Guest post by Steven Goddard
Last week, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon warned that “polar ice caps were melting far faster than expected just two years ago“
This was based on a number of widely publicized scientific studies released this year claiming that both the Arctic and Antarctic are melting faster than expected.
As recently as last week, scientists were sounding the alarm.
Tues., April 28, 2009OSLO – The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have awakened and are melting faster than expected, a leading expert told peers ahead of a conference of ministers from nations with Arctic territory.Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, an expert with the Center for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, told the conference in the Arctic town of Tromsoe that the need for a wake-up call was genuine for the polar and glacial regions.
He apparently didn’t read this paper from last Autumn’s AGU Meeting
Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice’s Armageddon has come to an end.
One has to wonder if some scientists are lacking access to the Internet, as the amount of polar sea ice on the planet is above the 30 year mean.
Yesterday, NSIDC announced that “Arctic sea ice extent at the end of April 2009 was within the expected range of natural variability.” and “The decline rate for the month of April was the third slowest on record“
The NSIDC graph below shows that April ice extent has actually increased by more than the size of Texas over past last two years. Clearly The UN Secretary General is mistaken when he claims “”polar ice caps were melting far faster than expected just two years ago.”
I took this graph a step further and compared 2009 vs. past years. Current April extent is the greatest in the last 8 years. It is greater than it was 20 years ago.
If you look at the last 20 years, there is no statistically significant trend in the data.
Arctic ice extent is essentially normal.
It is important to remember that ice area between mid-April and mid-August is what affects the earth’s climate, because that is when the sun is up highest in the sky. When the ice reaches it’s minimum in September, the sun is so low above the horizon that the presence or absence of ice has little impact on the earth’s SW radiation balance. A more complete explanation here .
Also, the claim of Polar Bear endangerment is based largely on the idea that the ice is supposedly breaking up earlier than it used to in the spring. The “third slowest melt on record” would hardly support that popular claim.
I continue to be astonished at the amount of misinformation being propagated by some scientists and governmental officials. The correct information is readily available to anyone who has access to Google and five minutes of time. What is the real agenda?
santitafarella
Gee guy. Thanks for the tip. I’m sure that very few around here have ever heard of Real Climate. After all, a site that’s still trying to defend the MBH Hockey Stick must be doing objective science and not involved in the spin doctor game.
The other possibility of course is that Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann et. al. need a platform from which to defend GCMs that can’t predict anything accurately and paleoclimate reconstructions that make the latest Harry Potter novel sound reasonable.
Reply: I deleted his comment, someone else approved it. It was pure abuse and contributed nothing ~ charles the moderator
OT with all the discussion on the UHI on this site here is an article on the reverse “Farmers’ crops keeping US cool ”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17079-farmers-crops-keeping-us-cool.html
Apparently “santitafarella” stepped over the line and is gone. Which brings up something that’s been bothering me: why promote RealClimate on the sidebar? Game theory says that quid pro quo is the successful strategy in situations like this.
RC should be promoted only when there is mutual cooperation. Until RC posts a link to WUWT, they shouldn’t get free publicity.
Besides, they lack credibility.
Steve Goddard (10:48:08) :
From Tommy Boy…
“I’m picking up your sarcasm…Well, I should hope so, because I’m laying it on pretty thick.”
Clearly the unavoidable theme of the NSIDC release is the dramatic arctic ice rebuild over the last 2 years.
Yet the final two paragraphs are devoted to a Rutgers study (forgive me if I’ve misconstrued this) that posits that lesser summer arctic ice somehow foreshadows warming of some sort, and less precipitation in North America. This appears to be along the lines of the positive-feedback-dominates, climate-spinning-out-of-control argument.
Now if this is so, then shouldn’t the 2005 ice minimum in the Arctic have promoted further warming and not cooling, the jist of the release? It seems non-sensical.
Was this tacked on at the end just to contradict the point in an inconvenient press release?
I think it might be worth pointing out this webite and CA both link to “Real Climate” while the reverse cannot be said.
Pardon OT Anthony…
Granted it’s lame to be html tag inhibited – but might you consider a plug-in WYSIWYG comment editor, e.g. ?
http://www.techmixer.com/add-wysiwyg-comment-rich-text-editor-on-wordpress-comment-using-tinymcecomment/
chagrined.
Excluding media that is already skeptical of AGW (“The Australian,” talk radio, blog sites such as this, etc.), which of the media currently supporting AGW will be the first to break their ranks? -scientific journals? -newspapers? -popular magazines/periodicals? -TV? -some blockbuster Hollywood movie? What organization will first admit they were wrong? -NOAA? -NASA? -IPCC? -Congress? -Academia? How will this occur? – gradually? – precipitously? When will this occur? Where will this first occur? -in the U.S.? -Europe? -Russia? … Or will we simply continue forever in denial by swapping the definitions for “hot” and “cold?”
Harry wrote: “The political left will simply bury “Climate Change” and/or morph the hoax into two forms: … 2. “We’ve never said what flat-earth wingnuts claimed we have said.” The press will run interference and the vast middle … will not know the difference.”
That’s why our side should eventually seek an NSF grant to create a “They Said It” website for historical-research + cautionary purposes. What a hoot it’ll be!
Don B 10:57:08
Wow, Don, that post on Pielke Senior’s blog is wonderful. It deserves a post of its own. Watch for it soon on both icecap.us and climatedepot.com
Kevin Trenberth knows where the ‘extra heat’ has gone. Remember, last year in an interview with NPR he let it slip that maybe the extra heat had been radiated back out into space? Heh, heh, heh.
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AEGeneral (10:29:32) :
“Break Out the Tar and Feathers.”
Thanks for that link; but don’t hold your breath waiting for that headline anytime soon. The only thing propping this up now is the media, and they’ve become so politically vested in AGW being true that they’ll never let go of it no matter what.
Actually, I may write that headline (and the article) for the local paper. I believe that the simplicity of the sea ice being a new high will trump any complex counter-arguments. Remember, when someone is being asked to sacrifice, they get very angry very quick when clear evidence of fraud crops up.
By the way, one amusing trick is to go the other way, and not hint at the direction of the facts in the beginning. Something like, “Total Global Sea Ice Has Set an All Time Record,” can be a good start. People who might react by tuning you out will be sucked in. Then hit them with the fact that it’s a record high.
This works especially well if you can do it in person just as a believer has taken a mouthful of beer or soda.
These studies simply give us an idea of the time lag between undertaking a piece of research and reporting it after completion vs the immediate reporting of results from an expedition.
Large research projects, often collaborations, tend to be funded for two to three years. Results are reported only towards the end or after completion. The most high profile conferences require submission of abstracts or full papers, often for peer review, on average 9 months before the conference. What I mean is that the research may well include data from the period 2005-2007.
That said, yes, they should be aware of the current situation, however consider this – perhaps they did mention it but it was conveniently overlooked in selective reporting.
To those concerned about RC not reciprocating the links, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That they are so petty should not be of any concern to open-minded folks.
I’d love to see George Monbiot of UK’s The Guardian suffer a sudden and highly embarassing Damascene conversion over AGW.
It’s only a matter of time now…
“How will this occur? – gradually? – precipitously? When will this occur?”
If the summer arctic ice extent breaks through the NSIDC mean, that would be a “news peg” for a fence-sitting, head-scratching, thumb-sucking article–or maybe something stronger.
Another news peg would be the trend of the odds on global warming bets on Intrade–if someone fair and knowledgeable will only approach the site to ask it to set up such bets.
was that final 2 AGW paragraphs in the press release included to give the press something else to write/broadcast about than inconvenient data?
OT: April North American temperatures are now in the NCDC database though the narrative on the front page is still March.
The real agenda?
Not hard to see:
-A little bit of old time religion (Gore’s prelapsarian idylls);
-a bit intellectual faddism, always a danger;
-mix in some self-serving careerism and some big egos who like to have the world’s attention and want to “save” everyone;
-good ole fears of or for the apocalypse, always bubbling away below the surface;
-add a terrific dash of ignorance about science and analytical methods;
-don’t forget the rise of environmentalism, the secular religion that, for many, replaces that dead bearded guy in the sky, and which is often a pretty beneficial thing;
-also the distrust of Big Oil (not very nice guys, after all), and a dislike of pollution;
-and finally, some advocacy groups who are riding this like crazy as a way to grow the “movement” and fund raise
Is it really so mysterious? No need for dark conspiracy theories. Just human beings carrying on as usual. References to Goebbels’ “Big Lie” are just vicious and misplaced. AGW folks like to have a dragon to slay, and so do a lot of the people commenting here – the evil, lying, socialistic, human-engineering, liberal, elite, GREEN, political cabal. Get real…
No heat = no AGW.
Promotion of AGW = promtion of fraud.
This is how you prove warming
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/2553.flv
Would be interesting to know what the ice cores say about the MWP
Don B (10:57:08) :
“As the oceans lose heat (falsifying the AGW theory, by the way) global sea ice is likely to prosper.”
The problem is that record ice formation means record amounts of heat transferred to the atmosphere. With its low specific heat, that will result in significant atmospheric temperature increases.
So warmists will switch hype back to air temperatures.
Steven
Nice article. You know all this about ice and I now all this about ice.
However, we need to get to grips with the fact that the science has become subservient to the agenda spun by environmentalists who are leading politicians -who are only to willing to be led – to a tax bonanza that has a very appealing green cloak. There are few people willing to speak up as that would mean they appear willing to sacrifice the planet for their own selfish ends. The sooner we get to grips with the reality that climate science is one of the most unscientific sciences there is-and that scrutiny of it is not all that it should be-the better we will be able to counter the message.
Tonyb
a leading expert told peers ……from the Moon University, with its campus located at the “Mare Ibrium”, of the Lunatic Faculty of crazy studies, where highly respected professors, who came directly from the NASA asylum of Boulder, Colorado, USA, currently lecture on the matter.
All visitors are commonly honoured with the local and most delicious syrup of “Moonish” (Highly Concentradted Lysergic Acid).
Catlin expedition: Obvious error in design? If they wish to evaluate ice thickness for anaomalies should it not be done over a very short time period? During 100 days the weather, including temperature, sunlight,clouds and winds, would I presume make their readings of little use since they are inconsistent and not homogenious. Plus they would be blown in different directions. That DC3 flyover was probably done over 1 week. If the Catliners stayed until August I bet their readings would really show thining!
“Rainforest film brings out stars”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8033535.stm
The rainforests should be protected for their own sake. In the future after the global warming apocalypse has failed to materialise people arn’t going to listen especialy those in the third world who have been told they cannot industrialise for the sake of their childrens children