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.
>>>“We are still seeing a downward trend that appears
>>>to be heading toward ice-free Arctic summers,”
>>>Meier said.
I am not great with stats, but surely even if the ice extent had recovered to normal levels, the ‘trend’ would still be downwards, until the 2007 downwards blip had been overcome by further years’ data.
.
Smokey,
for you
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ay7YirF9_M&hl=en&fs=1&]
Thanks for the heads up on ITLAPD.
If the embed doesn’t work, here’s the link.
BTW, why doesn’t anyone say, “after spending much of the year at or above multi-year average extents, sea ice appears to have bottomed well above the record low in 2007”?
Just wondering.
Hi, Perry
the paper is “Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling” by Kaufman et al.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/325/5945/1236
Most climate scientist now believe the NSIDC is permanantly out to lunch, but they won’t call them on it.
Alright, I’m not the greatest with math, and don’t take this question as rhetorical, I really wan’t an answer.
Unless you are keeping a running total of the Anomaly values. How does the data come up -accelerate- the downward trend in any circumstance. I thought acceleration was the delta of the delta. That is to say, if the Arctic lost half a million square feet every single year, the trend would be downward but the acceleration would be zero. If the Arctic lost half a million one year and each year it lost an additional 100,000 square feet to that half million, 600,000 then 700,000, then 800,000 the year after, wouldn’t that be an acceleration of 100,000 square feet? How in the world do you get a positive acceleration out of an increase in ice as opposed to a loss, unless you are adding the previous years ice delta from your arbitrary norm to this one? Why does last years delta have anything to do with this years delta? If next year the ice were normal wouldnt the totall trend be zero and the acceleration of the ice loss be highly negative?
Thanks
Can we ask the NSIDC how many years it takes to make ice “multi-year” ice?
Bart Verheggen:
“Even including the last two years, the downward trend in sea ice extent has accelerated! How is that a recovery?”
You’ re kidding, right? Or have you found a new meaning for the word “acceleration” ?
“By simply applying the oldest forecasting technique – persistence, combined with a knowledge now that we have more multi-year ice than last year. – Anthony”
So – if you had been using this method to make a prediction in October 2007, what would your prediction have been?
In general, we have a 30 year trend, with noise around that trend. The trend itself is statistically significant over that time period (eg, the noise is not as large as the trend). Attribution of that trend to rising temperatures seems likely, though I suppose some might want to attribute it to the phase of the PDO – that argument should be resolved within a couple of years – and we can attribute the noise (eg, strong excursions like 2007) to weather events.
I’d be willing to bet that the average over the next 3 years of minima will be less than the 2009 extent, based on the trends, though I haven’t actually done a statistical analysis to determine likelihood.
Ugh, I used trend where i should have used anomaly , and i’ll likely not get this clarification in before several people point that out to me.
According to NSIDC’s own website, multi-year ice is defined as ice that has survived ONE or more melt seasons. They don’t make a distinction between the strength of say three and six year old ice, and it seems that the maximum thickness is reached after 2 or 3 years. The entire life cycle of the ice ranges from 3 to 4 years to 7 to 10 years (depending on the current it gets caught up in). So, given that they have admitted to a short “pause” in global warming, how many more years to we have to listen to the “younger, thinner, weaker” ice argument?
Also, very interesting quote from a somewhat dated article on their website:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/essay_untersteiner.html
“Both the shrinking and thinning of the arctic sea ice cover appear to be in keeping with the poleward amplification of the global warming induced by increased greenhouse loading of the atmosphere and predicted by interactive climate models. Recent computations (e.g. Vinnikov, 1999) closely duplicate the observed reduction of the mean annual ice extent. However, closer inspection reveals a disturbing discrepancy: models show impacts in winter and observations show ice retreat in summer. As we expect from basic physical reasoning, the largest effects of greenhouse warming should be seen in the absence of solar radiation when thermal infrared radiation dominates the surface energy balance, i.e. in winter. The calculations by Vinnikov et al. (1999) and Manabe et al. (1992) indeed show the largest sea ice signal in winter. An explanation of this summer/winter discrepancy has not been offered so far. The absence and presence of sea ice, and its thickness, depend on very small differences between large fluxes of energy. Minor changes of the assumptions about surface albedo, snow cover, cloudiness and cloud radiative properties, ocean heat flux, and other factors, may have large effects on the computed ice cover and require a model precision that remains to be attained.”
So, somethings aren’t consistent with model predictions. 🙂
The worst, most non-scientific comment by the NSIDC is
“and well outside the range of natural variability. ”
Based on a thirty year record there is no way to make that claim. It is irresponsible.
Once again, the group-think on this site just baffles me.
2009 was the third lowest year on record, for minimum ice extent, with the other two lowest years being 2008 and 2007.
According to the ICESat data, this corresponds to record low ice volume, as well, at least up until 2008, as the thick multiyear ice continues to decline.
This data is outside two standard deviations from the mean of the 1978 to 2000 data.
It’s really just baffling.
Looking for any data to support a pre-determined conclusion is not science, regardless of the pretensions to scientific method and jargon affected by people on this site.
Ice extent is declining, and so is ice volume, at the same time CO2 is increasing. The reality agrees with the physics. The current rates of change are huge, as well.
Can’t we just look at the graphs, like the ones displayed by other articles on ths site, showing that the last three years are the lowest in the past few decades, and just see what is there?
At the start of the year I was reading comments from a French ski resort manager in a Pyrennean ski centre.
It went something like this;
“yes we had great snow this winter, the pistes were excellent earlier and for longer, than in recent years, its all down to global warming”.
So, what are we going to do about it?
People who have signed up for their RSS service get similar information.
Only bad news from the Arctic, the ice is melting.
NSIDC has turned into one big “Thermogeddon Propaganda Machine”.
Why don’t we sign a petition and present it to Government.
This petition could include all alarmist propaganda institution that are financed with taxpayer money.
We don’t pay for spin.
Mike B,
(I like your name by the way…) I’ve got a better idea – for those congressmen and leaders that won’t listen to reason – fire them next election. We, after all are their employers and they serve at our direction…at least that’s how I read the constitution. (US that is…)
Another Mike B
Why do they set the “average” dates for the satelite data at 1979 to 2000 instead of 1979 to 2009? This doesn’t make much sense to me as it is leaving out almost a decade of data.
BTW awesome site, always informative and educational, I never miss a day reading.
Regards,
What people may not be aware of is that, according to the Japanese data, the minimum ice area in 2005 was 5,315,156 sq kms, which occurred on 22 Sep. Currently, 2009 stands at 5,326,094 sq kms, which is clearly more than the 2005 minimum. Assuming we have, indeed, past the minimum for this year, it is obvious that in the very near future, 2009 will be the fourth smallest ice extrent, by calendar date; not the third.
“jorgekafkazar (19:16:38) : ”
“Mr. Meier’s statement is like taking a car driving west at 60 miles an hour in Albuquerque, and saying “We’re still seeing an east-bound vehicle that appears to be heading for St. Louis,” just because the car was once in Tucumcari”
This reference keyed me onto the best anology that covers the use of short term averages. It plays on a joke Stephen Wright said,
I got pulled over by a cop, and he said, ‘do you know the speed limit here is 50 miles per hour?’. So I said, ‘oh, that’s OK, I’m not going that far.’.
I have always remembered the punchline incorrectly as “I wasn’t going to be out that long.”
30 years of weather = climate? We have not been out that long.
Oh my God, it’s worse than we thought! (The NSIDC, that is.)
What happens when next year’s ice minimum is higher than this year’s?
Will this mean ice free minimums are even closer?
Are they joking?
If you take lowest ice extent data from 1979 through 2009 and do an I-MR chart, 2009 was still below the lower control limit (5.167) for the data set. Really close, but you’d still consider it as outside the range.
While the overall trend was/is down, something unusual clearly hit in 2007. My opinion, but what it’s worth, is that the system appears to be trying to recover its past range. A minimum somewhere around 6-5.3 for 2010 could happen.
On a positive note, the Mar09 data was within the population control limits (14.8-16.3). If we’re making predictions, I’ll take 15.5 for Mar10.
Similar Alarmism from the Center for Biodiversity
Sep 18, 2009
Center for Biodiversity Release Another Embarrassment
http://www.icecap.us (right column)
If we don’t cap CO2 emissions, we are doomed.
I guess the AGW folks are right… when you post here, you always see this…
George (07:29:20) : Your comment is awaiting moderation
Must be an extremist or a denier…. 🙂
It is a joke… I know it is pending (as this one will be when I push Submit Comment)…
Flanagan (23:34:59) : “. . . there was a paper recently showing from proxies that the Arctic ice was on the rise for the last 2000 years and then started decreasing in the beginning of the 20th century.”
Flanagan, apparently you are referring to the Darrell S. Kaufman study. To be blunt and short: That study is rubbish. To the extent that it was peer-reviewed speaks volumes of how broken the peer review process is.
I often find it worthwhile to consider your comments, but if you refer people to such garbage, you are undermining the credibility of your other comments.
Flanagan (23:34:59) :
Gene: there was a paper recently showing from proxies that the Arctic ice was on the rise for the last 2000 years and then started decreasing in the beginning of the 20th century.
Actually, the proxy study says the arctic warming is the highest in 2000 years. And as has been noted several times…winds cause more melt than temperatures. Not that I believe another “hokey” stick graph.
MikeE (18:27:52) :
All things being equal, surly they have also extrapolated the antarctic sea ice trends…….
Shouldn’t that read, surly they are