What would NSIDC and our media make of a photo like this if released by the NAVY today? Would we see headlines like “NORTH POLE NOW OPEN WATER”? Or maybe “Global warming melts North Pole”? Perhaps we would. sensationalism is all the rage these days. If it melts it makes headlines.
Some additional captures from the newsreel below show that the ice was pretty thin then, thin enough to assign deckhands to chip it off after surfacing.The newsreel is interesting, here is the transcript.
1958 Newsreel: USS Skate, Nuclear Sub, Is First to Surface at North Pole
ED HERLIHY, reporting:
USS Skate heads north on another epic cruise into the strange underseas realm first opened up by our nuclear submarines. Last year, the Skate and her sister-sub Nautilus both cruised under the Arctic ice to the Pole. Then, conditions were most favorable. The Skate’s job is to see if it can be done when the Arctic winter is at its worst, with high winds pushing the floes into motion and the ice as thick as twenty-five feet.
Ten times she is able to surface. Once, at the North Pole, where crewmen performed a mission of sentiment, scattering the ashes of polar explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins. In 1931, he was the first to attempt a submarine cruise to the Pole. Now, the Skate’s twelve-day three thousand mile voyage under the ice, shown in Defense Department films, demonstrates that missile-carrying nuclear subs could lurk under the Polar Ice Cap, safe from attack, to emerge at will, and fire off H-bomb missiles to any target on Earth.
A powerful, retaliatory weapon for America’s defense.
For example, one crew member aboard the USS Skate which surfaced at the North Pole in 1959 and numerous other locations during Arctic cruises in 1958 and 1959 said:
“the Skate found open water both in the summer and following winter. We surfaced near the North Pole in the winter through thin ice less than 2 feet thick. The ice moves from Alaska to Iceland and the wind and tides causes open water as the ice breaks up. The Ice at the polar ice cap is an average of 6-8 feet thick, but with the wind and tides the ice will crack and open into large polynyas (areas of open water), these areas will refreeze over with thin ice. We had sonar equipment that would find these open or thin areas to come up through, thus limiting any damage to the submarine. The ice would also close in and cover these areas crushing together making large ice ridges both above and below the water. We came up through a very large opening in 1958 that was 1/2 mile long and 200 yards wide. The wind came up and closed the opening within 2 hours. On both trips we were able to find open water. We were not able to surface through ice thicker than 3 feet.”
– Hester, James E., Personal email communication, December 2000
Here are some screencaps from the newsreel:
It was that way again in 1962:
And of course then there’s this famous photo:
But contrast that to 1999, just 12 years later, lots of ice:
But in 1993, it’s back to thin ice again:
The point illustrated here: the North Pole is not static, ice varies significantly. The Arctic is not static either. Variance is the norm.
There’s quite an interesting read at John Daly’s website, including a description of “the Gore Box”. Everybody should have one of those.
h/t to WUWT commenters Stephen Skinner, Crosspatch, and Glenn.
See the Skate image archive at NAVSOURCE
Gee – Global warming must have been bad in the 1950’s, so many poor Polar Bears must have starved and drowned…
If only the Catlin team had been alive and active back then – they could have found plenty of thin ice…
I love John Daly, God rest his soul. His was one of the first websites I ever found some years ago that refuted this nonsense.
Bleeding is so last week. If it’s green, it leads.
Great images.
Without images like these it would be easy for the Catlin explorers and others to say that open water at the pole is unusual.
I have saved these images to show my friends.
Whatever happened to the days when we were treated to new vistas minus the agenda?
Subs at the North Pole (wasn’t so bad, was it?), Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Pioneer, Voyager.
When Science delivered without the attendant sermon.
What happened?
If it weren’t for the Rovers operating on Mars, we’d be S.O.L., and right now, Sol is out to lunch. So appears to be Earth Science.
Sure do miss NASA and JPL.
If only the Catlin team had been alive and active back then – they could have found plenty of thin ice…
They ARE skating on thin ice, if the ARE there.
Looking over the media blitz, it would be par for their agenda for monkeybusiness to be afoot.
Nice pictures. I wonder how Dr.Serreze of the NSIDC and other global warmists would attempt to explain this variability. They’ll probably fall back on the old “it’s the weather” excuse.
Climate change: It’s natural.
That photo wasn’t “released by the NAVY today” – I have had it on my Arctic regional summary page for months: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/RS_Arctic.htm
REPLY: I discussed “what if”?…not that it was- Anthony
Looks like 1st year ice those subs were breaking through.
Am I seeing that right?
Does Flanagan have an opinion on the above pictures?
So much open water at the North Pole in 1959?
How do you explain it?
This inquiring mind would like to be informed.
Oh dear me. How ever will Al Gore handle this?
I know! He’ll say the skeptics made it all up. These were photoshopped or even shot in a Hollywood Special Effects studio. That’s how he’ll do it.
Everybody knows that the North Pole has never melted ever before. Everybody knows that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole in a big castle filled with merry little elves.
And Catlin is getting ready for their third resupply flight. Now according to their website, there were only three resupplies planned. 43 days and 540+ km to the pole? I don’t think so. Not unless they’ve had a change of plan in the number of resupplies.
Well, it just goes to show how much warming human activity has caused. Where are the pictures of submarines at the north pole before the industrial revolution? Eh? Where are they? There are none. Not a single one. My case is proved.
Only since mankind has pursued its wicked desires for warm homes, clean water and plentiful food have submarines been able to surface at the north pole.
And just look at the dates of these pictures – 1958, 1959, 1962, 1987, 1993 and 1999. More than 200 years of savage attack on mother nature’s fridge had already occurred, it’s hardly surprising the ice was thin enough for these dreadful machines to wreak their havoc.
And what about the damage they did to the fragile, naturally balanced ice sheets as the submarines (designed, you might note in a distinctly phallic shape) thrust upwards and breached the delicate hymen that was all between natures virtue and man’s disgusting lusts? How long do you think it took for the broken ice to heal from this savage act of macho oppression?
All the efforts of those who really care about mother nature have been dedicated to trying to ease her pain yet nothing, nothing I say again, can restore the wounds created by such brutal aggression to the intimate soul of her being.
You seek to make a cheap point about the thickness of the ice having been less in the past than it is now? How dare you? What an affront to those who have dedicated their lives to profiting from carbon credits, ahem, sorry, I meant protecting mother nature’s virtue.
You should be ashamed of yourself Mr Watts.
I need to take a cold shower now.
The faithful will probably say that those photos weren’t right at the pole, or that the pole had shifted to the equator, or that aliens made those photos in photoshop or something.
Robert Bateman — Looks like 1st year ice those subs were breaking through.
Although on the surface the claim that multi-year ice is thicker sounds logical, is this really true? What seems logical may not be, e.g. thinking the earth must be closer to the sun is when we get summer sounds logical yet isn’t true. One would think that ice compacts and thickness in any area is as much a factor of local currents (or lack thereof) and such as much as anything else.
The faithful will most likely ignore it.
If evidence doesn’t fit the dominant narrative/paradigm – throw it out.
Leon Brozyna (22:28:27) :
Oh dear me. How ever will Al Gore handle this?
I know! He’ll say the skeptics made it all up. These were photoshopped or even shot in a Hollywood Special Effects studio. That’s how he’ll do it.
No way he can wriggle his way out of that one.
Those pictures, I remember seeing them in Time or Life magazine 50 years ago. They may even have made the Huntley-Brinkley report, or a Walter Cronkite blurb.
I remember when it happened.
Billboard it. Spread it all over the place.
Front page it.
Bumper sticker it.
Run it all over the Internet.
Make buttons for it.
Make a moniker out of it:
Remember the Skate.
Make Al Gore eat it.
Isn’t there a record of a Chinese fleet finding the Arctic relatively ice free around 1276? Curse those medieval SUV’s!
The biggest problem I have with all the modelers is that they ignore the empirical evidence that is right there in historical records, be they written records of wheat and flax shipments from Greenland to Europe during the Medieval Warm Period or photographic evidence of surfacing subs and earlier Arctic Explorations.
All their proxies and calculated anomalies might give them a metric to plug into a model, but ignoring the written and photographic records of people who “were there” demonstrates the modeler’s all-consuming arrogance…and ignorance.
Nice pictures! It’s been a long time since I’ve seen them.
More inconvenient truths me thinks.
Interesting.
It was only a few weeks ago that I listened to a friend of mine talk about being on a boat when it surfaced through the ice relatively close to the pole. That would have been in the mid to late 70s. He was on a fast attack sub. I was on a boomer (missile sub). Though we crossed the Arctic Circle, we never went under the ice while I was on board, to my knowledge.
I think WUWT just did a preemptive strike on the thicker multi-year
ice excuse!
Sorry Anthony – missed the “if”
Mike Goad
Very interesting, is there any chance that your friend have some pictures with dates? It would be SUPER!
K.R. Frank
And no run away positive feedbacks or worldwide flooding occurred each time the ice was that thin.
Bill Sticker (22:55:30) :
Isn’t there a record of a Chinese fleet finding the Arctic relatively ice free around 1276? Curse those medieval SUV’s!
You are referring to Gavin Menzies’ book “1421: The Year China Discovered America”. There are no actual records of a Chinese expedition to the pole, but Menzies makes an interesting circumstantial case for it. Unfortunately, a lot of the evidence he presents was also used by Erich von Daniken in “Chariots of the Gods”. Oddly enough, the evidence exists…. it just doesn’t speak for itself.
Amen to that brother!
“Prince Charles is being accused of hypocrisy after it was revealed that he is chartering a luxury private jet for a five-day tour of Europe to promote environmental issues.”
The above from the Daily Mail (UK)
What, they don’t make donkey carts anymore?
I was always a global warming sceptic,because of the poem that I was taught in school.I am not a poetry person,but this one struck a chord,and should be taught to every Australian child.It was written in 1906 by Dorothea MacKellar
The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded Lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens,
Is running in your veins;
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies –
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of drought and flooding rains,
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me.
The tragic ring-barked forests
Stark white beneath the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
An orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the crimson soil.
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart around us
We see the cattle die –
But then the grey clouds gather
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.
Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold;
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.
An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown Country
My homing thoughts will fly.
It’s a poem that could be written today,and any time in the next 100 years.Nothing’s changed.
Aron (23:33:29) :
And no run away positive feedbacks or worldwide flooding occurred each time the ice was that thin.
(eye twitching uncontrollably) Of course not, the positive feedbacks are due to Man Made Emissions of CO2!!!. Dang it!!! And since CO2 had not yet peaked to the alarming levels that it has reached today, the positive feedbacks had not yet kicked in.
The ice melt back then was due to Man Made Emissions of CO2 that occurred prior to 1958 – haven’t you heard of the Industrial Revolution.
Now don’t go on about the arctic freezing up between 1958 and 2000 – that’s just weather and the CO2 warming was stuck in the pipeline just waiting to boil out – like it is now….
Gaaaaaa – run away.
Obviously it was done by the same team that did “The Dark Side of the Moon”. It reckoned the man walking on the moon was done in a Hollywood Movie lot.
Can we get better images so that they can be made into a computer wall paper. I would like to put it up on my computer. Fan bloody tastic!!
The level to which you ignore basic facts is becoming more and more obvious as James Hester, crew member mentions (polynyas) and as Hester also mentions they were using sonar to find these areas. The Arctic (as I hope you know) is just floating ice, on average only a few meters thick, these areas can form even at the pole
Polynyas are a phenomenon known for quite a long period of time, they are areas of open water that form (sometimes briefly) (sometimes in the same spot) they occur in both the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice.
While I realize you are cherry picking this to support [snip], but as proof for that cause this is worth nothing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynyas
On the recent blog on Dr Serreze you had a couple of critical posts from someone you referred to as birdman. When I was allowed to post on RealClimate (sadly I’m now banned for disagreeing) Bird Man gave me a roasting. It is very pleasing to see that you don’t ban and don’t roast this guy. But will he post on this blog as his post quoted Dr Seereze as saying
“There is this thin first-year ice even at the North Pole at the moment,” says Serreze. “This raises the spectre – the possibility that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year.”
I do so very much hope Bird MAn returns to make a comment on the ice free North Pole of some 50 years ago. However, I doubt he will.
So the polar bears that live in the artic today are sub-species after they true polar bears became extinct in 1959 due to the open water at that time! Isn’t evolution wonderful.
Don’t forget the magnetic North Pole moves (and quite fast.) Do we mean geographic or Magnetic?
Robert Bateman (22:07:02) :
“Whatever happened to the days when we were treated to new vistas minus the agenda?”
Read Eisenhowers last speech of 1961. Government became the leading funder of science. It’s that simple. And those who influence government with campaign contributions also provide endowments to Universities, so have say on what gets taught and researched.
Just reading in wiki about the russian drifting ice stations which started in 1937, they must have a huge amount of data on ice pre satellite.
“On average, an “NP” station is the host for 600 to 650 ocean depth measurements, 3500 to 3900 complex meteorology measurements, 1200 to 1300 temperature measurements and sea water probes for chemical analysis, 600 to 650 research balloon launches. Magnetic, ionosphere, ice and other observations are also carried out there. Regular measurements of the ice floe coordinates provide the data on the direction and speed of its drift.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_and_Russian_manned_drifting_ice_stations
see also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_and_Antarctic_Research_Institute
http://www.aari.nw.ru/index_en.html
AGW causes evaporation of the artic ice not the old stuff of melting ice. That’s what Waxman is avoiding not the melting.
For some years now, I’ve been using some of theswe pictures as wallpaer on my computers.
Alan Cheetham (22:21:05) :
that is quite some information you have assembled there, Alan ! … thanks a lot … 🙂
It seems first year ice to me, and Mr. Serezze at NSIDC have said it: it is much more vulnerable and is expected to disappear in the summer melt season…
Last year our friends at NSIDC said that the percentage of multi year ice in the Arctic reached a record low level, and this will lead to an ice-free North Pole in the summer of 2008. Of course they were wrong, but their obvious failure was completely ignored by the mainstream media. This year, they are trying to scare us with a record low level of first and second year ice. They don’t even mention the fast recovery of Arctic sea ice extent to near-normal levels. Let I guess, next year they will come out with an unprecedented low level of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd year ice.
Why do they put the Arctic sea ice anomaly chart to their main page for advocating purposes and try to hide the constantly above normal Antarctic ice from the public? If you are at the first time on their website, your chances to find any information from the current situation of Antarctic sea ice is not significantly different from zero. All in all, the NSIDC is lightyears away from the Neutral Point Of View.
More than a year ago I used to believe in this nonsense. Not anymore.
-A former AGW believer from Hungary-
Alan Cheetham (22:21:05) :
That photo wasn’t “released by the NAVY today” – I have had it on my Arctic regional summary page for months:
The whole world saw those pictures the years they were taken.
It was a feat at the time. Neato. Boss. Swell. Gosh.
Little did we know how important they would turn out to be.
Somebody deliver them to Congress with a TV camera & a microphone.
Let’s see what expletives the world will now attach to them.
Run it front page on the NY Times.
Hand them to George Will, Charles Gibson, Katie Couric, Martha Radich.
What about it, Gore?
envirotex (00:50:13) :
Don’t forget the magnetic North Pole moves (and quite fast.) Do we mean geographic or Magnetic?
Piece of cake. Just dig up the original story that hit the TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. US bragging rights, and right up there with the space race and all the other FIRSTS of the time. We did stuff, and oh how we let the world know how advanced we were.
This cannot be serious. It’s all a big lie. Now to debunk it.
Let’s see, err……..I know, these weren’t actually taken at the north pole but many miles further south & was a publicity stunt! (I’ll think of some dumb reason for a stunt in a while)…errr……….the submarines all fired torpedos into the ice to break it up…. then used the uranium from their reactors to melt the remainder of the ice & scare away the polar bears that’s why you can’t see any! The three captains & their crews all lied about it, every one of them, as part of a cold war conspiracy to blame the Russians for melting it! errr……they aren’t real pictures but merely simulations on a laptop by those co-conspiritors all working for dirty oil Christopher Monckton, Richard Courtney, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, Piers Corbyn, Stephen Wilde, et al especially all those at WUWT & anyone who went to the ICCC in March 09! errrr………….aliens melted the ice back in the 1950’s, & again in the 1980’s, no, no ,no that’s far too silly. Oh I know, a giant asteroid was on a collision course (yet again) with earth, these three intrepid submarine commanders were on a top secret mission to launch special surface-to-asteroid missiles that would deflect it away from civilisation, & they managed to knock it into the north pole, & they went there to make sure it was all gone & it had! Yes that’s the best one I think, far more plausible! What do you think Al Gorey? Got any better suggestions that you could use during your next bout of Senate testimoney? (I should be a screen writer – not!) BTW can I see three figures in the background pulling sledges in one area, a canoe in another, & a sailing boat on the horizon, all bearing union jacks? Hee hee!
Seriously though, can I just copy these pictures without too much difficulty because I really would like to show them to one or two idoits I know?
Just wanted to say how much I miss John Daly. His was the very first website I read on global warming after I converted from a believer. The sceptic cause lost a huge man when he died. Imagine the beating he’d be giving the warming-worriers today! I hope the relatives of Mr Daly appreciate how much we miss him.
Apologies for repeating a very relevant post I made several months ago. It illustrates that ‘history’ quickly becomes forgotten and that if the authorities make a detemined enough effort inconvenient history can be effectively erased.
” Claims of unprecedented warmth and abnormal melting of meltic arctic ice are unfounded if we look at history;
1 The following link describes the ancient cultures of the warmer arctic 5000 to 1000 years ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lithoderm/Inuit_culture
2 This relates to an Arctic culture thriving in warmer times 2000 years ago
From the Eskimo Times Monday, Mar. 17, 1941
The corner of Alaska nearest Siberia was probably man’s first threshold to the Western Hemisphere. So for years archeologists have dug there for a clue to America’s prehistoric past. Until last year, all the finds were obviously Eskimo. Then Anthropologists Froelich G. Rainey of the University of Alaska and two collaborators struck the remains of a town, of inciedible size and mysterious culture. Last week in Natural History Professor Rainey, still somewhat amazed, described this lost Arctic city.
It lies at Ipiutak on Point Hope, a bleak sandspit in the Arctic Ocean, where no trees and little grass survive endless gales at 30° below zero. But where houses lay more than 2,000 years ago, underlying refuse makes grass and moss grow greener. The scientists could easily discern traces of long avenues and hundreds of dwelling sites. A mile long, a quarter-mile wide, this ruined city was perhaps as big as any in Alaska today (biggest: Juneau, pop. 5,700).
On the Arctic coast today an Eskimo village of even 250 folk can catch scarcely enough seals, whales, caribou to live on. What these ancient Alaskans ate is all the more puzzling because they seem to have lacked such Arctic weapons as the Eskimo harpoon.
Yet they had enough leisure to make many purely artistic objects, some of no recognizable use. Their carvings are vaguely akin to Eskimo work but so sophisticated and elaborate as to indicate a relation with some centre of advanced culture — perhaps Japan or southern Siberia —certainly older than the Aztec or Mayan.
3 This link leads to the Academy of science report of the same year regarding the Ipiutak culture described above
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1078291
4 This refers to the Vikings living in a warmer arctic culture 1000 years ago
People might be interested in reading a very interesting book about the Vikings called ‘The Viking world’. It is a very scholarly and highly referenced book running to some 700 pages and deals with all aspects of the Vikings. It is good because it does not have an axe to grind, but deals matter of factly with all aspects of Viking culture and exploration.
There is a large section on their initial exploration of Greenland, the subsequent establishment of their farms there, everyday life, how they gradually lost access to the outside world as the sea lanes closed through ice, a record of the last wedding held In Greenland and how trade dried up. It also deals with Vinland/Newfoundland and it seems that it was wild grapes that helped give the area its name, it being somewhat warmer than today.
This is one of a number of similar books that record our warmer and cooler past throughout the Northern Hermisphere. Al Gore wrote a good book in 1992 called ‘Earth in the Balance’ in which he explored the changing climate that devastated the civilisations in the Southern Hemishpere.
The book ‘The Viking World’ is Edited by Stefan Brink with Neil Price Published by Routledge ISBN 978 0 415 33315-3
I suggest you borrow it from the local library as it costs $250!
5 This refers to a warmer arctic 75 years ago recorded on Pathe newsreel by Bob Bartlett on the Morrisey during his journeys there in the 1920’s and 1930’s and reported in all the media.
http://boothbayharborshipyard.blogspot.com/2008/08/arctic-explorer-on-ways.html
Wednesday, 10th August 1932
The ship rolled heavily all night and continues to do so….
The glacier continues its disturbances. No real bergs break off but great sheets of ice slide down into the water and cause heavy seas. About noon, the entire face of the glacier, almost a mile in length and six or eight feet deep slid off with a roar and a rumble that must have been heard at some distance. We were on deck at the time for a preliminary report like a pistol shot had warned us what was coming. The Morrissey rolled until her boats at the davits almost scooped up the water and everything on board that was not firmly anchored in place crashed loose. But this was nothing to the pandemonium on shore. I watched it all through the glasses. The water receded leaving yards of beach bare and then returned with a terrific rush, bringing great chunks of ice with it. Up the beach it raced further and further, with the Eskimos fleeing before it. It covered all the carefully cherished piles of walrus meat, flowed across two of the tents with their contents, put out the fire over which the noonday meal for the sled drivers was being prepared, and stopped a matter of inches before it reached the pile of cement waiting to be taken up the mountain. Fortunately, in spite of heavy sea, which was running, the Captain had managed to be set shore this morning so he was there with them to help straighten out things and calm them down.”
The arctic has periodically warmed to greater amounts than today-there is adiutional data from the Rpyal society, The Hudson Bay co and many other souyrces illustrating that there seems to be a cycle of extensive warming every 80 years or so contauined within a longher cycle of melt and cold. A tiny reduction in ice extent since 1979 ( A high point in ice levels) is of no consequence if you look at the historical record of this region
Tonyb
From today’s Independent:
“This is the quietest Sun we’ve seen in almost a century,” says NASA solar scientist David Hathaway. But this is not just a scientific curiosity. It could affect everyone on Earth and force what for many is the unthinkable: a reappraisal of the science behind recent global warming.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-missing-sunspots-is-this-the-big-chill-1674630.html
This all goes to prove that Al Gore is living in the past !
btw – has anyone had trouble accessing NSIDC ?
http://www.nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/daily.html
I have been tracking the current NH extent in anticipation of it intersecting the long term average anomly line, and just as it seems about to create some history…… WEBSITE GOES DOWN !
Not sure if this is a local issue or not ?
Al Gore and the North Pole. Interesting that Al Gore only allowed partial release of Arctic datas since he became Vice Presitent, although he had visited the North Pole already 1990, and has said in his book back in 1992 “that the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world’s weather system”, (see: a recent comment ; ca. 23 April; Monkton – Al Gore):
“We were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowscape, windswept, and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or ‘pressure ridges’ of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountains ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CO2 levels are rising just as rapidly, …As the polar air warms, the ice here will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world’s weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous. ” More at: http://www.oceanclimate.de/, referring to Al Gores North Pole visit (Gore, Al (Albert), (1992); “The Earth in Balance”, London, 1992.)
A very impressive and far sighted work by the late John Daly.
The Ice at the polar ice cap is an average of 6-8 feet thick
This blows away the crux of the alarmists arguments who have been claiming it is “supposed to be” twice that thick. The ice in those pictures is clearly first year ice.
Walt Meier has told me that the ice in the early 1980s (at the beginning of the satellite record) was exceptionally thick.
Didn’t Al Gore invent the submarine?
“Ice at the North Pole in 1958 and 1959 – not so thick?” lol – should be “Polynyas exist then as they do now”
“The Ice at the polar ice cap is an average of 6-8 feet thick, but with the wind and tides the ice will crack and open into large polynyas (areas of open water), these areas will refreeze over with thin ice. We had sonar equipment that would find these open or thin areas to come up through”
The state of the Arctic Sea Ice is declining – in thickness and extent – even if the US Navy found some polynyas back in the 60’s. Judging by the comments in this thread: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/18/arctic-ice-thickness-measured-from-buoys/, you guys will love the results found by the arctic ice buoys of the US Army.
http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/images/icethick.gif
“Results from Rothrock et al. (1999) shows changes in ice thickness comparing submarine results from the 1958 through 1976 to results from the 1990’s. The results show that there was thinning at every point of comparison. The thinning averaged 40%, representing a decrease from about 3 m to less than 2 m (see figure below).”
http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/change.htm
@vukcevic
Many thanks for that link.
Once before I almost fell off my chair when reading a climate change article – this was when I first heard about the opinion polls that show pretty conclusively that the majority of ordinary people believe the warming is mostly natural.
Once again I almost fell off my chair while reading this report – ok, a slight exaggeration!
The Independent is one of the major UK national newspapers and as far as I know is completely pro-AGW. This news report is almost perfectly balanced and actually questions AGW in the light of past historical knowledge of solar activity and climate. The report also passes what I could call the Solar Activity Test.
I have seen a number of documentaries and articles that discuss a possible cooling due to falling solar activity – I think one documentary was entitled ‘Saved by the Sun?’
But I noticed an extraordinary thing: not one of these mentioned a rather important fact, that the sun had been extraordinarily active during the 20th century. According to some scientists the sun was the most active for a few thousand years.
It’s obvious why this fact was suppressed. The spin was that the ‘disastrous’ warming was caused by CO2, but that the sun might come to our rescue by offsetting some of the warming. Of course, the other, and some might say blindingly obvious explanation is that the 20th century warming was caused by the overactive sun, and that now the sun has calmed down the world will start to cool. But of course that wouldn’t do, would it? If true then it means that CO2 has an insignificant role to play in climate change.
This article does state that solar activity was high in the 20th century, so it passes the test with flying colours.
I know it may be wishful thinking, but I do get the sense that the tide is slowly turning in favour of the truth. And this article in a major UK newspaper is just one more sign of this.
Chris
Subs at the north pole does not really mean much as the quote from James Hester shows, they picked thin or ice-free if possible areas to surface at. It does show the action of the ice and that ice-free areas are not unusual in the arctic.
Non-icebreakers forcing the Northwest passage are much more telling because that can only be done when there is a significant decrease in ice over large areas. Of course that has been done a few times over the last 100 years. Question did any non-icebreakers make it though in 2007?
Are there any newspaper types reading these posts? Is there anyone here that has a connection with a large newspaper that would publish a good article. Can we get a copy of the submarines at the pole newsreel to give to TV stations. I think the media is just about ready to take a look at this kind of stuff. Here is a chance to put together a terrific article with US Navy 1950s-60s, the British Navy 1817 etc showing global warming ranges of today as not unusual. I’m concerned as I can see there is a scurry to get expensive global warming policies in place -as they have in Europe with their cap and trade and hype. There is also a president that is “conciliatory” to the Old World malarkey and is greener than Kilarney. If they managed to pass the cap and trade stuff in North America then this cooling period would be seen as having been the result of these new policies even before a mole of CO2 had been bought and sold. Preaching to ourselves has had some spin off but I think we have to find a way to push the best stuff out there.
Come on Guys we all know that the conditions prevailing previously was weather not climate?
These weather conditions have been going on for millions of years but the underlying trend and past records of Polar bear extinction demonstrate that the climate is changing.
Are people really trying to say that numerous weather events are climate?
Using ambient moisture content readings from Scots pine and other proxies such as those I choose, I will be able to show for sure that the arctic ice being so thin in 1958, 1959 1936 and 1922 was due to CO2 emissions. In fact I don’t need to do any more research because the Hockey Stick Graph shows this warming.
On another point it is clear that the swine virus originating in Mexico is due to global warming and this is obvious.
I have tried unsuccessfully to connect with NSIDC for a few hours and they aren’t available. The blue line angling to meet or cross the average ice extent curve has been building up palpable suspense for a couple of weeks. I’m betting there is a new report coming out that will move their position cautiously away from deep global warming to tepid global warming and eventually … WUWT?
I’m reminded of Alistair MacLean’s classic book (and later movie with Rock Hudson), Ice Station Zebra.
Doesn’t anyone remember watching Ice Station Zebra on TV as a kid?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Station_Zebra_(novel)
@TonyB,
Tony, I was fascinated by your reference to Ipiutak, which I had not come across before. Two references gave dates, one about 100BC, the other around the 6th century. The first date corresponds perfectly with the Roman Warm Period, the second with a significant warming that occurred between the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods (according to an ice core graph that I often refer to). According to the ice core, around the 7th century there was a cooling that was actually deeper than the LIA, and the MWP may have occurred as the climate bounced back from this sharp cooling.
Here’s an interesting link:
http://explorenorth.com/articles/billjones/ipiutak.html
The writer mentions several mysteries, for example the nearest source of wood being hundreds of miles away. He was clearly assuming that the climate was the same as today’s. If the climate were indeed warmer than today’s then most if not all of those mysteries are neatly explained.
It looks as if the Ipiutak can be added to the list of civilisations/cultures that prospered when the world was warm and died out when the world was cold.
Chris
ak (04:04:21) :
“Ice at the North Pole in 1958 and 1959 – not so thick?” lol – should be “Polynyas exist then as they do now”
ak,
The title of the article is perfect and we don’t want to make it too complicated by using difficult scientific words like “Polynyas”.
That is because we want the “Incoming Director of the NSIDC to understand the story. We all like to see Dr. Mark Serreze succeed his career.
Unfortunately, from his position as “Incoming Director of the NSIDC” made some remarks about the Arcic Sea Ice that left us with the conclusion that he was a little confused and mixed up some basic thermodynamics.
It could also be that he has mixed up the understanding of the words “warm and cold”. It happens and it is perfectly human to make a mistake.
That is why I am very pleased with this publication and I really hope Dr. Mark Serreze
gets a chance to read it.
It would be a shame if the “Incoming Director of the NSIDC would become the “Outgoing Director of the NSIDC” only because of such a miner issue of understanding.
So, just for the record Dr. Mark Serreze, if you get a chance to read this, just repeat after me:
Cold is not warm and warm is not cold.
Warm = water
Cold = Ice
Except in the Arctic Region where:
cold + water + wind + sea currents = dynamic circumstances + Dr. Mark Serreze =
NO PANIC
Now if Dr. Mark Serreze will concentrate on last remark, I am sure he will be a fine director.
You see how easy it is to help some people.
Wally,
this story is not from 2007, but from last year …
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2008/11/28/nwest-vessel.html
maybe a Canadian reader can easily pinpoint the villages or towns in the article and confirm whether this was unusual or not …
Yep, the entire NSIDC wweb site seems to be offline for at least the last 8 hours.
It’s cold war propaganda.
Dill Weed
Since the Arctic sea ice never melted in the past, why did the Eskimo invent the kayak and the larger whaling boat capable of holding a dozen hunters?
http://www.arcticwebsite.com/WhaleNativeBoat.html
In terms of sea ice thickness, there is data from the Canadian Ice Service of sea ice monitoring at various communities across the Arctic that goes back to 1947. This would be coastal sea ice versus north pole pack ice but here is Alert and Eureka Canada where ice thickness has been measured basically once a week since 1947. The NSIDC ice movement maps say this area has the most multi-year ice remaining so it is the anomaly now.
Some ups, some downs, maybe a little down recently but still difficult to tell.
http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/3163/seaicethickness.png
Barry Foster (02:31:10) :
“Just wanted to say how much I miss John Daly. His was the very first website I read on global warming after I converted from a believer. The sceptic cause lost a huge man when he died. Imagine the beating he’d be giving the warming-worriers today! I hope the relatives of Mr Daly appreciate how much we miss him.”
Amen!
For those that have not seen the John Daly info, it’s an excellent resource for Arctic infomation. Worthy of reading and bookmarking.
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
A.Longiv although he had visited the North Pole already 1990
Did he really do it?. It would be interesting to have a picture of that trascendental event.
TonyB (02:44:27) :
Very interesting and illuminating post.
Can you point to sources for the Royal Society and Hudson’s Bay Company data showing an ice cycle of 80 years?
Thanks.
I will never forget the headlines and news stories about a decade ago when somebody ‘discovered’ open water at the North Pole one summer. You would have thought the apocalypse was upon us.
Of course, the retractions and corrections were barely noticed when it was pointed out this was a common occurrence and not a sign of global warming.
All that is missing is an apology from the apologist here.
But has not the 30 percent decrease happened since 1979?
Alan the Brit (02:16:23) wrote:
“Seriously though, can I just copy these pictures without too much difficulty because I really would like to show them to one or two idiots I know?”
Alan-
Go to
http://wisdom-soft.com/products/screenhunter_free.htm
You can download (free!!) ScreenHunter software that will let you screen capture whatever is showing on your screen (or parts thereof). I have been using it for months with great satisfaction. (On the rare occasion that it doesn’t go to the screen that you want, right click and try again. That cancels that attempt withot a blank exposure.) You can then e-mail whatever you copy.
Ian in Canada [imcqueen@nbnet.nb.ca]
Great and informative post!
However, is the first photo really of the Skate surfacing at the Pole on 17 March 1959? Or is it really just a file photo, taken elsewhere on another date, of the Skate, which surfaced at the Pole on 17 March 1959?
If the photo was really taken during the last week of winter, why is there so little ice in comparison with the other photos, many of which were taken in mid-summer? According to Hester’s account, the sub had to break through 2 feet of ice to do a winter surfacing. I see the ice in other photos, but not in this one.
REPLY: There is ice floating in the water, look carefully. – Anthony
vukcevic (03:08:45) :
From today’s Independent:
“This is the quietest Sun we’ve seen in almost a century,” says NASA solar scientist David Hathaway. But this is not just a scientific curiosity. It could affect everyone on Earth and force what for many is the unthinkable: a reappraisal of the science behind recent global warming.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-missing-sunspots-is-this-the-big-chill-1674630.html
The Independent article article mentions that a .01 change in sun irradiance equals 1.3 watts pr meter squared of energy, yet the Goddard Institute for Space Studies states that greenhouse gasses only cause an increase of energy of .035 watts per meter squared. http//data.giss.nasa.gov.gisstemp.2008
Wow! 1.3 versus .035. that means that the sun has 1.3/.035=35 times the global warming potential as all of the permanent greenhouse gasses put together.
The Meeting of May 18th,1987 would make a great T-shirt-with say,Global Warming!
23 years before Gore? then under it the Skate, and Ok, 50 years BFG…
Just a minor weather report.Had a nice spring day in NE Oregon,went to Pasco Wa.
it was in the 60’s/well off the hot temps of last week.-Snow is in the forcast…
After I and my wife bought all these plants…
oops, I goofed up that link to GISS
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
Look for the third paragraph below the heading for figure 4, the graph of solar irradiance.
Pathetic that their models are not showing this… how inconvenient!
Hmm, sounds though a submarine couldn’t rescue the Catlin crew.
“All that is missing is an apology from the apologist here.
But has not the 30 percent decrease happened since 1979?” -Gerald Machnee
“Comparison of sea-ice draft data acquired on submarine cruises between 1993 and 1997 with similar data acquired between 1958 and 1976 indicates that the mean ice draft at the end of the melt season has decreased by about 1.3 m in most of the deep water portion of the Arctic Ocean, from 3.1 m in 1958–1976 to 1.8 m in the 1990s.” – http://psc.apl.washington.edu/thinning/Rothrock_Thinn.pdf
Since this paper provides data from the US Navy subs, not just anecdotal pictures, could it be added to the original post for all to see? The timeframe of the study is comparable to that of the original post. The anecdotal evidence of showing the subs in polynyas might mislead readers to think that all the ice in the region was of the same thickness, where in reality, these spots were specifically sought so as not to damage the subs. Thanks.
JLKrueger (05:40:41) :
The NSIDC has been down now for at least 30 hours. [snip – baseless accusation]
I’m convinced that most of the world, including scientists of all fields, get their conception of the North Pole from Hollywood.
Remember the film ‘Ice Station Zebra’? The ice was portrayed as several feet thick, a uniform plain of white stretching as far as the eye can see. There was no gaps or open water, no ridges, just a vast expanse of ice and snow drifts.
People believe the Arctic ice cap to be a stable mass of ice, as if it just sits there, unmoving, forever. The believe it only melts around the edges and don’t understand how the ice drifts and flows from Alaska towards Greenland and Iceland.
AGW alarmists play upon this ignorance. Scientists who know better but do not correct the misreporting of the popular media are doing no favor to their profession.
When ever you read an article about the terrible melting of the Ice Caps … just send the March 17, 1959 picture to the blog … and the writer.
The more we circulate it, the more impact it will have.
[Reply: Better yet, send the link to the whole article to them. ~ dbstealey, mod.]
Re NSIDC being down –the Doomsday Code must have tripped.
If current_val not < lt_trend then go shut_down.
😉
I think I saw an HC show about this, where they were looking for evidence of chinese ships on the US west coast. Which is fine, except they were relying on dowsing to find them. They didn’t find anything…
From what I understand, given these photos – the “tipping point” theory is falsified. Can someone tell me how the tipping point theory can stand up to this evidence?
Probably the best short video of a US sub breaking through the polar ice is on the Stargate SG1 straight to DVD movie, Continuum, with a special feature of how they shot the sub breaking through the ice on cue.
There IS some merit to the “cherry picking” claim by the warmists over the US subs at the North Pole, because those “Polynyas” perhaps were used in preference to more icy areas nearby. The “ice free North Pole” claim is to have vast stretches of the polar region ice free (less than 15% ?) and we’ll know that when we see it. I don’t think anyone can make the claim that vast stretches of the North Pole have been ice free yet, BUT at the same token, I don’t think that event will happen anytime soon, either.
Furthermore, we all can guess that the “ice free North Pole” is rhetoric more than it is practical, due to the angle of incidence at 90deg anyway. It would take one hell of a stormy season to push that much ice out of the polar region in order to get that much free ice area so as to really make all that much difference in the direct solar forcing of the Arctic ocean.
Something I’ve not seen as yet when reading these Arctic ice threads — We’ve all seen the animated ice graphics, of how the ice flows past the eastern coast of Greenland, out into the Atlantic Ocean. The river of ice flowing always seems the same from year to year, covering approximately the same area, but I would hazard a guess that perhaps when the Arctic is very stormy, and the ice is really pushed toward and around the east coast of Greenland, the speed (and thus area/volume) of ice physically pushed out of the Arctic is perhaps markedly different from year to year. Perhaps significantly so. Has this ever been quantified?
I fear that revisionism is alive and well today. In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston was employed by the Ministry of Truth to revise history to ensure that Big Brother’s predictions remain accurate. Today, inconvenient truths like the submarine photos, will be ignored or twisted by the AGW revisionists to ensure that current doctrine is maintained and “accurate”.
The NSIDC has been down now for at least 30 hours. [snip – baseless accusation]
Big opportunities for beach resorts developers, surrounded by the most transparent water ever seen, Artic Sea ´s palm trees , white sand beaches, etc.,etc. They are a few buyers already here!
George Carlin has a message with more clarity than Algore and his acolytes. George’s language is interspersed with vulgarity but is basic common sense applied to Nature and the planet Earth.
—————————————————————
George Carlin on Global Warming
First I’d like to echo the admiration expressed for John Daly. One of the pioneer sceptics who relentlessly posed credible comon sense questions to the AGW community; many of which have yet to be answerred in kind. He is missed.
Second a question: what’s the funny little bump in the ASMR-E Sea Ice Extent graph that occurs frequently around June 1?
There have been doubts expressed about the validity of the submarine photo.
http://web.archive.org/web/20031203174202/http://www.trump.net.au/~greenhou/reply.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20060218082437/http://www.trump.net.au/~greenhou/home.html
REPLY: Perhaps the NAVY can help, even if we throw out that photo, there are others listed that support the same idea. – Anthony
This is another reason why the military makes it their business to know so much more about Arctic ice than the civilian sector: Open leads and polynyas are critical strategic resources.
He who knows the whereabouts and behavior of opportunities to surface through the ice – or equivalently, to move men & equipment across the surface unimpeded – holds a decisive ‘comman and control’ advantage over the competition.
To function as a global power today (and for decades now) it is vital to know where openings are in the ice, on a near real-time, continuous basis.
It’s not just a matter of scientific interest to know how, when & where openings occur in the Arctic icecap, but a matter of security at the highest level.
It is no accident or mere indulgence, that among the first & most important missions of nuclear submarines, was to demonstrate their value in understanding how to exploit the Arctic realm. These pictures that have been released were as much for the benefit of the Soviets etc, as they were for the curious publics in America & Britain.
Great collection of pics, WUWT – thanks!
There’s an awful lot of light in the “17 March 1959” north pole picture, given that the sun is still about 1.5o below the horizon and hasn’t yet risen at the north pole on March 17.
So, with the scarcity of ice during the times these pictures were taken, does any one know of pictures of places like the Maldives that were taken during the same times so we can see how they were affected?
There are two easily-accessible references, which describe the surfacing of the USS Skate at the North Pole on the 17th March 1959 (the first submarine to do so):
*
Calvert, J.F., 1959. Up through the ice of the North Pole, The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. CXVI, No. 1, July 1959, pp. 1-41.
*
Calvert, J., 1996. Surface at The Pole, Bluejacket Books (originally printed by McGraw-Hill, 1960).
and which say:
* That the sun was still below the horizon and it was quite dark (it did not appear until 19 March):
The sun was still just below the horizon and a very heavy overcast made for late twilight darkness
* That the weather was terrible:
*
the wind ….. was roaring around us at about 30 knots, blowing the snow until one could see no more than a quarter of a mile
*
The swirling snow loomed around the red torches
*
in the 26-below-zero cold….. The wind blew snow into our noses and mouths, and it was difficult to talk or even breathe
*
The wind and bitter cold made it physically difficult to hold and read the prayer book
*
the gale was increasing and the temperature dropping
*
Both sides of the lead were piled with the heaviest and ruggedest hummocks I had yet seen in the Arctic. It was a wild and forbidding scene
Enduser (07:04:56),
The GISS chart (the fig. 4 you mentioned) shows total solar forcing at .2 w/m2. That is quite a difference from your calculation. Do you know why?
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! for posting those old Navy pictures. I’m 61 years old and remember seeing some of those pictures in news magazines in the past. I have some good friends my same age who are absolutely convinced that the polar ice is melting, that the polar bears are going extinct and that Manhattan Island, the Maldives and Florida will soon be inundated. They have completely bought the media hype, and no amount of contradictory evidence can get them to change their minds. These pictures are the best visual evidence of the AGW hoax I have seen. Believe me, I will be forwarding these pictures to quite a few people.
Models are great at forecasting the past – something I learned from modeling population and energy usage. Biggest factor in modeling was the outlier, data that doesn’t fit – or in my case – when the biggest manufacturer shut down.
Seems to me that an accurate summer ice at the pole model would include temperature. Extreme cold dries out the atmosphere. As the earth is inclined about 22 degrees toward the sun, photons [fancy word for energy] striking the ice would cause it to sublimate more – sort of like evaporation – and thin the ice. The ice would thin from the top down.
Sublimation is no mystery. But it is counterintuitive to some.
When the ice ages covered the earth [relatively speaking], the most ice free zones were directly in front of the floe [sp] . The air was desiccated and vast drifts of wind blown soil built up – leaving hills hundreds of feet thick – Loess. Again – counterintuitive – but shows how a model builder using certain presumptions, can model the wrong thing. Desiccation is not a mystery.
Iceberg calving from glaciers. Hopefully every grade school student has learned that the proportion of ice below the sea’s surface is huge in an iceberg. Glacier Iceberg calving is merely the force of gravity breaking ice that is not supported enough by the strength of frozen freshwater in its bulk while flowing into saltwater that tends to melt away the bottom of the birthing berg. The modeling has to take into account snow fall versus temperatures and the specific ocean bed conditions at the glacier front. Does the modeler then confuse the long-term snowfall conditions with the formation of sea ice at the North Pole? The two are counter-intuitively not related.
That photo is obviously faked, just like the moon landing.
Final sentence in ksspyder comment should more plainly say – the interplay between snowfall over decades of time on glaciers and the formation of sea ice is not intuitive.
ak, you must look at the dates of the submarine data. The initial measure was taken in October, and subsequent measure taken in September,etc. It will show the ice to be thinner, of course, due to seasonal variation. Most people don’t realize that an area the size of the U.S. melts and freezes every year. TonyB mentioned the Hudson’s Bay records ( they go back almost 400 years) , which indicate a cyclical variation in ice extent and thickness. These are accurate records for their lives and livelihood depended on good data. This leads me to believe that we are well within naturally occurring variations of the polar ice. We live on a planet where water can exist in all three states at any given time. With a climate that is as complex as earths ( think of all the variables), there is going to be fluctuation in ice extent, thickness, movement due to winds, water temperature, salinity. The list goes on. You have to ignore a great deal of paleoclimate evidence to say that we are “outside” this natural variation.
They have more control over those who live in fear.
excuse me if this was posted already. Here is a scientific paper that compares some of the Artic warming and ice melt to what happened in the 1940’s. They say it is the same. Just mother nature and her changeable nature at work.
http://rdgs.dk/djg/pdfs/106/1/04.pdf
Walt Stone 08:17:25
In fact, the extensive loss of Arctic Sea Ice in 2007 was largely due to an unusual amount of wind driven loss.
=====================================
Robert Rust (08:12:46) :
Book burning.
However, the entire world + dog would know what happened & why.
Therefore, the agendists will try to bury and ignore the Skate & Seadragon at the North Pole in the late 50’s early 60’s.
Come up with pictures of subs poking up through the SOUTH POLE and you may have a shot at getting attention form the mainstream media.
REPLY: Actually, following Waxman’s lead, there’s probably pictures of subs poking up through the Arctic tundra. 😉 Anthony
Ian L. Mcqueen;-)
Done thanks. It seems to have been a security filter issue at my end but thanks for the tip!
AtB
Kath (08:17:56) : I fear that revisionism is alive and well today. . . . revise history to ensure that Big Brother’s predictions remain accurate”
James Hansen has done this. Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes yesterday introduced Hansen as “NASA’s top climate scientist, credited with the earliest and most accurate projections on climate change.”
I recall Hansen’s 1988 testimony before Congress in which he predicted a warmer climate by 1.2°C in twenty years. Here in 2009, the global average is only 0.17 to 0.22°C warmer than the 20th Century benchmark. He then had the audacity to publish a paper with himself as the lead author extolling the virtues of the accuracy of his 1988 projections. Looking back, none of his three scenarios came even within 50% of being accurate, yet the ya-hoos over at RealClimate.org insist Hansen was and is spot on.
Enduser (07:04:56) :
“Wow! 1.3 versus .035. that means that the sun has 1.3/.035=35 times the global warming potential as all of the permanent greenhouse gasses put together.”
Anthony/Steve:
I’ve been trying to get everyone to stop looking up at the sun for a minute and take a look where the sun gets some assistance from the earth’s interior:
http://esrc.stfx.ca/pdf/halifaxtalk.pdf:
“Canada’s geothermal database indicate that the ground heat flux has increased an average of 24 mW/m2 over the last 200years. Application of this method to the global geothermal data base allowed for a quantification of the global ground energy balance at the Earth’s surface for the past few centuries. Preliminary global ground surface temperature and surface heat
flux histories indicate that the Earth’s continents have warmed by about 0.5 K and received an additional 26 mW/m2 of energy in the last 100 years.”
Everyone appears to have dismissed the heat flux as too small. The average is small but take a look at the next link and you will see that it is quite high in certain places – particularly in the pacific where El Nino lives. Looking at the east pacific heat flux anomally (scroll down to the maps) and imagine the currents converging on the equator and gathering up this hot band into a narrow band along the equator. :
http://geophysics.ou.edu/geomechanics/notes/heatflow/global_heat_flow.htm
I think this would make a good post (and make your geological readers happy)
Enduder: quoting from the link: “…ANNUAL GROWTH RATE {upper case mine} of climate forcing by long-lived greenhouse gases (GHGs) slowed from a peak close to 0.05 W/m2 PER YEAR {upper case mine} year around 1980-85 to about 0.035”
It would help if everyone would read things carefully before responding.
News Flash!! Dateline September 25, 1957, Wednesday
U.S. Cutters Conquer Northwest Passage; 3 Coast Guard Craft First of the Nation to Make Transit CUTTERS CONQUER ARCTIC PASSAGE Canadian Ship on 2d Voyage Spar Assists Freighter
By JOHN H. FENTON Special to The New York Times.U.S. Coast Guard
September 25, 1957, Wednesday
Page 1, 811 words
BOSTON, Sept. 24–Two Coast Guard cutters were saluted in Boston Harbor today at the end of a successful mission to find a practical Northwest Passage–a route around the top of the North American Continent. …
Here is the link to the NYT article.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0814F83B5A177B93C7AB1782D85F438585F9
I have a scanned image of the page and the article if you want to add to your collection of photos above.
Here’s a little challenge: Look carefully at the photo captioned “USS Hawkbill at the North Pole, Spring 1999. (US Navy Photo)”. Do you notice anything odd?
Saw the artifacts in the Groton musuem ten years ago. Hope Winston hasn’t got there yet. Still, lots of old submariners alive who remember.
Gary Pearse (10:35:31) Very interesting, hope this will be a next post at WUWT.
jorge..
you mean like the dive planes are in a vertical position? It’d make a lot of sense to do that before surfacing through ice.
Mike86
Mike86, sharp eyes, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I’m surprised nobody noticed this other feature before now.
The North Pole is NOT the center of the Arctic Ice Pack. The majority of the Arctic Ice Pack is on the Pacific side of the pack – typically as far south as 65° latitude. That side of the pack is protected from warm water currents by the Aleutian Islands as well as the Bering Straight.
The Atlantic approach to the Arctic Ice Pack, however, is exposed to the warm water currents of the Thermohaline Circulation. Extending north and east from the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic Drift reduces ice and provides a path toward the Pole as far north as latitude 85°. Because of its proximity to the warmest edge of the ice field, ice at the North Pole is frequently thin and occasionally open.
Sorry folks, this information doesn’t contradict evidence of retreating polar sea ice or Global Warming. Perhaps you should research your subjects more thoroughly.
Guardian on the attack. All skeptics and cynics are part of a conspiracy paid for by vested interests! That’s right, all us thousands upon thousands of normal independent people are part of a misinformation campaign against…global warming????
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/apr/27/climate-change-scientific-evidence
CO2 in the Arctic accelerating faster than ever! The ice caps will evaporate faster than Waxman’s career!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/27/arctic-carbon-dioxide-levels
storky,
Please get up to speed on this. No one is questioning global warming. The planet has been warming since the glaciers retreated 11,000 years ago at the end of the last great Ice Age.
And as you can see in this chart, global sea ice extent has broken above its long term average: click
re the Hawkbill, do you mean the position of the sun? If it were the first day of spring, it would be on the horizon, but this could be in late spring. Hard to tell the scale and exactly how high in the sky the Sun is.
David Ball, The data used from the 50’s and 60’s spans July-October. The seasonal change was taken into account. Effectively, they reduced the thickness of the old ice and today, it’s still 40-50% thinner!
You can’t disagree though, that actually looking at the data collected on these trips (beautiful photos btw) is much more illuminating than just the photos themselves!
Earth Day 1970. Then and Now.
Earth Day 1970 Quotes.
Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University
We have about five more years at the outside to do something.
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist
Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist
We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist
Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….
• Life Magazine, January 1970
At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, its only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director
By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there wont be any more crude oil. Youll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy, and hell say, `I am very sorry, there isnt any.
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson
The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
http://www.reason.com/news/printer/27702.html
Ahh, and who can forget the movie “Ice Station Zebra”
Jason Calley (11:31:48) : “re the Hawkbill, do you mean the position of the sun? If it were the first day of spring, it would be on the horizon, but this could be in late spring. Hard to tell the scale and exactly how high in the sky the Sun is.”
You’re getting closer, Jason Calley. And you don’t need to know the date.
Hi,
Anyone looking for old images of USS Skate in Arctic waters go to my post:
“50 Years Ago, USS Skate (SSN-578) Was the First Which Surfaced at North Pole”
http://p2o2.blogspot.com/2009/03/50-yeras-ago-uss-skate-ssn-578-was.html
Regards
I basically do not wish harm to any human being, but I cannot banish from my mind the concept of ultimate environmental justice: Al Gore being eaten by a polar bear.
Chris Wright
Thanks for your kind comment on my 04 22 47. You then went on to say;
“According to the ice core, around the 7th century there was a cooling that was actually deeper than the LIA, and the MWP may have occurred as the climate bounced back from this sharp cooling.”
You may be interested in this document that relates closely to your cooling reference and includes the remarkable contemporary observation as follows;
“One huge iceberg crushed the wharf at the Acropolis, close to the tip of Constantinople’s peninsula, and another extremely large one hit the city wall, shaking it and the houses on the other side, before breaking into three large pieces; it was higher than the city walls.”
Anyway, here is a detailed extract with the link given at the end.
“On the Continent eighth-century minor annals record the severe winter in the
area from which they drew their information, Austrasia. This was the power center of the new Carolingian dynasty around the Meuse and Moselle rivers and west of the Rhine. In this region that “worst freeze” began on 14 December 763 and continued until 16 March 764.32 A generation later, the royal court still remembered the winter for its unprecedented bitter cold. About that time someone in the same or a related milieu wrote up the most detailed record, in the Chronicon Moissiacense. It observes under the year 762 that the freeze reached as far as the western provinces of the Byzantine Empire:
“A great freeze oppressed the Gauls, Illyricum and Thrace and, wasted by the freeze, many olive and fig trees withered; the sprouts of the crops withered, and in the following year, hunger oppressed these regions very severely, such that many people died from scarcity of bread.”
In response to the Frankish king’s request for news about the papal and royal
ambassadors whose return from Byzantium he had expected earlier, Pope Paul I protested that “it has assuredly not escaped you that because of the very cruel harshness of this winter season, no one is coming from those parts” with news of the envoys. In fact, the pope’s unusually specific expression of relief that the king himself, the queen, and their three children were “healthy and safe and unharmed” probably reflects the receding terrors of that extreme winter.
The special processions that King Pippin enjoined on the bishop of Mainz for God’s mercy for “the great and marvelous consolation and abundance of the fruit of the earth” after the terrible “tribulation for our sins” surely reflects the return to normalcy in 765. The economic impact on the Carolingian kingdom was serious enough to force Pippin to suspend his long-standing effort to conquer Aquitaine.
Some 2,000 kilometers to the southeast, a well-informed observer at Constantinople recorded that great and extremely bitter cold settled on the Byzantine Empire and the lands to the north, west (confirming the Chronicon Moissiacense’s statement concerning Illyricum and Thrace), and east. The north coast of the Black Sea froze solid 100 Byzantine miles out from shore (157.4 km). The ice was reported to be 30 Byzantine “cubits” deep, and people and animals could walk on it as on dry land.38 Drawing on the same lost written source, another contemporary, the patriarch of Constantinople, Nicephorus I, emphasized that it particularly affected the “hyperborean and northerly regions,” as well as the many great rivers that lay north of the Black Sea.39 Twenty cubits of snow accumulated on top of the ice, making it very difficult to discern where land stopped and sea began, and the Black Sea became unnavigable. In February the ice began to break up and
flow into the Bosporus, entirely blocking it.
Theophanes’ account recalls how, as a child, the author (or his source’s author) went out on the ice with thirty other children and played on it and that some of his pets and other animals died. It was possible to walk all over the Bosporus around Constantinople and even cross to Asia on the ice. One huge iceberg crushed the wharf at the Acropolis, close to the tip of Constantinople’s peninsula, and another extremely large one hit the city wall, shaking it and the houses on the other side, before breaking into three large pieces; it was higher than the city walls. The terrified Constantinopolitans wondered what it could possibly portend.
At 66 ppb, the spike in the GISP2 sulfate deposit on Greenland dated 767 is
the highest recorded for the eighth century (see Fig. 5) and shows that this terrible winter in Europe and western Asia was connected with a volcanic aerosol that left marked traces on Greenland.
http://www.medievalacademy.org/pdf/Volcanoes.pdf
I think modern people in their air conditioned cars or centrally heated homes believe that climate is relatively constant and forget that throughout our history we continually experience extremes of heat and cold caused by entirely natural forces.
This is nowhere better illustrated than in the climate references from the Byzantine Empire 383 to 1453AD which includes considerable detail on the events described above, and provides drawings of the various irrigation systems devised to beat the droughts during warm times, and the famine that ensued during cold times. It is remarkable to think that the Holy Roman Empire can still teach modern man a thing or two-in this case that there is nothing new- climatically-under the sun.
Tonyb
Some interesting links about Hawkbill
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/ice.run/journal.html
http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/08666b.htm
Hey Jorge, nope, I do not think I see what you are looking at. There are a lot of little details to indicate thick ice, ie the planes down, the periscope and antennas retracted, some pressure ridges on the horizon — but I do not think those are what you are looking at. What do you see?
Richard M (09:01:00) :
Richard M (09:01:00) :
Enduser (07:04:56),
The GISS chart (the fig. 4 you mentioned) shows total solar forcing at .2 w/m2. That is quite a difference from your calculation. Do you know why?
There is something odd about that graph. On the left, if you look between the blue lines, you see a difference of close to 1.5 watts/m^2, yet on the left of the graph, NSIDC added the notation “Solar forcing; .20 W/M^2.”
I do not know how 1.5 W/M^2 of increased irradiance translates into .20 W/M^2 of “solar forcing.” Someone wish to elucidate?
jorgekafkazar says:
Hmmm, is that land in the background off to the left? How far from land is the NP, anyway?
The North pole is located over the Arctic Ocean. The sea ice is free to drift around on the wind and current. Sea ice thickness and distribution must be followed over the course of several decades before an accurate picture of climate can be deduced. Sea ice has been declining in average range and and average thickness since constant satellite monitoring began more than 2 decades ago. Politicians and interest groups can spin this anyway they like, but the facts are the facts.
BTW, the sun in the pictures in the above articles looks to be about 30 degrees above the horizon. The sun a maximum of 23 degrees above the horizon at the geographic pole on or about June 20. Perhaps the pictures were taken at lower latitudes in the Arctic and the authors of the articles just forgot to mention that.
The ignorance and short memories in the media are astounding. As another example of this, my grandfather worked to retrofit an oil tanker into an ice-breaking oil tanker to transport Alaskan oil from the North Slope before the pipeline was built. The name of the original tanker or the rechristened one was the “Manhattan”.
The story I remember him telling was that the tanker had no trouble making the passage, but the damage from the ice made the tanker uncompetitive.
Thanks for reminding me of my grandfather.
In Memoriam for Anthony Gilardi 1907-1997
Aron (11:28:18) : If we ask ourselves what bothers us more of all this global warming or climate change creed, propaganda or whatever it is, is its political agenda which could make our grand children live in a kind of Aldous Huxley´s “Brave new world” where, for example, Al Gore´s descendants would have been chosen as the more “fitted” to rule the world. Can you imagine that?
I think people like the jewish people or like those who were seggregated not so long time ago in the balkans, can help in awakening the world of the danger these ideas entail to humanity. To all those fanatics, our pledge: Live and let the people live!
Thin ice/Thin tent walls . . .
From the Catlin Survey:
“Yesterdays weather window has now firmly closed. The ice team are positioned in the path of a huge storm. Pen reported this morning that winds are picking up, and the Ops team can see that over the next 36 hours the team will experience blizzard conditions with winds of up to 40 knots and a strong possibility of heavy snowfall.
During such extreme conditions, the only course of action is to sit it out and try and get some rest whilst the storm howls outside and batters the thin walls of the tent.”
It’s not just the thin tent that is getting battered by harsh reality. Seems their AGW premise is taking a sound drubbing.
I see Lou Dobs is having some doubters on his show:
http://www.businessandmedia.org/printer/2009/20090114065138.aspx
(click the video link)
@Smokey (11:31:45) :
“No one is questioning global warming.”
Huh? This website is almost exclusively devoted to questioning Anthropogenic Global Warming
“And as you can see in this chart, global sea ice extent has broken above its long term average”
Yeah . . . so . . . With so few data points contrary to the long term downward trend, what evidence is there that this blip is indicative of a new trend. Until a new trend is defined by more data, this is nothing more than noise.
And the Old Farmer’s Almanac is in on the act too:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2008-09-09-farmers-almanac_N.htm
The Almanac is reasonably prescient too, as it must have been compiled in the summer of 2008.
I would say lets all purchase those t-shirts and bumper stickers that say
C02 is plant food not pollution. All the warmers get their t-shirt and bumper stickers, well why can’t we.
http://www.zazzle.com/co2_is_plant_food_sweatshirt-235029984449853688
Claims of Arctic Melting = fraud = AGW
Bob (12:14:44) :
“Sea ice has been declining in average range and and average thickness since constant satellite monitoring began more than 2 decades ago. ”
I read a statement that the arctic had lost 1/3 of it’s ice since 1979 (due to changes in thickness – changes in ice extent have been much less, of course). Do you agree with this, Bob?
Thanks,
Frank
Bob says: “BTW, the sun in the pictures in the above articles looks to be about 30 degrees above the horizon. The sun a maximum of 23 degrees above the horizon at the geographic pole on or about June 20. Perhaps the pictures were taken at lower latitudes in the Arctic and the authors of the articles just forgot to mention that.”
Certainly you are correct about the 23 degrees, and it is also possible that the photo is mis-documented. I would, however, respectfully disagree that we are able to make a good estimate of the sun’s elevation in the photo without having more information about the camera and the lens used for the picture.
Ian (00:49:23) :
” When I was allowed to post on RealClimate (sadly I’m now banned for disagreeing)”
Ian,
Forget all about RealClimate.
I was banned just for publishing a WUWT link!
I think there are no WUWT posters left who can post on RealClimate.
storky can not understand the difference between natural climate change and the alarming but unsupported CO2 = AGW hypothesis. Nor can he understand the thirty year trend line [zero line] in global sea ice extent.
Be gentle with him.
ralph ellis (12:35:55) :
“And the Old Farmer’s Almanac is in on the act too:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2008-09-09-farmers-almanac_N.htm
The Almanac is reasonably prescient too, as it must have been compiled in the summer of 2008″.
Ralph,
Last year the Old Farmer’s Almanac published it’s weather forecast for last year’s winter and a great historic view by Joseph D’Aleo (www.icecap.us).
It must have been one of their best predictions ever because every letter printed turned out to be true.
Jason Calley (12:03:43) : “Hey Jorge, nope, I do not think I see what you are looking at. There are a lot of little details to indicate thick ice, ie the planes down, the periscope and antennas retracted, some pressure ridges on the horizon — but I do not think those are what you are looking at. What do you see?”
Richard Sharpe (12:10:23) : ‘Hmmm, is that land in the background off to the left? How far from land is the NP, anyway?”
Okay, this should nail it, guys: From the sun, drop a longish perpendicular through the horizon. Construct a circle with its center on the intersection, and passing through the sun. Now look below the horizon, at the point where the circle intersects the perpendicular again. What do you see?
Ron de Haan (12:45:23) & Ian (00:49:23),
The reason that Gavin Schmidt lost the GW debate is because he’s short: click. He claims it is the reason the alarmists, who went into the debate well ahead, ended up losing the debate [even though the debaters were seated].
So Gavin has a Napoleon complex. Who knew? But that explains his little-man response to posters who disagree with him; he just censors them — because he finally has the power!
Pee Wee Herman would probably understand.
Off topic but how many more hours before the alarmists claim the swine flu outbreak is due to global warming?
I predict a number of made to order studies will be released before Copenhagen linking flu pandemics to global warming. You know the thinking. If emissions aren’t reduced 20% by 2020 then 50% of the population will die by 2050 from flu pandemics.
The alarmists are so predictable. There is no way they won’t try to capitalize on the fear of the year.
For those who have been looking for a source for the photographs. Many submarine/North Pole photographs are in this archive.
http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/05idx.htm
Look for USS Skate, Sea Dragon, Billfish, Sea Devil, Queenfish.
I am alarmed that WordPress.com seems to be associated with folks who denounce the concept of global warming. I cannot find any way to contact WordPress. I see that two anti-global warming blogs are prominently featured on the WordPress home page. What’s up with this?
@Adolfo Giurfa
If Albert Gore wrote in his book “The Earth in Balance “, almost 20 years ago, that he had been at the North Pole, we should trusr him in this respect, that indeed he had been visiting the North Pole.
Interesting what he wrote in the NYT four months before being honered with the Nobel Prize (at : http://www.1ocean-1climate.com );
Al Gore: “Moving Beyond Kyoto”, The New York Times, July 1, 2007;
“We – the human species – have arrived at a moment of decision.”
“What is at risk of being destroyed is not our planet itself, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings”.
“We – all of us – now face a universal threat. Though it is not from outside this world, it is nevertheless cosmic in scale.”
with the conclusion:
“Just in the last few months, new studies have shown that the north pole ice cap – which helps the planet cool itself – is melting nearly three times faster than the most pessimistic computer models predicted”;
Looking at what John Daly presented long ago, was Al Gore better informed then he claims he was??
Bob (12:14:44) :”BTW, the sun in the pictures in the above articles looks to be about 30 degrees above the horizon. The sun (is) a maximum of 23 degrees above the horizon at the geographic pole on or about June 20. Perhaps the pictures were taken at lower latitudes in the Arctic and the authors of the articles just forgot to mention that.”
Well, I think we can make a better estimate. The conning tower looks to me to be between 25 and 30 feet tall, and I’d guess it’s about 100 yards away from the camera. The sine of the tower’s subtended angle is about .08, so the top of the tower is 4.8°. The sun’s azimuth angle is roughly two and a half times that, or roughly 12° above the horizon. Maybe 15°, max; nowhere near 30°.
The implications are clear. Submarines have caused global warming.
[snip – no references to WWI Germany please]
Robert Bateman (22:49:18) :
Leon Brozyna (22:28:27) :
Oh dear me. How ever will Al Gore handle this?
I know! He’ll say the skeptics [DENIERS! – GP] made it all up. These were photoshopped or even shot in a Hollywood Special Effects studio. That’s how he’ll do it.
Jorge, I can see that the fins on the sail are vertical, presumably to reduce the chance of damage on surfacing, but otherwise I am stumped.
suziam48: It is called freedom of the press, that’s watts up. If you don’t like it just read the New York Times
A. Longiv (13:12:03),
I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but Al Gore tends to exaggerate.
According to Al, he and Tipper were the genesis for “Love Story,” and Al was key to the invention of the internet.
Really. You could look it up. So take Al’s “new studies” with a big grain of salt.
And Claude Harvey, I think it’s been proven beyond any doubt that there is a clear correlation between the number of pirates and global warming: click
bob(12:14:44) the sun subtends and angle of 1/2 deg. from the picture that would put the sun at no more than two degrees above the horizon.
Cancel my last. I see Jorge answered the question while I was walking the dog.
Well done on intentionally misleading your audience – you’ll fit right in beside the MSM!
The article itself shows why this is utterly misleading. Holes in the ice are perfectly natural and in this case the sub used sonar to find them. You will also note that the hole they found closed up again within two hours.
This is VERY different from the ice free pole that is being predicted.
But good try none the less.
[Reply: Always identify who you are responding to.
~ dbstealey, mod.]
The nearest land is usually said to be Kaffeklubben Island, off the northern coast of Greenland about 700 km (440 mi) away, though some perhaps non-permanent gravel banks lie slightly further north.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole
1999 photo would suggest land is no more than 10-15 miles away.
Bethany (12:38:08) : said,
I would say lets all purchase those t-shirts and bumper stickers that say
C02 is plant food not pollution. All the warmers get their t-shirt and bumper stickers, well why can’t we.
Try this,
Cars make CO2 trees absorb CO2, drive your car feed a tree and help save the planet.
“suziam48 (13:11:17) :
I am alarmed…”
Somehow that does not surprise me. Al gore and the media are counting on that. You have been conditioned to be alarmed at the slightest provocation. Try to calm down and remember that we still live in a free country. I know it’s hard to believe that there might be some people who disagree with you. Try to remember a long time ago when you heard the expression, “I may not agree with what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Do you rememner that saying? Maybe you can google it…
Just come in on this. Surely those nukes have just floated up through the tundra that underlies the North Pole? Odd that there’s no sign of it making a dash for space…
Smokey (12:59:55) :
So Gavin has a Napoleon complex. Who knew? But that explains his little-man response to posters who disagree with him; he just censors them — because he finally has the power!
——————
…. and he’s got the “delusions” part down pretty well too.
http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/bro/lowres/bron1193l.jpg
vukcevic (13:36:50),
You don’t think those could be ice ridges?
Mike Bryant (13:42:14) : “Try to remember a long time ago when you heard the expression, ‘I may not agree with what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'”
Actually, Mike, if you’ve been keeping up with current events, it goes: “I may not agree with what you are saying, but I will defend to the death the right of the media not to print a single, solitary word of it.”
…I wonder if Congressman Waxman has seen these images ?
A. Longiv (13:12:03), “And Claude Harvey, I think it’s been proven beyond any doubt that there is a clear correlation between the number of pirates and global warming:”
A.L.: you need to update your data. Just as the decline of pirates led to the late 20th Century warming, the recent increase in pirates off the coast of Somalia has contributed to the 21st Century cooling.
The Spaghetti Monster lives!
Hey moderator, where is my last post? It displayed right below Smokey (12:59:55) : Why did you pull it?
Are your values so fragile that thy cannot withstand scrutiny? Apparently so.
suziam48 (13:11:17) :
I am alarmed that WordPress.com seems to be associated with folks who denounce the concept of global warming. I cannot find any way to contact WordPress. I see that two anti-global warming blogs are prominently featured on the WordPress home page. What’s up with this?
suziam48 (13:11:17) :
Do you have any problems with that?
I am alarmed that people like suziam48 are apparently interested in stifling the views of those she/he disagrees with.
Perhaps she/he will now be organizing marches in the street against WordPress, along with boycotts and other actions against someone she/he disagrees with.
You know what’s amazing? These people think they “stopped the war” in Vietnam by their marches and protests. Yep. Now they’re going to march and protest to “stop global warming”, and I promise you it will be just as effective.
Smokey (13:56:24) :
vukcevic (13:36:50),
You don’t think those could be ice ridges?
Rest of the ice looks very flat (as it should), I would expect to see ice ridges in fast moving currents.
A little south of the Arctic in the lower 48, there is this: http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=59427&wuSelect=WEATHER
===============
Winter Storm Warning in effect until 6 am MDT Thursday…
Tonight
Snow showers. Areas of blowing snow. Snow accumulation 4 to 5 inches. Lows around 25. North winds 5 to 15 mph… increasing to 15 to 25 mph with gusts to 35 mph after midnight. Chance of snow 90 percent.
Tuesday
Snow. Areas of blowing snow. Windy. Snow accumulation 6 to 9 inches. Highs around 30. North winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts to 40 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.
Tuesday Night
Snow. Areas of blowing snow. Windy. Snow accumulation 6 to 9 inches. Lows around 25. North winds 10 to 20 mph…increasing to 20 to 30 mph after midnight. Gusts up to 45 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.
Wednesday
Windy…snow. Accumulations possible. Highs 30 to 35. North winds 25 to 35 mph with gusts to 50 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.
Wednesday Night
Snow likely. Accumulations possible. Lows 20 to 25. North winds 5 to 15 mph. Chance of snow 70 percent.
Thursday
Mostly cloudy with a 40 percent chance of snow showers. Highs around 35.
Thursday Night
Partly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of snow showers. Lows 15 to 20.
==============
Perhaps suziam48 would like to explain to these Montana folks why they can’t plant their crops with all that global warming.
Smokey,
In a thread about Arctic Sea Ice, wouldn’t it be more apropos to use Arctic Sea Ice trends?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.jpg
Walt Stone: “I don’t think anyone can make the claim that vast stretches of the North Pole have been ice free yet…”
Less ice in Arctic ocean 6000-7000 years ago
Date: Oct 2008 Source: Science Daily
ScienceDaily — Recent mapping of a number of raised beach ridges on the north coast of Greenland suggests that the ice cover in the Arctic Ocean was greatly reduced some 6000-7000 years ago. The Arctic Ocean may have been periodically ice free.
”The climate in the northern regions has never been milder since the last Ice Age than it was about 6000-7000 years ago. We still don’t know whether the Arctic Ocean was completely ice free, but there was more open water in the area north of Greenland than there is today,” says Astrid Lyså, a geologist and researcher at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU).
Shore features
Together with her NGU colleague, Eiliv Larsen, she has worked on the north coast of Greenland with a group of scientists from the University of Copenhagen, mapping sea-level changes and studying a number of shore features. She has also collected samples of driftwood that originated from Siberia or Alaska and had these dated, and has collected shells and microfossils from shore sediments.
”The architecture of a sandy shore depends partly on whether wave activity or pack ice has influenced its formation. Beach ridges, which are generally distinct, very long, broad features running parallel to the shoreline, form when there is wave activity and occasional storms. This requires periodically open water,” Astrid Lyså explains.
Pack-ice ridges which form when drift ice is pressed onto the seashore piling up shore sediments that lie in its path, have a completely different character. They are generally shorter, narrower and more irregular in shape.
Open sea
”The beach ridges which we have had dated to about 6000-7000 years ago were shaped by wave activity,” says Astrid Lyså. They are located at the mouth of Independence Fjord in North Greenland, on an open, flat plain facing directly onto the Arctic Ocean. Today, drift ice forms a continuous cover from the land here.
Astrid Lyså says that such old beach formations require that the sea all the way to the North Pole was periodically ice free for a long time.
”This stands in sharp contrast to the present-day situation where only ridges piled up by pack ice are being formed,” she says.
However, the scientists are very careful about drawing parallels with the present-day trend in the Arctic Ocean where the cover of sea ice seems to be decreasing.
“Changes that took place 6000-7000 years ago were controlled by other climatic forces than those which seem to dominate today,” Astrid Lyså believes.
Inuit immigration
The mapping at 82 degrees North took place in summer 2007 as part of the LongTerm project, a sub-project of the major International Polar Year project, SciencePub. The scientists also studied ruined settlements dating from the first Inuit immigration to these desolate coasts.
The first people from Alaska and Canada, called the Independence I Culture, travelled north-east as far as they could go on land as long ago as 4000-4500 years ago. The scientists have found out that drift ice had formed on the sea again in this period, which was essential for the Inuit in connection with their hunting. No beach ridges have been formed since then.
”Seals and driftwood were absolutely vital if they were to survive. They needed seals for food and clothing, and driftwood for fuel when the temperature crept towards minus 50 degrees. For us, it is inconceivable and extremely impressive,” says Eiliv Larsen, the NGU scientist and geologist.
——————————————————————————–
Adapted from materials provided by Geological Survey of Norway.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020095850.htm
storky (12:34:49) :
@Smokey (11:31:45) :
“No one is questioning global warming.”
True, most of us here agree that there has been some warming since the little ice age. Global warming and AGW are definitely not similes.
storky: Huh? This website is almost exclusively devoted to questioning Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Yes, definitely, but we also are interested in weather and related phenomena.
smokey: “And as you can see in this chart, global sea ice extent has broken above its long term average”
storky: “Yeah . . . so . . . With so few data points contrary to the long term downward trend, what evidence is there that this blip is indicative of a new trend. Until a new trend is defined by more data, this is nothing more than noise.”
Two can play at this game. Since when is 30 years of satellite data enough to declare a long term trend? Especially when anecdotal evidence hints at a cyclical nature to Arctic ice coverage. Recent trends may be “noise” but the recent trends are “noise” that flies in the faces of ice free Arctic predictions.
Everything that was old is new again.
I don’t want to be off topic, so I hope suziam48 goes on a personal fact finding mission to the North Pole. I should also remind suzi that WordPress hosts something like 3 million blogs, so she’s got a big censorship job ahead. The size of her job is even more alarming because she can’t figure out how to contact WordPress [hint: try a search engine].
That said, Code Tech, not only did the protests fail to stop the war [Nixon stopped it, fulfilling a campaign pledge], but UN Sec-Gen Kofi Annan presided over the murders of about 500,000 Darfur civilians, and the forcible eviction of two million more. Kofi Annan did, however, issue some very stern statements concerning the situation.
For doing nothing to stop the Darfur killings, Kofi Annan was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2001. The Darfur killings continued.
However, the scientists are very careful about drawing parallels with the present-day trend in the Arctic Ocean where the cover of sea ice seems to be decreasing.
“Changes that took place 6000-7000 years ago were controlled by other climatic forces than those which seem to dominate today,” Astrid Lyså believes.
That may be one of the weakest AGW cover clauses yet.
mike t
This partially answers your question about arctic cycles.
“Historical records of sea ice change
Detailed studies have been made of possible correlations
between Viking and other early European
excursions to the High Arctic and the historical or
ice core records of climate change. The earliest
evidence of Vikings in the High Arctic is in the twelfth
century on Bache Peninsula (Schledermann 1980).
Ogalvie (1984) compared a decadal sea-ice index for
Iceland with that of earlier, less accurate work by
Koch (1945) and showed that for the earliest interval
of reliable historical records (1601–1780 A.D.), the
amount of sea ice between Greenland and Iceland
fluctuated from brief (10–30 years) lows of no or
minimal ice at intervals of about 90 years (1651–
1681 and in the 1740s). These low ice years alternated
with ~20 year periods of considerable ice in 1610–
1630, 1680–1710 and 1740–1760 (~50 year recurrence
Intervals”
As regards Hudson bay records, google ‘Polar Bear Alley’ and delve into the archives
hope this helps
Tony B
suziam 48,
So free speech for those who disagree with you must be stifled?
Dr. Hansen and Gore must be very proud of you.
Suziam48, you go ahead and prepare for warming, and I will prepare for both warming and cooling. Both have happened before, and will happen again. I am proud to say I have a very small carbon footprint, not because I believe carbon is bad in any way, but because I think it is lunacy to be wasteful, no matter what we have at our disposal. You are being rather self-righteous, if I may say so.
@Craig Moore (14:55:39) :
“A little south of the Arctic”
Cut Bank, Montana is 1200 miles south of the arctic circle, 2600 short of the pole – that’s a little?
Clearly you don’t know the difference between weather and climate. Allow me to help:
Weather
–noun
1. the state of the atmosphere with respect to wind, temperature, cloudiness, moisture, pressure, etc.
Climate
–noun
1. the composite or generally prevailing weather conditions of a region, as temperature, air pressure, humidity, precipitation, sunshine, cloudiness, and winds, throughout the year, averaged over a series of years.
So, has the climate been getting colder over the past several years or warmer? Show us!
“Leon Brozyna (22:28:27) : Oh dear me. How ever will Al Gore handle this?”
Monckton couldn’t get in to the presence of Al Gore. Do you think this photo will?
ak (04:04:21) :
” Judging by the comments in this thread: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/18/arctic-ice-thickness-measured-from-buoys/, you guys will love the results found by the arctic ice buoys of the US Army.
http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/images/icethick.gif”
Dude, nice cherry picking, Hansen and Mann would be proud. You get 20 years of data on one and only four on the other period.
ak,
The Arctic trend you posted is indeed interesting. Up nearly 3,000,000 km2 in just two years.
Suzi,
Unlike you and the other alarmists, WordPress believes in and celebrates freedom of speech, no matter how much that speech is inconvenient, politically incorrect, or dangerous to your political agenda.
@Robert Austin (15:00:39)
“Two can play at this game. Since when is 30 years of satellite data enough to declare a long term trend?”
Relative to multiple daily data points and seasonal trends, 30 years is a long-term trend.
“Especially when anecdotal evidence hints at a cyclical nature to Arctic ice coverage.”
The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data.
“Recent trends may be “noise” but the recent trends are “noise” that flies in the faces of ice free Arctic predictions.”
So what? Until it redefines a new trend or reinforces the current one, noise is noise.
storky (15:26:42) :
@Craig Moore (14:55:39) :
“A little south of the Arctic”
Cut Bank, Montana is 1200 miles south of the arctic circle, 2600 short of the pole – that’s a little?
Clearly you don’t know the difference between weather and climate.
=========================
First, I know where it is. I grew up in Montana.
Second, you have no idea what I know.
Third, as to the direction of temperature trends, WUWT has posted several columns with supporting data on the subject. I suggest you read them.
“alex verlinden (05:25:55) :
Wally,
this story is not from 2007, but from last year …
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2008/11/28/nwest-vessel.html
maybe a Canadian reader can easily pinpoint the villages or towns in the article and confirm whether this was unusual or not …”
Thanks for the link Alex. The article states this was the first commercial vessel to take the northwest passage from eastern Canada. Normally the villages get their summer supplies from the Alaska side via tug boat and barge. The ship was ice-hardened and had a ice-breaker on standby but said they encountered no ice. So it looks like in low ice summers the passage is not too difficult.
Gary Pearse (10:35:31) :
Enduser (07:04:56) :
“Wow! 1.3 versus .035. that means that the sun has 1.3/.035=35 times the global warming potential as all of the permanent greenhouse gasses put together.”
Anthony/Steve:
I’ve been trying to get everyone to stop looking up at the sun for a minute and take a look where the sun gets some assistance from the earth’s interior:
http://esrc.stfx.ca/pdf/halifaxtalk.pdf”
Gary, the document (page 3) contains hockey stick graphs only.
The time line of the graphs start in the year 1.000 until 2.000.
We see a flat lining flux and temp graph until the year 1.500 that is followed by a dramatic increase.
This is interesting because the period that shows a rise in flux includes the Maunder and the Dalton Minimum.
There should also be an indication that would point to the Midieval Warmth Period which covered the period from 800 to 1.300 AC, a period in time where temperatures were higher than today. At least the first 300 years of the graph should show higher flux/surface temp data.
Am I the only person smelling a rat here?
Regarding the Hawkbill photo: There should be a reflected image of the sun on the ice. Instead, there’s a dim pattern of specks of light scattered over an area about the size of a beach towel. If the albedo of the ice were 100%, the reflection would be exactly as bright as the sun itself. It’s not; it’s a lot dimmer. This indicates an albedo much less than 100%, probably as low as 30% or less, judging from the difference in brightness between the solar image and the ice. At zenith angles between 75° to 90°, the albedo of still water can be as high as 100%. A typical range would be 60% to 80%. The albedo of this particular ice is probably lower than the water under it! The average high latitude albedo of ice is not very different from open water, and often (as seen here) is even less.
Remember, also, that the vertical emissivity of the Arctic Ocean is about 0.993; the typically quoted emissivity of ice is only a fraction of that, about 0.20. Here, as shown in the photo, it might be as high as 0.70, still significantly below that of open water. Open water can shed heat in the Arctic winter even faster than ice. Add to that the insulating properties of ice, and the net result is that it’s extremely unlikely that the Earth will over heat due to the polar caps disappearing in some imaginary and irreversible “tipping point.”
[picture of kayaker fleeing from polar bear goes HERE]
Smokey, as I’m sure you know, that was my point. IN fact, protests etc. likely prolonged Vietnam and certainly cost lives on both sides. Protests heartened the enemy.
But that wasn’t my main point. I am ALWAYS entertained by people who see something they disagree with or that clashes with their worldview, and the first instinct is to ban it, block it, stop it, silence it, shut it down, etc.
Me? I believed in AGW. I really did. I studied a lot about it before realizing there even WAS a “debate”. I am glad I found John Daly’s site, and am more amazed every day that the sham continues, even though the wheels fell off after 1998.
Also, this thread got me started on studying the Skate, and I ended up wasting a couple of hours today browsing information about Nuclear Subs, and eventually Hanford (which is actually just a few hours drive from me). Fun stuff!
ak (14:57:30) :
ak, you’ve been bamboozled. But don’t feel bad, lots of folks have been tricked by cryosphere’s “adjusted” charts. Compare their before and after ‘adjusted’ chart with yours: click.
New York Times, February 20, 1969 article :
“Col. Joseph O. Fletcher. a retired Air Force polar specialist now with the Rand Corporation in California, has cited the presence or absence of pack ice around Iceland as an index of such trends (i.e. sunspot activity trends). From the 9th century to the 13th century almost no ice was reported there. This was the period of Norse colonization of Iceland and Greenland.”
storky (15:46:40) :
@Robert Austin (15:00:39)
“Two can play at this game. Since when is 30 years of satellite data enough to declare a long term trend?”
Relative to multiple daily data points and seasonal trends, 30 years is a long-term trend.
30 years is still a blink of an eye in climate history, saying it is a long term trend relative to a shorter trend does not validate it. Both the 30 year and recent trends tell us nothing worth knee-capping our economy over and you know this perfectly well. If we here take small pleasure from the discomfiture of those predicting imminent Arctic meltdown, well too bad.
“Especially when anecdotal evidence hints at a cyclical nature to Arctic ice coverage.”
The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data.
That is just a snark, not a rebuttal. Sorry, “scientists” do not appear to have dedicated their time to reconstructing historical Arctic ice coverage to the same degree as they devoted to teasing climactic data from proxies. Incredible statistical gymnastics were applied to produce the “hockey stick” but no similar efforts have been applied to historical Arctic ice coverage. So what is left is anecdotal evidence which is not quantitative or definitive but it may be a hint that you are on the wrong track.
“Recent trends may be “noise” but the recent trends are “noise” that flies in the faces of ice free Arctic predictions.”
So what? Until it redefines a new trend or reinforces the current one, noise is noise.
So you feel confident in extrapolating the 30 year trend to an ice free Arctic. Yes, it is a well known fact in some circles that climate phenomena always follow a linear path to catastrophe when man is implicated. How about we just take a deep breath and wait and see what happens before we officially declare that the sky is falling.
TonyB (15:11:39)
Thanks for the leads. Original Schledermann 1980 and Ogilvie 1984 seem hard to get hold off, but I’ll keep trying. And looking for them led me to new interesting sources. I’m in touch with HBC archives on another matter and may ask if they have papers.
Your help much appreciated.
I find this to be TERRIFYING news!!. I don’t know about all of you but if the Ice caps DO melt, and water goes up all over the WORLD my Home will be submerged in the ocean!!!.Glad I don’t tend to panic too much or be an ALARMIST, like some people i know.. Science can be a “Good Thing” if it is handled properly.. I KNOW this to be true, because I am one of the few men on this planet that can call themselves a “MOLECULAR GASTRONOMIST” and do it in the TRUE sense of the word.. Nothing happens by accident..I believe that GoD and Magic(k) led me here for a reason!!. If you like food check out my brand new web Page on Newsvine.com
North Pole ice not so thick in 58-59, but it’s getting thick now.
Hey Jorge, interesting point about the lack of solar reflection, and yes, we would certainly expect a brighter spot on the ice under normal circumstances. I kept looking at the photo and never noticed that it was lacking until you pointed it out. On the other hand, we really do not have enough information about the photo and how it was made. For instance, the light coming off of the ice will be strongly dominated by the horizontally polarized component of the sunlight. Most good photographers will carry a polarizing filter with their gear so that they can cut out that reflection and glare. You make a good point, but we may just have a photo taken with a polarized filter on the lens!
“ak, you’ve been bamboozled. But don’t feel bad, lots of folks have been tricked by cryosphere’s “adjusted” charts. Compare their before and after ‘adjusted’ chart with yours: click.”
still a downward trend, right? ok. similar to the downward trend in thickness over the same time. you don’t see that with a handful of pics, you see that with data.
and anyway, i only used that source because i followed your link, and then looked around a bit. do you trust the source enough to make a point with it, or not? (or do you get to have it both ways?)
listen, i think it’s great how worked up you (guys in general) get worked up about small blips in this or that record, but blips are blips. remember the cold temps up north this past winter? think that could have something to do with the spike in ice extent (which to re-iterate is still at/below the mean)? heard anything about the sun’s quiescence recently? think that might have anything to do with NOT melting as much ice as it could?
2007 was wholly unremarkable from the rest of the recent record until July. 2008 didn’t deviate much until August. I don’t expect anything different for 2009… we’ll see come summer time.
“[Reply: Always identify who you are responding to.
~ dbstealey, mod.]”
Actually, I was responding to the article.
Let me repost the quote included in the article:
“the Skate found open water both in the summer and following winter. We surfaced near the North Pole in the winter through thin ice less than 2 feet thick. The ice moves from Alaska to Iceland and the wind and tides causes open water as the ice breaks up. The Ice at the polar ice cap is an average of 6-8 feet thick, but with the wind and tides the ice will crack and open into large polynyas (areas of open water), these areas will refreeze over with thin ice. We had sonar equipment that would find these open or thin areas to come up through, thus limiting any damage to the submarine. The ice would also close in and cover these areas crushing together making large ice ridges both above and below the water. We came up through a very large opening in 1958 that was 1/2 mile long and 200 yards wide. The wind came up and closed the opening within 2 hours. On both trips we were able to find open water. We were not able to surface through ice thicker than 3 feet.”
Read that again and tell me this article is [snip]
A man on the sub TELLS you that what this article is claiming is FALSE.
“We surfaced near the North Pole in the winter through thin ice less than 2 feet thick.”
The North Pole was not even REMOTELY Ice free – the sub had to come up through 2 feet of ice, and that was only when they managed to find a thin spot, with most of the area covered with ice 6 to 8 feet thick.
“The ice moves from Alaska to Iceland and the wind and tides causes open water as the ice breaks up. The Ice at the polar ice cap is an average of 6-8 feet thick, but with the wind and tides the ice will crack and open into large polynyas (areas of open water), these areas will refreeze over with thin ice. We had sonar equipment that would find these open or thin areas to come up through, ”
Holes in the ice appear naturally and soon refreeze. These subs used those holes to surface. The fact is, the ice today is much thinner all over.
So not only is the premise of this article WRONG it is PROVED wrong by a quote it includes!
Anyone debating this [snip] about trends etc is wasting their time. He is a [snip] and will twist any “factoid” to suit his argument.
Reply: Play nice. Continued use of pejoratives and comments will be deleted in their entirety ~ charles the moderator
ak,
Does it not bother you that the chart you posted looked like it did only because the data was “adjusted” to make it look that way?
And Cryosphere doesn’t only adjust recent data, they adjust all the data. They can make their graphs look like whatever they want. When they adjust older data, they make the more recent chart look even scarier.
I posted a chart showing that global sea ice is now above its thirty year trend line. That is to be expected, given this year’s cold temperatures. Total sea ice oscillates around the trend line.
Literally hundreds of $Billions to $Trillions are proposed to be spent on a non-problem — based on fiddled charts like the one you posted.
Do you not see that as a problem? Is data manipulation to support a repeatedly falsified hypothesis OK with you?
Karmakaze,
The post that is the basis of this thread, as well as the quote, exactly prove the point:
The ice is not fixed, it opens closes independent of temperature, and that thinning ice in the Arctic is not unusual.
Your AGW faith does not permit you to comprehend that this exactly disproves the fear mongering of the AGW promoters. You are a true believer and are being taken on a ride, as long as you willingly participate by fooling yourself.
@smokey “And Cryosphere doesn’t only adjust recent data, they adjust all the data… They can make their graphs look like whatever they want…
I posted a chart showing that global sea ice is now above its thirty year trend line…”
So it is ‘get to have it your way’. Same source of data and graphs, but mine is bad – yours is good. Thanks for the clarification.
Also, why are you posting southern ice extent graphs now? How come it seems nobody wants to talk about Arctic ice extent/thickness in a thread specifically about Arctic ice extent/thickness? (Probably because the data doesn’t support the premise.)
“So not only is the premise of this article WRONG it is PROVED wrong by a quote it includes!”
@Karmakaze – Relax, this sort of thing isn’t so atypical around here… 🙂
AK,
This will give you an idea of some of the shenanigans taking place at CT.
http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u43/gplracerx/SummerArcticIceExtent4-2-2009.jpg
This graph was put together by DeWitt Payne. It clearly shows that CT is not to be trusted. By adjusting historical data up and new data down they can fool lots and lots of people… They can even fool you on your IPhone.
Thanks,
Mike
PS I guess they have been taking lessons from GISS.
RE: Karmakaze (17:48:26) :
The claim was not “ice free” the claim was
“We came up through . We came up through a very large opening in 1958 that was 1/2 mile long and 200 yards wide. The wind came up and closed the opening within 2 hours. On both trips we were able to find open water.”
This statement
“We surfaced near the North Pole in the winter through thin ice less than 2 feet thick.”
Only indicates that in one area near the North Pole they found ice less than two feet thick. The reason for the thin ice (rather than 6 to 8 feet) is explained..
“The Ice at the polar ice cap is an average of 6-8 feet thick, but with the wind and tides the ice will crack and open into large polynyas (areas of open water), these areas will refreeze over with thin ice.”
Note the relevant facts.
Thin ice near the pole is not “global warming” but rather a refreeze after wind and tides cause a break up.
We know from 2007 that wind and waves can cause a significant ice loss.
We know that if the Catlin team makes it to the pole area finding sections of thin ice would not be abnormal.
Robert Austin (17:05:56)
” ‘The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data.’ That is just a snark, not a rebuttal.”
Actually, it is among the first things you’re taught in Probabilities and Statistics.
“So what is left is anecdotal evidence which is not quantitative or definitive but it may be a hint that you are on the wrong track.”
Nope. It means NOTHING until the next data point arrives.
“So you feel confident in extrapolating the 30 year trend to an ice free Arctic.”
No, not from 30 years of satellite data alone. But when it is reinforced by 11,000 years of core ice sample data from glaciers all over the planet, I have greater confidence.
“The ice is not fixed, it opens closes independent of temperature, and that thinning ice in the Arctic is not unusual.”
@hunter, just to be precise, it should say ‘and that [i]thin[/i] ice in the Arctic is not unusual’. Submarines don’t surface in ice greater than 2-3 feet. That hasn’t changed since the 1950’s.
However the ice [i]around[/i] the polynyas, where the subs surface, [i]has[/i] thickened. Check out this scientific paper I linked to earlier:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/thinning/Rothrock_Thinn.pdf
After reading that, you can come back and use ‘thining ice’ in it’s proper context 😉
No self-respecting polar bear would touch Gore with a 10 foot, north pole.
ak,
Your mind is already made up. But for others following this issue, when ak said: “Same source of data and graphs, but mine is bad – yours is good. Thanks for the clarification”, he was referring to the following two charts. The top chart is the one ak originally posted, and the second one I posted to show the devious data manipulation by Cryosphere Today:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.jpg
The final, “adjusted” chart: click.
ak can’t be helped [cognitive dissonance is by definition incurable; when the world doesn’t end as predicted, those afflicted by CD simply re-set the goal posts, and await the next doomsday. They can not admit they’re wrong when CD takes hold; cognitive dissonance is a root worm that blinds the afflicted to any other point of view].
Others, however, can get a very clear snapshot of how we got to this point in the debate, by clicking on this.
And for your reading pleasure, here is another description of recent events: click. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Because $Trillion policy decisions are being decided, right now, based on these outright shenanigans in the corrupt climate peer-review process.
suziam48 (13:11:17) :
I am alarmed that WordPress.com seems to be associated with folks who denounce the concept of global warming. I cannot find any way to contact WordPress. I see that two anti-global warming blogs are prominently featured on the WordPress home page. What’s up with this?
Wordpress has a home page?!
(Jaw drops) I thought word press was some sort of extension of this highly trafficked site. Ref: http://wattsupwiththat.com/
Thanks for the info – I feel illuminated, (I see that two anti-global warming blogs are prominently featured on the WordPress home page) I’ll check it out.
suziam48 (13:11:17) :
I am alarmed that WordPress.com seems to be associated with folks who denounce the concept of global warming. I cannot find any way to contact WordPress. I see that two anti-global warming blogs are prominently featured on the WordPress home page. What’s up with this?
===================
I’m sorry you feel alarmed suziam. You’re right to be worried I think but, and please don’t walk away just yet, I think you’re worried about the wrong things.
Like you I was, also very worried about the consequences of global warming. Unlike you, however, I got lucky and overcame my fears before they affected my mental well-being!
I feel a bit embarrassed about what I’m about to say – it doesn’t come easy to a crusty old Scotsman like me to be indelicate- but I think you need help. I may be 100% wrong- ach weel it’ll not be the first time – but in for a penny, in for a pound!
You want anti-global warming viewpoints to be put into quarantine, crated up and buried.
Is that really you?
Is dissension and debate about climate science so distasteful as to be ranked alongside holocaust-denial, racial hatred and religious intolerance?
Are all ‘denialists’ so intellectually challenged that they believe the world is flat?
Does the questioning of ‘consensus’ projections about the consequences of AGW make one an ‘Earth-Hater’ or a shill of Big-Oil?
If your answer to any of the above is ‘yes’, then you, truly, are at a critical cross-road in life. The step you next take may well define your future. Choose well!
It should be about the science – the data – the facts- and every argument deserves an airing. Yes, you’ll always get the crazies – there’s no magic bullet for them – never has been, never will be! But, and this is crucial, by exposing the crazies to the oxygen of open and objective debate we can identify and thus exclude their hypotheses. What we should have left over is a payload, untainted by subjective, commercial and political contamination. That is not where we are at!
My road to recovery began for all the wrong reasons. So convinced was I that mankind was headed to ignominious oblivion that I kept looking for examples of catastrophe that supported that view. I found lots and lots of doomsday predictions that reinforced my worldview until the ‘law of unintended consequences’ puckishly intruded and planted a seed of doubt!
I found skeptical sites and found out that the debate was not over as far as some were concerned. Not a problem, I initially thought, that’s the Internet for you and God bless the crazies!
Then I started to notice anomalies that, however hard I resisted, kept on niggling me. Why was I getting the impression that pro-AGW sites, such as those hosted by Gavin and Tamino, were so intolerant of opposing opinions that they came over as rude, ill-tempered bullies unlike WUWT and CA?
The endless repetition by the aforementioned AGW proponents of ‘appeal to authority’ argument, followed by ad-hominem attack and denigration rapidly turned me against those who employed such tactics – It seemed to me that such a public display of bad manners was more a symptom of blustering arrogance than that of reasoned and helpful persuasion!
Suziam48, that’s when the doubts first crept in – maybe for the wrong reasons – in short I started out by disliking the messengers which led to me question their motives; and that made me question the message itself! Agreed that doesn’t make the Science wrong if the message is correct but it should ring a warning bell. Take care when choosing where your next step will take,
PS – I still worry about AGW
I worry that the ‘current consensual perception of certainty’ of the actions needed to combat it, far exceeds the scientific evidence that it is actually a problem.
I worry that the ‘current consensual perception of certainty’ will bring to fruition sets of measures and counter-measures that will achieve precisely the opposite of what they attempt to do.
Mostly, however, I worry about people like you Suziam48. Your passion, intelligence and anger are not in doubt – fantastic attributes – but are you able to re-trace and then re-examine your sources?
What’s up with this?
ralph ellis (12:35:55) :
As both that article and another reader mentioned, the forecast was done with help from Joe D’Aleo (see http://icecap.us/ ). Joe’s article is at http://www.almanac.com/timeline/ . Joe has been one of the most consistent and forceful arguers that warming was not due to CO2. I believe the Almanac brought Joe in after a rather poor winter forecast for 2007/2008 and Joe came up with one based largely on the PDO, AMO, and probably solar data (the Almanac likes sunspots).
[Oops – I submitted this to the wrong post. Sigh.]
arctic-astronomy (08:54:38) :
> There’s an awful lot of light in the “17 March 1959” north pole picture, given that the sun is still about 1.5° below the horizon and hasn’t yet risen at the north pole on March 17.
According to my software, the Sun’s declination was -1.53° on that date. Unfortuately, I’m not quite sure which hour that’s for (hey, I wrote it in 1980 or so!) The declination is changing about 0.40° per day then. American sunrise/sunset is defined as the moment the upper limb of the sub is on the horizon. Given the the size of the Sun and refraction, that moment is close to when the center of the sun is about 0.5° below the horizon.
Civil twilight is defined as the period when the Sun is between -0.5° and -6°, so if the photo was taken right at the North Pole, it would be during bright twilight. At temperate latitudes, civil twilight lasts for about a half an hour, duting this period in the US most states (all?) permit drivers to drive without headlights on.
From the article [the John Daly report by a sailor who was there]:
There’s your thin ice. And ice 6 – 8 feet thick ice is what the Three Stooges/Catlin gang found this year. That deconstructs the most recent moving of the goal posts by the alarmist contingent. Current ice conditions are essentially the same as they were fifty years ago, the desperate arm-waving of the warmers notwithstanding.
We’re skeptics here, and all we’re saying is: prove it. Or if you can’t, at least show some strong, real world evidence [in other words, no GCM “evidence”] that the current climate is outside of its normal and natural historical parameters.
The global warming alarmists are really grasping at straws here, still trying to convince everyone else that a rise in a minor trace gas will eliminate the North Pole ice cap.
They need to get a grip.
Smokey,
well played! misdirection is the first skill learned by any good magician.
here are the timestamps of the images i refered to previously. I’m affixing timestamps so that the readers (and I do apologize for having to post this again) can verify the chronology and sleight of hand: Ak said… “Same source of data and graphs, but mine is bad – yours is good.”
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg Smokey @ (11:31:45)
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.jpg Ak @ (14:57:30)
Same host, same directories, but one graph is good. the other bad. After which I was publicly shamed: ‘lots of folks have been tricked by cryosphere’s “adjusted” charts” ‘ Smokey @ (16:19:15)
Listen, let’s drop the image things ( and my response to the cool animated gif stills stands – ak (17:36:05) – consider this my second time stating so).
Ak reiterates… “How come it seems nobody wants to talk about Arctic ice extent/thickness in a thread specifically about Arctic ice extent/thickness? (Probably because the data doesn’t support the premise.)”
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/thinning/Rothrock_Thinn.pdf
(please, i’ll probably lose the debate if you guys challenge me on the data ( the very essence! ) of this post!)
Arctic Sea Ice Thickness: http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/images/icethick.gif
Measured in meters (1 meter = 3.28 feet)
Region ’58–’76 1990s m %
Chukchi Cap (5) 2.1 1.2 −0.9 −43
Beaufort Sea (5) 2.1 1.2 −0.9 −43
Canada Basin (6) 3.5 2.2 −1.3 −37
North Pole (5) 3.8 2.4 −1.4 −37
Nansen Basin (6) 3.9 2.2 −1.7 −43
Eastern Arctic (2) 3.3 1.5 −1.8 −55
All regions (29) 3.1 1.8 −1.3 −42
Source: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/thinning/Rothrock_Thinn.pdf
(apologies – i’m hoping the angle brackets work – the square brackets didn’t earlier. g’night)
Michelle Malkin points out a local weatherman disagrees with MSNBC’s AGW scaremongering, including by pointing out that their AGW claim of the poles being the “climate machine” is obviously wrong, as the machine is obviously the tropics.
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/04/27/msnbc/
arctic-astronomy (08:54:38) : There’s an awful lot of light in the “17 March 1959″ north pole picture, given that the sun is still about 1.5o below the horizon and hasn’t yet risen at the north pole on March 17.
Or fast film and a fast lens. The soft focus foreground and slightly soft at the tail of the boat indicate a very open fast lens. There seems to be a graininess (though hard to tell through the binary translation) that would indicate a fast B&W film. There appears to be slight motion blur to some of the peoples heads that would indicate a shutter speed of about 1/30 to 1/50 second (though again, access to a better image would let me make a more reliable evaluation). The overall flatness of the image implies fast film, pushed processing, or very flat lighting (such as indirect lighting from cloud diffusion / reflection) or all three.
I would speculate that this is a picture taken on about an ASA 400 film, perhaps an ASA 200 pushed to 800 at most, with an f stop of about F2 to F4, and a shutter speed of about 1/30 of a second. I would speculate it was 120 format, since 35mm was still relatively new then, but it could be 35mm as Tri-X was introduced in that format in 1954. If 35mm, the photographer had to have a very steady hand or a stable gunwale to brace against. IIRC, a 2 stop push was well known then and Kodak Tri-X was introduced in the ’40s with an ASA of 200. I don’t remember the 1959 speed, by 1970 it was ASA 400. Given that I’ve taken street pictures at night with such settings, diffuse over the horizon sunlight from cloud bounce ought to provide more than enough light. I see nothing in the picture to indicate it is fraudulent.
The general poor sharpness argues for a not very great lens or a good one so far open on the f stop that it has lost significant sharpness and some more sharpness lost to push processing. There is not enough in the corners to evaluate corner sharpness, though the slight blur to the edge of the bow says edge sharpness is a bit low, though finding an equivalent distance center frame target for relative sharpness is hard. There is either a slight motion blur or the overall sharpness is softer than I’d like, but I think there is a bit more center than edge sharpness. Lens open wide or poor edge of frame sharpness. Hard to tell in this size digital conversion, it could just be an artifact of the copy process.
The very flat washed out overexposed sky says that the light is coming from the clouds and the Skate had far less light on it than the clouds had, so the clouds get washed out in over exposure to get proper light from the Skate / water. Indirect lighting from cloudy overcast sky, not much direct lighting at the water surface.
Compare it with the second picture of the Skate. Much higher contrast with hot spots, sharp edges, greater depth of field, even what looks like a small quantity of cloud detail near the conning tower. Much more light, lens stopped down, shutter faster, less / no push processing, and though the figures are smaller making it harder to determine – they do not seem to show motion blur (even though there is what might be an expectation of motion given the bent posture of the bodies).
Finally, though they are color pictures, the more recent photos such as the Hawkbill show a hard crisp sharpness with great detail and depth of field of a full daylight snow scene consistent with a full sun environment. That is what is missing from the Skate pictures and what you would expect to see if the pictures had been taken in full sun with the sun above the horizon.
Again, access to better copies of the image would allow a more definitive analysis and less rampant speculation, but these pictures are all consistent with their asserted context.
(And yes, working in security and forensics warps how you see pictures for a very long time… though I can still turn it off and just enjoy the art of them.)
Seen JAXA today? 2009 well behind 2008!! Going down slow! Time to sweat alarmists.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Well in 1956 the Arctic ‘calved’ more icebergs than ever today…
One other important thing is that before 1959 no regular data are available for the North Pole’s inner parts in series of reading. Why? Simply because before there was even one scientistic group living over longer periods in the inner parts of the Arctic no such readings could be done….
One other important thing to remember. The ice under a certain spot today aren’t the ice from same longitud/latitude of yesterday. Ice moves.
Looking at the original here:
http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0857806.jpg
It’s a bit better image, but not by much. Less flat contrast, but not by enough to change my opinion. Sharpness is better, so I’m less critical of the lens quality. If the image format reflects the film format, it’s closest to 122 film size (also called ‘postcard’) though it doesn’t exactly match anything. Aspect ratio of about 1.66 : 1 where 35mm is 1.5 : 1 and 120 format 6×9 is also 1.5:1 and some odd 120 frame sizes are 1.5x : 1 with postcard at 1.69:1 so I’d guess at this point it was a ‘postcard’ camera in 122 film format or 1.5:1 image with the foreground cropped to remove excess water and raft to fit on a postcard. It is possible it’s a 35mm rangefinder camera (they were around then and would fit easier on a small sub) and if this image is as sharp as it gets, well, even old poor 120 film in 6 x 9 had better sharpness than this image. I’d expected the original to be much larger than this and with better resolution. My error of assumption / guessing.
So at this point the only change I’d make is to say I think it’s a 35mm rangefinder with Tri-X in ASA 200, possibly push processed a stop or two, stabilized by resting on the raft gunwale and with the image cropped to remove excess foreground from that ersatz ‘tripod’.
This picture is the most fantastic thing I’ve seen in the whole AGW pantomime. Of course it’s naughty but nothing compared to the polar bears, penguins and melting glaciers. this is the deniers polar bear. Keep up the good work gentlemen
storky (18:13:53) :
sRobert Austin (17:05:56)
“So you feel confident in extrapolating the 30 year trend to an ice free Arctic.”
sNo, not from 30 years of satellite data alone. But when it is reinforced by 11,000 years of core ice sample data from glaciers all over the planet, I have greater confidence.
So does your “greater confidence” extend so far that you consider the science “settled”? I imagine one can rationally favour the AGW hypothesis without raving about tipping points and polar bears dieing. The fact is that we are not going to appreciably reduce or CO2 production in the near future so it will be interesting to follow climate trends over the next decade.
I have added the photo of the USS Skate at the North Pole to the wikipedia articles here. Hope everybody can help make sure they stay up there in the face of historical revisionism from the alarmists, and complain to wiki admins if certain individuals persist in removing them….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_shrinkage#Effects
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic#Climate_change
Stephen Daivs (00:43:46) : Polynyas are a phenomenon known for quite a long period of time, they are areas of open water that form (sometimes briefly) (sometimes in the same spot) they occur in both the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice.
Oh, golly, you mean when those ice shelves in Antarctica break and get a big water gap in them it isn’t due to global warming, it’s strictly natural? Why thank you for enlightening me and making that clear.
Adam Soereg (01:59:58) : even mention the fast recovery of Arctic sea ice extent to near-normal levels. Let I guess, next year they will come out with an unprecedented low level of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd year ice.
And don’t forget that with that 2nd and 3rd year ice in the way, they can legitimately state “Less new ice formed at the arctic this year than last!!!”
Jason Calley (17:29:38) : “Hey Jorge, interesting point about the lack of solar reflection, and yes, we would certainly expect a brighter spot on the ice under normal circumstances. I kept looking at the photo and never noticed that it was lacking until you pointed it out. On the other hand, we really do not have enough information about the photo and how it was made. For instance, the light coming off of the ice will be strongly dominated by the horizontally polarized component of the sunlight. Most good photographers will carry a polarizing filter with their gear so that they can cut out that reflection and glare. You make a good point, but we may just have a photo taken with a polarized filter on the lens!”
Yes, I’d agree. A polarized filter would account for almost zero visible specular reflection, if it’s there. I did consider a filter, but the surface of the ice here seemed quite rough, consistent with much lower than normal albedo. Under either scenario, the rest of my post is unaffected; Arctic ice just isn’t the ideal reflector it’s assumed to be. Good comment, Jason.
North Pole and Submarines.
There seems quite a lot of interest in the sources of the images in the post. Here are the sources of most of the pictures in the post and a few more.
Skate (SSN-578), surfaced at the North Pole, 17 March 1959. http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0857806.jpg
Sailors from the Seadragon (SSN-584), background, clowning around on the ice during the craft’s August 1960 Arctic operation. The batter is ready to receive the first baseball ever pitched at the North Pole. http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0858412.jpg
Skate (SSN-578), at the North Pole, 1962. http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0857801.jpg
Seadragon (SSN-584), foreground, and her sister Skate (SSN-578) during a rendezvous at the North Pole in August 1962. Note the men on the ice beyond the submarines. http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0858411.jpg
Skate (SSN-578), and Seadragon (SSN-584) surfaced at the North Pole, 1962. http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0857805.jpg
Seadragon (SSN-584), in the background, and Skate (SSN-578) surfaced at the North Pole, 1962. http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0857805.jpg
Seadragon (SSN-584), foreground, and her sister Skate (SSN-578) during a rendezvous at the North Pole in August 1962. Note the men on the ice beyond the submarines http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0858411.jpg
The Queenfish (SSN-651) at the North Pole on 6 Aug. 1970. http://navsource.org/archives/08/658/0865127.jpg
Santa Claus greets crewmen of the Queenfish (SSN-651) at the North Pole (Chief Quartermaster Jack Pataterson as Santa), summer 1970. http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0865104.jpg
Makeshift number. On 5 Aug. the Queenfish (SSN-651) became the 10th American submarine to reach the geographic North Pole. It then surfaced through a hole in the ice about 500 yards away. http://navsource.org/archives/08/658/0865118.jpg
An elevated view of the attack submarines Ray (SSN-653), Hawkbill (SSN-666), and & Archerfish (SSN-678) surfaced at the geographic North Pole, 6 May 1986 during ICEX 86. This is the first time three nuclear-powered submarines have simultaneously surfaced at the pole. http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0866623.jpg
The sail of the nuclear-powered attack submarine Billfish (SSN-676) protudes from the ice while the ship is surfaced at the North Pole. The sail-mounted diving planes are in the vertical position for breaking through the ice on 30 Mar 1987. http://navsource.org/archives/08/500/0867605.jpg
U.S. and British sailors explore the Arctic ice cap while conducting the first U.S./British coordinated surfacing at the North Pole. The ships are, left to right: the nuclear-powered attack submarine Sea Devil (SSN-664), the fleet submarine HMS Superb (S-109) , and the nuclear-powered attack submarine Billfish (SSN-676), 18 May 1987. http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0866408.jpg
U.S. and British sailors explore the Arctic ice cap while conducting the first U.S./British coordinated surfacing at the North Pole. The ships are, left to right: the nuclear-powered attack submarine Sea Devil (SSN-664), the fleet submarine HMS Superb (S-109) , and the nuclear-powered attack submarine Billfish (SSN-676), 18 May 1987. http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0866403.jpg
Hawkbill (SSN-666), at the North Pole, 1999.
http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0866623.jpg
North Polar Region (Apr. 19, 2004) – The Royal Navy Trafalgar class attack submarine HMS Tireless sits on the surface of the North Pole. Tireless surfaced with the U.S. Navy Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Hampton (SSN 767) for ICEX 04, a joint operational exercise beneath the polar ice cap. http://www.news.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=13821
North Polar Region (Apr. 19, 2004) – The crew of the Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Hampton (SSN 767) posted a sign reading “North Pole” made by the crew after surfacing in the polar ice cap region http://www.news.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=13822
While USS Honolulu (SSN-718) is the 24th Los Angeles-class submarine to surface at the North Pole, she is the first of the first-flight 688 to perform operations Arctic. http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_23/north.htm
Submarine North Pole timeline.
http://www.google.co.nz/archivesearch?sourceid=navclient&rlz=1T4ADBR_enNZ272NZ275&q=submarine+%22north+pole%22&um=1&ie=UTF-8&scoring=t&ei=OyD2SdStDcaHkQXq4amiCg&sa=X&oi=timeline_result&resnum=11&ct=title
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To be completely cynical, isn’t it convenient that as one global scar diminishes (AGW), another has been discovered (Swine flu).
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Good job there was a film cameraman already there when the Skate first surfaced, else we’d never have witnessed such a historic moment.
Important Message:
The german Alfred-Wegner-Institut finished an expedition today:
The Ice in the arctic is two times thicker than expected: 4m instead of 2m
http://www.radiobremen.de/wissen/nachrichten/wissenawipolararktis100.html
Look at a properly laid out, accurately built armillary sphere: It will show th esun’s position above the horizon for every day of the year – at the latitude the pole of the armillary is set for.
The sun’s height above the horizon – which is proportional to the length of each day – only very slowly moves from its minimum height (on Dec 22) to exactly even (12 hours from sunup to sundown) on March 22 to maximum height on June 22, and back to a twelve hour day on Sept 22.
(Yeah – I know – sometimes its the 21st, not the 22nd – but notice that the photo’s taken of the submarines at the north pole were dated March 17. Very close to the 12 hour day (midpoint or equinox) of March 21-22.)
So, when the photo was taken, the pole had 12 hours of daylight, and an hour or so before (and after) of twilight when the light was only slightly lower quality. Only much later in the year does the pole (the area above the Arctic Circle/below the Antarctic Circle) get the proverbial 24 hours of sunlight. In winter, same rule applies: 24 hours of darkness doesn’t suddenly change to 24 hours of sunlight in one day.
There is an article in the guardian today,I don’t know if it has been posted
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/28/climate-change-poles
Headline
Climate change hitting entire Arctic ecosystem, says report
They give links in the article,but it looks like the report
they are talking about is a rehash of old info.I am a dumbo at science,and want to point this out in this blog
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/apr/27/climate-change-carbon-emissions
but I may be wrong.What do I do?