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.
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Hi, inquirer
to my knowledge, no publication refuted the work by Kaufman so far. Are you actually an expert on proxies? The fact that some “blogs” declare the have “debunked” something has absolutely no face value until this refutation is itself published, and confirmed by others.
You might not like the way science works, but that’s the way it is. Are your negative comments on the peer-reviewing process based on a personal experience of scientific publishing, or just on some idea you just made up about how it works?
Bart Verheggen (03:00:23) said:
“Even including the last two years, the downward trend in sea ice extent has accelerated! How is that a recovery?”
I don’t know how you arrive at such a conclusion. Perhaps you can explain?
Can I refer you to my 1 54 45? There is ample evidence that the current melting is part of a natural oscillation that we can pick up in 1810-1860 and 1929-1940.
You seem to be relying too much on satelite data since 1979 from which I would assume you have no particular interest in arctic history and historic climatology in general prior to 1979. The world has warmed and cooled before and no doubt will do so again without any help from us.
I read your guest post on Real Ckimate but was particularly interested in this comment from your web site:
“The problem with CO2 is that a large part of our emissions stays in the atmosphere for centuries or even millennia”
Please cite your references, then you might like to discuss this with ferdinand who often drops by here. He will be most interested in your theory. He is Dutch as well.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/the-origin-of-increasing-atmospheric-co2-a-response-from-ferdinand-engelbeen/
best regards
tonyb
You would not believe this, until you read the article.
lead scientist on California air board study justifying costly new diesel rules got his degree. UPS, USC, UCLA — what’s the diff?
A San Diego businessman (Bryan Bloom) who is part of a group that worries the California Air Resources Board’s rules on diesel emissions will devastate parts of the state’s economy for no scientifically valid reasons passed along this photo from New York City. This is what’s at the address that the web site of “Thornhill University” lists for its U.S. campus. Thornhill U, remember, is where the lead scientist on the air board’s controversial study recommending sweeping new diesel emission rules got his Ph.D. by mail for $1,000.
Hien Tran admitted Dec. 10 to CARB that he lied about having a Ph.D. in statistics from UC Davis. Instead, Tran said, his Ph.D. was from “Thornhill.” Nevertheless, the air board still voted unanimously to adopt the rules based on his research Dec. 12 — without acknowledging Tran’s deception. Months and months later, Tran was demoted, but he still has a key role. Academic fraud, you see, is no big deal. The air board is on a mission. The normal concerns about making huge decisions based on tainted/flawed/untrustworthy/suspect research? The board couldn’t be bothered.
So what if its lead scientist got his degree at the “campus” above. UPS, USC, UCLA, UCSD — really, who can tell the difference?
Posted by Chris Reed at September 16, 2009 04:38 PM
Comments
This guy is a fraud and Ron Roberts is being led down the path by the nose by him. How embarassing is that. Look, everyone wants cleaner air, but putting overpriced 1970’s style smog equipment on diesels is a step backward. The 2009 Natural Gas Act, co-sponsored by Brian Bilbray And Mary Bono Mack, would allow Diesel fleet owners to convert their existing equipment to run on 100% pure American Natural Gas and actually decrease business costs while decreasing our dependence on Foreign Oil. Conversions of this type are NOT EVEN CONSIDERED by CARB as an emissions solution. eMail your Assemblymen and let them know CARB is out of control, behind the times and being led by a fraudulent “scientist” …
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/036157.html
This is funny considering how bad the experts missed this year.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/arctic-sea-ice-not-following-consensus/
Haha, Anthony already had done the same post. That’s good.
This is a perfect example of someone pulling the political funding string to get the spin on the story they want. I’m very dissapointed that Dr. Meier would allow his integrity to be tarnished like this. Any reasonable person, as I hope any scientist would be, knows that when we are researching something with geological time scales, 30 years would just be the start of the observational and data collection period; much to early to start making swag theories.
What are the sophisticated computer models that Meier and Serreze use to prognosticate ice extent? As one can read here
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2009_outlook/august_report/downloads/pdf/panarctic/10_Meier_etal_AugReport_JulyData.pdf
they basically do (with the help of a computer) the same as we all do: They eyeball the curves from the last few years and guesstimate which one will be followed by reality. That’s it. Simple as that. Nothing more. No wonder their August-prognosis of 4.69 million square kilometers was rather bad. That is state-of-the-art?
“… minimum extent was greater than each of the past two record-setting and near-record-setting low years, …”
Has it even been mentioned that this year’s extent will likely surpass that of 2005 by the end of this weekend? Had to get that press release out before the argument got weaker!
Flanagan (08:19:40) :
I thought this Kaufman paper had some good things to say, http://esp.cr.usgs.gov/research/alaska/PDF/KaufmanAger2004QSR.pdf
Pity that all those Arctic proxies he had access to in 2004 did not get used, but I’m sure that there was a good reason.
Bart Verheggen (03:00:23) : “How is that a recovery?”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up to 9500+ although it had been down to 6500 earlier this year. Still, it is well below its range and average from 1999 to 2007. Would you therefore reject that the Dow Jones has had a reovery.
One potentially misleading part of Meier’s statement is that current ice levels are “well outside the range of natural climate variability.” Dr. Meir is referring to the variability experience from 1979 to 2000. We do not have comprehensive data before that, but we do have enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that variability over the centuries has been much more than that experienced from 1979 to 2000. That group of years does not even consist of a statistically valid sample size for elementary statistics. And statistics get much more complicated when we are dealing with oscillations of various lengths. It may take hundreds of years to see a repeat of the status of variation oscillations experienced in the early 2000s. Just a start of the potential list: PDO, AMO, NAO, solar cycles, position of Jupiter relative to earth . . . .
I have such a huge problem with scientific publications starting out their articles this way:
“CU-Boulder’s Snow and Ice Data Center analysis shows negative summertime ice trend continues.”
It’s not defensible as objective at all when they say a couple of paragraphs down “this year’s September minimum extent was greater than each of the past two record-setting and near-record-setting low years…” Does the data they’re presenting not show that their supposed summertime ice trend is NOT continuuing — yet saying the trend continues is not fallacious? Do they know how much BS this is? These are smart people, right?
It reaks of political manipulation. These “scientists” — er, I mean party-liners — are destroying the public’s trust with science, do they know this? Do they care?
It’s their grant money at stake. Come 2015, when these climate scientists are fulfilling their destinies as Starbucks baristas and servers at the Olive Garden, they’ll wonder where they went wrong.
Press release from a tomato plant acting as AGW climate modeler:
“We still see an upward trend in sunlight hours per day if I fit a linear trend line to the whole record from March to July.
Therefore our models predict that by May or June next year there will be no nighttime hours.”
The article states “Outside the range of natural climate variability”.
Nonsense. The Arctic ocean was certainly mostly ice-free in the summer during the Holocene Optimum — a mere 8k – 6k yrs ago. The boreal forest grow right up to the northern arctic coast in Canada/Alaska. There is tundra for hundreds of miles south now.
Civilization just happened to blossom into organized agricultural societies during this time.
Marcus (06:06:47) :
You do not simply have a 30 year trend with “noise about it”. The first half of your record is flat, with all decrease in the latter portion of the second half. Thus, by artificially attaching your trend line to 1979, you are diminishing the slope of the actual decrease that occurred.
You are also artificially creating a situation where the value of the slope from 1979-2009 has a greater negative value than the slope from 1979-2008, because 2009 is still below the “trend line”. This, then, is your artificially induced “acceleration” and is IMHO a severe abuse of statistics. Unfortunately, such misrepresentations seem very common on the AGW side of things.
Mitchel44… Mmm, let me think… Maybe they didn’t use the data they reported in 2004 because their 2009 study is on the last 2000 years while the previous paper is on the Holocene optimum (somwhere between 5k and 9k years ago)?
Or because the mentioned heating of the North Pole was due to a shift in the Milankovitch cycle, a phenomenon that did not take place again since then?
The experts will have to show me that ice flowing out of Fram Strait versus ice staying in the Arctic and getting thrown together in jumbled thick layers produces the same amount of melt. My hypothesis is that when Arctic ice is driven inwards instead of outwards, both area and extent overestimate melt.
“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.”
Last time I checked my dictionary, second-year ice would BE multi-year ice. What will they say next year when the ice recovery continues again, that they’re now looking for fourth year ice?
However, I do feel that my expectations for an ice recovery of an even larger extent were somewhat shattered as the ice extent shrank during the early summer. So what Meier and Serreze said about younger ice being thinner must hold some validity. It does seem to shrink rapidly. Yet the final extent of the yearly shrinkage at last stabilized at a level relatively far above the previous year’s level. So the surprize for me was to see both the level continuing to decline in early summer and then pull out of its nose dive to a relatively hefty overall gain compared to last year’s. This must mean that there is validity to the overall recovery, and by implication there may indeed be something to this sunspot minimum that is not being fully accounted for in our weather predictions. It will be very interesting to see whether and how much overall gains there are in the polar ice extent over this present sunspot cycle.
Vanguard (12:11:08) :
Last time I checked my dictionary, second-year ice would BE multi-year ice.
The ‘official’ use of “multi-year ice” is in regards to ice 3 or more years old. Defies common definition of the term, but, it is how they do it.
This is a very well written opinion piece about the coming winters.
The author questions why NOAA is taking surface stations of grid and thinks it’s because those stations provide evidence the earth is in a cooling phase now.
Will this winter be comparable with the winter of 1963?
Via icecap.us
http://truthbehindthescience.blogspot.com/2009/09/09-10-brut-force-predictions-suns.html
~snip~ über-snark. ~dbs, mod.
Leland Palmer (06:52:31) :
Wrong again, trickster. The record goes a lot farther back than the tiny slice of time you’re picking: click.
Here’s another record of past temperatures: click.
I have plenty more pre-SUV graphs showing the same natural oscillations. They all show natural climate variability; nothing is static. Today’s climate is completely normal.
Well from the JAXA data site, it appears that the ice hit bottom at about 5,249,844 on 9/13, nad the 2005 minimum, was 5,315,156 on 9/22, and we are already today above that 2005 minimum at 5,326,094.
So the refreeze started a full week or more earlier than in 2005, nad here we are still four days from the 2005 minimum, and we are growing back rapidly.
And despite what they say about the ice being thinner; it is surface water coverage, that produces albedo instead of near BB absorption; so the greater coverage of otherwise open water, would seem to be more important, than just piling on more snow from the extra precipitation from warmer years.
And the latest data sho that the trend is upwards from historic lows, so the case for ice free Arctic waters would seem to be overstated.
George
“But most of the 2009 September Arctic sea ice is thin first- or second-year ice”.
This is made to sound like an dire warning of more drastic melting to come in the future. In fact it is a direct consequence of the large increase in this year’s minimum extent. If the minimum increased from 4.7 million to 5.2 million sq. km. then there must be AT LEAST 500,000 sq km of first-year ice – 10 per cent of the total.
An increase next year to 6 million would be accompanied by the ominous presence of even more first-year ice.
Just have to spin it out until Copenhagen – after that who cares what happens – free money for all.
Slightly OT: How do JAXA calculate Arctic SSTanomalies? I noticed that the SST’s on the edge of the ice sheet are always top of the range but in 2007 at least none of that SST data had previously been available (having been Ice) so I asked myself how it was calculated. That led to asking how any of it was calculated. (Bob Tisdale… anyone?)
Interesting to wonder what satellites would have seen in 1940 (+/-)