17 C (63 F) is about their limit. There is no weather station at the North pole for obvious reason, so I’ll take the closest one, Alert on Ellesmere land. Annual average there is -18 C (-2 F), so for alligators to survive there would require a warming of abut 35 C (65 F).
Methinks Dr Stern is a wee bit overwrought.
Benjamin P.,
Your assertion is a piece of Orwellian history. Last year at this time were the infamous (and laughably wrong) assertions by the AGW promotion industry that 2008 could very likely see an ice free Arctic.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080620-north-pole.html
Your take on this is just on example of why AGW is more properly studied as social science than climate.
“It must be frustrating that the planet isn’t heating up like you want it to.”
That’s what I want? How’d you deduce that?
I am more about some solid science over anything, and that is a position I have maintained since I started posting here.
So I am curious, is it the wind every year? or just the years when there is more than “normal” (whatever normal is).
As for short term trends, if the ice was shrinking or growing, short term trends say little about climate on the whole. And my 2007 example was to show that short term trends are pretty silly to throw much stock behind.
Take a breath smokey, I am not trying to attack your position, just sharing my thoughts on short term trends and climate.
Hunter, what is my assertion?
Squidly
Say what? Come on, what is this guy smoking? And where can I get some?
Port of Spain, for starters. But only until it’s engulfed by the Caribbean.
Anthony;
Given the spate of grim news on the political front of the AGW debate, I think it might be time for a bit of a diversion to introduce a little lightheartedness to the mood of your readers. I suggest a pool for the best prediction of the summer low of the AMSR-E sea ice extent. I’ve got dibs on 5.857142 mil. km2, a number I arrived at by strict adherence to all the rules of technique and methodology of the warmists playbook for climate estimation, i.e. I smoothly extracted a number from my anal orifice and then applied unjustified precision to make it look more “scientific”.
It would probably enhance the entertainment value if everyone kicked in a couple of bucks with their entries, but given the increasing number of times your name has appeared in pieces about opposition to the administration’s policies, there’s probably already an army of political operatives and liberal bureaucrats out there trying to do a Joe the Plumber rectal polyp count on you and you wouldn’t want to hand them the opportunity to nail you for running an illegal lottery.
Michael (08:53:55) :
> Say what? Come on, what is this guy smoking? And where can I get some?
That’s not fair. The smoke sessions in the Oval Orifice are only at 10am and 2pm. (The other sessions are in the family residence.)
But do they Inhale?
I think Chu is outside of his expertise and has drank too much of the AGW koolaid uncritically. Giving us ABCs (American Born Chinese) a bad name as scientists.
Since we are talking about heat flow into and out of the Arctic, and it takes a lot of heat to melt the ice vs snow, and most of the ice is first-year which is easier to melt, then this is a big deal.
On Garde! Beware of “adjustments” to (ALL) this data soon. BTW The cryosphere today site does not show .648 above anomaly for NH (noticed that the data on above graph does)
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/iphone/iphone.anom.series.html
compared to one put here (above)
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/iphone/images/iphone.anomaly.global.png
Have I missed something?
A comparison of the various Arctic ice sites seem to show that Cryosphere Today is starting to head south again and is an apparent outlier. See the various charts, Cryosphere Today vs
IJIS JAXA and NSIDC.
I wonder what there excuse is this time.
For those checking the actgual ice areas, here is the comapartive data for April 20th in km²:
2003 13,420,938
2004 12,763,594
2005 13,120,156
2006 12,966,875
2007 12,980,781
2008 13,175,938
2009 13,562,188
Note that this year’s coverage is 141,250 km² greater than 2003, the next highest year.
A little O/T, but speaking of impressive gains, see how WUWT stacks up against Real Climate (which is breaking into the top 100,000 web sites less and less frequently) and Al Gore’s Climate Crisis (which looks to be almost non-existent). Here’s the new look from Alexa:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wattsupwiththat.com+realclimate.org+climatecrisis.net
Equally impressive is the new look at Quantcast:
http://www.quantcast.com/profile/traffic-compare?domain0=realclimate.org&domain1=wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com&domain2=wattsupwiththat.com&domain3=climatecrisis.net&domain4=
Yeah! WUWT rocks. But then, we all knew that already.
Correcting butchered sentence in prior post:
For those checking the actual ice areas, here is the comparative data for April 20th in km²: