Nansen Corrects Sea Ice Data – Sea Ice Extent Now Greater, Near Normal for Most of April/May

3. The totality of reports here and elsewhere seem to indicate:
i. Very warm May in Alaska.
ii. Colder May in Northern US states.
iii. Very warm in parts of Europe (e.g. Switzerland)
A common thread to link those anywhere?
How about a deeply negative AO for most of the month?

OT, but it’s always interesting when the MSM hits a sceptical note. Try this Daily Telegraph (UK) leader from today, commenting on the latest wild predictions from the UK Met Office What a shower.
Little by little, we breach the citadel.

Rebar,
The Arctic minimum occurs in September when the sun is just above the horizon. Near the solstice (now) the Arctic is full of ice. The albedo argument is overblown.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_extent.png

We’re experiencing some new record lows here in Sweden:
A place called Västervik/Gladhammar -0.1° had a new record this night. Previous record was 0.0° in June 1867.
Ulricehamn -1.1°, lowest since 1935.
Lund 3.6°, lowest since 1962.
Norrköping 0.2°, lowest since 1962.
Kristianstad 1.1°, lowest since 1975.
But… This is only weather of course. 😉

“…so it would look like a high ice year for a short burst until everything got caught up, then the real tale of ice would start to be told…”
i think nevertheless the “real story” in 2008/2009 were temperature related winter increases. summer ice is a long backlagging indicator dominated mostly by previous years leftovers, ocean currents and winds.

Bsaed on this, it’s all moot anyway. Maybe Al was right? (I’m beig facetious here)
http://climateprogress.org/2009/06/04/noaa-puts-out-el-nino-watch/
As this apropo to sea ice extent are there any counters, or at least explanations for this swift and sudden “discovery”? God forbid that Dr Hansen have the facts fit his own predictions of an El Nino and new records.
Usually Bill has some great links on ocean currents, SST’s and whatnot.

RoyFOMR (09:52:23) :

OT but Gavin is looking for sympathetic reviewers to help sell his new book. Any volunteers?

The book will only sell to the true believers. There after it will sit on the coffee tables of waiting rooms the world over.

Mikey (11:18:58) :
…This appears to be a time of year when the lines historically bottleneck.
They don’t appear to start to separate until after July. It’s clearer still…
You are right on. At this moment, IARC-JAXA has practically no predictive power
for guessing which way it goes in the next months.
Flanagan may see it different, but everything which does fit to him is climate.
Everything else is simply weather.
Coming to weather:
June ís rather cold here. May be precursor of a lame summer.
We hand a great April. There were days when even with T-shirt it was
warm. In the last two weeks, I never missed to have a pullover or jacket on.
Was necessary.
But thats only weather, yeah.
Had it same at end of March 1981 (After a pretty cold February). I was out
with t_shirt on March, 26th. The summer of ’81 was forgettable.
Here, the warmest year was 1994. For the remaining year, if the other months
are on average (1997-2008-mean), it may become the coldest year since 1996.

Hunter
How ya doin’, Mr. Romm?
The last time I looked, he had turned his attention to the ice thickness (and therefore, volume), even going so far as to cite the Catlin Expedition in support! The last refuge of a scoundrel, perhaps.. 🙂

Steve Goddard
It is interesting to examine old documents as they hold many clues to the state of the arctic ice at various times in our history. That it is highly variable in depth and extent is obvious from the numerous accounts passed down to us, and that climate changed frequently is also evident.
This from a collection of papers collected by the Royal Geographic society dated 1875. They record expeditions to Greenland, Siberia and many other places as far back as 1821 and those reports in turn talk of first hand observation by people 40 years before that, so we have excellent evidence of actual observations back to around 1780.
This is one extract from 1868 concerning a British expedition to Greenland, a land which was then an almost unknown quantity.
“We lived for the greater portion of a whole summer at Jakohshavn,
a little Danish post, 69° 13′ n., close to which is the great Jakohshavn
ice-fjord, which annually pours an immense quantity of icebergs into
Disco Bay. In early times this inlet was quite open for boats ; and
Nunatak (a word meaning a ” land surrounded by ice “) was once an
Eskimo settlement. There is (or was in 1867 ) an old man (Manyus)
living at Jakohshavn whose grandfather was born there. The Tessi-
usak, an inlet of Jakohshavn ice-fjord, could then be entered by
boats. Now-a-days Jakohshavn ice-fjord is so choked up by bergs
that it is impossible to go up in boats, and such a thing is never
thought of. The Tessiusak must be reached by a laboriousjourney
over land ; and Nunatak is now only an island surrounded by the in-
land ice, at a distance — a place where no man lives, or has, in the
memory of any one now living, reached.
Both along its shore and that of the main fjord are numerous remains of dwellings long unin-habitable, owing to it being now impossible to gain access to them by sea. The inland ice is now encroaching on the land. At one time it seems to have covered many portions of the country now bare.
In a few places glaciers have disappeared. I believe that this has
been mainly owing to the inlet having got shoaled by the deposit of
glacier-clay through the rivers already described. I have little
doubt that — Graah’s dictum to the contrary, notwithstanding — a
great inlet once stretched across Greenland not far from this place,
as represented on the old maps, but that it has also now got choked
up with consolidated bergs.
In former times the natives used to describe pieces of timber drifting out of this inlet, and even tell of people coming across ; and stories yet linger among them of the former occurrence of such proofs of the openness of the inlet.”
Extract two
“1 ‘ Reise til Ostkysten af Gronland,’ 1832, and translated by Macdougall, 1837.
There is another bay which I could not investigate to its bottom on account of the immense masses of ice that were setting out, and which is called by the natives Ikak and Ikarsek {Sound). It runs between Karsarsuk and Kingatok, and its length is from Karsarsuk to its end about 15 German miles ; it is situated in 72 D 48′, and the sea, at its entrance, is covered by numerous islands. All the natives living in this neighbourhood assured me unanimously that there had been a passage formerly to the other side of the land.”
Third extract
” An observation which it is interesting to mention here, and which gives a
proof of the very little difference between the temperature of the surface and that at some depth, is mentioned in the Voyage of Captain Graah, p. 21. He says,” The 5th of May, 1828, in lat. 57° 35′ N., and 36° 36′ w., Gr., tbe temperature of the surface was found 6°-3 (46°-2 Fahr.), and at a depth of 660 feet 5°5 + K. (44°-5Fahr.).” This proves that there is no cold submarine current in the place alluded to to the s.e. of Cape Farewell. A still more conclusive experiment is recorded by Sir Edward Parry in the account of his first voyage, June 13, 1819 : in lat. 57° 51′ n., long. 41° 5′, with a very slight southerly current, the surface tempera-ture was 40J° Fahr. ; and at 235 fathoms 39°, a difference of only 1J°.”
Fourth extract
“156 DR. EAE, 1853-54— ANDERSON, 1855.
Cape Parry was passed at midnight, and we came across some heavy ice, being the first met with since leaving the straits. On the 30th it was so close as to compel us to haul in shore, affording a great contrast with the state of the ice at the same period two years ago, when the pack was 30 miles from the land.”
fifth extract
“Until within the last nine centuries the great continent of Green-
land was, so far as our knowledge extends, untenanted by a single
human being — the bears and reindeer held undisputed possession.
There was a still more remote period when fine forests of exogenous
trees clothed the hill-sides of Disco, when groves waved, in a
milder climate, over Banks Island and Melville Island, and when
corals and sponges flourished in the now frozen waters of Barrow’s
Strait. Of this period we know nothing ; but it is at least certain
that when Erik the Red planted his little colony of hardy Norse-
men at the mouth of one of the Greenland fiords, in the end of the
tenth century, he apparently found the land far more habitable
than it is to-day.
For three centuries and a half the Norman colonies of Greenland
continued to flourish ; upwards of 300 small farms and villages
were built along the shores of the fiords from the island of Disco to
Cape Farewell….and Greenland became the see of a Bishop. The ancient Icelandic and Danish accounts of the transactions are corroborated by the interesting remains which may be seen in the Scandinavian museum at Copenhagen.
During the whole of this period no indigenous race was
seen in that land, and no one appealed to dispute the possession of
Greenland with the Norman colony. A curious account of a
voyage is extant, during which the Normans reached a latitude
north of Cape York ; yet there is no mention of any signs of a
strange race. The Normans continued to be the sole tenants of
Greenland, at least until the middle of the fourteenth century.”
There is very much more in a similar vein which matches with the findings of the Royal Society who also found great variations of ice from year to year, as is also recorded in the annals of the Hudson Bay co and the Board of trade journals dating back to 1676 covering Newfoundland.
Interestingly the latter mentions for 1817;
‘That Newfounbland is forced to face another winter of misery’ a mention in 1818 of the ‘long and vicious winter’ in 1821 ‘winters of wretchedness and distress’ and in 1822 ‘rigours of a Newfoundland winter’
Note;-1815 is now known as the year without a summer and clearly this had a profound effect on the climate of the Arctic. Previous mentions of harsh winters in Newfoundland are hard to find .
In fact there had been a long period of warm summers in the Far North which was noted for several decades by whalers which prompted this exchange in 1817: (shortened version)
President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817 (Royal Society of London 1817):
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated….
….. this affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.” A request was made for the Royal Society to assemble an expedition to go and investigate.
An examination of these old documents will illustrate the current circumstances of diminshed sea ice are not at all unusual and have been documented for centuries.
Tonyb

The std deviation bands around the NANSEN data seem very tight to me. You have three years in a row running at what seems to be 2-3 stnd dev’s from the mean? Intuitively, that seems odd.
And then in 2009: On May 22, the data is normal and by June 7, it’s 1.5 stnd deviations from the mean? There’s that much short term intra-seasonal volatility and those stnd dev bands are right?

Peter Plail
Back in 2003 Europe experienced a heat wave which was wrongly blamed on manmade green house gases. Modern science has shown that natural planetary cycles like the Atlantic ocean surface temperature oscillations [as measured by AMO] was the likely and major cause. The AMO in 2003 reached a monthly peak level of 0.504 , the fourth warmest ever, and the 6th warmest ever on an average annual basis. Today the UK AGW scientists are again claiming that Great Britain will have another 70 year heat wave yet seem to again ignore ocean cycles which on average cause 2 warm but also 2 cool cycles per century rather than just worst case warming as this study suggests. It is like in economics, projecting 100 years of unprecedented boom years and ignoring all recessions which occur every 10 years. Their 2080 forecast is a meaningless worst case scenario. The sun is going into low activity and solar heating will be diminished as well for the next several solar cycles. http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Study+Acknowledges+Solar+Cycle+Not+Man+Responsible+for+Past+Warming/article15310.htm
Here is what the scientists who studied the 2003 European heat wave concluded;
Overall, our results provide strong evidence that during the 20th century the AMO had an important role in modulating boreal summer climate on multidecadal time scales. We have focused here on time mean anomalies, but some of the most important impacts are likely to be associated with changes in the frequency of extreme events. There is evidence that the frequency of U.S. droughts (4) and the frequency of European heat waves (23) are both sensitive to Atlantic SSTs.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/309/5731/115