From NSIDC sea ice news
During the first half of August, Arctic ice extent declined more slowly than during the same period in 2007 and 2008. The slower decline is primarily due to a recent atmospheric circulation pattern, which transported ice toward the Siberian coast and discouraged export of ice out of the Arctic Ocean. It is now unlikely that 2009 will see a record low extent, but the minimum summer ice extent will still be much lower than the 1979 to 2000 average.
Figure 2. The graph above shows daily sea ice extent as of August 17, 2009. The solid light blue line indicates 2009; the solid dark blue line shows 2008; the dashed green line shows 2007; and the solid gray line indicates average extent from 1979 to 2000. The gray area around the average line shows the two standard deviation range of the data. Sea Ice Index data.
Figure 1. Daily Arctic sea ice extent on August 17 was 6.26 million square kilometers (2.42 million square miles). The orange line shows the 1979 to 2000 median extent for that day. The black cross indicates the geographic North Pole. Sea Ice Index data. About the data. <!–Please note that our daily sea ice images, derived from microwave measurements, may show spurious pixels in areas where sea ice may not be present. These artifacts are generally caused by coastline effects, or less commonly by severe weather. Scientists use masks to minimize the number of “noise” pixels, based on long-term extent patterns. Noise is largely eliminated in the process of generating monthly averages, our standard measurement for analyzing interannual trends. Data derived from Sea Ice Index data set. –>
Note: This mid-monthly analysis update shows a single-day extent value for Figure 1, rather than the usual monthly average. While monthly average extent images are more accurate in understanding long-term changes, the daily images are helpful in monitoring sea ice conditions in near-real time.
Overview of conditions
On August 17, Arctic sea ice extent was 6.26 million square kilometers (2.42 million square miles). This is 960,000 square kilometers (370,000 square miles) more ice than for the same day in 2007, and 1.37 million square kilometers (530,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average. On August 8, the 2009 extent decreased below the 1979 to 2000 average minimum annual extent, with a month of melt still remaining.
Conditions in context
From August 1 to 17, Arctic sea ice extent declined at an average rate of 54,000 square kilometers (21,000 square miles) per day. This decline was slower than the same period in 2008, when it was 91,000 square kilometers (35,000 square miles) per day, and for the same period in 2007, when ice extent declined at a rate of 84,000 square kilometers (32,000 square miles) per day. The recent rate of ice loss has slowed considerably compared to most of July. Arctic sea ice extent is now greater than the same day in 2008.
AMSRE from JAXA shows similar extent conditions:
As does NANSEN:
Also: since the average water temperature is about 17 Celsius, the neutrality should be 7.13 and not 7.
Hi a jones-
Trolls are badly motivated, and just like to argue.
I am motivated by concern with the fate of the earth and future generations.
I really don’t like to argue, and only do it here because I think it’s necessary to let people on this board know that most climate skeptic talking points are mostly nonsense.
Oh, you all have a occaisional good point. There might actually be a solar/ cosmic ray / climate connection, for example. The problem is, that even if such a connection exists, it is irrelevant, because we can’t depend on a Maunder-like sunspot minimum showing up just when we need it.
So, really, I am well motivated and don’t consider myself a Troll. I really am sincerely concerned with the fate of the Earth and the people on it.
And I really do think that we are on a track toward disaster. Declining Arctic ice cover and the albedo/ice feedback are part of that disaster.
http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/nocs/news.php?action=display_news&idx=628
Leland Palmer,
If your methane scare had any real validity, it would be front and center on the news 24/7. But it’s just a fringe belief, so it’s generally disregarded, even by most climate alarmists.
Just to be on the safe side, though, I highly recommend that you utilize this inexpensive protection: clicky.
Hi Smokey-
Oh, that’s one of the great things about science, isn’t it?
Ideas change, new discoveries are made, and even acknowledgement of past mistakes and misjudgements are sometimes made.
It’s been said (jokingly) that old scientists don’t change their minds, they just die.
But really, they’re more adaptable and willing to admit error than most people are, certainly in my opinion, most people on this blog.
The media generally lags the science, and a lot of the science in this area is still catching up with the reality.
IPCC group leader Chris Field, bless his honest heart, has publicly admitted that much of the science is rapidly developing, and that scientists are becoming generally more alarmed, rather than less.
Looking at the above quote, I think that Chris Field meant “ppm” rather than “percent”.
He misspoke a couple of times, during this interview. He was apparently nervous, and he said that the Arctic permafrost had about a billion tons of carbon in it, when he meant a trillion tons (the latest estimates are roughly 1.5 trillion tons of carbon in the permafrost).
Still, go there and watch the video, if you want a look at a real climate scientist. Judge his sincerity for yourself.
http://i1.democracynow.org/2009/2/26/member_of_un_environment_panel_warns
He appears to be honest, a nice guy, somewhat shy and nervous, not the world’s best public speaker, but sincere.
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The reason I say we’re on a trajectory of climate change that we haven’t explored is that we have only looked at scenarios where the growth of CO2 was limited to in the range of two to 2.5 percent per year. We genuinely don’t know what a climate will look like with the more rapid rate of increase that we’re actually seeing.
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CO2 has been higher in the past and we are still here. Cooling would be much, much worse than warming.
CO2 is up, warming is, well, non-existent. Much ado about nothing.
Hi Jim-
You could even be right. I doubt it, but it seems remotely, theoretically possible that the extremely complex Earth climate system will confound us yet again.
What are you willing to bet?
Are you willing to bet, for example, everything that’s most valuable to human beings that exists anywhere in the universe?
Leland Palmer (12:55:12),
No need to shout in bold, it isn’t any more convincing.
Regarding Mr. Field, it should always be kept in mind that he knows where his bread is buttered. He is not independent. Field is a political appointee; he has his marching orders, and he tows the AGW line like he’s supposed to in order to stay on the UN’s gravy train. He has a fat paycheck, but zero credibility. Please don’t waste our time with the purchased opinions of UN/IPCC propagandists like Chris Field.
You ask, “What are you willing to bet?” But you are not even willing to give up your fossil fuel burning, CO2-emitting automobiles, despite your argument that they are going to cause the end of the world. Want credibility? Trade your cars for bicycles. Get some walking shoes. Actually go green, instead of leaning in that direction to salve your conscience. Set an example. The future of the planet depends on you!
Jim (13:10:15):
Yes, CO2 has been much higher many times in the past, for hundreds of millions of years at a time: click [click in the graph to expand]. A hundred million years of CO2 being thousands of ppmv higher than they are today didn’t cause problems, and any speculation that it did is just that, speculation. And conjectures like the methane popgun are far out of the mainstream; more like Scientology than science.
In general, the higher the CO2 concentration, the greater the extent and diversity of life on Earth. Life thrives with more carbon dioxide! CO2 is entirely beneficial. It is no more harmful than H2O. Both are essential to life.
“”” If we look since 2000, we’ve seen a rapid acceleration in CO2 emissions, so that the actual trajectory of emissions has grown more rapidly than in any of the scenarios that were characterized in detail. The reason I say we’re on a trajectory of climate change that we haven’t explored is that we have only looked at scenarios where the growth of CO2 was limited to in the range of two to 2.5 percent per year. We genuinely don’t know what a climate will look like with the more rapid rate of increase that we’re actually seeing. “””
So Christopher; the present Mauna Loa CO2 level is about 385 ppm, so 1% of that is 3.85 ppm, and 2.5% of that is 9.625 ppm
So the ML bas line amount of CO2 is increasing about 1.5 ppm each year; so how does that gybe with your claim of 9.625 ppm per year.
That is a pretty large exaggeration fudge factor, even for an IPCC shill to explain away.
Back to the drawing board I am afraid; or perhaps a course in remedial arithmetic.
Alexej Buergin (00:24:53) :
Oceans have a pH of 7.9 to 8.2 (the numbers mentioned above are the mean). So there is no reason to worry about a variability of this order.
And your blood has a pH of ~7.4, a drop of 0.1 would be quite a problem, basically uses a similar buffer system to the ocean.
Red herring alert: Phil. is correct about the buffering but a drop of O.1 in human blood is quite easily compensated for. This whole issue depends upon how rapidly the ocean acidification is proceeding and it is pretty doggone slowly. Let’s see both sides of the question, Phil..
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Leland, I said the globe is cooling and your hydrates are stabilizing. You can relax a little if you’d just pay attention.
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Hi Smokey-
About the bold print, well, thanks for your advice. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t follow it. These are my posts, and I will use the available fonts to make my points more effectively, in my opinion, not yours.
About Chris Field, well he was a political appointee, I think – by the Bush Administration.
His work at Stanford is funded by ExxonMobil, which might explain some of his nervousness, when he blew the whistle on the fossil fuel companies on Democracy Now. 🙂
Really though, the main climate culprits are the coal fired power plants, followed closely transportation.
You might check out the CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action) database, which has a very nice database of power plants that plugs right into Google Earth. Download Google Earth from Google, install it, and then follow the directions on the CARMA website to install the CARMA “.kml” database. It’s easy.
http://carma.org/
Some perspective on the climate problem can be gained just by cruising around in this database installed into Google Earth.
Some of these monster power plants emit 20-30 million tons of CO2 per year. That means that millions of people would have to stop driving completely to equal just one of these power plants.
What we need to do, if we want to make a difference, is seize (nationalize) the coal fired power plants, and convert them into biomass/biochar fuel, enhanced efficiency including oxyfuel combustion and an IFCC (Indirectly Fired Combined Cycle) topping cycle, and subsequent deep injection of the captured CO2.
Back to the Arctic. The general concern is that there are 1.5 trillion tons of carbon in the permafrost. Estimates of the amount of methane that could be produced by the permafrost run to billions of tons of methane per year. The methane produced by the decaying organic material in the permafrost might be enough to start the oceanic methane hydrates dissociating.
At that point, bend over, assume the emergency position, and kiss all you hold dear goodbye.
Leland Palmer,
Quit playing word games. Chris Field is a political appointee. He was appointed Co-Chair of WG-2 of the UN’s IPCC. If he didn’t crave that appointment, he would have turned it down, don’t you think?
But in fact Field does crave being a political appointee in a thoroughly corrupt, anti-American, parasitic organization, which uses the bogus scare of AGW to get its paws deeper into American taxpayers’ pockets. That says plenty about Mr. Field, who is nothing but a modern day Vidkun Quisling, selling out his country to the enemy.
Next, you say: “Some of these monster power plants emit 20-30 million tons of CO2 per year.” That is excellent news! We need to build lots more of them. It’s a win-win: cheap electricity, and plenty of life-giving, beneficial CO2. But of course, people like you want to cause skyrocketing electric bills instead, based on wacko fringe conjectures like your methane popgun fantasy.
Note that China is building an average of two new coal fired power plants every week — and they publicly state that they will continue at that rapid pace through at least 2024. But of course, you turn a blind eye to China’s un-scrubbed CO2 emissions. And India’s. And Brazil’s. And Russia’s, etc., etc. Don’t think we don’t notice.
Why the hypocrisy? You should be protesting in front of the Chinese embassy every day in your spare time, since China’s particulate pollution fills the atmosphere. But you don’t protest them, do you? Instead, you badmouth the cleanest country on Earth. What is wrong with you?
The rest of your post is the usual alarmist nonsense, frightening yourself with scary fantasies. Time to grow up and join the mainstream. If you want something real to worry about, asteroid threats would be a good place to start.
Smokey: well said.
kim (17:10:33) :
Red herring alert: Phil. is correct about the buffering but a drop of O.1 in human blood is quite easily compensated for. This whole issue depends upon how rapidly the ocean acidification is proceeding and it is pretty doggone slowly. Let’s see both sides of the question, Phil..
So your pH drops and you get sick but as Kim points out it can be fixed by medication or otherwise treating the affected organ, how do you ‘compensate for it’ when it’s the whole ocean that’s affected?
As regards speed, do you think it’s happening slow enough so that organisms can adapt?
The methane produced by the decaying organic material in the permafrost might be enough to start the oceanic methane hydrates dissociating.
At that point, bend over, assume the emergency position, and kiss all you hold dear goodbye.
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Leland; Dude – methane scaremongering is so last year, or the year before that, or the year before that even, and so on and so forth, but please feel free to assume the emergency position until you yourself become either “decaying organic material” or atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Since the debate is over, and most people on here would agree with that, perhaps you could restrict your keyboard access to the time immediately before we are kissing all we hold dear goodbye.
Please …. and good luck with that.
Phil. 21:05:34
Inadequate analogy, Phil. The human organism is, just as is the earth, capable of compensating for a change in pH, without recourse to medication or other treatment. More CO2 in the ocean will stimulate plant life in the ocean just as more CO2 in the air stimulates plant life on land.
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And what, may I ask, has a 40% rise in atmospheric CO2 done to human physiology? And what has it done to oceanic physiology?
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Phil. 21:05:34
Sorry, I missed your last question, earlier. I believe hydrocarbons will be priced out of the energy market before our release of CO2 has anything but minor effect on the climate and the biosphere. Those hydrocarbon bonds were much too lovingly formed to break merely for the energy contained within them. We need them for feedstock for plastic to house, clothe and feed the teeming billions, and to contain their stuff.
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Gad, I meant ‘transport’ instead of ‘feed’ in that last comment. Oh well, my slips are generally better than I meant, and some organisms consume plastic with alacrity.
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Hi Smokey and all-
Well, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction was no fantasy. It took life many millions of years, tens of millions of years in some areas, to regain the the diversity that was shown before that event.
The Paleocene – Eocene thermal maximum was another such apparent event, complete with the same C13 to C12 negative isotope ratio shift displayed in the Permian – Triassic mass extinction. This negative isotope ratio shift is fully consistent with the release of trillions of tons of isotopically light methane from the methane hydrates.
The C13 to C12 isotope ratio signatures in the sediments and sea shells laid down during that apparent runaway methane catastrophe appear to confirm dissociation of the methane hydrates, during those catastrophes.
One of the scientific papers supporting the clathrate gun hypothesis was featured on this blog. It was apparently posted out of ignorance of its implications, because it certainly doesn’t support the climate skeptic position:
The most obvious choice for the observed isotope ratio shift is a couple of trillion tons of isotopically light methane entering the atmosphere from dissociating methane hydrates. The authors of the paper were certainly aware of this.
Concerning politics, well, there’s nothing patriotic about allowing the destabilization of the climate leading to a mass extinction.
What’s patriotic about that?
Oh, link to the above:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/14/there-appears-to-be-something-fundamentally-wrong-with-the-way-temperature-and-carbon-are-linked-in-climate-models/#more-9347
“Phil. (16:04:07) :
Alexej Buergin (00:24:53) :
Oceans have a pH of 7.9 to 8.2 (the numbers mentioned above are the mean). So there is no reason to worry about a variability of this order.
And your blood has a pH of ~7.4, a drop of 0.1 would be quite a problem, basically uses a similar buffer system to the ocean.”
Since you worry about the pH of my blood I do not have to do that myself. But how about fish?
The preferred pH-level in a saltwater aquarium is between 7.6 and 8.4, but saltwater fish like it best around 8. Freshwater fish, not surprisingly, are much more diverse. There is a “Neon Tetra” who lives best in 5.8 to 6.2.
Conclusion: If the pH of the oceans would fall (it does not, but if it does, it does so very slowly), saltwater fish would adapt.
Phil. (21:05:34) :
So your pH drops and you get sick but as Kim points out it can be fixed by medication or otherwise treating the affected organ, how do you ‘compensate for it’ when it’s the whole ocean that’s affected?
As regards speed, do you think it’s happening slow enough so that organisms can adapt?
I don’t know if you are familiar with this paper
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/48/18848.full
It’s an 8 year study involving nearly 25,000 measurements of oceanic PH at an island in the Pacific just off the coast of Washington and though the authors do claim to show a stronger than predicted decline in ocean, their measurements also show daily ranges of a quarter of a point, annual ranges of a point or more, and a 1.5 point range for the length of the study. This would seem to indicate that oceanic species are already adapted to a fairly wide range of PH conditions. Though they observed that various species did better or worse in the changing PH conditions, they didn’t indicate that any had been obliterated.