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.
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.