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.
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For those who keep claiming the global cooling fears are myth, go back and read the time magazine article.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html
It is interesting that in the 70’s, they said:
“Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.”
Are these facts correct? Why are we always looking at data from 1978 forward?
RR Kampen, just about everything in your (08:18:02) post is wrong for one reason or another. For example, your statement:
That is a perfect example of an “argumentum ad ignorantiam”: The fallacy of assuming something is true simply because it hasn’t been proven false.
I do agree with you that Newsweek is not scientific. Not at all. But that article quotes numerous actual scientists and their organizations on their belief that the planet could be entering a new Ice Age. Re-framing the argument to make Newsweek the issue deliberately disregards all the scientists being quoted. It’s a red herring argument.
It’s understandable that you would be uncomfortable with an R^2 [non] correlation of .001 between CO2 and temperature; a number so tiny it is indistinguishable from noise.
And appealing to nineteenth century radiation physics is no doubt a reference to Arrhenius — who recanted his 1896 paper that alarmists like to quote, and replaced it with his 1906 paper showing a much lower sensitivity [which has been shown to still be much too high].
Finally, we constantly witness backing and filling by the alarmist contingent over their warnings of runaway global warming leading to climate catastrophe. But that is the position that they must take, because as stated above, if the result of higher CO2 concentrations is only a couple of tenths of a degree change in temperature, then there is no justifiable reason to pay another dime of grant money toward any “mitigation,” or global warming studies, or first-class trips to Copenhagen courtesy of unwilling taxpayers. A couple of tenths of a degree toward a more comfortable, agriculturally beneficial climate is a non-problem. That’s why the warmist folks absolutely must sound their false alarms over runaway global warming: because if a CO2-caused climate catastrophe isn’t right around the corner, then there are much better things to spend all that wasted money on; things that matter. So they are forced to be climate alarmists. They have no choice, see? Once they start crying “Wolf!”, they can’t stop.
It’s either alarmism 24/7/365, or kiss all that grant money goodbye.
RR Kampen said;
“If you doubt the impact of very small concentrations of stuff, try a little cyanide.”
Co2 is the very stuff of life, cyanide isn’t. Quite what was your point?
tonyb
RE: Smokey (08:57:57) :
“It’s either alarmism 24/7/365, or kiss that grant money goodbye.”
There is no grant money for bona fide climate specialists then? Only for the ‘Alarmists’? I must become one!
—
““Unless no other cause of GW is found the AGW-position remains.”
That is a perfect example of an “argumentum ad ignorantiam”: The fallacy of assuming something is true simply because it hasn’t been proven false.”
I think you have missed out on most of the argument. Look carefully. Suppose we have
– Observation: X and
– Hypothesis: ‘A causes X’.
Without any further research, claiming the truth of the hypothesis fails to your argument. But, of course, research STARTS at a hypothesis, it does not end with it.
Now all possible causes for X, that is A, B, C, D, E et cetera shall be inspected for existence.
If B, C, D, E et cetera are not found, but A is found, the hypothesis remains.
That is the situation here.
Of course, one could try to deny the hypothesis A causes X itself, but in the GW-case this would violate conservation of energy. CO2 traps heat as a matter of fact.
Of course, one could try to deny X itself. Well: http://agwobserver.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/globalcooling.gif?w=514&h=409
—
“I do agree with you that Newsweek is not scientific. Not at all. But that article quotes numerous actual scientists and their organizations on their belief that the planet could be entering a new Ice Age. Re-framing the argument to make Newsweek the issue deliberately disregards all the scientists being quoted. It’s a red herring argument.”
The Newsweek article is like http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/07/guardian-global-warming-to-trigger-earthquakes-tsunamis-avalanches-and-volcanic-eruptions/ . How do you regard that text, containing as it is references to numerous actual scientists?
As for consensus, observe http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/1970s_papers.gif
from http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm .
—
“It’s understandable that you would be uncomfortable with an R^2 [non] correlation of .001 between CO2 and temperature; a number so tiny it is indistinguishable from noise.”
I sure would, knowing the correlation is so big climate models since the early eighties can’t do without it.
—
“And appealing to nineteenth century radiation physics is no doubt a reference to Arrhenius ”
And earlier, including Fourier.
—
“Finally, we constantly witness backing and filling by the alarmist contingent over their warnings of runaway global warming leading to climate catastrophe.”
Let’s please dismiss alarmism like those dumb Britisch tsunami’s and ‘runaway warming’ and stuff like that. GW is serious as it is, but the idea it will end the world or humanity is plain nonsense. It WILL, however, pose some serious difficulties.
Maybe you would like to know that I also abhor Kyoto and emission rights and nonsens like that. If we stop emitting CO2 now, it wil take half a millenium to have the CO2 back to the 1900-level. We have to take GW for granted and anticipate on possible consequences. Big deal.
Smokey
I have had this discussion numerous times with Brendan H. Below is the convoluted series of posts. It is nonsense for others to suggest that the theory of cooling in the 70’s was limited to a very few articles-most of them emanating from Nigel Calder. I see I will have to put these posts into a proper sequence at some point as no doubt they will be needed again.
“Brendan H at 02 51 57 said
“As for William Connolly, the paper he co-authored on the myth of the 1970s cooling consensus presents a persuasive and well-supported argument. I think you should give it another chance.
http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf “
****
I have seen this article before in another form- the three authors are interesting including William Connelly-on whom I did a long and thorough piece about his personal agenda as a member of the UK Green party and as gatekeeper of wikipedia climate section (my 01 14 54 earlier today addressed to Joel and Smokey)
The second author was Thomas Peterson, who Anthony has met;
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:xpjH07lfElgJ:wattsupwiththat.com/2007/06/30/+thomas+peterson+noaa+politics&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=uk
Thomas Peterson is the keeper of weather records including weather stations at NOAA. Anthony records being co interviewed with him
When trying to continue his surface stations project shortly after this meeting he found;
“You are not authorized to view this information. Your IP address has been logged”
When it came back up Monday afternoon, the “managing parties” field identifying the location of the weather station was gone. I would note that I shared a radio interview with Dr. Thomas Peterson of NCDC last week, so I am certain NCDC is aware of the effort. No notification was given, nor even a professional courtesy to advise of the change, nor any notice on the website.”
The Row over access was repeated in more detail here
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1879848/posts
The third author of the piece you cite is John Fleck who is a competent science writer on the Albuquerque journal- he reported his own involvement in the article here;
http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/guest_columns/1897180018opinionguestcolumns02-18-09.htm
His politics are left wing -which is his own business- but the reports he co authors need to be seen against that background.
The original report you cite is rebutted here
http://www.openmarket.org/2008/12/09/the-new-ice-age-continued/
For my part I had an involvement, in as much back in the 70’s I was asked to write a piece on climate change and being unaware at that time what was being referred to collected material from both ‘sides’. There were undoubtedly far more pieces citing cooling rather than warming-whether they survived as digital copies anywhere –and therefore are still being cited-depends on who the record keeper was at the time. I threw away my files years ago and recall the flimsy folder with warming material and the very thick bunch of folders on cooling.
The article you cite makes some interesting comments including;
“Scientists teasing apart the details of Mitchell’s temperatures found it (cooling) was not necessarily a global phenomenon.”
Mitchell had based his calculations on 200 weather stations for his 1963 treatise. Interestingly this was the same number (and appears to be the same ones) that G S Callendar based his work on when he came up with the seminal document on AGW being caused by rising co2 levels back in 1938. He had based his own work by backtracking to 1850 to show rising temperatures and found only 100 weather stations of which some 50 were flawed and unreliable. Interestingly Charles Keeling admitted to being influenced by Callendars work so based his own hypotheses on the basis that temperatures were rising and so was co2-this latter supposition based on Callendars cherry picking of historical co2 data.
It is certainly untrue to rewrite history and claim global cooling was a myth. It wasn’t. To base a new world order on a tiny number of historical temperature records- many of which were known to be flawed then and are flawed to this day- is clearly absurd.
Sorry Brendan, but the report you cite could easily be rewritten to show a diametrically opposite view and if anyone here would like to fund it I shall be happy to oblige
TonyB
Sorry, but I was in a hurry this morning so did not post my full reply. (00 46 39)
You said earlier that the report you linked to demolishing the myth surrounding Global cooling;
“…As for the opinions and activities of the report authors, I don’t see where they are relevant to my claim that their report “presents a persuasive and well-supported argument”.
I had made some very detailed anaysis suggesting that two of the three authors had an acknowleged warming agenda and the third-the keeper of the weather records- certainly did not appear as objective as he might, if the experience of others is anything to go by.
You then said;
“The authors identified seven papers claiming global cooling, 44 papers claiming global warming, plus a number of neutral papers. In other words, if there were any scientific consensus, it was in favour of warming. This finding is supported by an opinion survey carried out in 1977 of top climate scientists, who narrowly favoured warming over cooling.”
With respect Brendan the two statements do not correlate.
Let us for the sake of advancing the arguement (only) accept the poll at the time showed a narrow consensus in favour of warming, and for the sake of easy maths accept it was around 5%
Yet by the figures you cite around 80% of papers the thre authors ‘found’ supported warming. Surely it is more reasonable the figure would represent around 50/55%?
This suggests a number of possible explanations.
* The coolers didn’t write much
* The coolers documents were never digitised or became lost over time.
* The authors didn’t dig hard enough to find the true representation of papers that the poll shows should have been there.
Are you seriously saying a group of objective authors seeking to present a well balanced argument found only around 15/20% of cooling papers, when it should have been at least double or triple that number? In doing that is it really correct to say that they are presenting ‘a persuasive and well-supported argument?”
I suggest that the authors well known sympathies have prevented them from delving far enough to present anything that is balanced.
This is also so far from my own direct experience at the time as to exist in a parallel universe. Finding papers without the internet back in the 70’s was not easy and my own memory of writing my own article at the time is that I subsequently threw away far more than 7 cooling papers, and far fewer than 44 warming papers!
We will each continue to believe what we want Brendan, but it is only fair to point out that an important and widely cited report of this kind does need to be put into the context of the agenda behind those writing it.
Tonyb
Re: TonyB (09:19:31) :
“Co2 is the very stuff of life, cyanide isn’t. Quite what was your point?”
(I can’t survive on CO2)
My point is that the well-known argument that CO2 exists in such low concentrations it can’t possibly make a difference is rubbish. I chose the easy way to show this.
Sorry, I can’t be bothered any further by statements like: “If we stop emitting CO2 now, it wil take half a millenium to have the CO2 back to the 1900-level.” As Prof Lindzen would say, that conjecture is so bad, it’s not even wrong. It is a falsified invention. Prof Freeman Dyson provides solid evidence that CO2 persistence is around 12 years. Repeating an insanely wacky number for CO2 persistence of 500 years means you’re listening to people who wouldn’t know the difference between their ankle and an adiabatic chart.
Do your homework, get up to speed on this subject, stop repeating ridiculous talking points like that, and accept the fact that the entire basis for the CO2=AGW scare comes out of always-inaccurate GCMs, and accept the fact that the real world contradicts the computer models.
Then we can talk.
~snip~
Mind your language. ~dbstealey, moderator.
Well I’m still back at the Arctic ice, and as of this morning 09/08/2009, looking at the 09/07 IARC-JAXA graph, it looks to me like it has hit bottom; and earlier than last year; which itself was earlier than 2007.
Just a wild guess it won’t go below 5.25; maybe 5.20, but so what ? It’s not back to 2006 or the long term (since 1979) average, but 2005 looks a lot like 2007 timing wise, and since then it has been starting the refreeze earlier.
Well another exciting year of watching the grass grow. I like the increased information on the JAXA site. Not also the Arctic temperature is now in full crash dive mode.
Yes I know it’s just weather; but the trend is not conducive to AGW theorists getting a lot of sleep.
Between watching the ice, and the sun, I haven’t even noticed that my front lawn has grown to where I need to mow it sometime this week.
Re: Smokey (09:49:50) :
“Then we can talk.”
I don’t think so. You are trying to force arguments on me in an ad hominem, authoritarian way. ‘Accept the fact…’ which is a non-fact, but even if it were, you know: just mind your language please.
“”” Roy Spencer (14:24:13) :
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. 🙂 “””
So where is the exaggeration; I think Roy is correct. Might I suggest that people consult their OED and look up the word ( if ) .
And “if not”, then I don’t see any near term return of the Wisconsin Glaciation.
George
Why does the Climate Change ‘debate’ sound ever so much like the Kevin Bacon Game with an ever increasing number of degrees/steps?
(How do we make responsible and punish some capitalist American for the environmental effects causing the deaths of untold lesser Borneo frog limpets in Mesopotamia?)
Sea ice coverage isn’t *now* as important as sea ice volume. “Second and third year ice is much lower than ever!” (well, duh, there wasn’t as much ice last year or in ’07). But how do we tie that to AGW? While the IPCC ‘reports’ do contain a number of facts, the leap of logic from those facts into conjecture – and the rather psychic ability to identify a single cause in a complex system – is what is alarming.
As there appears to be an open debate as to whether the melting trend observed so far is due to unusually high solar activity in the last thirty years or if this is due to man-made industrial pollution emitted in the same period, I do not think the degree of melting is relevant as long as the cause of that melting is subject to question. The recent and sudden reduction of solar activity as determined by sunspot count and the indications that this may not be temporary should give us a clear way to settle this question.
As yet, the data is still inconclusive. It may take several more years before can we say for sure that the previous trend really has been broken. We should not expect to recover from thirty years of melting in a single year.
Ian (00:03:29) :
** [snip] **
So OK for Tamino to blog on the abstract of a paper but not OK for WUWT. Typical of AGW proponents. What is also typical is that I can’t reply to Scott A Mandia on Open Mind as all my posts to that blog are deleted. Open Mind my foot.
If you want a post to appear on Tamino’s website, you must open it with “Wonderful, Tamino. Very enlightening, as usual” or “Nice summary and quite elegant” or “Illuminating, as always” … anything that will get your nose burrowing into the crevice of acceptance.
IJIS have not updated their data, but just visually the ice on the 8th appears to be more than that on the 7th.
I had forecast 5,100,000 earlier then upped it to 5,277,000 later on Climate Audit. Now methinks it may even be over 5.3
John Goetz (19:32:04),
Excellent point. Too true.
On the plus side, “Tamino” never made the cut in the Weblog Awards or the Wikio top Science sites. No wonder, as insecure as he is. Real science encourages contrary opinion and facts. We get that on WUWT. But not on the censorship-prone AGW sites.
IJIS have just posted their data 5,308,594 sq kms. Melt 20,312 compared to yesterdays 16,250, but my prediction – expect an update, just like yesterday, when they reduce this melt figure and up their ice extent. Visually the ice seems more in the animation here : http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/satellite/index.uk.php choose a select time step and toggle between the 7th and 8th.
I run into warmers every day and I always shut them up by asking them if the city they live is has gotten warmer in the last 40 years and by how much? The info is available to everyone with a few clicks on the weather underground. If they don’t know , tell them about your city, If you are lucky enough to live in a town in the usa chances are your city has cooled or stayed about the same. They can’t preach al gore’s gospel if they don’t know what is happening in their own backyard. We are in a street fight for our freedoms with these moroooooons and we are trying to debate them with data they controlllll. Ask them how much sea levels have risen on Lower Matecumbe in the Florida keys? If levels are not rising in the keys how can a rise anywhere else in the world have meaning? I have not met one warmer that can deal with this type of debate. I don’t want to hear that coral is dying on some remote island in the middle of the pacific, show me on maui,or key west , with bouy temp data that proves your theory. Next time you see your congressman ask him if his city is warming , You know what his answer will be, he will look like a fool too.. We have to stop this soon or we will all be pushing our electric cars our of snow drifts in a few years.
The warmers know this has nothing with the facts, they don’t care about facts or the truth,they never have.It is about cap and trade, the green movement and every other liberal idea they have come up with since the late sixties,they are getting old and losing their power, Ozone holes didn’t work,nuclear power gonna kill us all of the 1980’s, didn’t work,acid rain didn’t work,ice age of the 1970’s didn’t work.If we can stop this global warming crap they can all retire and move to Florida and leave us alone . 30 years of ice data has no meaning , talk to me in another 250 years then you might be able to show a trend.
Re: jim (21:27:52) :
“acid rain” – That would be China’s largest ecological disaster. Solved partly in the US, wholly in Europe by taking sulphur out of gasoline and implementing filters in chimneys. Why forget the work put into solving this serious problem?
For all that it’s worth, which is not much, but it looks if the 2009 ice extend is going to beat the 2005 ice extend, somewhere around the 15th of September.
Or not.
” Richard (20:39:11) : IJIS have just posted their data 5,308,594 sq kms. Melt 20,312 compared to yesterdays 16,250, but my prediction – expect an update, just like yesterday, when they reduce this melt figure and up their ice extent. Visually the ice seems more in the animation ”
Sure enough they have posted an update and guess what! This time it has gone up by a whopping 21,875 sq kms! and the ice extent is now not less by 20,312 sq kms but it has INCREASED by 1,563 sq kms the second time it has done so. (The first on the 4th of Sept)
RR Kampen,
What does acid rain have to do with global warming?
Smokey (09:26:04) : RR Kampen, What does acid rain have to do with global warming?
Smokey I’m amazed at your ignorance. Everything has got to do with (anthropogenic- dont forget that will you? normal warming is ok) global warming- hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, mosquitoes, pollution, general motors, toyota. You just dont “get it” it seems.
Richard,
All skeptics are ignorant. Just ask any climate alarmist [you can easily tell an alarmist from a normal person: alarmists are the ones who are afraid of CO2 and debates].
Ice from the 8th to the 9th. Again visually it seems to have increased, everywhere except off the East coast of Greenland and the NW coast of greenland. Overall I think it has increased a smidge. Methinks IJIS will again show a decrease followed by an update increasing the extent.