Those that have been watching the IARC-JAXA Arctic sea ice plot, and noting the slope of gain, rather expected this to happen. Today it did.
Here’s the current IARC-JAXA Sea Ice Extent plot:
source: http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
And here is the plot magnified and annotated to show the crossing:
While 2009 minimum on 09/13 of 5,249, 844 was just 65, 312 sq km below 2005 in minimum extent, which occurred on 9/22/2005 with 5,315,156 sq km, it has now rebounded quickly and is higher by 38,438 sq km, just 2 days before the 9/22/05 minimum. On 9/22/2009 it may very well be close to 60-80,000 sq km higher than the minimum on the same date in 2005.
While by itself this event isn’t all that significant, it does illustrate the continued rebound for the second year. The fact that we only missed the 2005 minimum by 65, 312, which is about one days worth of melt during many days of the melt season is also noteworthy.
and the antarctic is still increasing ……
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png
The AGW promotion community loses another claim.
When will the leaders of that community admit they need to revisit their predictions?
I am aware of nothing else claiming to be science where questions regarding the validity of claims and predictions are ‘settled’, as the AGW promoters claim.
I did the same post as WUWT again, haha. I wouldn’t have except it was probably a few hours before this one. I have also added some updated ice area anomalies from the NOAA17 satellite as well.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/sea-ice-update/
Hot dawg! That’s a “death spiral” if I’ve ever seen one!
BTW, I have a slightly OT question. Yesterday i saw a TV ad that showed a poor little penguin chick getting all of the deadly noxious oil cleaned off from its plumage with Dawn dish washing detergent. The message, of course was that Dawn (and its superior grease-cutting action) was helping save the environment.
I don’t seem to recall any oil spills recent or otherwise that has affected penguins in the SH. Does anyone know of any?
“Polar frost’ leaves 40 dead in Argentina
27/07/2009
MOSCOW, July 27 (RIA Novosti) – Severe cold weather that has gripped central and southern Argentina for two weeks has already killed about 40 people, the Infobae news website reported on Monday.
According to Argentinean media, “a wave of polar frost” came to Argentina last week and caused “a sensational drop in the temperature to minus 16 degrees Celsius.” The average winter temperature in Argentina is about 10 degrees Celsius, ranging from 20 C in the north to 1 C in the south.
Compounding the cold, several southern regions saw heavy snowfalls, including in the south of Buenos Aires province, where there was 40 centimeters of snow for the first time in 50 years.
A representative of voluntary organization “Red Solidaria” said most of the deaths were the result of hypothermia or improper use of heating devices, either by fires or carbon monoxide poisoning.
Juan Carr added that if the necessary measure are not taken, the number of people killed will exceed the number of victims of previous years – winter weather causes the deaths of about 90 people annually in Argentina.
Weather services reported that the cold weather would continue for about a week. Voluntary organizations began dispensing warm clothes and blankets to reduce the number of victims, while local media held contests for best snow photos.
Buenos Aires last saw snow in July 2007, the first time the Argentinean capital, which is situated in subtropical zone with average annual temperature of 15 degrees Celsius, had seen snow since July 27, 1928.”
“Bill J (08:52:01) :
and the antarctic is still increasing ……
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries”
That’s the real interesting thing for me. Both hemispheres cooling?
AlGore is going to have to grow another finger on that “five year high five”….
Also-the Temps seem to be below average,too-note the DMI graph at the
right side of this page…
Also Nino appears to be fading further…
We’re in for an interesting period over the next couple of months. This is the period where the seasonal jump in the Arctic refreeze significantly exceeds the start of loss in the Antarctic. Over the past two years, this has represented a large gain in the global ice anomaly in the region of 2.5 to 3.0 million km^2. :
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
With arctic temps below the last couple of years…:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
could we see a similar bounce? If so, it would approach or exceed the highest anomaly over the 1979-2008 period. Wouldn’t that be an interesting prelude to Copenhagen?
something that I’ve been thinking on for a while: it is insane that viewing the scientific claims behind climate change skeptically has come to be seen as a “conservative” view. How could that possibly have happend? There is nothing inherently “liberal” or “conservative” about science; in fact, I seem to remember many on the left complaining about the last administrations so-called lack of scientific credibility.
The worst thing of all is for a political movement to let themselves get trapped on the wrong side of some issue of fact which could turn against them and thus discredit them by showing lack of judgment. Political issues should be issues of policy, emphasis, opinion – how much tax revenue goes to defense, how much domestic, etc. Issues of fact may *influence* these priorities, but anyone with even the least bit of sense on either side should know to always leave options open for adjustment if issues of fact turn out different than assumptions. That’s just wise management.
A political movement that allows itself to get trapped on the wrong side of an unalterable issue of fact is committing political suicide.
For the record – I don’t know for certain what will happen with our climate. I will wait and see what the facts turn out to be, and I will not assume that I know what they are going to be before they happen. In no sane world should this be regarded as a “conservative” opinion – but apparently at this time our world is not quite sane.
Hunter, historically many sciences go through phases where a clique or theory becomes dominant through patronage (the current governments “patronize” AGW theorists through funding their research). As a modern example try hunting down some literature on alternatives to the “standard model” in physics, as well as some of the reasoning behind the apparent need for the alternatives. I know at least three alternative arguments being advanced – none of which are compatible with each other and all of which address empirical issues or theoretical points that SM treats as “settled.” As laymen, the rest of the public find themselves in the invidious position of being asked to “trust” the experts, meaning that the arguments are to authority rather than to science.
Actually, science is liberal, as in “free”. Anyone is free to participate and anyone is free to dispute findings. Jonathan Rauch uses the term “liberal scientific method” in his excellent book, “Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought”.
“While by itself this event isn’t all that significant”.
Indeed what does it mean, really. Look at the slope of gain of the 2008 ice extent. That surpassed the 2005 extent in October and in November was, for a short while, even greater than any of the last 7 years. Totally unpredictable behaviour as far as I can see.
wws (09:18:07) :
something that I’ve been thinking on for a while: it is insane that viewing the scientific claims behind climate change skeptically has come to be seen as a “conservative” view. How could that possibly have happend? There is nothing inherently “liberal” or “conservative” about science; in fact, I seem to remember many on the left complaining about the last administrations so-called lack of scientific credibility.
Exactly-but since Galileo-science has had a political bent to it-until the facts are
now irrefutable.Like a Moose herd in your back 40-in NE Oregon…
And this morning there was snow in the high country of Colorado and Wyoming!
I’ve been watching this graph every day and waiting for an article like this. Once again the planet is telling the catastrophic AGWers that they’re wrong.
The ice caps are doing so well! Victory for the Polar bears and Penguins!
> it is insane that viewing the scientific claims behind climate change
> skeptically has come to be seen as a “conservative” view.
True, but it then allows them to claim that ‘conservatives are the ones who also reject the science of evolutionary theory in favor of creationism, so their opinions can be summarily dismissed’.
PS – Everyone on this list should (re)read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I’m re-listening to the audio version now. Scary how much of it relates to the world of today, though it was written a bit over 50 years ago.
“something that I’ve been thinking on for a while: it is insane that viewing the scientific claims behind climate change skeptically has come to be seen as a “conservative” view. How could that possibly have happend? There is nothing inherently “liberal” or “conservative” about science; in fact, I seem to remember many on the left complaining about the last administrations so-called lack of scientific credibility.”
delighted to read this. My particular questioning of the environmental movement started with the Brent Spar incident in the North Sea. The environmental movement pursuaded public opinion that this redundant oil platform would be a toxic hazard if it were dumped in the deep ocean (mid- Altantic). With a large successful campaign, public pressure was put on the company and the green movement ensured the Brent Spar was brought ashore and broken up -at great expense and using a great deal of resources. It was than revealed that the oil company had been telling the truth and there was no toxic hazard from the empty oil platform. The trustworthy, earnest environmentalists had been spinning a line!
The green movement “lost” me then. I’ll make my own mind up now and question all stats and opinions – wherever they come from!
Dropping the Brent Spar into the mid Atlantic would have been like dropping a 6″ nail into Loch Ness
(Keep up the good work!)
Did you see nutty NSIDC report on Sea Ice Minimum???
“In addition, the Arctic is still dominated by younger, thinner ice, which is more vulnerable to seasonal melt.”
Dominated???
Did you notice the cockamamie convoluted figure #3 of the report? They are seriously trying to mislead people.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
I wonder if it will refreeze to both North America and Asia in time for all of us to drive to Copenhagen. 🙂
….and AMSU is still showing record high lower stratospheric temperatures for the time of year….hmmmmm
Well don’t forget all those warnings, that this is “only” first year ice, and the ice volume is down because of the lack of second, third, etc ice. All of which may be true; BUT ! remember, how much of the arctic ocean volume freezes, is somewhat irrelevent; it can have only minor effect on earth’s climate.
The issue with the ocean ice, is that the open water is a near black body absorber for what little solar radiation there is up there, whereas the sea ice is a fairly good reflector, and enhances the albedo, leading to cooling.
So sea surface coverage is somewhat more important, than how darn thick that surface ice gets, which has little effect on the albedo change.
There is a CO2 effect in that the more tonnage of ice that forms, the more CO2 is expelled into the atmosphere and oceans from the freezing sea, so more ice tonnage, would seem to lead to more atmospheric CO2 which according to the AGW theory and Arrhenius, wouldn’t be good.
So I’m more interested in sea ice surface coverage, than I am in how much multiyear ice, although I do agree that more is better in the long run if you don’t want to get too unstable.
We should have an international holiday each year on the day the minimum is reached.
I think right now there’s a 1.5 million sqkm increase in polar ice extent vis a vis 2008.
A useful figure to take to Copenhagen perhaps?
They are not only wrong, Smokey, they have it totally backwards.
It’s not just that the globe is not warming, it’s cooling, and it’s not exactly taking it’s sweet time about it.
Anybody living in the Alaska & Northern Canada had better take warning of what is coming.
I live in Breckenridge, CO, and it’s cold and snowing today. Fall foliage should peak in a week, or sooner with this cold and snow.
The sun reappeared on the right column but without the supposed nr.1026 spot!
The AGW position supports the left’s attack on the free market and on enterprise. Also, they have found the best way to promote the redistribution of wealth through cap and trade. I believe they have been trying to push for fast movement on policy change just in case the science turns against them. Once the policy changes are in place, it will be difficult to undo even if the science has been proven faulty.
Any questioning of the science that promotes so much that liberals desire is ridiculed as conservative attacks, even though the attacks are on the science, not on policy.
It appears clear that the onset of refreezing is occurring about a week earlier then the average for the last eight years and maybe ten days earlier than the ‘crisis’ year of 2007. This trend has got to be very discouraging for members of the ‘church’.
Looking at the graphs that include standard deviation, the southern hemisphere may soon exceed normal:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
I’ll also put in a prediction of getting back within +/-2 standard deviations by October 5.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
Back in April ’07, NSIDC had a press release titled ‘Models Underestimate Loss of Arctic Sea Ice’. Here’s a quote from that release,”… models indicate that about half of the ice loss from 1979 to 2006 was caused by increased greenhouse gases, and the other was half caused by natural variations in the climate system, the GRL study indicates that greenhouse gases may be playing a significantly higher role.” Well, NSIDC underestimated Arctic Sea Ice then and blames it on rising CO2 emissions. This year, NSIDC made predictions that have clearly overestimated Arctic Sea Ice loss and now blame natural variations. But ! But ! Even though Arctic Ice now is at 2005 levels and growing, NSIDC refuses to admit Arctic Sea Ice is rebounding. NSIDC would rather say,’ the ice is too thin’ or ‘ there is not enough multi-year ice’. What trash. I believe that whooshing sound I hear in the background is the reputation of men, like Walt Meir, swirling down the water closet. When its all said and done, I doubt men like that would even be able to get a job as a shaved ice vendor. I think its time to send an e-mail to wmeir@nsidc.org and ask him what his future plans will be when Barry looks for a scape goat to save his A$$. -David Alan-
Ted Annonson (09:38:45) :
And this morning there was snow in the high country of Colorado and Wyoming!
____________
High country my foot. Acouple of hours ago it was snowing in Colorado Springs (that is where the mountains meet the plains.)
Not cold enough for it to stick, though.
Actually I have lived here for 30 years, and such weather is common in late September.
You so rock! Right on the money as usual.
Well, hang on to your hats. Sounds like Ms. Boxer & Co. are getting ready to push the Climate Bill through the Senate. News blip from today was saying the Democrats now think that 60 votes can be found and locked in before Copenhagen.
Maybe they’ll sell this as Climate Insurance reform.
It would be neat if the red line moved above the remaining three lines and topped the chart by December.
Oops–make that “remaining four lines.”
There are two dimensions at play in looking at the minimum sea ice exent: the minimum reached and the date of the minimum.
Comparing the annual absolute minimum therefore leaves us with extra degrees of freedom and a more “noisy” measurement. The range of timing variation being around a couple of weeks according to the above data: the range of the minimum being about 1 Mkm^2.
As the theoretical minimum should be on the date of the equinox (I think), it might make sense to compare sea ice variation on the date of the equinox. This doesn’t necessarily capture the absolute minimum in the year, but it does remove one of the dimensions for making comparisons.
Just a thought – I should imagine that there will be objections.
What is the ice extent graph for the theoretically maximum heat loss state for the N Pole?
wws (09:18:07) :
…it is insane that viewing the scientific claims behind climate change skeptically has come to be seen as a “conservative” view…
I could not agree more.
The cap and tax proposal strikes me as the most incredible hostage to fortune every promulgated by a political party.
If they manage to push this through then all it will take is three hard winters to give us President Palin.
I can see it now – an hour-long science documentary advertising and celebrating the renewal and rebuilding of the Arctic ice cap.
Ok, only joking.
.
wws (09:18:07) : “…The worst thing of all is for a political movement to let themselves get trapped on the wrong side of some issue of fact which could turn against them and thus discredit them by showing lack of judgment….”
Never forget: violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Frank (09:28:44) : “Actually, science is liberal, as in ‘free’.”
But “liberal” no longer means a free thinker. It means a pimply PhD in Birkenstocks who judges himself by his noble intentions instead of by his actions and their consequences.
>>This trend has got to be very discouraging for
>>members of the ‘church’.
That should be Church with a capital. The organisation, not the building.
.
Sorry, I meant to say ‘BBC’.
.
I can see it now – an hour-long BBC science documentary advertising and celebrating the renewal and rebuilding of the Arctic ice cap.
Ok, only joking.
.
Benier duster (10:37:27) :
….and AMSU is still showing record high lower stratospheric temperatures for the time of year….hmmmmm
I had a look at the AMSU website, where is your record high lower stratospheric temperature?
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
David Alan (11:06:33) : “…I think its time to send an e-mail to wmeir@nsidc.org and ask him what his future plans will be when Barry looks for a scape goat…”
You’ve misspelled both his name and his e-ddress. Spelling does count, sometimes, people.
Enduser (09:13:54) :
“… a poor little penguin chick getting all of the deadly noxious oil cleaned off from its plumage with Dawn dish washing detergent.”
That treatment condemns the penguin to death, as it would any sea bird. This we discovered to our horror in Cape Town in 1968. Every bird we cleaned died. You have to use a special solution to strip the oil from the feathers (I have no idea what it is). The feathers are left with a sufficient proportion of their natural oils which prevent the bird from getting saturated with water and dying of hypothermia.
John Edmondson (11:50:04) :
Benier duster (10:37:27) :
….and AMSU is still showing record high lower stratospheric temperatures for the time of year….hmmmmm
I had a look at the AMSU website, where is your record high lower stratospheric temperature?
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
______________________________________
I suspect that Benier Duster is talking about Channel 5, at 14000 ft. This channel is showing record high temps right now, even though I don’t think that 14000ft qualifies as lower stratosphere.
BTW, bad link above… Try this one.
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
Stop Press, Stop Press…
BBC World are now reporting a STEEP decrease in CO2 levels.
The reason? Either the Met Office are predicting a cold winter, or the authorities have deduced that public opinion is turning against them.
They are looking for a way out.
.
jorgekafkazar (12:01:32) : —————– exactly! Just as much as I would like to give the man credit, his name and position will be as significant as how I posted it: Meaningless. When those in the employ of NASA stand up and take a stand against the corruption being instigated by it, I’ll provide proper links to reputable men.
This article is highly misleading. I notice how none of the graphs at the top show the ice extent before 2002. The reader might want to peruse the actual discussion from the actual Snow and Ice Data Center and their explanation of the wind patterns contributing to the observed ice extents over the past few years, rather than looking at catchy snippets from WUWT:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
“Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the third-lowest extent since the start of satellite measurements in 1979. While this year’s minimum extent is above the record and near-record minimums of the last two years, it further reinforces the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent observed over the past thirty years.”
REPLY: The AMSRE satellite data set only extends back to 2002, so it it impossible to present this data in the same time period as NSIDC. That being said, you won’t find political statements like “arctic death spiral” and “ice free North Pole in 2008” from JAXA like we did from NSIDC’s Mark Serreze.
Then there’s the SSMI sensor issue, which NSIDC missed this year, and when I pointed it out, they said “its not worth blogging about” only to then the very next day realize the seriousness of the failure and post data retractions, then going through a repair process.
I trust an organization and its data more when they don’t get politically involved and don’t have issues with sensors where they tell people who spot the problems to essentially “bug off”.
NSIDC has lost a lot of trust with a lot of people for that reason. Use them if you wish, if it suits your world view. I prefer using an data from an organization that is free of such issues. – Anthony
From Wikipedia:
The troposphere begins at the surface and extends to between 7 km (23,000 ft) at the poles and 17 km (56,000 ft) at the equator, with some variation due to weather. The troposphere is mostly heated by transfer of energy from the surface, so on average the lowest part of the troposphere is warmest and temperature decreases with altitude. This promotes vertical mixing (hence the origin of its name in the Greek word “τροπή”, trope, meaning turn or overturn). The troposphere contains roughly 80% of the mass of the atmosphere. The tropopause is the boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere.
Check out chLT at 3300 Ft (bottom of the troposphere) That puppy is well above record highs.
It is rather puzzling to me that there can be such a seeming disconnect between troposphere temps and SSTs.
This map from NSIDC clearly shows the massive gain in ice extent area in 2009 (white) relative to the 2007 minimum (light and dark grays)…
NSIDC 2007 vs 2009 Map
The summer ice minimum has grown from 2007 to 2008 to 2009… How many years in a row will the summer Arctic sea ice minimum have to expand before gov’t bureaucrats and the media acknowledge that global warming has given way to global cooling?
If the three-year decline from 2004-2007 was proof that the icecap was vanishing, how is it possible that NSIDC “scientists do not consider this” two-year run in the opposite direction, all but erasing the total magnitude of the three-year decline “to be a recovery”?
Enduser (12:10:03) :
Thanks, I saw that. Hardly panic stations though.
ralph (12:11:37) :
Stop Press, Stop Press…
BBC World are now reporting a STEEP decrease in CO2 levels.
_______________________________________________________________
BBC is full of crap. CO2 levels always fall this time of year.
Mauna Loa doesn’t see anything strange happening.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
@Ralph
Checking the BBC website all I found is this
“The global recession and a range of government policies are likely to bring the biggest annual fall in the world’s carbon dioxide emissions in 40 years.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that global CO2 emissions will fall by more than 2% during 2009. ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8267475.stm
Enduser (12:10:03) :
Thanks, I saw that. Hardly panic stations though.
One other thing isn’t the “hotspot” predicted to be at a much higher altitude?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/04/a-simple-analogy-on-climate-modeling-looking-for-the-red-spot/
i.e. about 10km
On AMSU this altitude looks pretty flat to me.
Steep decrease? That’s funny, the CO2 cycle usually reaches a peak during NH winter and goes to a low during NH summer if I looked at the Mauna Loa graph correctly. That and the recession not being able to explain a steep decrease as there’s still tons of CO2 emission happening here in the US, China, and sooner or later India.
Did you see nutty NSIDC report on Sea Ice Minimum???
“In addition, the Arctic is still dominated by younger, thinner ice, which is more vulnerable to seasonal melt.”
They have no evidence this is true and the rapid summer melt and then refreeze over the last few years indicates the reverse is true – older Arctic ice is more vulnerable to melt and newer ice is more resistant to melt. Probably due to accumulated particulates causing decreasing albedo in the older ice.
But heh, this is climate science. Who needs pesky evidence.
“How many years in a row will the summer Arctic sea ice minimum have to expand before gov’t bureaucrats and the media acknowledge that global warming has given way to global cooling?”
Oh, about 20 or so .. enough to counter the past 30 year decreasing trend. And enough growth in ice coverage to come somewhere close to reaching the average value over the last 30 years….
“If the three-year decline from 2004-2007 was proof that the icecap was vanishing,”. Also, you fail to mention the previous 30 years of data which shows a strong decreasing trend. It wasn’t just a 3 year decreasing trend, it was 30.
“scientists do not consider this two-year run in the opposite direction all but erasing the total magnitude of the three-year decline”….
Because they explained the different wind patterns over the last couple years which explain why the years had different ice melt patterns. You’ll find this explanation in the link I provided above.
The red 2009 line looks closer to the highest minimum blue line of 2003 than it does to the lowest minimum yellow line of 2007, which is pretty good for a couple of years work.
Next year will be very interesting.
George E. Smith (10:38:10) :
The issue with the ocean ice, is that the open water is a near black body absorber for what little solar radiation there is up there, whereas the sea ice is a fairly good reflector, and enhances the albedo, leading to cooling.
George, do you have anything more to back this up? I am genuinely asking (not making a dig) as I struggle with what you’ve said as a concept; primarily because it describes a positive feedback mode which is pretty rare in nature (i.e. less ice = more ocean = more heating = less ice, more ice = less heating = more ice) so either way you go the tendency is to move to extremes.
What do you think of an alternative supposition, namely that energy absorption of open water at high latitudes is relatively low due to atmospheric path length + angle of incidence (think low sun reflecting off a lake = big reflection); that coupled with ice cover acting as an insulator – reducing the ocean’s heat loss to the atmosphere. In this conjecture it’s a negative feedback – much more common in nature (i.e. less ice = more ocean = more heat loss = lower temps = more ice, more ice = more insulation = higher temps = less ice).
Cheers
Mark
My unofficial calculation of the AMSR-E data average annual anomalies relative to a living average of daily values for each date of the year (excluding Feb 29 and with minor gaps filled by linear interpolation) are as follows:
2002 360,279 sq km (partial year average)
2003 386,583
2004 194,509
2005 -107,636
2006 -232,108
2007 -486,735
2008 -2,624
2009 78,439 sq km (partial year average)
The last daily anomaly value I have calculated for this year is -55,044 sq km (20 Sep). From 2002 to 2006, the fall anomalies were the highest of the year, but from 2007 to 2009 the fall anomalies have been the lowest of the year.
Dave Middleton (12:27:50) :
“how is it possible that NSIDC “scientists do not consider this” two-year run in the opposite direction, all but erasing the total magnitude of the three-year decline “to be a recovery”?
The NSIDC and the BBC think, that for a recovery, the sea-ice would have had to jump to the 1979-2000 mean this year.
You could call it a partial recovery, but actually you couldn’t, because a partial recovery would be uncertain about the future.
Therefore it has to be called a pause. A pause doesn’t contain any information about the increase – which, of course, doesn’t matter – but a pause knows what will happen in the future.
Just wondering, why they don’t close the NSIDC, after they have solved science and now answered all future questions.
It may be interesting to see a map showing maximum (April) sea ice extension in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic (Norwegian Polar Institute 2000). The maximum extend in 1769 is very similar to this years minimum extend!
http://www.climate4you.com/images/SeaIceSvalbardSince1769.jpg
mudmucker (12:21:10) : “This article is highly misleading.”
On the contrary my highly misled observer. The graph itself comes from IARC-JAXA website and here’s a quote from that website:”The algorithm for calculating SIC was developed and provided by Dr. Comiso of NASA GSFC through a cooperative relationship between NASA and JAXA.” Now while I understand that you wish to inform us of NSIDC and the news they provide, most of the WUWT READERS here do and find it laughable, much like your comment. -David Alan-
Polar Bears at Center of Climate Change Debate
Monday, September 21, 2009
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,553021,00.html
facts don’t matter. Refer back to the quote of the week.
Here is the right place for this:
The total ice extent in 2009 is far more than the total ice extent of 2005 already, and the difference is getting bigger now as the freeze sets in. Though one would get the impression if one just looked at the minimum extent or even the averages for September that the ice in 2009 is less than that in 2005.
This is absolutely clear visually if you plot the areas under the graphs.
Total ice in 2009 upto 20th Sept = 4.4 million Km^2 more than 2008
Total ice in 2009 upto 20th Sept = 54.3 million Km^2 more than 2005
I suspect that the difference at the end of the year would be huge.
wws (09:18:07) :
You put your finger on the problem. Left and right are political concepts and have nothing to do with pure science.
Turn that argument on its head. The proponents of the global warming hypothesis are overwhelmingly (not exclusively) on the political left. Does this perhaps tell us something?
Not only are they leftish they betray all the characteristics of the hard left as anyone who had to sit through union branch meetings in the 70s will tell you. A similar trait can be found when any of the traditional left are in public “debate” (I use the word generously) especially on radio or television.
They cannot tolerate an opposing or even a differing opinion and will talk over or talk down anyone who attempts to express one. As far as possible they will refuse to engage in argument at all but if forced to do so, rather like a conjuror they will try to force your attention away from what they are really after so the warm-mongers drag you into quibbles about hundredths of a degree and it’s only later that you realise that what they were claiming was a) unmeasurable and b) well within any conceivable error limits, and c) not what you thought you were talking about anyway.
They will bore on at length about minutiae which are of no interest to anyone (certainly not themselves) until those who actually have a life leave or fall asleep. At which point they take a vote, declare the motion carried unanimously and proceed to declare that the matter is settled and there is no need for further discussion.
If you have the tenacity to hang in there they will resort to ad hominem attacks, a habit which has become all too familiar to us here and on other blog sites around the place!
AGW has very little to do with science; it has everything to do with leftist politics and has been successfully dressed up to appeal to mainstream politicians because it provides them with the perfect excuse to raise taxes in the interest of saving the planet. I mean, who wouldn’t want to “save the planet”?
Talk of branch meetings reminds me of the local branch secretary who was taken into hospital with appendicitis the day of a meeting. The following morning the branch chairman appeared at his bedside with the message that the members wished him a speedy recovery by seven votes to three with one abstention!
O/T I see the sun has developed a sort of spot.
Mark Fawcett, this is an interesting topic and explains why Antarctic ice is not receding (overall, but on the peninsula it is). This is because Antarctic ice melts in the summer, and that is when there is the most sunshine. But in winter, when the ice forms, there is no sunshine. So there cannot be a positive feedback trend over the years between Antarctic ice and sunlight because 1) in winter there is no sunshine, and 2) in summer there is no ice. (except for maybe dates of melt)
Ouch! has anyone else noticed the DMI-COI graph for today?
Sam, your description of AGW proponents does not describe me. I am centre politically. I believe that power corrupts, and you get this on both the left and the right. I do not want carbon taxes for the sake of taxation; in fact, I don’t even believe gasoline taxes are necessary. The open market will solve this problem by itself when electric cars are brought to market, which would have happened 10 years ago were it not for patent abuse activities by Chevron to keep them off the market. In 2 years the consumer will be able to both save money and not emit CO2 by buying an electric car!
Rather than stifling debate, I embrace it, and like to point out all the logical flaws made by ~snip~. That may bore you, but that’s science.
“On the contrary my highly misled observer. The graph itself comes from IARC-JAXA website and here’s a quote from that website:”The algorithm for calculating SIC was developed and provided by Dr. Comiso of NASA GSFC through a cooperative relationship between NASA and JAXA.” Now while I understand that you wish to inform us of NSIDC and the news they provide, most of the WUWT READERS here do and find it laughable, much like your comment. -David Alan-”
Can you provide the equivalent graph going back 30 years? Or are you instead fixated on reporting on weather events?
I somehow think that they still wouldn’t call it a recovery.
Our uncertainty about the future is only just a bit greater than our uncertainty of pre-1979 quantitative ice extent changes.
Well we could just call it a “trend reversal”… If and when it turns down again, we can call that a “trend reversal” as well.
If I own a stock that suffers a share price decline from $40 to $4… And then the stock price recovers to $15… It’s a recovery… A partial recovery.
That’s a good point. If climate change is “settled science,” why bother monitoring it any longer.
“REPLY: The AMSRE satellite data set only extends back to 2002, so it it impossible to present this data in the same time period as NSIDC. That being said, you won’t find political statements like “arctic death spiral” and “ice free North Pole in 2008″ from JAXA like we did from NSIDC’s Mark Serreze.
Then there’s the SSMI sensor issue, which NSIDC missed this year, and when I pointed it out, they said “its not worth blogging about” only to then the very next day realize the seriousness of the failure and post data retractions, then going through a repair process.
I trust an organization and its data more when they don’t get politically involved and don’t have issues with sensors where they tell people who spot the problems to essentially “bug off”.
NSIDC has lost a lot of trust with a lot of people for that reason. Use them if you wish, if it suits your world view. I prefer using an data from an organization that is free of such issues. – Anthony”
So… in other words, the data set you provided hasn’t been around long enough to infer any long term trends from it….. even though it basically agrees with the NSIDC data over the same period, and the same NSIDC data going back 30 years shows a dramatic decreasing trend?
WWS
“something that I’ve been thinking on for a while: it is insane that viewing the scientific claims behind climate change skeptically has come to be seen as a “conservative” view.
Well, you would think so anyway. However when legitimate science is highjacked to drive political agendas – it makes sense. I tend to think that those who are interested in real science are skeptics by nature, so those who question AGW may have a variety of political views but , those who buy into AGW hook, line and sinker tend to be uniformly liberal. Therefore if you aren’t “for” AGW, you get branded conservative regardless of the actual situation.
A political movement that allows itself to get trapped on the wrong side of an unalterable issue of fact is committing political suicide.
I would like to believe that this is true, but there are too many instances where there is no day of reckoning. Issues just quietly disappear or media enablers revise history ex-post facto to protect their allies. Examples abound.
Personally, I believe that our current economic mess was triggered early last year when gas prices hit $4.50/gal. Many families saw their discretionary budgets shrink to zero, and many businesses were hurt because their customers were spending their “excess” income on fuel. This lead to the rounds of layoffs, which triggered the problems with the sub-prime mortgages, which of course sent Wall street into a tail spin, etc.
Have you seen those responsible for those horrible decisions ferreted out, exposed and driven out of government service? Personally, I don’t think it’s all that hard to figure out why fuel prices soared or why we had a problem with sub prime mortgages, but apparently all of the economists who know exactly what will happen in the future are unable to do a honest post mortem on what has just happened in the recent past.
If it becomes obvious to everyone that AGW isn’t happening, it won’t change anything. They will pursue the same Government controls for other reasons, reducing dependance on foreign oil or to create a green economy or some other excuse. It was never actually about the science, it’s about the social agenda.
Obama has reversed the warming! The ice caps are growing! The water is clean, the air is cleaner and Acorn is going to prison. Woops, how did that get in there?
It’s a crazy mixed up world when the extent of sea ice growing is seen as a good thing.
I suppose It’s pretty hard to have anything but a hollow victory against someone who has defrauded you.
Today the DMI Polar Temperature shows a pretty big uptick. Is there anything to this, or is it some kind of data glitch?
“”” Mark Fawcett (12:42:08) :
George E. Smith (10:38:10) :
The issue with the ocean ice, is that the open water is a near black body absorber for what little solar radiation there is up there, whereas the sea ice is a fairly good reflector, and enhances the albedo, leading to cooling.
George, do you have anything more to back this up? I am genuinely asking (not making a dig) as I struggle with what you’ve said as a concept; primarily because it describes a positive feedback mode which is pretty rare in nature (i.e. less ice = more ocean = more heating = less ice, more ice = less heating = more ice) so either way you go the tendency is to move to extremes.
What do you think of an alternative supposition, namely that energy absorption of open water at high latitudes is relatively low due to atmospheric path length + angle of incidence (think low sun reflecting off a lake = big reflection); that coupled with ice cover acting as an insulator – reducing the ocean’s heat loss to the atmosphere. In this conjecture it’s a negative feedback – much more common in nature (i.e. less ice = more ocean = more heat loss = lower temps = more ice, more ice = more insulation = higher temps = less ice). “””
Mark, I seldom post anything that I can’t back up; and if I do, I usually label it sas conjecture.
So lets deal with my statement that the open oceans (water) acts asa near black body absorber.
Water is a well understood optical material, and over the main energy containing portions of the solar spectrum, water has an optical refractive index of about 1.333 (ratio of speed of light in vacuo to speed of light in water). At the interface between two refractive media (water and air) of indexes n1 and n2, the reflection coefficient for light incident normal to the surface is given by r = [(n1-n2)/(n1+n2)]^2 so if you put the values 1.333 and 1.0 in for water and air, you get 0.02 as the value for r (1/7^2).
This is actually a special case of the complete Fresnel formulae for energy splitting at a media interface, and can be simply derived from Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic fields.
At angles other than zero deg incidence, the light is partially plane polarised, and for the reflected part of the beam, the reflection coefficient drops to zero for one of the two polarisations at an angle known as the Brewster angle, which is arctan (n2/n1) = 53.1 degrees for water. At that incidence angle (off normal) the reflected beam is pure plane polarised (and your polaroid sunglasses, can be rotated to remove that polarisation, and so get rid of the water surface reflection.
However for the refelcted beam, at the Brewster angle the value of R has increased till it is about double what it was at normal incidence.
As a result; the total reflected energy, remains about constant at about 2% up to the Brewster angle,a nd for greater angles of incidence, both polarisations are again present, and the value of r increases rapidly up to 100% for grazing incidence.
However, the amount of incident light decreases at grazing angles (spreads over a large surface area), so the larger angles don’t account for much total energy flux. The net result is that about 50% of the toal energy is contained in the brewster angle cone, and the rest outside of that.
Careful calculations and measurmenets suggest about 3% of the total incident solar spectrum is reflected, and the rest propagates into the water (97%) where ultimately something or other absorbs it in deep water.
So the deep oceans absorb about 97% of the total incident solar energy; and that is pretty darn close to a Black body; at least for the restricted range of wavelengths covered by the solar spectrum.
Ice and snow on the other hand are quite reflective for visible light; but not as highly reflective as some people think. New snow reflects well, but once it ages a bit (the surface melts), the clear facets transmit light, and the snow can trap a lot of light, so the reflection coefficient can drop to as low as 40% after just a few hours. But in any case it reflects sunlight better than sea water does.
And yes it is often argued that this replacement of sea ice by open water is a positive feedback warming effect. That is debateable, because the open ocean can also evaporate better than the ice, so more open ocean means more evaporation and ultimately more precipitation (of snow) somewhere, very likely on the surrounding lands in the arctic (which contains more land than water).
But I always like to point out that they have ice in the polar regions for a very specific reason; THERE AIN’T MUCH SOLAR ENERGY THERE ANYWAY.
Which is why I believe the climate effects of the polar regions are somewhat overblown. Most of the cooling takes place during the midday heat of the tropical deserts, since the Stefan Boltzmann radiation goes as the 4th power of the Temperature (Kelvins), so the desert highs can radiate more than ten times the rate of the polar lows.
Well I could go on and on, but you get the point; from the point of view of lowering the arctic heating, the areal coverage of ocean water, is far more important, than building deeper ice layers, which insulate the surface.
George
How is related this graph
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg
to this information?
http://i680.photobucket.com/albums/vv161/Radiant_2009/popularmechanics1957-2.jpg
NW Passage was passable in 40ties as well.
I would say the Arctic ice extent in 40ties was similar to today one. The cryosphere picture stinks.
PS I do Optical design all day long; so your mouse likely has some of my optics in it; so Fresnel reflection is my bread and butter.
“In 2 years the consumer will be able to both save money and not emit CO2 by buying an electric car!”
One Problem though. Wouldn’t this happen?
With more and more electric cars coming on the road. They do need recharging so eventually more power stations are going to have to be built. So more CO2 will be emitted if the power stations happen to be of the cheaper coal powered variety!
ralph (12:11:37) :
Stop Press, Stop Press…
BBC World are now reporting a STEEP decrease in CO2 levels.
The reason? Either the Met Office are predicting a cold winter, or the authorities have deduced that public opinion is turning against them.
They are looking for a way out.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8267475.stm
“The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that global CO2 emissions will fall by more than 2% during 2009.
Measures such as emissions trading have complemented the drop in emissions as economic activity has declined. ”
Really? Anyone told the Chinese yet?
Richard wrote:
“My particular questioning of the environmental movement started with the Brent Spar incident in the North Sea.”
I think back to a small matter of lynx hairs.
mudmucker (13:11:39) :
And the winner of the prize for the “logical flaw” of the day is ………………..
Tell me, where does the electricity come from for your eco-wonderful vehicle?
Please explain to me how it is beneficial to take crude oil and refine it to make fuel oil to generate electricity which can then be sent along power lines to the point where you plug your car in rather than to take crude oil and refine it to make petrol which can then be sent to an already existing network of supply points called gas stations (or petrol stations this side of the pond).
It seems to this simple soul that there is an additional, and quite unnecessary, process in there somewhere. (Please don’t mention wind power unless of course you only want to drive your car about one-quarter of the time and only when the wind says you can. And don’t start on about ‘peak oil’ either; have you seen what Brazil and the Gulf are sitting on?)
In 2 years the consumer will be able to both save money and not emit CO2 by buying an electric car!
Typical of the magical thinking laced with conspiracy theories of many AGW proponents.
Where will the electricity come from?
Answer = coal and gas fired power stations
Mains electricity powered vehicles require between 2 and 3 times more energy, and hence release between 2 and 3 times more CO2, because of the inefficiencies in generating, distributing and and storage of electricity.
People don’t realize we use internal combustion vehicles precisely because they are more energy efficient than the alternatives.
And BTW the reason electric vehicles are cheaper to run is because coal is a much cheaper fuel than oil.
Mark Fawcett (12:42:08)
You are exactly right.
There was an earlier article on this site, that clearly explained the non-issue of albedo. The article mentioned the critical incidence angle of 70 degrees for water. If the light is at angle of greater than 70 degrees, there is no difference between water and ice, in terms of reflectivity.
What this means is that changes of albedo due to ice coverage in the Arctic aren’t functionally meaningful, due to the time of year that minimum extent occurs. Arctic Ice is primarily above 70 degrees north, and the only time that there is sunlight above critical angle of incidence is around the time of the summer solstice. The above graph of ice extent shows that there is very little difference from year to year at the solstice, it’s halfway through the melt. The big annual differences are about the time of equinox, at which time all but 3 degrees of the Arctic circle is below the critical angle.
This is not quite the same case in the Antarctic, as the ice there lies between 50-70 south, so there are periods of time that the sun on the ice is above the critical angle. Given what has been happening with ice extent down south, there is no contribution to any global warming.
This does bring up the fact that the Antarctic ice could create a positive feedback, one direction or the other, which seems out of place in nature. In fact, it is known to have done so. Prior to the time that Antarctica moved south over the pole (plate tectonics) there were no permanent ice caps. The current climate situation, ice ages seperated by interglacials, only started to occur after Antarctica moved over the pole and created a base to support the permanent ice cap. Prior to that time, polar ice was only seasonal.
“The fact that we only missed the 2005 minimum by 65, 312, which is about one days worth of melt during many days of the melt season is also noteworthy.” – Anthony Watts
I would concur, it seems that a single day is actually insignificant and can be chocked up to natural variability, as could ten days, or 650,312 sq km could be too! Many times in northern Edmonton the winter would be late or early by ten days, two weeks or so… no one freaked out crying warming wolf… if it was delayed we enjoyed the weather… if not we dug our shovels out earlier.
Isn’t it a crime to cry “wolf”? [snip – policy]
In the end science and hard core facts of the objective reality of Nature will prevail.
mudmucker (13:17:14):”So in other words, the data set you provided hasnt been around long enough to infer any long term trends from it .. even though it basically agrees with the NSIDC data over the same period, and the same NSIDC data going back 30 years shows a dramatic decreasing trend?”
The idea that data going back 30 years seems to be dramatic, and your assumption that the data set Anthony is refering to to be cherry-picking or trite is badly misleading from the truth. Proxies are the only available data sets going beyond 30 years. Depending on what proxies you want to observe, Arctic Sea Ice has and will continue to trend up and down.
I would broaden your scope of research beyond politcally-scienced agenda websites and dig a little deeper. Otherwise, you might just find yourself hopelessly following down the alarmist’ road to idiocy.
-David Alan-
On feedback, one test would be ask how much heat is gained or lost for a decrement in ice coverage.
If ice cover recedes by one unit and there is there a resulting net heat gain, we would have the minimum condition to argue that further ice loss is possible.
If ice cover recedes by one unit and there is a resulting net heat loss, we could not argue for any further ice loss. In fact, ice gain could be expected.
Given the geometry of the globe, surely the above two possibilities would lead us to look for an equilibrium at high lattitude.
mudmucker (13:17:14) :So… in other words, the data set you provided hasn’t been around long enough to infer any long term trends from it….. even though it basically agrees with the NSIDC data over the same period, and the same NSIDC data going back 30 years shows a dramatic decreasing trend?
Actually neither has been around long enough to draw any definitive conclusions from them. The 30 run of NSIDC is not capable of showing us how the Arctic reacts to various combinations of oceanic oscillations. It does not have enough Arctic data from a negative PDO combined with a positive NAO let alone a negative one. 30 years is within one range of state for multi-decadel influences and almost totally void of others.
You posted this…
“Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the third-lowest extent since the start of satellite measurements in 1979. While this year’s minimum extent is above the record and near-record minimums of the last two years, it further reinforces the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent observed over the past thirty years.”
Which is in a way disingenuous. It does not reinforce the negative trend. Any time a ‘peak’ is reached it takes time to return to a norm. That is doubly so when dealing with the sea ice due to the loss of multi-year ice in 2007. The recovery rate is actually phenomenal and lends more toward a reversal of trend rather than a continuence.
You also posted that a change in wind patterns was a reason for the increase over the last two years…. but… failed to mention that it was due to unusual wind conditions, in part, which caused the massive loss in 2007. Hence you are trying to say that the return to more normal wind patterns is the anomaly. That is spin.
You know it is a wonder that the Arctic is making any ice at all. Kaufman, Briffa, et al just did their hack piece on Arctic summers vs an increasing distance (with some numbers I disagree with) from the sun at summer solstice over the last 2000 years. But, what about the winters?
Well…. unlike the summer solstice the winter solstice is occurring when we are much, much closer to the sun. Like…. 464,779 miles closer. During that same 2,000 years the tilt of the Earth’s axis has completed about 10% of its change from 24.5 degrees to 21.5 degrees. Hence, the amount of Solar radiation at the Equator and the Arctic during the winter is increasing (though so is the difference between the two).
Yet… the Arctic is still capable of recovering from the effects of 30 years of warm oceans in the NH and from a unique year of anomalous meteorological conditions.
“Typical of the magical thinking laced with conspiracy theories of many AGW proponents.
Where will the electricity come from?
Answer = coal and gas fired power stations
Mains electricity powered vehicles require between 2 and 3 times more energy, and hence release between 2 and 3 times more CO2, because of the inefficiencies in generating, distributing and and storage of electricity.
And BTW the reason electric vehicles are cheaper to run is because coal is a much cheaper fuel than oil.”
Sorry, you are incorrect. You’re talking to a mechanical engineer here.
Electric vehicles are significantly more efficient than gasoline powered vehicles because the ICE is about 25% efficient (it runs suboptimally because it is directly linked to the wheels.) Central firing stations are much more efficient. Also, scrubbers on emissions work better on central plants rather than individual tailpipes.
We won’t need any new generation plants because electric cars are mostly charged at night when demand is low. Also, coal is produced domestically, and does not support al Qaeda in the Middle East as oil does.
But we are also shifting to more wind power which could concievably provide 30% or more of our power (with a continent-wide grid it wouldn’t matter if the wind is blowing in your particular location.)
Also, when electric cars come out, manufacturers will start covering the body work with solar panels, which with today’s technology could give you 10 km a day of free driving (with the current ones on the market) and with future advancements in panel efficiency up to 50%, about 30-40 km a day, only on sunny days of course. It’s not magic; it’s solar energy!
“People don’t realize we use internal combustion vehicles precisely because they are more energy efficient than the alternatives.”
No, we use them because they cost the consumer a lot of money. This benefits the auto industry, the oil industry, and governments. No one is looking out for the interests of the consumer. And websites like WUWT make this situation worse because they turn consumers against themselves by spreading scientific misinformation.
How is suggesting that people be held to account for “crying warming wolf” against this web site’s policy? I’m taken aback and a little bit stunned by the “[snip – policy]”. I’ve posted such comments before and not had them censored.
REPLY: You called for criminal prosecution of people without facts in evidence. If you don’t like the snip, I make no apology. – Anthony
Now all that’s left to do is wait another year and see what impact the increased volume of ice (read multi-year ice) will have at next year’s minimum. How much closer to 6 mil km² will it be? Until then, let’s enjoy Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve & Day, Valentines, etc…
What’s up with the temperature spike? http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Richard (10:22:07)
I suppose why skepticism has become a conservative domain is because there is such a uniform cacophony of agreement in the media and intelligensia about issues, that people would just be swept along with it. Conservatives, however, know how full of BS the media and intelligensia are, because conservatives are so often the target. Therefore conservatives are naturally skeptical and liberals are not.
I’m not asking for an apology, I’m simply attempting to comprehend your policy.
If I’m not mistaken there is a trail going on about global warming. It seems then that it’s a relevant topic to comment on.
Actually there are facts in evidence, An Inconvenient Truth, for instance would be used as evidence in a case against Al Gore for making false claims.
In my humble opinion Al Gore went into a movie theater and cried “warming wolf”. That is a crime in many places just as much as crying “fire” as it spreads “irrational panic”.
I’m not going to belabor the point here. I’m just curious why it’s against the site policy to suggest an avenue of political action against those that make false claims that impact us all in serious ways including financial? Especially considering that you’ve written at least one article on the topic.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/24/us-chamber-of-commerce-wants-trial-on-global-warming-issue
Measures such as emissions trading have complemented the drop in emissions
Despite a belief to the opposite almost none of the projects generating CO2 emissions credits (so call carbon offsets) reduce CO2 emissions.
The offset projects fall into 2 categories. Reductions in CO2 ‘equivalents’ (mainly methane and other non-CO2 gases). And reafforestation or forest conservation.
The former has no effect on CO2 levels and the latter may have some effect on the overall deforrestation trend but has certainly no reversed the trend (and may well have the perverse consequence of accelerating deforrestation).
We can say with certainty that emissions trading has made no contribution to any CO2 reduction that may have occured.
Caps on CO2 may have had some effect. I’m referring specifically to the trading issue.
Re: mudmucker (15:16:00) :
“No, we use them because they cost the consumer a lot of money. This benefits the auto industry, the oil industry, and governments. No one is looking out for the interests of the consumer. And websites like WUWT make this situation worse because they turn consumers against themselves by spreading scientific misinformation.”
Where in the world do you get your information? We use I.C. engines for personal transportation because they are reliable, convenient and affordable. Compare the lifetime cost of any hybrid or all-electric vehicle (without taxpayer subsidies) with the I.C. and you will still find the straight-up I.C. engine is the cheaper alternative. By all means, purchase a hybrid or all-electric if it assuages your conscience or tickles your technical fancy, but do not fool yourself that the majority of others do not do so because of some giant conspiracy by the “profiteers” and their evil government henchmen.
What you’re missing in all this is capital cost. The typical coal-fired power plant now costs approximately $2,000 per horsepower to construct. The typical (and less thermally efficient) gasoline I.C. engine is more in the range of $15 per horsepower to manufacture. You can buy lots of gasoline with the difference and still come out ahead with the I.C. engine. A windmill will run you in the range of $10,000 per usable horsepower because the capacity factor (average power/installed power) is so poor with wind turbines in even the best locations. Compare that with $500 per average horsepower for a combined-cycle gas turbine power plant and you will see why windmills did not long ago sweep the country.
It isn’t about conspiracies. It is all about economics.
Solar panels on cars? Please. At best, with any existing technology (other than hyper expensive GaAs exotics) you might get 600 watts midday, less than 8 kWh per day. No matter how slow you drive, you won’t get far. As for charging at night? Great, until a million folks do the same. Then your ‘surplus nighttime electricity’ vanishes. 30% from wind? Sure, if we reduce our total demand by about 80%. As for ‘nationwide grids’, you haven’t tried sending electricity very far. Resistive losses and phase shift throw that out. Plus the ecos are rather strong in opposing new transmission lines.
Given that it takes more power to charge a battery than you get back out, as much as 50% more, I rather doubt charging your car off the grid from a reasonably modern coal fired plant is much cleaner than a modern ICE. Even my 10 year old Mercedes tests 0.00% on required emission tests here in Colorado. At idle and 2500 RPM. CO2? Sure. Not that that matters. And I don’t need to dispose of many tons of ash. 215 HP, 21 MPG. And a new battery costs about a hundred bucks.
Nuclear or fusion might make electrics viable, if we had a battery worth a tinker’s d—. Li-Ions are better than most, use rare material, and as GM’s Volt Battery guy put it, a 350 lb battery is about equal to a gallon of gas. A hundred grand for a Tesla and you get about 200 miles/charge. Great, unless you need 10 more miles to get home. AAA will deliver a couple gallons of gas anywhere. Doubt they can deliver a few kWh’s.
TANSTAAFL
Mudmucker,
I refuse to believe that you are an ME, if for no other reason, than you believe that we will get 30% from the wind.
Unlike you, I actually am an ME, and like ALL MEs, i can tell you that wind is not economically attractive, just socially attractive to those who believe in free lunches.
Even T Boone has put his wind farms on hold, without big government cash infusions or mandates, wind simply isn’t viable.
We use internal combustion engines because they are feasible, convenient and reliable. That line about nobody looking out for the consumer can only flag somebody as being out of touch with the enormous benefits of a entrepeneurial
society. I have worked for years in the automotive business and if you don’t think that we care about the consumer, then you don’t think, period.
Speaking as a real ME, I believe that the future is the clean diesel cars. Qatar is currently building a 1 trillion dollar facility to convert natural gas to diesel. Unlike a most of Arabian peninsula countries, they don’t have alot of oil, but they have natural gas out the wazzo. The facility will be able to supply half of Europe’s diesel demand. Europe already has 50% of their cars running on diesel. The VW TDI Jetta gets better MPG than the Prius, is a nicer car, has better performance, and is cheaper. Other than that though.
If you were a real ME then it would be obvious that as the range of an electric car increases, the weight of the batteries has to go up as well. Batteries are fairly heavy, so electric cars will always have a very limited range. Doesn’t mean that there won’t be applications, but they will never be what we expect out of our cars. I’d like to have an electric car for short trips, but I can only afford so many cars.
Regardless, for the forseeable future, electric cars are coal burners, don’t pretend it’s anything but.
“Where in the world do you get your information?”
Nissan will be releasing its EV next year and you will be able to buy one in 2011. It will cost $25 to $30,000. Cost will come down significantly thereafter as mass production is optimized. Search “Nissan Leaf”. It will cost about $35 a month to charge, obviously depending on your local electricity price and how much you drive.
“Compare the lifetime cost of any hybrid or all-electric vehicle (without taxpayer subsidies) with the I.C. and you will still find the straight-up I.C. engine is the cheaper alternative.”
For now, yes, but if gasoline goes up much like last time (which is sure to happen as it’s becoming scarcer and demand is increasing), and in 5 years when EV’s drop in price to $20,000, the economics will swing in favour of EV’s. That’s only 5 years away.
“What you’re missing in all this is capital cost.”
What’s important is the price of electricity you pay at night, not the capital costs involved with building new power plants. We won’t need new power plants (charge your EV at night).
Regarding wind turbines, your economic analysis is obviously flawed because they are springing up all over the place; the industry is almost doubling in capacity every year, as is solar energy.
“It isn’t about conspiracies. It is all about economics.”
It’s about both conspiracies and economics. The conspiracy is attempting to keep economies of scale from bringing an affordable EV to market (via Chevron’s patent on the NiMH battery). That conspiracy will fall apart within 5 years as EV’s sweep the market.
night after night my senses get assailed with sponsor a donkey/ penguin / non-humanoid £3 per month WWF scam.
Given the planet-killing GHG production by other lifeforms, may I make an appeal?
Terminate a Termite. For £2.50 per month – saving the planet and 50p a month to boot!
As I think I have said before please wake me up when something nteresting happens in the Arctic.
Like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow at the North pole.
Otherwise the ice will do as the ice will do and there’s no doing anything about it.
Kindest Regards
Enduser (11:12:32) :
High country my foot. A couple of hours ago it was snowing in Colorado Springs (that is where the mountains meet the plains.)
~~~
The Springs may be where the Mt’s meet the plains, but they are also at (average) 6500 ft elevation. and yes, elevation maters.
Gallagher (16:29:18) :
Unlike you, I actually am an ME, and like ALL MEs, i can tell you that wind is not economically attractive, just socially attractive to those who believe in free lunches.
~~~
It is only socially attractive when someone else has to live with it. Just ask the environmentally friendly and PC’s in Marin County, CA. When told their power company would be environmentally friendly and switch to wind, they had such a fit, they killed the plan.
Juraj V. (13:51:48) :
The graph you posted showing ice extent perfectly flat before the sixties (at least in the fall) is junk. It is based on a model of arctic temperatures (not ice) which itself is junk. A better chart (still not perfect) comes from Russian data, the bulk of which is actual measurements of ice extent, not pretend extend using a bogus temperature record as a proxy. Here’s the Russian data, shows an overall decline, but not as dramatic as other fluctuations, plus the decline is likely natural as the 1800’s were generally cooler in the NH
http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu:8080/~igor/research/ice/fig2.gif
I’m a little taken aback by all the completely inaccurate numbers being thrown at me by apparently real engineers; I guess being an “expert” doesn’t mean you actually research the numbers.
“Solar panels on cars? Please. At best, with any existing technology (other than hyper expensive GaAs exotics) you might get 600 watts midday, less than 8 kWh per day. No matter how slow you drive, you won’t get far.”
The Tesla Roadster gets 135 Wh/km, so at your 8 kWh per day that is 60 km. Let’s add in some modest efficiency reductions and bring it down to 10 km shall we?
“30% from wind? Sure, if we reduce our total demand by about 80%.”
Not if we build more wind turbines (?!?!)
“As for ‘nationwide grids’, you haven’t tried sending electricity very far.”
In BC we send our electricity 1500 km from the dam to the city.
“Given that it takes more power to charge a battery than you get back out, as much as 50% more, I rather doubt charging your car off the grid from a reasonably modern coal fired plant is much cleaner than a modern ICE.”
Nope, the Tesla Roadster’s plug to wheel efficiency is 70%.
“A hundred grand for a Tesla and you get about 200 miles/charge. Great, unless you need 10 more miles to get home.”
That price will drop dramatically when they are mass produced (they have only produced 800 so far I think — they can hardly compete with Toyota on economies of scale). When you see your charge drop down you go charge it up at a “gas” station, it takes 1/2 hour. How many times have you run out of gas and been stranded? Almost never, I’d guess.
Also, Lotus has developed a 100 lb range extending ICE which will give you limitless range.
“i can tell you that wind is not economically attractive, just socially attractive to those who believe in free lunches.”
Oil is subsidized.
“If you were a real ME then it would be obvious that as the range of an electric car increases, the weight of the batteries has to go up as well. Batteries are fairly heavy, so electric cars will always have a very limited range.”
Nope, they are made of lithium, #3 on the periodic table. These batteries are extremely light. The Tesla Roadster gets 240 mile range. With developments in the next 5-10 years we should see this approach 500 miles. With a genset trailer or a 100 lb range extending ICE on board you have limitless range.
“Regardless, for the forseeable future, electric cars are coal burners, don’t pretend it’s anything but.”
Not if you have solar panels on the roof of your house. In California it’s now cheaper to put them on your house than not (admittedly, with government subsidies but those will soon not be needed as costs drop).
“The VW TDI Jetta gets better MPG than the Prius”
The Prius uses NiMH batteries. This is the conspiracy. Chevron got hold of control of this patent and forced Toyota to stop making EV’s in 2003. They are only allowed to use the battery in the Prius (a non plugin parallel hybrid). Toyota is not allowed to add a wall plug so you can charge up overnight and get 20 km of range for your morning commute. That is why the Prius’s mileage isn’t outstanding.
The new Prius coming out is a plugin but it uses lithium ion batteries (patent not controlled by an oil company)
Craig Moore (15:26:57) :
“What’s up with the temperature spike? http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php”
Interestingly it corresponds with the appearance of a sunspot as the spike to zero did around July 4th.
To all those throwing in a political angle to the debate, know that these are sweeping generalisations and do not reflect reality. Just stick to the science folks, because departing from that angle loses the debate immediately.
There are plenty of people on both sides of the fence politically, and climate change-wise, and the two probably do not correlate all that well. Besides which, left and right are relative judgements (left in the US is probably right of right in Australia for example).
Wind turbines are subsidised; coal plants are penalised by requiring extra coal usage to bury the CO2 nutrient and thereby starve plants and thenceforth animals and humans. Wind turbines are also animal killers. From the European Environment Agency’s own report, I did an analysis of this here: http://peacelegacy.org/articles/wind-farms-do-they-kill-birds
ked5 (16:51:19) :
It is only socially attractive when someone else has to live with it. Just ask the environmentally friendly and PC’s in Marin County, CA. When told their power company would be environmentally friendly and switch to wind, they had such a fit, they killed the plan.
I am shocked by their practically! Did someone explain it to them? What drove the decision?
Of course, it’s common knowledge that the Kennedys stopped wind farms off Cape Cod, and it’s not like they had to pay for or survive on wind power, they just didn’t want to see the ugly things out the back door.
I spent today exploring the Hoosier Pass area (the Continental Divide) 15 miles South of Breckenridge, and it was like the middle of winter up there. Eight or more inches have fallen so far, and more is in the forecast. The wind made it feel bitterly cold. After a short hike in the Blue Lakes area my dog and I were happy to return to the cab of my truck and the heater. Autumn begins tomorrow, but it’s just about finished up there as most deciduous trees have shed their leaves. Definitely not warm in the high country of Colorado.
Mudmucker:
When, ten to twenty years from now, the real environmental nightmare produced by 100-pound (and heavier) car batteries begins to unfold, I will remember the “greens” who screamed that they were necessary.
Alas, I won’t be able to give you any of the credit personally, because you don’t feel comfortable enough with your views to use a name.
Shame, that.
Bulldust (17:33:08) :
Too late for that, it’s already in the political arena. And since my GOP US Congressman wants to fight the Climate Change Bill by introducing a competing bill to conserve energy instead of tax it into the dirt, I say
“Bring it”.
Harold Ambler (17:46:40) :
Like the MTBE additive that was supposed to be the next big thing in clean fuel. Destroyed many a carburator, fuel injections and diesels, and then got into the groundwater where they found out how toxic it really was. A Czar in California waved the wand and made it so. Didn’t look, didn’t think, didn’t ask.
We should not forget the history that from around 1920 to 1940s a strong Arctic warming happened (and probably sea ice extent decreased, though few people were aware of that because it was wartime and technology was still in its infancy), and then from around 1940 to mid-1970s the Arctic tended to cool. All these were before the satellite era that started only 30 years ago, in 1979.
I am sure we are simply experiencing a repetition of such a 60 to 70-year warming/cooling cycle which probably has taken place from time immemorial.
Craig Moore (15:26:57)
Air mass from Siberia, which was quite hot recently.
mudmucker (17:24:09) :
“The VW TDI Jetta gets better MPG than the Prius”
The Prius uses NiMH batteries. This is the conspiracy. Chevron got hold of control of this patent and forced Toyota to stop making EV’s in 2003.
Ok, I hear you, just relax. I don’t mean to pry but, where you are, are you there…..alone? Is there anyone you can talk to about this? I can sense your frustration and frankly, I don’t think that simple facts are going to do anything to help you through this.
Maybe you should just take a break and not think about it for a few days, what will be, will be. Luckily for all of us climatic change isn’t generally all that abrupt in a single lifespan, you’ll be fine.
mudmucker (17:18:48) :
i dont suppose you have any specs on kw/kg on engines & battery/kg/charge? Obviously a big diesel train is a good example of a large scale “hybrid” but quite heavy for the power they deliver.
“Wind turbines are subsidised; coal plants are penalised by requiring extra coal usage to bury the CO2 nutrient and thereby starve plants and thenceforth animals and humans. Wind turbines are also animal killers.”
Just to point out the facts, they aren’t doing this. There may be a couple around here and there I believe but it’s very uncommon.
Turbines are terrible bird killers if they aren’t sited properly. So ….. site them properly…..
Harold Ambler @ 17:46:40
10-20 years? Try 1 or less in some cases. A couple of buddies that pull wrench at a Toyota dealer tell me the batteries are crap and rarely last beyond a year. Toyota is, or soon will be eating some substantial costs for warranty replacements. I am yet to see a “recycled” prius battery. Must be an enormous pile of them somewhere. Bet it’s in China.
I am hoping someone develops more cars like the Tesla. That is a promising design. The Prius is a maintenance trap with much lower than advertised mileage. Anyone ever actually see one where the gas engine wasn’t running? Maybe for about 50 feet out of the driveway, or stopped at a light. The rest of the time that little 4-pot is singing soprano lugging 1000 kilo’s of dead batteries!
“It is only socially attractive when someone else has to live with it. Just ask the environmentally friendly and PC’s in Marin County, CA”
It’s probably not a good idea to put wind turbines in scenic coastal areas. A better place is the huge interior of the continent with strong prairie winds blowing all the time and endless corn fields and no one around to complain except the farmers who will make money off them.
“When, ten to twenty years from now, the real environmental nightmare produced by 100-pound (and heavier) car batteries begins to unfold, I will remember the “greens” who screamed that they were necessary.”
Lithium is non-toxic, just to point out the facts. Beyond this, these batteries are expensive and they will be worth a lot of money after they are finished for their lithium. No sane person will throw them in the ditch.
REPLY: … just to point out the facts…You are wrong. Lithium IS in fact toxic.
http://www.drugs.com/enc/lithium-toxicity.html
Note the key words:
Poisonous Ingredient: Lithium, a soft metal
“Ok, I hear you, just relax. I don’t mean to pry but, where you are, are you there…..alone? Is there anyone you can talk to about this? I can sense your frustration and frankly, I don’t think that simple facts are going to do anything to help you through this.”
I’m not sure what you mean. You think that because I go through each one of your arguments and discredit them with facts that I am frustrated? Yes, I guess it’s frustrating to see every energy consumer being ripped off $200 a month and all the other bad things that go along with global warming and the politics of fossil fuel extraction, how could any sane person that realizes what’s going on not be frustrated?
“Luckily for all of us climatic change isn’t generally all that abrupt in a single lifespan, you’ll be fine.”
Yup, pawn it off onto future generations.
REPLY: And NONE of this has anything to do with sea-ice, which is the topic of this thread.
WUWT users, don’t feed the troll any longer for this off topic train wreck – A
“REPLY: … just to point out the facts…You are wrong. Lithium IS in fact toxic. .”
Oh please, you really will go to the ends of the earth to try to prop up your false world views won’t you.
It’s all about degree of toxicity. Pretty much anything is toxic in high enough concentrations. If you eat too much vitamin A it’s toxic too. So don’t eat your batteries, or put them through an atomizer and breath the dust, LOL.
As your link points out, it is a medication prescribed for certain psychological problems. Certainly it’s in nowhere near the same league as lead.
REPLY: Sorry, still wrong. You said it *wasn’t toxic* with no qualifiers, it obviously is. I’d say it is pretty close to lead. Peel off a chunk of Lithium metal and swallow it if you dare. And again none of this has anything to do with sea ice. If you wish to comment on sea ice you are welcome to do so. – A
“REPLY: And NONE of this has anything to do with sea-ice, which is the topic of this thread. ”
Hah, I’m not the one who brought up these reams of inaccurate information surrounding energy production and use that had to be corrected.
All I did was state a fact: electric cars are here today, they will be cost effective to purchase in about 3 years, and you can produce tons of energy on your roof via solar panels, and in 10 years the solar panels on your car will give you 20 km of free driving a day.
If you don’t like those facts, then delete my posts, but in the interests of fairness also delete all the others dealing with energy.
REPLY: mudmuck I drive an electric car. In fact I own two now. See the about page. So don’t lecture and stick to the topic. You are disrupting the thread on sea ice. -A
mudmucker (19:01:57) :
“A better place is the huge interior of the continent with strong prairie winds blowing all the time and endless corn fields and no one around to complain except the farmers who will make money off them.”
I really loathe people who think nothing of shoving off everything to the farmer as if the farmer is the garbage heap for the ‘intelligent elite’. Keep your garbage wind farms to yourself and leave our farmland alone. No price you can pay will compensate for the theft of the peace and quiet so stay off our land!
Snip if you see fit Anthony. I’m getting tired of farmers getting dumped on. I had to say it.
REPLY: I agree, the troll is in the penalty box now. The thread is about sea ice, not farmers, not cars, not lithium, not windmills. – A
mudmucker (19:10:09) :
Yup, pawn it off onto future generations.
You are aware that the climate has been changing on this planet for the entire time its existed eh? hell when the earth came out of the last glaciation into this interglacial the shifts were over 100x what we are seeing now, that is normal. What is unusal is the length of this interglacial, we should be on well on our way back into the next major glaciation which should last 100k years or so(interglacials normally about 10k). With km thick ice sheets over the majority of the land masses in the northern hemisphere. So would future generation prefer what the climate has been 90%of the last 2.5million years? Somehow i really doubt it.
But that aside, is 380ppm o co2 going to stop the next glaciation? It certainly hasnt in the past even with higher co2 levels. So when was the perfect climate for earth achieved? last week? one hundred years ago? The planet will do what it does, its up too life to adapt too the climate… we have survived climate shifts orders of magnitude greater than the present trends with stone age technology… and a warmer climate with bronze age technology, not only did we survive as a species, we thrived, thats when civilization was born.
“What is unusal is the length of this interglacial, we should be on well on our way back into the next major glaciation which should last 100k years or so(interglacials normally about 10k)”
Ice ages cycle on 100 thousand years, according to the Milankovitch cycle which largely explains it. We only just came out of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, so we have along time to go before the Earth would naturally enter another ice age.
Hah, go ahead, delete me. I’ll just come back with more facts to refute your lies, you idiot.
Ok, back on topic.
Every winter the water freezes in the arctic.
In the spring it melts.
Sometimes more one year, sometimes less (melt/freeze)
Nothing new here, move along.
Mudmucker
Re: melt and freeze numbers. We would be better off using the overlapping three-month average system (JFM, FMA, MAM, AMJ, etc) as that takes care of wriggles created by a non-sentient Earth. It cares not one wit that there is more ice this year on this day of the month than last year on this day of the month. Would you agree?
We would also be wise to develop a basic understanding of Arctic temperature anomalies at the sea surface and in the air, as well as wind patterns over the last 30 years, before we talk about the 30-year trend being secondary to a warming Earth but the last couple years of melt being caused by windy weather.
“Ice ages cycle on 100 thousand years, according to the Milankovitch cycle which largely explains it. We only just came out of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, so we have along time to go before the Earth would naturally enter another ice age.”
Are you suggesting we have 90K years till the next glaciation?
Stephen Brown (12:07:35) :
Enduser (09:13:54) :
“… a poor little penguin chick getting all of the deadly noxious oil cleaned off from its plumage with Dawn dish washing detergent.”
That treatment condemns the penguin to death, as it would any sea bird. This we discovered to our horror in Cape Town in 1968. Every bird we cleaned died. You have to use a special solution to strip the oil from the feathers (I have no idea what it is). The feathers are left with a sufficient proportion of their natural oils which prevent the bird from getting saturated with water and dying of hypothermia.
. . . . . . .
Precisely true. When I was a kid, the neighbors had some baby ducks that managed to get into some oil from a car oil change. The neighbors cleaned them off with dish detergent. Then three of the baby ducks drowned, because they couldn’t float with all their natural oil having been cleaned away.
First, do no harm . . .
At present rate of increases (2,000,000km for Antartic Ice Cap and 500,000 km for Arctic Ice Cap) how long would it take to drop the oceans visibly?
Mudmucker
“’What is unusal is the length of this interglacial, we should be on well on our way back into the next major glaciation which should last 100k years or so(interglacials normally about 10k’
Ice ages cycle on 100 thousand years, according to the Milankovitch cycle which largely explains it. We only just came out of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, so we have along time to go before the Earth would naturally enter another ice age.”
Wow, you really get your “facts” messed up, don’t you? Read the paragraph that you quoted again. The ice ages last about 100kyr while the interglacials (that’s the warm periods) only last about 10kyr. That is broadly accepted, i.e. the science is settled, the debate is over, the consensus has been reached.
As to your other claims about energy, I would recommend revisiting your thermo textbooks. The real reason that we still burn fuels in our cars is that they are cheap, easy to handle -takes a few minutes to “recharge”- and the energy density can’t be beat. Certainly batteries don’t even come close to the energy contained by volume or weight of a liquid hydrocarbon at STP, which is really too bad because you are correct to point out the poor thermal efficiency of ICE’s and the non-idealities of an ICE powertrain compared to the simplicity and near ideal performance of an electric motor. I mean, why am I still using a transmission in the 21st century?!
Cheers,
Tsk Tsk
p.s. I too drive a hybrid because while I’m not worried about climate change I am concerned about energy security and I like to think that I help promote more efficient technologies. Ideally, I’d like to be able to buy a hybrid turbo diesel -or possibly a hybrid HCCI assuming they can get the bugs worked out- and get the best of both worlds.
mudmucker (19:42:26) :
Ice ages cycle on 100 thousand years, according to the Milankovitch cycle which largely explains it. We only just came out of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, so we have along time to go before the Earth would naturally enter another ice age.
Ummm… no. glaciations last 100k years, interglacial s are normally around 10k. This interglacial is around 12k at the moment. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/vostok/graphics/tempplot5.gif
We only just came out of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, so we have along time to go before the Earth would naturally enter another ice age.
The Laurentide Ice Sheet began to melt 22,000 yrs ago.
Statistically speaking, the “warm” peak grace period is used up.
Which is what the geologists in the 70’s were so worked up about, and where the warmists came in.
Oh well, at least the geologists were truly experts in thier fields.
Just for reference, it appears that the my AMSR-E data shows a steadily decreasing Arctic sea-ice extent of 174,098 sq km per year until Aug 31, 2007 and after that date a increasing trend of 309,183 sq km per year best matches the data. The two trend lines intersect at -413,990 sq km. It is still too soon to say if the latter trend will hold up. I have heard that one-year ice is easily melted. It also appears that first-melt water is easily re-frozen.
mudmucker (19:42:26) :
“What is unusal is the length of this interglacial, we should be on well on our way back into the next major glaciation which should last 100k years or so(interglacials normally about 10k)”
Ice ages cycle on 100 thousand years, according to the Milankovitch cycle which largely explains it. We only just came out of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, so we have along time to go before the Earth would naturally enter another ice age.
Actually the current interglacial is not really anomalous in length. While the Milankovitch Cycles are a major role player in the glacial cycles they are NOT precisely synchronous to each other hence the exact nature of each glacial / interglacial period and timing will be somewhat varied. That is true without even adding in other various influences and factors.
In terms of the cycles and their relationship to each other there is nothing to prevent entering the next glacial period in the next 1,500 to 2,500 years… perhaps sooner. That of course is in reference to temperatures dropping to LIA levels (and not returning to current for 90,000 years or so). Major ice advance would follow and be a long, slow process.
How will we know when an extended period of glaciation has started? NO ONE alive during the first stages of it will ever really know. Our life spans are too short. One way of looking at it, however, is that we started about 8,500 years ago and the true long term temperature trend substantiates that.
mudmucker (19:42:26) :
Ice ages cycle on 100 thousand years, according to the Milankovitch cycle which largely explains it. We only just came out of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, so we have along time to go before the Earth would naturally enter another ice age..
It is instructive to look at these plots:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Vostok-ice-core-petit.png
We are at the edge at far left. Note the oscillations along a cooling mean trend, that can be seen by eye.
The holocene age blown up
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
shows this cooling trend clearly, except for the uptick close to our time on the left.
If you were a betting man, what would you bet that the cooling trend will continue despite the ups and downs of the roll down hill?
I don’t agree with the phrase “rebounded quickly”, it seems to be plotting similar to quite few years. I’d leave it to at least October to be able to judge how 2009 swapped from melt to freeze compared to other years.
Regards
Andy
As nearly all of the ice cap increase is over ocean, not much change in sea level.
Warm oceans under cooling atmosphere should yield cooler and damper planet overall for a while. In many areas glaciers are advancing.
Maybe the AGW people should declare victory due to their efforts. :-l
As a young lad, I wondered why wet clothing hung to dry in the winter first froze, then dried. I wondered why the ice cubes in the treys in the freezer compartment got smaller and smaller if not used. Hmmmm . . . sublimation.
Then too, there are those such things as latent heat and specific heat. Hmmm. There is a small area between the atmosphere and liquid H2O that is ‘taint ‘Taint liquid water and ‘taint vapor. H2O molecules can and are “ripped off” by wind. How evaporative coolers work. 540 BTUs are carried off from the water for each pound of water in the process. This heat has to leave the water vapor for clouds to form, when the same amount of heat is released. Huge transfers of heat from bodies of water to the point where clouds condense out. This is completely separate from convection.
Weren’t chemistry and thermodynamics fun when I was in college?
Oh well, I am long since retired (professional civil engineer). Why bother to lecture when it is far more fun to watch the fighting?
BTW, Anthony, I don’t use my name because I am still licensed to practice civil engineering, and in the state I am registered, my residential address is public information, and can easily be had. I don’t need any nasty snail mail, or any “offers”. As such, I will remain, LarryOldtimer. I use that screen name since I am “half past” 73.
Friends:
The above discussion of albedo has been mistaken because its participants seem to have forgotten that polar regions are net emitters of radiation: n.b. they are not net absorbers.
The tropics absorb net radiation and the polar regions emit net radiation. There is an energy flow from tropics to poles.
Does growth of polar ice cover have a positive or negative feedback on polar ice cover?
Ice provides an insulating layer over polar waters. Black bodies are both better radiation emitters and better radiation absorbers than white bodies. Ice is whiter than water. Polar regions are net radiation emitters.
Think about it.
Richard
George E. Smith (13:51:41) :
Thanks George, very useful info, much appreciated; always nice to see some good old physics for a change – time I dusted off the books, ye gods it’s been a while… :o)
Cheers,
Mark.
DGallagher (13:26:46) : Have you seen those responsible for those horrible decisions ferreted out, exposed and driven out of government service? Personally, I don’t think it’s all that hard to figure out why fuel prices soared or why we had a problem with sub prime mortgages, but apparently all of the economists who know exactly what will happen in the future are unable to do a honest post mortem on what has just happened in the recent past.
Pardon me, but I am an Economist and I can (and have) detail exactly how and who was responsible for the collapse of the housing bubble (and it’s formation). The problem is that the folks in power don’t listen to Economists either unless they are hand picked to spout a particular party line.
HINT: Look up the community redevelopment act as amended and signed by Pres. Clinton. Look at Fanny May and Freddie Mac cronies such as Barney Frank and Little Chuckey Shummer (and a cast of thousands of other congress critters over the years… just look at the Fanny & Freddie contributions history for the cast of characters.) Then also look at the radical right wingnuts who demanded a repeal of Glass-Steagall in exchange for letting the CRA go through and the democrats to hand out mortgage money to anything with a pulse…
I’d tell you more, but it just puts folks to sleep when an Economist starts talking about Economics… even if it is Political Economics.
Marian (14:01:12) :
“In 2 years the consumer will be able to both save money and not emit CO2 by buying an electric car!”
One Problem though. Wouldn’t this happen?
With more and more electric cars coming on the road. They do need recharging so eventually more power stations are going to have to be built. So more CO2 will be emitted if the power stations happen to be of the cheaper coal powered variety!
Good Point! With 50%+ of electricity from coal, and about 30% from other fossil fuels, the rest being substantially nuclear and nuclear having a decades+ lead time to add capacity: The added power demand would have to come from running the coal plants longer and running the “peaking plant” natural gas turbines longer. (Things like hydro and geothermal are already producing at capacity).
If you think we can add enough wind and solar to charge a big growth of electric cars you are mistaken. An electric car is about 35 kW-hr per day minimum (assumes about a 1 hour total drive time). Typical home consumption is closer to 24 kW-hr / day. So you would need to roughly double the total electric generation (and then some) to handle the electric cars. That can’t happen in 2 years… Or even in 10. And I’d hesitate to try and do it in 20 without a dramatic effort ala WWII war time mobilization…
So you might be able to buy a lot of electric cars in a couple of years; but don’t expect to be able to charge a nation worth of them for at least 20 years… And when you do, expect a lot of that to come from coal.
>>> “In 2 years the consumer will be able to both save money
>>>and not emit CO2 by buying an electric car!”
Further to other comments on this, I make the electric car slightly LESS efficient that a European diesel (my large turbo-diesel family saloon will do 55 mpg on a long run).
By my calculations the efficiences are as follows:
Diesel vehicle
Diesel transport to pumps 98% efficient
Diesel engine in car 38% efficient
Total for diesel car 37% energy efficiency
Electric vehicle
Electrical generation at power station 45% efficient
Electrical transmission 98% efficient
Electrical storage in lithium-ion battery 85% efficient
Electric motor 90% efficient
Total for electric car 34% energy efficiency
Thus diesel cars are more efficient than electric cars.
.
.
As to more power stations:
Electrical energy in the UK is 9% of total energy.
Transport consumes 26% of total energy.
Thus to supply the majority of UK transport (less aviation and shipping) with electrical energy, we would have to double or treble the number of power stations. All electric cars do, is reduce the pollution in cities, and transfer it to the countryside instead.
That’s what the Greens will not tell you.
.
>>> It will cost about $35 a month to charge, obviously depending
>>>on your local electricity price and how much you drive.
A comparison of price between diesel cars and electric cars means nothing, as the former energy source normally has a great wadge of tax included, whereas electricity often does not (and night electricity is often subsidised). Anyway, cheap night recharging will not be possible when 30% of drivers have electric cars.
Electric cars will only become useful and viable when:
a. We invent a decent battery.
b. We have 100% nuclear power electrical supplies
Then, they will make a great deal of sense, but not before.
.
As to hybrid cars – well, it depends what you use them for.
The Prius will do 50mpg in town and 48mpg outside.
My large Citroen diesel will do 38mpg around town and 59mpg outside.
http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/specs.html
http://www.citroen.co.uk/new-cars/citroen-c5-saloon/in-more-detail/technical-specifications/
So in my normal driving mode, the Toyota Prius hybrid is MORE POLLUTING than my Lemon C5. Like everything in this AGW bandwagon/religion, the Prius is simply a badge of Greenness, it does absolutely nothing for the environment.
The whole AGW religion is sustained by smoke and mirrors.
.
mudmucker (15:16:00) : Sorry, you are incorrect. You’re talking to a mechanical engineer here.
You may be able to engineer a fastener, but your economics are broken.
Electric vehicles are significantly more efficient than gasoline powered vehicles because the ICE is about 25% efficient (it runs suboptimally because it is directly linked to the wheels.) Central firing stations are much more efficient.
So use a Diesel ICE. 1/2 of Europe is. Almost all the trains, trucks, ships etc. of the world do. And present gasoline engines are closer to 35%.
THE most efficient engine in the world is a Diesel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine#Power_and_fuel_economy
The MAN S80ME-C7 low speed diesel engines use 155 gram fuel per kWh for an overall energy conversion efficiency of 54.4%, which is the highest conversion of fuel into power by any internal or external combustion engine.[1] Diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline (petrol) engines of the same power, resulting in lower fuel consumption. A common margin is 40% more miles per gallon for an efficient turbodiesel.
The gas turbines, such as the record holder from GE, run out at 52%. To get more than that takes combined cycle where the heat is used. If you want to “go there” then we must also allow for the cabin heat and defroster heat used in ICE cars in their efficiency numbers…
Now you can put a highly efficient Diesel in a car directly, or you can use it to make electricity with generator losses, then take transformer losses, transmission losses, more transformer losses, charger losses, battery charge losses, standby self discharge losses of about 1% / day, inverter losses, then electric motor losses and subtract all them from the original Diesel efficiency. BTW, those original generation, transmission, and storage losses are about 1/2 the energy input (depending somewhat on battery technology used. Exotics can be 95% efficient, but most that are economical are about 70% or less efficient. You also lose about 5% in each major conversion appliance like chargers, inverters, etc.) Ask an E.E. about it…
So you can run 1 gallon of Diesel in the vehicle, or 2 gallons of Diesel equivalent in your electric generation and distribution system. Your choice. And that is why almost everything that moves in the world uses Diesel or jet turbines with a small part going to gasoline cars. (In Europe today, over 50% of new car sales are Diesel.)
AND there is no way around that. That Diesel IS the world record holder now for efficiency. Everything else is down hill.
We won’t need any new generation plants because electric cars are mostly charged at night when demand is low.
You do realize that gas turbines are used for peak demand and shut off at night due to the high cost of fuel and maintenance for long duration use? And that running them at night to charge cars will cost about twice to 4 times as much as base load power plants? And that no utility will do this for very long (due to the turbines wearing out in continuous use…)
But we are also shifting to more wind power which could concievably provide 30% or more of our power (with a continent-wide grid it wouldn’t matter if the wind is blowing in your particular location.)
I can tell I need to put together another posting on this to avoid endlessly retyping it… Sigh.
1) You get to BUILD that continent wide grid. Add 10 to 20 years and a few 100 billion dollars.
2) WInd destabilizes a grid at over about 20%
3) You can’t depend on wind to be there at all time (ie when folk plug in their cars that will typically be about 7pm as they get home from work and sit down to dinner… i.e. peak of the peak demand). So you MUST be able to meet that demand with other dispatchable generation plant (that means coal or gas turbine or some nuclear). IFF you don’t meet the demand, the grid collapses. There is not graceful load shedding built into the system; it is very ungraceful.
4) Continent wide transmission is not very efficient. Your transmission losses go way up, so your efficiency goes way down.
Also, when electric cars come out,
They are out now. Tesla dealership in Palo Alto (visited it a week or two ago) and another dealer who’s name I forget in Santa Cruz. More on the way. Oh, and you can get a PHEV kit to convert your Prius to plug in.
manufacturers will start covering the body work with solar panels,
They already do this. Don’t you keep up with this stuff? The Pious will run a tiny fan that turns over the cabin air cutting down on your heat load in summer. That’s about it. You can maybe get 1 kW PEAK out of these things if you are lucky. The reality is closer to 500 W peak. You get that for about 4 hours out of the day. That’s about 2 kW-hrs BEFORE LOSSES. That will run the typical e-Car about 2/30 of an hour. 4 minutes in summer in a sunny climate. Ought to get you out of the parking lot and past the first light or two. Or run the AC long enough to cool the car as you head for the parking lot exit.
which with today’s technology could give you 10 km a day
Either you are dreaming or you have never done the math for a real panel in real places. Remember that you get about 1 kW of sunshine per sq.meter IFF your car is parked in the Sahara at high noon and tilted to be perpendicular to the sun. Everything else is down hill from there.
future advancements in panel efficiency up to 50%,
Yup, dreaming all right. Even the concentrating exotic materials cells can’t get much beyond 30% and those cost enough to make your eyes bug out. For less than a cm2 of surface area.
“People don’t realize we use internal combustion vehicles precisely because they are more energy efficient than the alternatives.”
This is exactly correct.
No, we use them because they cost the consumer a lot of money.
Tesla: $80,000+
Kia: $14,000
Yup, those ICE cars sure do cost a lot /sarcoff>
No one is looking out for the interests of the consumer.
Competition does (as does the consumer). And competition is the one thing that an electric car still can not meet. I’d love to have one, but not as long as they cost 4x the competition, go 1/2 to 1/4 as far, need batteries replaced every few years, and using the AC kills your range. I love the Tesla, but you will not drive it from San Francisco to L.A. in 7 hours as I do in my Diesel. Nor can you do it on the little bit of fuel it takes in a Diesel.
And websites like WUWT make this situation worse because they turn consumers against themselves by spreading scientific misinformation.
You really have no clue who your host is, do you? IIRC Anthony HAS an electric car. I’d like to have one but don’t want to go the kit car route (helped a friend with his kit car) and don’t have $80,000 kicking around. I’ve attended a half dozen e-car meets and first saw the Tesla demonstrator at an E.E. meeting in Palo Alto a couple of years ago. BTW, I own stock in an e-car company (Fiskar vis QTWW) and do want them to make a profit.
But you must be realistic about the technology. It is NOT going to compete for the typical car driver in Texas. Not yet anyway.
BTW, per the “patent games” comment in another article. Electric cars have been around since before gasoline. There isn’t a lot of patent protection in them. Their major issue is just limited range and long recharge times. The Renault system going in in Israel might help that. We’ll see. IMHO they are ‘niche only’ for about 10 more years.
Alec, a.k.a. Daffy Duck (10:31:14) :
I’ve never understood why this argument is brought up.
If true, this means it would take less heat to melt the thinner ice. According to AGW, there is more heat in the planet, which would lead to the more rapid and extensive melting of the arctic ice; not only more heat, which would melt more ice even if it were not thinner plus the fact there is now thinner ice, vulnerable to the heat.
Yet, this supposedly thinner, vulnerable ice is not only holding its own, more is surviving, now for the third year in a row.
All else being equal, this would indicate less heat is finding its way North, a very strong indication AGW theory is flawed. No matter the origin of the heat, man-made or natural, there is less of it.
It would be wiser on the part of proponents to argue there has been a shift in wind patterns to explain away this surprising (to them) growth in both area and extent of the ice pack. But perhaps that is a two edged sword as the argument cuts both ways, when the ice pack was shrinking it could be argued this is do to shifting wind patterns.
Wind patterns are being used to explain away the absence of the warmer troposphere over the tropics predicted by AGW models and theory.
I don’t see the long term average and trends on that graph.
Mike86 (11:22:12) :
Source?
mudmucker (16:37:00) : Nissan will be releasing its EV next year and you will be able to buy one in 2011. It will cost $25 to $30,000. Cost will come down significantly thereafter as mass production is optimized.
Unfamiliar with marketing too, I see. That is an initial price while they gauge sales interest. If sales demand exceeds assembly line size, the price will go UP no matter what happens to assembly costs.
BTW, car mass production is already optimized. Henry Ford did it with the Model T. The particular engine stuffed in doesn’t matter much.
For now, yes, but if gasoline goes up much like last time (which is sure to happen as it’s becoming scarcer and demand is increasing)
So I take it you missed the CNBC show today about the world running out of oil tankers and tanks since everything that could float was full of oil trying to cope with the over production…
One More Time, Repeat After Me: “There is no energy shortage and their never will be.”
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
There are a couple of Trillion bbl of oil yet to use that we know of and there are new oil finds at depths that were theoretically impossible for oil per the prior theory. So all the globe that was “completely explored” is now unexplored at that shell of depth. BP, Chevron, PetroBras and others have all found oil in vast quantities (BILLION bbl scale) in the last couple of years at depth. Oh, and APA Apache found a pot load of nat gas too.
, and in 5 years when EV’s drop in price to $20,000, the economics will swing in favour of EV’s. That’s only 5 years away.
More fantasy future dreams. If it is 5 years away, then the design has to already be done with present technology. Have you forgotten all the required government safety tests? Manufacturer lead times for parts?
Regarding wind turbines, your economic analysis is obviously flawed because they are springing up all over the place;
That is the power of subsidy.
The conspiracy is attempting to keep economies of scale from bringing an affordable EV to market (via Chevron’s patent on the NiMH battery).
Now I know you are drinking the coolaid. There are Li-ion, Li-polymer, NiCd, and a host of other batteries out there. Even if Chevron was using a patent on NiMH in a way that restricts trade (and violates anti trust laws, btw) one could just swap battery type. The Lithiums are better batteries anyway (which is why Tesla uses them. (The Ovonics patent is only on one modification of the NiMH anyway, the original patents have expired, so anyone can make a generic NiMH, just not the Ovonics enhancement).
The NiMH is a particularly poor choice in many ways for an electric vehicle. From the wiki:
Self-discharge
The self-discharge is 5–10% on the first day and stabilizes around 0.5–1% per day at room temperature.[…]The rate is strongly affected by the temperature at which the batteries are stored with cooler storage temperatures leading to slower discharge rate and longer battery life. The highest capacity cells on the market (>8000 mAh) are reported to have the highest self-discharge rates.
Big batteries are hot after charging and tend to stay that way. Self discharge will be high.
So you are going to lose up to 10% on day one with largest cells being worst. Great… and a Google search also turns up that the charge discharge cycle can range from 65% to 90%; so you lose at a minimum another 10% and up to 35% (total so far just for the battery and sitting a day is 20% to 45% of your electricity wasted…) There are much more efficient batteries.
BTW, Tesla uses an AA size battery in a large pack so that heat is better dissipated and so that any bad cell is not a catastrophic failure (it automatically “patches” around dead cells). They also said it was cheaper since they could leverage off the mass produced laptop cells. Given that, the notion that Chevron can suppress ” EV-Ni-MH cars” via not making small lots of special purpose very large cells is just a little bit silly… (The Prius uses a “D” sized cell, so the strategy is not unique…)
Oh, and your statement that an ICE is less efficient due to direct mechanical coupling to the wheels is also specious. DIrect mechanical coupling is the most efficient kind. And guess what the Tesla does? Yup, a transmission and direct mechanical coupling to the wheels.
I’m joining the folks that doubt that you really have an M.E. degree. If you do, ask for your money back.
REPLY: And NONE of this has anything to do with sea-ice, which is the topic of this thread.
WUWT users, don’t feed the troll any longer for this off topic train wreck – A
Oops! Sorry… Note to self: Scan whole thread, then reply to early message.
Enduser (12:22:17) :
Here’s a little experiment for you.
Take a hair dryer and turn it on to full with the highest heat setting.
Direct the air onto a glass of water. See how long it takes the hair dryer to warm up the water. It will take a long time with a lot of hot air to warm up that glass of water.
Why?
Consider the contents of this table.
Look at the last column and compare the values between air and water.
Also, notice how much heat is contained in air with water vapor.
The oceans are much more important than the atmosphere when it comes to heat content. And water vapor is far more important than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.
A small side-topic response: hybrid diesel (or turbo-diesel) are not as interesting as hybrid gaz, because the efficiency curve of a diesel engine is not as horrendous as a gaz one: diesel have better peak efficiency than gaz engines, but also their peak efficency is not as sharp and the diesel retain acceptable (let’s say 20 %) efficiency on a much larger part of running condition (especially at low gaz, which is very the most common usage for powerful car engines).
So gaz hybrid gains enourmously by using a small gaz engine working close to it’s peak efficiency all the time, but the gain for a diesel engine are much less significant. Other tricks (regenerative brakings, less need for powerfull engine allowing for more efficient transmission, …) will compensate for the added weight…but the gain is modest, and, imho, not really worth it…except for pluggable hybrid, which would bypass gaz taxes that are very large in europe 😉
EM Smith–
You are dead wrong about wind destabilizing the Grid.
Stanford university released a study concerning wind farms, and baseload power.
Interestingly, the more wind farms that are interconnected, the more baseband power % you can reliably provide.
From the abstract:
“It was found that an average of 33% and a maximum
of 47% of yearly averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric
power. Equally significant, interconnecting multiple wind farms to a common point and then connecting
that point to a far-away city can allow the long-distance portion of transmission capacity to be reduced, for
example, by 20% with only a 1.6% loss of energy. Although most parameters, such as intermittency,
improved less than linearly as the number of interconnected sites increased, no saturation of the benefits was found. Thus, the benefits of interconnection continue to increase with more and more interconnected
sites.”
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf
Denmark exceeds 20% wind produced electricity, and exceeds 24% consumption of wind electricity in Western Denmark, I guess the grid there is all dodgy.
“”” karl heuer (10:51:41) :
EM Smith–
You are dead wrong about wind destabilizing the Grid.
Stanford university released a study concerning wind farms, and baseload power.
Interestingly, the more wind farms that are interconnected, the more baseband power % you can reliably provide. “””
Well there’s that simple word; “interconnected.”
Somebody mentioned how much mechanical energy there was in the oceans just due to the swimming actions of trillions of krill. Each of them operates alone in generating its energy, though the may signalwise communicate with each other to stay out of each other’s way.
But what if you had to interconnect all those individual free clean green renewable energy producers to deliver their total energy to some grid somewhere.
Power grids are not unlike traffic light systems. Each traffic light acts locally to create whatever traffic mayhem it can in its local neighborhood.
But then they connect them into grids to jointly supervise their actions.
And now you have the problem that somebody in Bangladesh probably writes the AlGorythm that is going to make local traffic decisions based on some global appraisal of the traffic conditions.
It never works of course, and local traffic slowly grinds to a halt as decisions are made further and further from the data gathering points.
Most traffic light networks don’t have the brains of a two year old child; and the result is most light systems are mostly red most of the time, and most of the traffic is stopped most of the time.
If the AlGorythms were any good; most of the lights would be green most of the time.
How effective traffic lights are is demonstrated any time there is a power outage, and all the lights go out. Even with the silly “everybody stop” AlGorythm, that replaces the computer model; traffic moves far more efficiently with all the lights out than with them on.
If you let the drivers make the stop go decision too instead of an octagon; it can get betetr yet.
You would have to give people a driving test before you gave them a driving licence. Something along the lines of the requirements for piloting a plane would seem appropriate.
So the sparse distribution of solar energy in all its forms, leads to massive interconnection networks; which are both expensive and vulnerable.
All the wind fan farms I have seen are quite devoid of human beings; you couldn’t risk some farmer discing the ground, and discovering where they put that “interconnected” grid.
karl heuer:
It seems you have been misled concerning wind power and grid stability. Whatever the paper you cite says, the experience of windfarms in practice is very different from your assertions.
Firstly, in the real world it is simply untrue that:
“It was found that an average of 33% and a maximum of 47% of yearly averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric power.”
OK, they may have “found” that according to their model, but that “finding” is so wrong that it has to discredit everything else in their paper.
By definition, baseload power is continuous. So, wind power cannot provide any baseload electricity because wind power is intermittent. Indeed, the quotation you provided admits,
“Although most parameters, such as intermittency, improved less than linearly as the number of interconnected sites increased, no saturation of the benefits was found”.
So, they admit they could not solve – only improve – the problem of “intermittency”. Intrmittent power cannot be used as base load power.
Times of maximum power demand occcur when there are prolonged periods of exceptionally hot or exceptionally cold weather. And such periods occur when there is a stationary anticyclone over a region so there is no wind: i.e. no windpower. One such event happened over Western Europe only a few years ago and was touted as The Sign Of Things To Come by AGW propogandists. The power supply would fail at such times if wind were supplying the baseload
And you say:
“Denmark exceeds 20% wind produced electricity, and exceeds 24% consumption of wind electricity in Western Denmark, I guess the grid there is all dodgy.”
Your guess is correct. Denmark overcomes its grid stability problems by dumping electricity as a free gift to its neighbours when Denmark’s grid has unmanageable stability problems. On some occassions Denmark has payed adjacent countries to take electricity from Denmark to avoid the Danish grid from failing.
And Denmark is reducing its reliance on wind power.
For an assessment of wind power in practice I suggest you read my paper at
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtney_2006_lecture.pdf
Richard
I don’t think that wind farmers either generate or diminish sea ice.
Perhaps some people do not understand that the purpose of wind farms is NOT to generate sea ice but rather electricity.
I have also failed to find any data / studies where wind farms were being used to blow sea ice out of the Arctic. Nor do I find any tests or studies attempting to use wind farms to change the earth’s orbit or change the position / altitude of clouds.
Lee Kington:
You say:
“I don’t think that wind farmers either generate or diminish sea ice. ”
True, but nobody commented on my posting at (00:56:39) which considered the albedo effect of polar sea ice. Indeed, since then there has only been one posting on the subject of sea ice.
So, I joined the discussion people were having. Perhaps that was wrong.
Richard
Wonder why the temps are up in the Arctic. It sure hasn’t hurt the continued build up of ice.
Wonder what the error bands are for the various ice regions of the Arctic. Do you suppose that some areas have much wider error bands than others? Maybe if we were to view the 2 standard deviation specific to each area we might get another clue as to which areas are more variable. I propose that these areas might also be more sensitive to weather pattern changes.
Is there a good reason why the vertical axis on the IARC-JAXA sea ice extent graph always starts at 2e6 rather than zero? This has the effect of making it look as though the summer minimum in 2007 were half what it had been in 2006, when it was in fact about two thirds. That is still a huge drop, to be sure, easily sufficient to make Al Gore soil his panties the organic way. But 2 is close enough to zero (for sufficiently small values of 2, yuk yuk!) that it couldn’t hurt to run the picture down a little further, no? It’s not like they conserve any ink that way.
Pamela Gray (20:18:55) :
“Wonder why the temps are up in the Arctic. It sure hasn’t hurt the continued build up of ice.”
I’ve wonder about this too. Perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that the temperature of the sea surface will tend to plateau at just below it’s freezing point, so air temperature will rebound. Could also be something to do with the Arctic vortex, which speeds up as temperatures fall. If you look through other years it’s not a rare event.
>>>Denmark exceeds 20% wind produced electricity, and
>>>exceeds 24% consumption of wind electricity in Western
>>>Denmark, I guess the grid there is all dodgy.
This is a great fallacy.
In actual fact, Denmark has NEVER used ANY of its wind electricity – it is too variable and unreliable. It sells it to Scandinavia instead.
http://www.thomastelford.com/journals/DocumentLibrary/CIEN.158.2.66.pdf
.
>>For an assessment of wind power in practice I suggest
>>you read my paper at
>> http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtn
Agree with every word.
Why have the grid operators not gone on TV (or the media) and said what their problems and concerns are? Are they being paid not to tell??
.
Toning down the propaganda.
“Arctic Ice to Last Decades Longer Than Thought?”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090921-arctic-sea-ice.html
Richard Heg (09:29:16) :
This summer Arctic sea ice shrank to only 1.97 square miles (5.1 million square kilometers). The 2009 drop is still the third largest on record, but it’s not as big as some scientists had feared. (Explore a vanishing sea-ice interactive.)
Arctic sea ice typically shrinks in the summer and grows in the winter. It typically reaches its lowest coverage around mid-September.
One-Year Reprieve
Meier cautions the new findings do not mean the Arctic is in recovery, or that global warming is slowing down.
“I look at it as a one-year reprieve,” he said. “I don’t expect that to continue.”
For one thing, this year’s ice is thinner than in the past, and thus more vulnerable to future melt.
“If we get another really warm summer,” Meier said, “we’ll probably be back to where we were in 2007.”
————————————–
….and there was silly old me thinking that Walt could stop bed-wetting this year.
Don’t you love the typo though ?? 1.97 square miles. That’s a pretty small area for the entire population of drowning polar bears to cling on to.
Oooops, that should be “Richard Heg’s link”. Sorry for almost saddling you with that snip Richard.
If the freeze rate matches last year, the 2009 curve will rise above all previous AMSR-E curves by mid-October. That has happened once before this year, during a three-week period around the first of May.
BS from BBC and NASA :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8272357.stm
It’s Arctic Monkeys!
“I am sure we are simply experiencing a repetition of such a 60 to 70-year warming/cooling cycle which probably has taken place from time immemorial.”
Different species of microfauna grow in open water compared to under ice, and their fossils leave characteristic signatures in the sea bottom sediments. The fossils from open water don’t show up in recent arctic ocean sediment cores, showing his level of melt HASN’T taken place for thousands of years.
“Faunal and lithologic evidence is used to reconstruct paleoceanographic events over the last 4.5 million years. The inception of perennial sea-ice cover is dated at about 0.7 million years.”
Arctic Oceanic Climate in Late Cenozoic Time; Yvonne Herman and David M. Hopkins
Science 1 August 1980: Vol. 209. no. 4456, pp. 557 – 562; DOI: 10.1126/science.209.4456.557
61 cites
sigh…
In an article about the 2008 sea ice, you claimed that a 28% increase was reason to refute AGW. Which is wrong because of the difference in time scales between climate and weather (ice being a result of weather).
Now there is a 38% DECREASE in sea ice and you are not treating the data the same way.
I am not saying these is warming, just pointing out the selective treatment of data.
Also I don’t think any climatologists would agree that the data from 2005-2009 can be used to say anything about climate.
The IJIS website that you cite as the source for the information in this blog posting now (early October)shows that the extent of sea ice has fallen back below 2005 levels
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Since the comparison to 2005 was the central theme of your blog post I hope you will note this for your readers.
Also, as you know, comparing data points from a couple of nearly adjacent years can not be expected to show the greenhouse effect. If you or your readers want to see how the current year compares to long term averages, I suggest that you use the graph on the NSIDC website at
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
This graph gives current year, record year and average from 1979-2000. I have found that students understand this graph without giving the change in consecutive years more weight than it deserves.