This is the press release sent out by NSIDC today (sans image below). Instead of celebrating a two year recovery, they push the “ice free” theme started last year by Marc Serreze. There’s no joy in mudville apparently. My prediction for 2010 is a third year of increase in the September minimum to perhaps 5.7 to 5.9 million square kilometers. Readers should have a look again at how the experts did this year on short term forecasts. – Anthony
Image source: NOAA News
Arctic sea ice reaches minimum extent for 2009, third lowest ever recorded
CU-Boulder’s Snow and Ice Data Center analysis shows negative summertime ice trend continues
The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the third-lowest recorded since satellites began measuring sea ice extent in 1979, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.
While this year’s September minimum extent was greater than each of the past two record-setting and near-record-setting low years, it is still significantly below the long-term average and well outside the range of natural climate variability, said NSIDC Research Scientist Walt Meier. Most scientists believe the shrinking Arctic sea ice is tied to warming temperatures caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases being pumped into Earth’s atmosphere.
Atmospheric circulation patterns helped the Arctic sea ice spread out in August to prevent another record-setting minimum, said Meier. But most of the 2009 September Arctic sea ice is thin first- or second-year ice, rather than thicker, multi-year ice that used to dominate the region, said Meier.
The minimum 2009 sea-ice extent is still about 620,000 square miles below the average minimum extent measured between 1979 and 2000 — an area nearly equal to the size of Alaska, said Meier. “We are still seeing a downward trend that appears to be heading toward ice-free Arctic summers,” Meier said.
CU-Boulder’s NSIDC will provide more detailed information in early October with a full analysis of the 2009 Arctic ice conditions, including aspects of the melt season and conditions heading into the winter ice-growth season. The report will include graphics comparing 2009 to the long-term Arctic sea-ice record.
NSIDC is part of CU-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and is funded primarily by NASA.
For more information visit http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/, contact NSIDC’s Katherine Leitzell at 303-492-1497 or leitzell@nsidc.org or Jim Scott in the CU-Boulder news office at 303-492-3114 or jim.scott@colorado.edu.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Bart Verheggen
Read the report. 5C higher than today.
Do you truly believe that the arctic ice levels are at a ‘unprecedented’ low level today?
tonyb
Bart Verheggen: You write “The downward trend in Arctic sea ice extent has accelerated indeed. “. This is statistical nonsense. The summer sea ice is not something that fluctuates just randomly along a downward trend line. This is very simple: The area of ice in one summer is dependent on the ice area of the previous summer, since the area of melted ice depends on the thickness of the ice, which depends on the amount of multi-year ice, which depends on the previous summer. The increase of the last two summers has been about 11% per year – how do you expect it to recover faster than that?
Leland said
“Hi Tony B:
To the best of my knowledge, the positive feedback cycles mentioned most often are wildfires in the tropical and boreal forests, the melting Arctic icecap/ albedo feedback, release of methane and CO2 from melting permafrost, release of dissolved CO2 from warming oceans into the atmosphere, increases of water vapor in the atmosphere, and release of methane from the methane hydrates.”
You do realise that outgasing of co2 from the oceans is a perfectly natural part of the carbon cycle? Methane has been released from melting permafrost since time immemorial -I cited a link on this. Wildfires are primarily caused by people burning forest for crops, biofuels etc. More people more burning. We have too many people-industrialisation generally reduces population pressures but that is a different-although very interesting-argument.
Please cite your study of increased water vapour due to man.
We have already dealt with your comment on hydroxyl. Arctic ice has huge variations that operate in cycles. I cited seven links earlier demonstrating this. Have you read them? The last-very well documented cycle-was 1920-1940
tonyb
Leland Palmer (07:41:39) :
When 10,000 years of 5 degr.C higher temperatures in the Arctic (and 1-2 degr.C global) weren’t enough to release catastrophic amounts of methane (hydrates) from the melting of permafrost and/or the ocean shelves, why do you think that 100 years of a few tenths of a degree will lead to a catastrophe?
This kind of scenario’s is only the result of climate models, which still need to show even the slightest start of skill to “project” the future…
Bart Verheggen (07:11:01) :
“The question of course is: How long will we remain above that temperature, and will the icesheets remain stable for that time period?”
If we find economical and abundant alternatives within this century, the CO2 levels will fall back to about pre-industrial levels within 150 years, thus in total about 2.5 century + about 30 years for land+oceans to return to pre-industrial temperatures (if that is a blessing, that is another point: freezing Thames and Schelde in winter? A shorter growing season?). Thus in total 3 centuries of CO2 and temperature luxury. In principle, ice sheets should grow again and sea levels would fall back to the previous period (if CO2 was the cause of the melting/increase!).
The current sea level change is projected to be about 30 cm this century.
Compare that to 6 m sea level increase over 10,000 years or 6 cm per century in the Eemian. In both cases: plenty of time to increase the height of the dikes all over the world…
Espen, you are correct that it is not hypothetical …and it can get a lot worse.
Leland Palmer, you are no friend of nature.
Paul Vaughan
Ecologist
Ferdinand,
You’re talking about “a few tenths of a degree” over the course of hundred years. For the 21st century global warming to be only a few tenths of degrees would require one of two things:
– Society drastically reduces their GHG emissions very soon. But then really drastically, nothing like is even being discussed these days.
– Climate sensitivity to be only a few tenths of degrees per doubling of CO2. I’m guessing this is your line of thinking rather than the former. However, this would require for the foundations of climate science to be totally wrong; it’s at odds with what we know about past climate changes (LGM), the response from major volcanic eruptions, with what we know about various feedbacks in the system.
It seems utterly unlikely that the state of the science is so far off as this would require. If you can quantitatively explain past and current climate changes better than current GCM’s, incorporating all the relevant physics, with such low sensitivity… you would truly be heralded as the new Galileo. Forgive me for being skeptical though.
Bart Verheggen (00:41:04) :
Bart, according to Modtran, the direct effect of 2xCO2 is 0.9 K, with water vapour feedback about 1.3 K. All the rest is based on (only positive) feedbacks, of which several are very questionable, especially cloud feedback. Thus indeed, based on the current lack of warming, not “projected” by any GCM, and the overblown assumptions of the aerosol effect (even the sign is disputable) I assume that the real sensitivity for 2xCO2 is below 1.5 K.
My (sorry, Oxford’s) simple climate model (EBM – energy balance model) performs even a little better with 1.5 K/2xCO2 than with 3 K/2xCO2 to retrofit the past century temperatures:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/oxford.html
If we will reach 2xCO2 in this or next century, that is another question. Much depends on the price and availability of the alternatives. There is a break-even in CO2 increase at about halve the current emissions and further reductions will lower the CO2 level in the atmosphere.
I’m glad you’ve got it all cleared up. I’m sure the vast majority of professional climatologists that remain extremely concerned about the climate destabilization we appear to be witnessing will be very glad to hear that. 🙂
The oceans contain 40,000 gigatons of dissolved inorganic carbon. The atmosphere contains 700 gigatons of carbon.
Gas solubility decreases as temperature increases.
So, the oceans, potentially could stop acting as a huge CO2 sink. Would the equilibria shift between bicarbonate and carbonic acid, and between carbonic acid and CO2? The oceans contain 40,000 gigatons of carbon.
Which means that if the oceans release two percent of their dissolved CO2 and bicarbonate this alone could more than double atmospheric CO2.
If what we are witnessing was part of the “natural” carbon cycle, the climate system would have many thousands of years to absorb any increase in CO2, and sequester it as carbonates, due to weathering of mafic rocks and formation of carbonate from the absorbed CO2, and precipitation of bicarbonate as carbonate. But we have dumped carbon into the atmosphere so suddenly that rock weathering is being overwhelmed, and increased acidification of the oceans is limiting precipitation of the carbonate, I think.
According to Chris Field, one of the IPCC group leaders, the tropical forests will release 100 to 500 billion tons of CO2 themselves from wildfires into the atmosphere, on any business as usual scenario, an amount comparable to the entire industrial revolution, potentially increasing CO2 in the atmosphere by on the order of 50%.
Permafrost has melted before, but not so much of it so suddenly, I think. The northern permafrost contains an estimated 1.6 trillion tons of carbon. If ten percent of that ends up in the atmosphere as methane over the next century, this could increase greenhouse absorption from sunlight sufficient to trigger dissociaiton of the oceanic methane hydrates, which is the main concern.
And increased hydrate dissociation appears to be occurring, even as we speak, from water temperature increases of only one degree C.:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17625-as-arctic-ocean-warms-megatonnes-of-methane-bubble-up.html
When 3-4 trillion tons of methane hydrate apparently dissociated during the Permian – Triassic mass extinction, average surface air temperatures increased by 10-40 degrees C:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/aboutus/staff/kiehl/Kiehl-Shields.pdf
If CO2 increases are due to man, and therefore rising temperatures are due to man, how could water vapor increases in the atmosphere due to rising temperatures not be due to man?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Role_of_water_vapor
Bart Verheggen: “It seems utterly unlikely that the state of the science is so far off as this would require.”
Well, that was my position too – until very recently (and after having firmly believed AGW to be a real and imminent danger for almost 30 years!). But I’ve come to the conclusion that much of climate science must indeed be very far off. Having a degree in mathematics and having actually done some semi-relevant statistics (biometry) several years ago, I’m rather disappointed with the statistical ground work being done here. For instance, the “homogenized” GISS data from the arctic seems close to worthless, it appears to include a whole lot of airports that are classified as rural areas, and which (for this reason) is used to correct the data of cities in the arctic the wrong way. My current conjecture is that the data does not support the claim that recent years were any warmer than the 30s and 40s in the arctic. And it does not only apply to the Arctic, Anthony has shown the US data to be flawed, and I think it may be the case for may other parts of the World, including continental Europe. In addition, the number of stations in use is now so low that it doesn’t really cover enough area to give any sensible measure of “world surface temperature”.
Add to this the highly questionable methods of the Mann hockey stick paper (now repeated in the Kaufman et al. paper), and the strong support for the reality of the Warm Medieval Period from both historical records (e.g. Vikings on Greenlands) and lots of proxy data (very recently the WMP was confirmed in tropical data from Indonesia).
Ferdinand Englebeen:
“I assume that the real sensitivity for 2xCO2 is below 1.5 K”.
That is a minor fraction of what the UN/IPCC claims. The planet is demonstrating that you are far closer to reality than the IPCC.
Leland Palmer,
You are clearly in the same league as the medieval priests who argued incessantly about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. No doubt if they were here today, they would infest WUWT with posts emulating yours, and based on just as much idle speculation.
Well over 30,000 physical scientists [just in America — there would be several times as many if the statement was opened to scientists world wide], a large fraction of whom hold advanced degrees, have signed the following statement concerning methane:
You might as well be defending Scientology, for all the validity your methane posts have.
Is “Leland Palmer” the screen name for your real identity, Dr Raygun?
Hi Smokey-
This 30,000 “scientist” poll has been pretty thoroughly debunked, as you must know:
Here’s a video link:
You will no doubt go on using this climate skeptic talking point, anyway.
It’s easier to debunk Leland Palmer than shooting fish in a barrel.
The whole boring video [Aargh! Eight minutes wasted on bogus drivel!] tried to make one point: that a small percentage [less than a dozen!] dishonest people submitted fake credentials. [If it were more than that, for certain Leland’s propaganda screed would have had the list.]
That still leaves over thirty thousand legitimate scientists who signed the petition stating unequivocally that “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
Leland pegs the cognitive dissonance meter.
Actually, the video makes several good points.
Firstly, there was a certain amount of fraud involved in gathering them, with the petition being accompanied by a cover letter from Dr. Seitz, along with a non-peer reviewed article on global warming which was deliberately designed to appear to be from a scientific journal. The National Academy of Science subsequently made clear it had no connection with either the cover letter or the deceptive, non-peer reviewed article.
Secondly, no attempt was made to verify the identity or the authenticity of the signatures.
Thirdly, Dr. Seitz was very much involved in the tobacco industry effort to deny a link between cigarette smoking and its health effects,and Dr. Seitz directed at least 45 million dollars worth of studies, none of which ever showed a link between cigarette smoking and cancer or other health effects of smoking.
Dr. Seitz has been employed by the professional tobacco effect denial industry for years, and has branched out to be employed by the climate skeptic industry, apparently making millions of dollars in doing so. He is quite elderly, and his mental competence has been questioned by his own tobacco industry employers.
The signatures were gathered in a deceptive manner, accompanied by a cover letter from a professional paid skeptic, and also accompanied by a fake scientific journal article. The gatherer of the signatures is a fringe group, whose other output includes nuclear war survival literature and home schooling literature for parents concerned about avoiding socialist teaching by the public schools.
Like I said, you will no doubt continue to make this climate skeptic talking point.
This appears to be more like the behavior of a lawyer, who will continue to make any argument he believes might persuade his audience to adopt a specific viewpoint, than the behavior of a scientist.
Leland Palmer, your mind is made up and closed tight. You can have the last CD-inspired word. But first, I want to point out something:
The link you gave is dishonest propaganda. They simply fabricated things that are not true. And you believed them, based on nothing but a YouTube video.
For those who want the citation showing that the video worshipped by Leland has mendaciously fabricated a completely false story, it’s here: click.
Simply parroting that “no attempt was made to verify the identity or the authenticity of the signatures” is typical Leland. It’s provably untrue, but that doesn’t matter, and the facts be damned.
Actually believing that highly regarded scientists like Prof Freeman Dyson were tricked into signing the clear and straightforward OISM statement is incredible beyond belief. No doubt those scientists, when they read the language of the statement, thought about what it said and signed it. And it wasn’t an easy internet poll; it required signing the statement, putting a stamp on the letter, and mailing it. Emails are specifically not accepted, and the signers are verified. Tricksters are thrown out.
Also, there are few scientists who will not do paid research for companies, whether the research is for tobacco companies, or oil companies [or for treacherous anti-American weasels like the convicted felon George Soros, for that matter]. I would like to see Leland turn down $45 million from a tobacco or oil company, based on principle. Ri-i-i-i-i-ght. He would no doubt accept 45¢ from a tin foil company.
I really resent Leland’s constant ad hominem character assassination against reputable individuals. He does it constantly. No doubt Leland gets cheers and huzzahs at the wacko blogs he usually [I almost said normally] inhabits. But ad hominem attacks like his don’t fly here, where facts matter, not personalities. This isn’t People magazine, or the Weekly World News. This is the world’s “BEST SCIENCE” site. Ad hominem attacks mean only one thing: Leland has zero credible facts, so he personally attacks the scientists by alleging associations with “fringe” groups, the “denial industry,” and “home schooling.” What does that have to do with the language of the Petition??
What Leland fails to understand is that the specific language of the Petition is the entire issue. Let’s debate that, eh? Impugning the motives and character of 30,000 highly educated individuals is typical Leland Palmer. He is acting exactly like the lawyer types that he projects onto everyone here that he doesn’t agree with.
Leland’s absurd belief that thirty thousand+ people, holding advanced degrees in the hard sciences, have been ignorantly bamboozled into signing a crystal clear statement is as ridiculous as his silly methane fantasies.
When Leland gives up his fossil fuel burning cars and starts walking the walk on “carbon,” instead of only talking the talk, he will be taking the first step on the road to credibility.
Hi Smokey-
I think the shoe is on the other foot, of course, and would apply most of what you have criticized me for to you.
I think we have established several things on this thread. We have established that catastrophic warming events appear to be linked to methane release from the methane hydrates, in at least two mass extinctions in the past – The Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum and the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.
We have established that a clear path to destabilization of the methane hydrates appears to exist, and that there are credible news reports that this might already be happening.
We have established that this release of methane from the methane hydrates could be triggered first by fossil fuel use and secondly by positive feedback effects of that fossil fuel use, including wildfires, albedo changes, methane and CO2 release from the carbonaceous material in the melting permafrost, CO2 release from the oceans, and increased water vapor in the air from increased average temperatures.
Logically, considering that these changes have a high probability of catastrophic effects, and also have a high probability of occurring, the reasonable thing to do is cut back on fossil fuel use, and also put carbon back in the ground using a combination of biomass fuel and carbon sequestration.
But, as I have said, people on this site, for whatever speculative reason, do not appear to be acting logically.
Leland,
You haven’t established anything. Again, there is no sign of increasing methane emissions from permafrost or clathrates, the increase halted some 5 years ago.
Temperatures in the Arctic were 5 degr.C higher during the Eemian, the previous warm period some 120,000 years ago, but CO2 levels were 100 ppmv lower and methane levels one third of the current levels.
Thus we are responsible for the higher levels, but that doesn’t show much relationship with temperature.
Further, comparing the current much lower CO2 and CH4 levels and (still unsure) cause of a climate optimum tens of millions of years ago, when the geological conditions (place of the continents, mountain ranges) were completely different is not appropriate at all…
Hi Ferdinand-
It’s the rapidity of the changes we are making that is likely to kill us, IMO.
The danger is that methane hydrate dissociation can become self-sustaining, like lighting a fire, which burns higher and higher until it is out of control.
This has apparently happened before, at least twice, and we haven’t even talked about a huge event back in the Precambrian, which apparently freed the earth from its “snowball earth” state and switched it rapidly into a tropical one.
The changes that happened during the Eemian occurred much more slowly. Methane had time to oxidize into CO2, CO2 had time to become sequestered as carbonate, forests had time to advance or recede over thousands of years instead of burning catastrophically or dying in bark beetle infestations.
Lovelock used to say “Gaia is a tough bitch” and he didn’t really believe in runaway catastrophic global warming. Now he’s predicting six billion dead by 2100.
Geologists are also somewhat skeptical about global warming, because the catastrophic events in earth history happen much more seldom than the long periods of stability.
As Stephen Hawking said in the documentary “The Eleventh Hour” the danger is that methane and CO2 release can become self-sustaining, and run away, due to our geologically instantaneous injection of 300 billion tons of fossil carbon into a self-regulating system.
The criticism that our evaluations are limited to only a few years of satellite observation is nonsense. Humans have attempted to find marine passage across the North Sea for hundred of years and only recently they have met with success due to the decrease in the ice cover.
David (12:30:05) :
The criticism that our evaluations are limited to only a few years of satellite observation is nonsense. Humans have attempted to find marine passage across the North Sea for hundred of years and only recently they have met with success due to the decrease in the ice cover.
David,
I can’t believe your ignorance of your remarks.
Not only you confuse the North Sea with The Arctic Ocean but you also question
the facts about our short records of reliable satellite data.
There have been many well documented passages by ship through history which indicates that variability of the Arctic Sea Ice Extend is a natural event.
Leland Palmer (08:27:54) :
“Hi Ferdinand-
It’s the rapidity of the changes we are making that is likely to kill us, IMO.
The danger is that methane hydrate dissociation can become self-sustaining, like lighting a fire, which burns higher and higher until it is out of control.
This has apparently happened before, at least twice, and we haven’t even talked about a huge event back in the Precambrian, which apparently freed the earth from its “snowball earth” state and switched it rapidly into a tropical one.
The changes that happened during the Eemian occurred much more slowly. Methane had time to oxidize into CO2, CO2 had time to become sequestered as carbonate, forests had time to advance or recede over thousands of years instead of burning catastrophically or dying in bark beetle infestations.
Lovelock used to say “Gaia is a tough bitch” and he didn’t really believe in runaway catastrophic global warming. Now he’s predicting six billion dead by 2100.
Geologists are also somewhat skeptical about global warming, because the catastrophic events in earth history happen much more seldom than the long periods of stability.
As Stephen Hawking said in the documentary “The Eleventh Hour” the danger is that methane and CO2 release can become self-sustaining, and run away, due to our geologically instantaneous injection of 300 billion tons of fossil carbon into a self-regulating system”.
Leland Palmer,
Stephen Hawking in this case is wrong and so you are wrong to.
Our contribution to the total CO2 budget currently measured in our atmosphere is only 3% and it’s absorbed by an ever growing biomass.
Methane is absorbed by bacteria common in the earth’s soil in such an abundence that this will never become a problem.
The only problem we have today is a bunch of “know nothing scaremongers” that refuse to accept the scientific reports about these subjects because there true aim is to serve a political agenda.
You are obviously one of them.
It looks like there may be confusion over the terms ‘accelerating’ and ‘continuing.’ It appears to me that the minimum ice-extent this year is within the bounds of a continuing linear trend from 1979. I believe an accelerating trend would contain a term proportional to time squared. Perhaps such a fit would have been possible before 2008 (when we entered an exceptional period of minimum solar activity) but since then we have been seeing a recovery in Arctic sea-ice extent from the all-time record low of 2007.
At this time, it appears that one can cherry-pick weather data to prove that we are seeing the beginning of a new cooling trend or a continued warming trend. I prefer to wait two or three years until few more cherries ripen before making any decision.