NSIDC seems to be saying: It’s slightly less worse than we thought. For another view, see Dr. Tony Berry’s sea ice analysis on WUWT yesterday.
From a University of Colorado Press Release
Arctic sea ice recovers slightly in 2009, remains on downward trend, says U. of Colorado report
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  IMAGE: This graphics show multi-year Arctic sea ice changes.
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Despite a slight recovery in summer Arctic sea ice in 2009 from record-setting low years in 2007 and 2008, the sea ice extent remains significantly below previous years and remains on a trend leading toward ice-free Arctic summers, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.
According to the CU-Boulder center, the 2009 minimum sea ice extent was the third lowest since satellite record-keeping began in 1979. The past five years have seen the five lowest Arctic sea ice extents ever recorded.
“It’s nice to see a little recovery over the past couple of years, but there’s no reason to think that we’re headed back to conditions seen in the 1970s,” said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geography department. “We still expect to see ice-free summers sometime in the next few decades.”
The average ice extent during September, a standard measurement for climate studies, was 2.07 million square miles (5.36 million square kilometers). This was 409,000 square miles (1.06 million square kilometers) greater than the record low for the month in 2007, and 266,000 square miles (690,000 square kilometers) greater than the second-lowest extent recorded in September 2008.
The 2009 Arctic sea ice extent was still 649,000 square miles (1.68 square kilometers) below the 1979-2000 September average, according to the report. Arctic sea ice in September is now declining at a rate of 11.2 percent per decade and in the winter months by about 3 percent per decade. The consensus of scientists is that the shrinking Arctic sea ice is tied to warming temperatures caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases being pumped into Earth’s atmosphere, as reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Sea surface temperatures in the Arctic this season remained higher than normal, but slightly lower than the past two years, according to data from University of Washington Senior Oceanographer Mike Steele. The cooler conditions, which resulted largely from cloudy skies during late summer, slowed ice loss compared to the past two years. In addition, atmospheric patterns in August and September helped to spread out the ice pack, keeping extent higher.
The September 2009 ice cover remained thin, leaving it vulnerable to melt in coming summers, according to the CU-Boulder report. At the end of the summer, younger, thinner ice less than one year in age accounted for 49 percent of the ice cover. Second- year ice made up 32 percent of the ice cover, compared to 21 percent in 2007 and 9 percent in 2008.
Only 19 percent of the ice cover was over two years old — the least ever recorded in the satellite record and far below the 1981-2000 summer average of 48 percent, according to the CU-Boulder report. Measurements of sea ice thickness by satellites are used to determine the age of the ice.
Earlier this summer, NASA researcher Ron Kwok and colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle published satellite data showing that ice thickness declined by 2.2 feet between 2004 and 2008.
“We’ve preserved a fair amount of first-year ice and second-year ice after this summer compared to the past couple of years,” said NSIDC scientist Walt Meier of CU-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. “If this ice remains in the Arctic thorough the winter, it will thicken, which gives some hope of stabilizing the ice cover over the next few years. However, the ice is still much younger and thinner than it was in the 1980s, leaving it vulnerable to melt during the summer.”
Arctic sea ice follows an annual cycle of melting through the warm summer months and refreezing in the winter. Sea ice reflects sunlight, keeping the Arctic region cool and moderating global climate temperatures.
While Arctic sea ice extent varies from year to year because of changing atmospheric conditions, ice extent has shown a dramatic overall decline over the past 30 years.
“A lot of people are going to look at the graph of ice extent and think that we’ve turned the corner on climate change,” said NSIDC Lead Scientist Ted Scambos of CU-Boulder’s CIRES. “But the underlying conditions are still very worrisome.”
NSIDC is part of CIRES and is funded primarily by NASA.
No knock on PhDs, but Thomas Karl is no ‘Dr.’ Neither is Harry van Loon or Freeman Dyson. My objection to Karl is that he is more politician than scientist, and has no credibility after his excusing his work and that of his bureau.
Why do they get this wrong over and over and over?
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NSIDC clearly seems to be pushing an agenda. Here is a selection of their press releases from 2008, a year that average Arctic Sea Ice Extent was increasing:
3 December, 2008 Ice growth slows; Arctic still warmer than usual
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/120308.html
2 October, 2008 Arctic Sea Ice Down to Second-Lowest Extent; Likely Record-Low Volume
http://nsidc.org/news/press/20081002_seaice_pressrelease.html
4 September, 2008 Record ice loss in August
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/090408.html
26 August, 2008 Arctic sea ice dips below second-lowest record
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/082608.html
25 August, 2008 Arctic shortcuts open up; decline pace steady
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/082508.html
11 August, 2008 Sea ice decline accelerates, Amundsen’s Northwest Passage opens
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/081108.html
1 August, 2008 Race between waning sunlight and thin ice
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/080108.html
17 July, 2008 A different pattern of sea ice retreat
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/071708.html
2 July, 2008 Melt onset earlier than normal
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/070208.html
3 June, 2008 Arctic sea ice still on track for extreme melt
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/060308.html
5 May, 2008 Arctic sea ice forecasts point to lower-than-average season ahead
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/050508.html
7 April, 2008 Arctic sea ice extent at maximum below average, thin
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/040708.html
It is also telling and pathetic that NSIDC never mentions Antarctic Sea Ice Extent, which is currently above average and hit a record high this year:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png
“But the underlying conditions are still very worrisome.
Uh.. no.. I’d call glacial ice advancing into Canada worrisome.
What about the Antarctic? Any press releases for the fact that the 2009 Ice Area peak was 5th highest since 1978??
No- because it’s “climate change”, not GLOBAL warming anymore 😉
“It’s nice to see a little recovery over the past couple of years, but there’s no reason to think that we’re headed back to conditions seen in the 1970s,” said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze
Amazing chutzpah to suggest he’s glad that ice cover has increased.
The bad news (if you believe the NSIDC) is that it looks like the polar bears are screwed. The good news is that this could be an opportunity for the Texas “prairie chickens”, if they can learn to swim. T. Boone Pickens may have folded his Texas Panhandle windmill tent prematurely.
Oh, you mean we are not heading back into the era of “Impending Ice Age Will Kill Us All!” ???
Isn’t this a good thing? I’m confused here. Its recovering, but don’t get too excited because it likely will not recover to the point where we are going to scare you to death again with cries of “The Ice Age Is Coming”??
Give me a break… GIGO
If the glaciers spread down to cover half the northern hemisphere, (Like in Day after tomorrow) they’d say
“They would have gone even further had it not been for global warming”
humour.
Ric Werme (12:49:30) said:
No he won’t!
3 more years and we WILL have ice -free summers: Al Gore said so in Berlin, underneath the dinosaur. I seem to remember him holding up 4 fingers and saying something on the lines of : 4 years – 4 – count them!
I wouldn’t get to worked up about this. My feeling is we are setting up to surpass the 1970’s levels of ICE Area. It took what 10 years to prove the Hockey stick to be wrong. I’d like to revisit this conversation in 2018 and see how much ice there is then.
The one thing I do let get to me is these idiots only have what 30 years of records to look at. How can they call the 07 level to lowest?? Yes I know it’s the recorded low. but who’s to say that 1953 wasn’t lower?? You can’t which in my mind proves there is an agenda!!!!!!
Don’t these guys read the papers ?
The atmosphere is going to cool because of the low solar activity. We won’t see an ice-free summer for at least on full solar cycle (11 years)
Dr Jones
I hope you’re not leaving comments on a blog during working hours, on a computer paid for by me, the Australian taxpayer?
Back to work, bludger. Go surf for warm p0rn somewhere else.
I was born in 1937. I don’t put much stock in 30 year trends. Let’s look back at the low ice levels of the pre-WWII, pre-fossil fuel exploitation, pre-CO2- increase period and explain the high temps of the 1930s, compared to the lower temps of the 2000s. A longer perspective sometimes offers a better focus.
Mark Serreze had to write something, but if this is the best he could come up with, it’s just not good enough. Truth or consequences?
http://a.abcnews.com/images/Business/abc_merrill_lehman_080915_mn.jpg
Ice alarmist stories just don’t know when to stop, you’d think they could go back to the drawing board and try a new model if the old one continues to not work properly.
Also, the Solar Flux is back down to 69 according to the side graphic on this site, I thought Leif said it likely wouldn’t go back down to below 70!? The Sun apparently doesn’t want to listen I guess?
no wonder no one in north america believes in agw. This map has roughly looked like this for ONE year now.
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp1.html
In contrast asia looks hotter therefore no change etc globally
Meanwhile on the other side of the planet: “Antarctic Ice Melt at Lowest Levels in Satellite Era”
I expect the headlines will be “Antarctic at lowest levels!”
The US warmists are getting desperate. I think this cartoon says it all really…
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_tb0lU7SbvKE/SpLWQrIHtwI/AAAAAAAACb0/Yc_2IuWL2cg/s400/GW+Cartoon.jpg
Brit warmist alarmism is not only growing more desperate, it’s growing exponentially stupid too. Can you believe this story still has legs?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/06/times_thermageddon_r_us/
“It’s nice to see a little recovery over the past couple of years, but there’s no reason to think that we’re headed back to conditions seen in the 1970s,”
This is bad science, 1970 was very close to entering a solar grand minimum and the PDO had endured many years of negative readings. Give it a little longer and we will have the same results again, but to imply its a normal level is just plain wrong.
DB2 (12:34:40) :
“Examination of records of fast ice thickness and ice extent from four Arctic marginal seas (Kara, Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi) indicates that long-term trends are small and generally statistically insignificant, while trends for shorter records are not indicative of the long-term tendencies due to strong low-frequency variability in these time servies, which places a strong limitation on our ability to resolve long-term trends.”
Read that over twice. Maybe three times. At least someone has scientists “with clue”! You see EXACTLY this same behaviour in stock markets where folks will get their panties all in a bunch on a 2 week down dip in a strongly running up (or flat roller) long term trend and sell right at the bottom of the dip when they ought to be buying. You can not use a short cycle event with oscillations to inform you about long term trends. You must use a measure of longer scope than the period of interest or the ‘low-frequency variability’ (i.e. the rolling of shorter period than the very long term trend) will simply drive you ’round the bend’…
Also, BTW, NSIDC is sounding remarkably like the “Perma-bear” stock pundits. Right after a cyclical drop (about every 10 years for about 1.5 to 2 years) they crow how right they were. They then slowly extend their time window for when the “crash” will resume Real Soon Now, sort of soon now, soon I’m sure, any year now, we are not going up for a long time, well it has been a long time but now we must be close to a top and dropping will resume soon! Until 8 years pass, they miss the entire bull run phase, and are at last vindicated because they “called the crash” when it returns on schedule (and more or less in phase with sunspot cycles… modulo a bit of error band and some hand waving 😉
So watch for the ever lengthening prediction window, the “well, but for this unexpected exceptional event it would have continued down – so just a little longer”, and then the final “It has been a counter trend up for a long time, so when it DOES INEVITABLY turn down, it will do so with a great gusto to catch up with where it ought to be!”.
Watching perma-bears (and perma-bulls) go through their cyclical date with failure is great fun… and knowing which one is best for their phase of the market can be helpful. But they pretty much never seem to “get it” that it’s a cyclical wheel of change they have bolted themselves onto and they WILL get dunked in the drink when the cycle turns…
BOTH fields (climate and stocks) suffer from the same basic failure. Too short a time for their measuring tools in a very long cycle system. For stocks, you have to look at the decade or 2 decade length to see the cycles. For climate, 30 years is a bad joke. We have at a minimum the 60 year PDO, the 176-200 year solar, and the 1500 year Bond Event cycles. Unless you de-trend your shorter term data for those longer term cycles, you will simply be discovering the influence of those cyclical events and then attributing the result to an incorrect cause. (In other words, 30 years of warming “must be from CO2” when in reality it was just 1/2 of the PDO cycle.)
FWIW, the “step change” higher in the ’70s with the last flip will, IMHO, happen again with this flip. We ought to see, IMHO, the same “step change” to the cold side. It would be very interesting to see a graph of the PDO state showing the flipping points along with some clean (i.e. non-GIStemp) temperature record. (I would use GHCN adjusted, pre-GIStemp fiddling, and pick the 1000 longest lived thermometers to produce that data product. I’ve published the source code for how to do this, so anyone can do it.)
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/will-the-good-ghcn-stations-please-stand-up/
It is a very short set of programs, written in FORTRAN. If you really want to use this but can’t stand the idea of FORTRAN I can translate them into C fairly quickly. (Or any of a couple of other languages I’ve used over the years, mostly older things like Algol, Pascal, and related, or even BASIC if pushed into it… but I’m not fluent in the new trendy things like C#, C++, Python, or just about any other “object oriented” thing. I have managed projects written in them, and can puzzle my way through reading them, but writing them is not high on my skill set 😉 They seem to make bloated code that is bigger than it needs to be and I’ve never really needed their “features”…)
Alan Bates (13:55:14) :
3 more years and we WILL have ice -free summers: Al Gore said so in Berlin, underneath the dinosaur. I seem to remember him holding up 4 fingers and saying something on the lines of : 4 years – 4 – count them
—————–
It was actually 5. I have it etched into my memory, as my comment at the time became the quote of the week.
It doesn’t really matter though at this point does it ??
Polyakov et al and other papers suggesting the supposed problematic extent decline is within plausable natural variation when the records over the early 20th Century are taken into account, but the papers are pre the 2007. It would be nice to see the same analyse re-done now.
The importance of the Polar ice lose is the claim that we are at a tipping point and the melt water water will stop the famous atlantic conveyor. The conveyor is still running, the sea level is not rising more than it did before man spotted the ice problem, Thames is not frozen. It is not even clear the polar bears are suffering. In short the world has not come to an end. We do not really care if there is a bit more ice at one pole and a bit less at the other?
The truth is there is not agreement as to why the polar ice minimum has declined in recent decades. Few believe air temp alone is a good predictor of summer ice extent. Air temp, wind, and currents may be part, but I have not seen any models with proven skill even a few months in advance. Nothing modelled 2007, and not 2008.
Which means we have little or no handle on the detail of the processes going on. Which in turn means it hard to see if it unprecedented or even unsual, and certainly impossible to see if it is a problem. But as 2009 had more ice than 2008, with more than 2007, we do not appear to have tipped.
>Since most of your commentary here is centered around your view of what I should and should not do, may I suggest you get your own blog where you can control it as you see fit? I’m sure you could figure out a way to make BoM pay for it.
Your repeated tendency to disclose personal information (which is wrong) and attack individuals when someone points out how comprehensively flawed your analysis is speaks volumes.
REPLY: 1. I made no analysis here. 2. You jumped in with an off topic Insta-demand News Bulletin totally unrelated to sea-ice. So then you won’t be getting your own blog? Your tendency is clear also. Read the blog policy page. -A
jorgekafkazar (12:00:02) :
“…
It’s nonsense, of course. This is like saying a car heading west out of Albuquerque is headed for New York because it was once in Minneapolis. The current “trend,” insofar as there is one, is clearly and strongly upward.
…”
Jorge, I do not think you are wrong, however the above statement commits the same error of logic that the original article does. Any “trend” is measured over a given interval. Manipulate the interval aperture width and the direction of any trend can change. This is precisely why AGW theory would like to make the MWP vanish. As it is their “trend” aperture is limited to period between the present and the Little Ice Age. Push back to the MWP and the “trend” reverses.
You can extract an entire series of positive and negative trends in serial fashion pushing back the peak of the last glacial epoch and farther – after all the Paleogene, 50 mya, was far warmer than the present, so obviously we should be worrying about global cooling. What it comes down to what length of trend is important in human terms and in terms of our environment? Changes on that scale will affect us and our children. Worse, silly “policy” decisions based upon mistaken causes for trends could catastrophically alter the conditions of the present civilization.
“All in” time, got to get those hoax taxes passed, STAT.
Well this was surely unexpected that a government funded institution would hang on to the hoax as long as plausible … and then some.
What has science become. Going to be a bad winter for the hoax.
Maybe this has some relevance
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26176180-11949,00.html
The log from HMS Isabella, which set out in 1818 to seek the fabled Northwest Passage, indicates there has been a small but significant decline in the sea ice in Baffin Bay over the past 190 years. Until now, scientists tracking sea ice formation have largely relied upon observations from satellites.
However, some of the logs suggest that there has been little or no change in sea temperatures elsewhere in the Arctic. Climate change sceptics are likely to seize on these records as evidence that man-made greenhouse gases are having less impact than many scientists have claimed.