It looks like we’ll see the 2009 Arctic sea ice melt season bottom out in a few days and it won’t be a record setter. Even NSIDC admits this. Here is a magnified graph of the IARC-JAXA AMSRE sea ice extent plot that is linked in the sidebar of WUWT.
Here is the full sized image:
For reference here are some other sea ice graphs:
I made a prediction a few threads back that we’ll see a turn on September 9th. Many others made predictions then. Since JAXA is not on holiday tomorrow like we are in the USA, I expect we’ll see an update for Sept 7th in the next 12-18 hours. We have an update for Sept 6th data now and it is shown above.
In the meantime feel free to discuss the issue in this open thread.
PS IJIS have adjusted their data again.
Now, as per their new data, on Sept 4th the ice grew for the first time by 8,125 sq kms, followed by falls of 24,531 and 14,375 sq kms the next two days.
Flanagan
Both WUWT and CVA have run extensively on this. There were 220 comments over on the CA about the study. Curiously I saw nothing from you. Lucy Skywalker neatly summed up the absurd study;
“Climate data analyst Steve McIntyre who publishes Climate Audit and is known for his research discrediting Mann’s original “Hockey Stick” temperature graph, weighed in on the new Arctic study. “Amusingly, the [Arctic study’s lead author] Kaufman Team perpetuates Mann’s upside down use of the Tiljander proxy,” McIntyre wrote on September 3, 2009. “You can readily see that this closely matches the Mann version,” McIntyre noted. “The most cursory examination [of the study] shows the usual problem of seemingly biased picking of proxies without any attempt to reconcile proxy conflicts,” McIntryre wrote”
Why do you want to disbelieve actual observation made by real people at the time?Why do you want to rely on more hockey sticks?
The answer is plain. If the MWP and LIA are proven to exist they were caused without current levels of co2. Therefore co2 is not a primary driver that facilitates dramatic temperature shifts. However, if the MWP and LIA are minimised that enables you to say that they were small natural variations that took place at a constant co2 level of 280ppm but with enhanced levels we are affecting the planet. There was a MWP. THere was also a Roman optimum and Holocene warm periods
You are letting your idealogy show Flanagan. Look at the evidence, temperatures do fluctuate in mans recent history to temperatrures greater than now, without enhanced (or reduced) levels of co2.
tonyb
If the rate of ice growth seen since 2007 continues, it is a mathematical certainty that North America will be covered with ice by the end of this century.
You may be exagerating a tad.
If you look at the latter half of the Forties when the Arctic cooled it quite rapidly froze over. The Hudson Bay company was closing outposts since they could no longer supply them. Resolute was intended to be many miles farther West. That was as far as a US icebreaker could penetrate the Northern Route of the NW Passage that Larsen had so easily travelled a couple years before. As always history is repeating.
Shawn Whelan (12:44:56) :
I think Dr. Spencer knows he is exaggerating 😉
The point is to highlight the absurdity of trends I think.
DaveE.
DaveE and Shawn
Speaking of trends, I live next to the sea in South Devon. Two foot of water has disappeared in the last hour!!! I predict that the English channel will be drained within 18 hours. Help! what shall I do to avert disaster?
tonyb
Flanagan,
Re Antarctic:
“What models suggest …” you obviously don’t understand that models suggest whatever their programmer wants them to suggest. It is easy to build a model to suggest anything you want.
Eye balling historical data I believe it could be some kind of natural cycle. Geo-engineering could solve the problem though – we could pipe water from the Atlantic (where there is plenty) to the Channel thereby maintaining levels at their historical mean.
Flanagan,
I would agree that on average there probably has been a long term gain in ice in the Arctic. The average global temp has been decreasing for ~3500yrs (at least if you average Vostok and GISP2 to estimate global for this interglacial).
But, one has to mention trends of all intervals within that time frame (otherwise you’re cherry picking). See graph. Overall increase in ice for ~3500yrs (entering the next ice age), shorter term trend of decrease in ice from LIA recovery (minimum of 6200yr cycle present in 10be and C14 records at LIA), coinciding with an even shorter trend of decrease in ice which should extend to ~2200yrsAD (~1186yr cycle of probably solar origin, though time will tell, the last was the MWP).
http://s852.photobucket.com/albums/ab89/etregembo/?action=view¤t=GISP2_VOSTOK_INTERGLACIAL.jpg
Let’s be honest. There are fluctations at all time scales.
Unfortunately the model doesn’t show that, or any influence from solar, PDO, AMO, AO, nothing but the CO2 hockeystick.
As Horton’s buddy used to say…Hhhmpph!
Ed
I think Dr. Spencer knows he is exaggerating 😉
Thanks for saving me Dave.
Speaking of trends, I live next to the sea in South Devon. Two foot of water has disappeared in the last hour!!! I predict that the English channel will be drained within 18 hours. Help! what shall I do to avert disaster?
tonyb
Send all your money to Algore. That is the solution to climate change.
Do it before the tide comes in.
(I am just joking, DaveE)
Vincent (09:03:48) :
“And if the imbalance isn’t happening then there is no forcing. Where is this missing energy? No one can tell me. Hansen can’t tell me – he thinks the datasets are wrong. What do you think?”
Didnt yah hear…. its hiding in a pipeline somewhere.(probably one o “big oils” pipelines) And its just biding its time, and is going to jump out and bite us on the bums at some yet to be determined time in the future when we least expect it… yup(nods sagely to self)
A lot is made of the Arctic melting but often with very little care in pointing out that it is a Summer event only
This is true. Something is causing additional summer melt, but has no effect on winter freezing.
Global warming (of the atmosphere) is primarily a winter phenomena according to the global temperatures from HadCRU etc and according to the climate models. Hence a warming atmosphere should cause the opposite of what is observed, ie it should cause less winter freezing and have little impact on summer melt.
The obvious candidate for the cause of more summer melt is particulate air pollution deposited on the ice causing increased melt through reduced albedo.
Re Philip_B (20:54:55) :
A lot is made of the Arctic melting but often with very little care in pointing out that it is a Summer event only
This is true. Something is causing additional summer melt, but has no effect on winter freezing.
—
If average January temperature over the Arctic would rise from -30° C to -20° C, this warming would be absolutely dramatic. But the sea would freeze over every winter nevertheless.
This happens even though surrounding SST’s increase – most of the melt of the Arctic ice (particularly the multiyear ice) happens from below. But the surface meter of Arctic water is sweeter than the sea water below it (by runoff from the Siberian rivers mainly) so it freezes at temps only slightly below zero.
If average July temperature over the Arctic would rise from 0° C to +1.0° C, it would be almost immeasurable warming. But this, in combination with increasing SST’s, will gradually erode the ice until a first ice free Arctic summer.
Imo it’s pretty obvious why the melt should be a summer event.
@rr Kampen your last post is all speculation.. !
furthermore you dont take into account winds and humidity
.. there can be an increase in icethickness even when temps are above 0 C.
temperature alone means so little.
RR Kampen,
I’ve heard the theory that changes in distribution in freshwater from Siberian rivers is bringing more heat to the ocean surface and melting the ice from below.
If it is happening (has happened) then it could produce a short term (say 2 to 4 year) change in summer ice extent. But can not possibly cause a longer term trend.
So as an explanation for the 2 to 4 years of summer ice melt up to 2007 it’s plausible.
However, to claim this mechanism could produce an ice free Arctic Ocean is fantasy.
But this, in combination with increasing SST’s, will gradually erode the ice until a first ice free Arctic summer.
You completely misunderstand. On an inter-annual basis the ice isn’t being eroded. That’s what no changes in winter sea ice extent means.
Re: Philip_B (05:06:24) :
“I’ve heard the theory that changes in distribution in freshwater from Siberian rivers is bringing more heat to the ocean surface and melting the ice from below.”
—
I don’t know this theory and offhand I consider it to be weak. The Siberian fresh water distributes over the Arctic ocean in a thin layer and freezes up every autumn, which means that a positive temperature anomaly of this bit of water always vanishes in October.
—
“You completely misunderstand. On an inter-annual basis the ice isn’t being eroded. That’s what no changes in winter sea ice extent means.”
If more than half of the Arctic sea was covered with ice of five years and older until about 2004, whereas today virtually all ice three years and older has gone, we have to talk erosion. More ice disappears in summertime than freezes in winter. Imo this is rather easy to understand – I must be missing your subtle point?
The sea ice extent is NOT the important parameter, it is only part of it. VOLUME is the thing to watch. Once average thickness drops below a breaking-up threshold (about 0.5 metre) extent vanishes in no time flat. See day to day devastation on e.g. ‘Cryosphere Today’.
—
Re: rtgr (03:01:28) :
“furthermore you dont take into account winds and humidity”
Correct, my arguments filter out meteorological variability. I look at trends, not extremes.
Caution to Kampen, Flannagan, et al. Your names are being taken down for a review of these times in the future. Remember the “Consensus” back in the 1970s who had the world freezing to death, crops failing and mass starvation in Asia and Africa by 2000!
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=dddc4451-802a-23ad-4000-a9b55ed9489a&Issue_id=
“……Of course Newsweek essentially retracted their coming ice age article 29 years later in October 2006. In addition, a 1975 National Academy of Sciences report addressed coming ice age fears and in 1971, NASA predicted the world “could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age.”
Gee whiz, maybe NASA’s ice age prediction just got interrupted by a brief warm spell (that of course they had expected to happen)
Re: Gary Pearse (07:11:10) :
“Caution to Kampen, Flannagan, et al. Your names are being taken down for a review of these times in the future. Remember the “Consensus” back in the 1970s who had the world freezing to death, crops failing and mass starvation in Asia and Africa by 2000!”
—
Thank you, but I remember no such consensus. The consensus was that increasing CO2-levels would lead to increased heat content in the lower atmosphere; the questions then were:
– Is it already measurable?
– Or might there be negative feedback-effects, e.g. increased cloud cover that keep global temperatures down?
Apparently the temperature-CO2-correlation works out pretty straightforward so for now both questions are answered (respectively yes, and no). Modulations on the trend are explained by ENSO, volcanoes, industrial dust and solar variability.
The modern myth of ‘ice age’-consensus in the 70’s relates to a single, rather non-scientific book by Nigel Calder called ‘The Weather Machine’. This book was fantastically popular with the general public but not in the scientific community.
I believe the current period of extended minimal solar activity should give us a unique opportunity to determine the effect, if any, that solar variability has on climate change. I do not think we have seen such a deep solar minimum in over 150 years.
As yet, I believe the jury is still out on this question. Looking at my chart of AMSR-E data with the average annual freeze-melt cycle subtracted out, I see that data for this year to be averaging about 580,000 sq km above the average for the whole year of 2007. For now, this is inconclusive as it is still within the range of similar re-growth episodes evident on the old NSIDC monthly ice-extent plots from 1979.
I presume that Arctic ice-extent changes are also affected by weather-related cloud-cover and wind flow. I would think that a run-away greenhouse effect would show up as progressively less arctic ice frozen each winter and increasing ice melted each summer as ever more of the Arctic Ocean is exposed to direct solar heating. It may take several years more before a clear trend is observable. Perhaps the modest Arctic ice-extent increase of the past two years indicates that we do not need to sound the klaxon of alarm just yet.
Kampen me boy, you need a course in logic. Or maybe you’re just too young to remember.
There is no cause and effect between increasing levels of carbon dioxide and global temperature. None. So please stop misrepresenting the situation. Falsely claiming there is a correlation between CO2 and temperature doesn’t make it so.
Note the [non] correlation below the chart: click. If you limit your comments to verifiable facts, you will be forced to conclude that any effect from increasing CO2 is extremely minor, and can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes. Accepting that fact will help you to avoid looking foolish: CO2 rising from 4 parts in ten thousand to 5 parts in ten thousand is not going to trigger runaway global warming. And that, my friend, is exactly what the climate alarmists are trying to sell. A pig in a poke.
Sorry, but the facts completely debunk the alarmist position. That’s what planet Earth is telling anyone who has the common sense to listen.
Funniest thing about the global cooling thing is that Stephen, (Scary scenarios), Scheider was one of those on the Earth is cooling bandwagon LOL
DaveE.
Smokey 7:51:39
I agree that the correlation stinks, but there may yet be a CO2 signal in the temperature record. I don’t think it is big enough to be detected yet, or if it is big enough to be detectible and present, we haven’t figured out what it is yet.
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Re: Smokey (07:51:39) :
“Kampen me boy, you need a course in logic. Or maybe you’re just too young to remember.”
Newsweek is hardly scientific. The article mentions no greenhouse gases. Just a question: do you think they don’t exist? Do you think an atmosphere of pure N2 and O2 and no trace gases would have the exact same temperature as we have now? Shall I dump a thousand articles about CO2 and AGW as of the fifties of last century on you, then?
“There is no cause and effect between increasing levels of carbon dioxide and global temperature. ”
You may need a course in nineteenth century radiation physics. Or are you trying to deny conservation of energy?
“CO2 rising from 4 parts in ten thousand to 5 parts in ten thousand is not going to trigger runaway global warming. ”
‘Runaway’ global warming was of course never predicted. A climate change is. The change will have to continue until the CO2-content levels off; then climate and oceans will take a few years to settle in a new equilibrium. No ‘runaway’ – that is popular gibberish (as is the article about ‘tsunami’s in England’ discussed elsewhere on this site, of course).
If you doubt the impact of very small concentrations of stuff, try a little cyanide.
As long as global temperature is still rising in combination with the rise of CO2-levels, there is logically no debunk of the AGW (not ‘alarmist’, please) position – even if the two are correlated along some other variables. Unless no other cause of GW is found the AGW-position remains. Hyperesoteric, immeasurable solar variation will not do! Mystical propositions like ‘naturally coming out of the Little Ice Age’ will not do! Science, please.
kim,
That’s why I wrote that “any effect from increasing CO2 is extremely minor, and can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes.”
There were several obvious errors in RR Kampen’s (07:20:48) post. If CO2 had the effect claimed, the planet would warming significantly as CO2 increased. But the planet is cooling, not warming. Any effect from CO2 is so minor that it is overwhelmed by other factors. There is nothing to be alarmed about regarding carbon dioxide, which is entirely beneficial.
Re: Smokey (08:28:33) :
“There were several obvious errors in RR Kampen’s (07:20:48) post. If CO2 had the effect claimed, the planet would warming significantly as CO2 increased. But the planet is cooling, not warming.”
If CO2 had the effect claimed, how much would you expect the atmosphere to have warmed? About 25° C maybe?
“Any effect from CO2 is so minor that it is overwhelmed by other factors. There is nothing to be alarmed about regarding carbon dioxide, which is entirely beneficial.”
Other factors (deep solar minimum, extreme La Niña, two volcanoes) would have brought the years 2007 and 2008 near the coldest on record. Instead they tipped into the top ten warmest.