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.
JimInIndy (14:42:51) :
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.
Truer words were never spoken. This ought to be printed out 10,000 times and sent in paper mail to the jokers looking at arctic ice. Maybe if they had to read it that many times it would sink in, just a little bit…
Take a look at this chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice-core-isotope.png
140,000 years of “temperatures” via proxies.
Here is a close up of the last 40,000 years in ice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epica-vostok-grip-40kyr.png
Notice for that the entire 10-12,000 years of the Holocene we have been in a general downtrend. Slowly, inexorably, cooling. Notice that it is an incredibly flat stable time when compared to the rest of the 140,000 years. Then ask just exactly how “extreme” our “climate change” has been when it has been ‘steady as a rock’ in comparison to the past…
Now look back to the LAST interglacial. Notice the “pop and start dropping” with not very long at the top? We are incredibly lucky ours has been flatter and we will need to be ever more incredibly lucky if we are to prevent that this time by any means possible.
There is some process that acts as a hard lid on temperatures just a bit above our present temperatures. (If you look at longer duration charts you see all the inter-glacials whack into it and bounce off). There is no such protection to the downside. ALL the risk is to the downside.
The cold has rapid onset, but the ice build up (bottom line) is slower:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png
(No, it isn’t an issue any time soon. The ice extends as a wobbly linear trend in a glacial. Take the max extent at last glacial and measure the distance to the Greenland sheet. Divide by 100,000 years. You get the ice advancing at about 800 FEET per year. We could easily already be in the “next” glacial and the LIA might have been the start. We wobble that much, but the max extent of ice in the NEXT LIA ought to be all of “800 feet further south per year since the last LIA” at the bottom of the next one. Not the kind of thing to get excited about in any one human lifetime… Call me in 1000 years and we’ll see if the ice is 800,000 feet or about 160 miles further south than in 1816. You can walk south farther in a few minutes than the ice advances in a year, on average. That’s the “fun” part of the “Ice Age Is Coming!” disaster scenario. You get to have all the disaster and panic talk, but nobody gets hurt for 1000 years 😉
The real question we ought to be asking is “Why has this interglacial been so stable and hospitable to life when prior interglacials were pop-and-drop spikes? And how do we keep this one from dropping off a cliff like the last ones?”
UP IS DOWN
O/T [sorta]
Has anyone come forward and claimed an exact SC23 minimum ‘date’ [that’s stood up to counter-arguments?].
Or is the graph still being ‘estimated’?
Speaking for civil servants (as I am one – in Australia), I think you’ll find the vast majority are happy to go about their jobs reporting information impartially. The problem lies at the top of organisations where the service interacts with politicians to whom they report.
If the Australian experience is anything to go by the civil service has bceome increasingly politicised in the upper echelons, with the party in power usually ensuring the top candidate for a position happens to be aligned with party views. I am sure it is not all that different in the US.
So at the end of the day the politicians get to hear what they want to hear. This is not a problem with 90%+ of the civil servants doing their job, but at the interface with politicians. Frank and fearless advice died decades ago.
Luckily the organisation I work for is far more pragmatically (development) oriented, so this is almost never an issue.
Dr David Jones of Ferny Creek (15:52:30) : “Your repeated tendency to disclose personal information…”
A very quick Google search yields a “Firebreak” PDF near the top:
“Dr. David Jones, head of Climate Analysis at the bureau’s National Climate Center.”
If you really want personal information, I could dig a little deeper.
Until the “ice experts” at NSIDC can, with fifteen arrows, at least bracket the right answer –as they failed to do this summer– they do not deserve any respect for their prognostication skills of the future. Simple as that.
“I’m sure you could figure out a way to make BoM pay for it. -A”
I’m still waiting for the BOM to update the sites below that We had our lowest September maximum on record on the 30th .
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/200909/html/IDCJDW6083.200909.shtml
This beats the previous by 1.7C at both locations.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_007045_All.shtml
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_007046_All.shtml
IMO, This is just another “not in the last 50+ years” anomaly’s that have just kept happening around the world since the sun has gone quiet.
One of the returning threats contributing to “the melting” is soot, preferably soot from Anthropogenic activities.
They never mention the soot and dust which have a natural origin like volcanic emissions, wild fires and dust storms.
Here is a picture from a dust storm over Washington.
If you look at the incredible frequency and the scale of these events, human activity
is entirely insignificant:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=40590&src=eorss-iotd
Dr David Jones of Ferny Creek (15:52:30) :
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.
Dear Sir or Madam: To think that you can be ‘anonymous’ in the age of 24 x 7 video cameras, GPS tracked cars and cell phones, tens of thousands of video cameras in London alone, international interlinked police and military databases, google earth, satellites that show MY care in MY driveway, and a google drive by with plenty of license plates in the image (and much much more) is simply silly. We won’t even get into millimeter wave visualization tools that let you see through clothing.. (It can be fun to take out the IR filter from video cameras and see just what clothing they see through with their “IR and a bit less” capability… the mil spec stuff easily lets you see guns through clothing and without X-rays to set off countermeasures detectors.)
If you attend ANY event ANYWHERE you ARE on video. (I went to a country farm with friends and about 100 ish attended a solstice party. Yup, found myself on video…)
While I try, for various reasons, to limit the degree to which “privacy erosion” hits me personally, it simply is not possible to be private in a public place; and that includes the internet.
If you don’t think the internet infrastructure is instrumented to track origin of IP addresses and log who talks to whom, well… I can show you how to set this up with either: Cisco router commands, or on any Unix / Linux box. I take great pains to mutate my IP address, yet Google knows what city I am in. Though I’ve kept them from knowing my street address with some diligence).
FWIW, I have done and I have taught computer forensics. If you ever put anything in email, realize that in the USA it must be kept for years. (The exact number varies by the type of company doing the email service, up to 7 years for some, 5 or so for most). This is so that lawyers can do “discovery” and don’t have to hire folks like me to dig it out of the garbage can… This is part of why I am reluctant to do much of anything via email.
So not only is your assertion that “disclosing personal information is wrong” terribly naive, it is an attitude completely obsoleted both by the technology of our day and the laws that have pushed it onto us.
To quote someone or other “Good luck with that…”
Finally, I have been reading this blog for a long time now. (2 years?) In that time I’ve not seen Anthony “attack” anyone. He will point out folly. He will point to the blog ‘rules’. He will suggest that folks who are a PITA please find some other A to be a Pain in… And he will suggest, and sometimes tell, folks who insist on “instructing him how to run HIS blog to make THEM happy” that maybe they ought to go be king of their own hill…
If you don’t like that, might I suggest you go away to where you will be less aggravated by things you can not control? I’m sure you would be happier with less negativity in your life. (Then again, if the negativity follows you from place to place, consider that it just might be you…)
I think a lot of alarmists think they can get away with making apocalyptical predictions because they feel that they cannot be disproven in their lifetimes and are safe from ridicule or worse.
Well I am not so sure they can feel so safe.
The last ‘prediction’ I saw in the UK was that it was ‘likely’ that global temps would rise by 4C by 2060 as ‘things are worse than we thought’.
So how long do we have to wait before we have a 90% confidence level that this prediction is false.
Now to get to those temps it is obvious that numerous record high temp years will have to be set along the way.
The current record year is 1998. So running from that year and assuming man made CO2 emmissions remain constant and either assuming a linear warming response or more accurately a logarithmic response to the rising CO2, what is the probability of any year subsequent to 1998, taken in date order, being a record year, assuming all other forcing and feedback factors even out over these years?
Further then work out the probability of any subsequent year not being a record year. Then work out how many years, subsequent to 1998, that does not contain a record year, have to pass before we have a 90% confidence level that the statement, ‘temps will be 4C higher in 2060’, is false.
Can any maths and probability experts out there confirm the exact date?
Alan
“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!”
Is Al Gore and his cronies going to hire a bunch of students over the summer to go up to the Arctic with blow torches so the ice is going to melt on que? I think that’s what we be needed if the trend of recovering Arctic sea-ice continues over the next few years.
I don’t believe a word the NSIDC says. I don’t believe it is conducting science. I believe it is conducting a political campaign. Observations of thinner ice or lower extent are good observations that can readily be explained by natural climate variables and cycles. Furthermore I don’t believe 30 years of data should be used to draw conclusions about anything to do with a climate system that has existed for billions of years. We have an out-of-control government-science complex hell bent on controlling and taxing energy with a supine mainstream media that recycles climate alarmist talking points relentlessly.
Off topic, but interesting that NOAA’s arctic camera at
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/latest/noaa1.jpg
stopped updating as of Sept 25th.
Did it get blown over by an early fall gust?
In the mean time at the other side of the world:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/10/06/antarctic-ice-melt-at-lowest-levels-in-satellite-era/
This whole concept of ice disappearing is ridiculous. Here is my latest post done last week on sea ice calculated right from the gridded satellite data – code provided.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/5590/
Look at the last couple of plots which offset global sea ice anomaly by the average global sea ice.
Let’s just say, it aint too friggin’ close and this kind of insanity has got to stop.
If it’s not science, what is it?!
QUoting:
“slight recovery”
Commenting:
If a million square kilometers (at the nadir of annual ice extent) or 25% is “slight” then please send me a “slight” portion of your annual income, OK?
Ron de Haan (16:50:57) : One of the returning threats contributing to “the melting” is soot, preferably soot from Anthropogenic activities. They never mention the soot and dust which have a natural origin like volcanic emissions, wild fires and dust storms.
Nice picture! BTW, take a look at this graph of historic dust levels over the prior glacial cycles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok-ice-core-petit.png
Notice that lower dust line? Dust goes “way high” by an order of magnitude or so toward the (dry) end of a frozen glacial… By comparison, we are practically devoid of all dust right now.
Rising dust levels is an indicator of more cold, not more warmth. And any idea that rising dust is going to make things warmer need to look at the constant increase in ice levels as the dust increases during glacial episodes.
Plants are very highly CO2 stressed at 200 ppm. I would speculate that between the CO2 stress (that reduces the ability to handle water stress) and the increasingly frozen (and therefor dry) environment, ice age glacials end in a frozen desert with death of plants widespread ending in a dust “blow off” from that desertification.
Warm is Wet.
Warm is Good.
Warm is growth.
Warm is not dusty.
Cold is not good for plants and other living things.
I guess its safe to say “global cooling” is over since global temperature anomalies have risen rapidly since September 2007. No, wait… Doh! We’re only supposed to apply that logic to Arctic sea ice anomalies.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2007.67/plot/rss/from:2007.67/trend
I would be interested to know how things compare with the extent of coverage during World War II? I am sure that the RN kept abreast of the extent of coverage whilst running the Russian convoys.
“We still expect to see ice-free summers sometime in the next few decades.”
The North Pole–home of Santa, his elves…and 6 C increases in world temps! Sorry kids, Christmas is cancelled (and we are going to have to reduce your standard of living to 1850).
“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.
And there’s no reason not to think that either Mr. Serreze
Come on, you know you are being disingenuous.
” INGSOC (11:53:08) :
“The September 2009 ice cover remained thin, leaving it vulnerable to melt in coming summers, according to the CU-Boulder report.”
If this is so, then why were the scientists that actually measured the ice thickness (Polar 5 flyover) surprised by the “thicker than expected” ice they found? (I can’t find the link to the original Polar 5 Wegener Institute article… Anyone?) Don’t tell me CU-Boulder used the data from the Catlin Expedition!”
http://www.awi.de/de/aktuelles_und_presse/pressemitteilungen/detail/item/research_aircraft_polar_5_finishes_arctic_expedition_unique_measurement_flights_in_the_central_arc/?cHash=086f3b9dd6
There was a article by Radio Bremen that was a bit more plain.
I suppose we will have to wait until after Kopenhagen to see the results (if ever). But maybe the university of Alberta will let us know.
Anthony and Charles: A well deserved snip. But didn’t you think it was funny?
REPLY: No doubt. -A
I keep wondering why all these scare stories about the loss of Arctic Ice. We know that the planet has been in a non ice age several time. A non ice age means there is no ice at either pole. Yet the planet is still here, animal and plant life is still here. What is the worry. I doubt if we will get out of this ice age yet it was warmer in the Medieval warm period and the Arctic then was wide open, but not ice free. The polar bears are still here, the planet is still here, we are still here. It was even warmer in the Roman warm period and… What is this worry about declining ice about? Not that it is declining. The inhabitants of the Arctic would like it if it was declining. There are times I think this is only about change. People were born into a certain climate period and they want it to stay the same. Hey, both my parents were born in the 20’s and they would like it to stay as warm as it was then.
At it’s current rate of growth, Arctic ice will stretch all the way to D.C. by the end of the century….