There’s plenty of stories about how Arctic sea ice is now “rotten”. There’s darn few that talk about yearly comparisons or what other scientific outlets are saying about the claim.
As many WUWT readers know, 2007 was the minimum year of summer extent in sea ice, a year that is routinely held up as a cause for alarm. Another cause for alarm has been the “decline of multi-year sea ice”. Most recently we’ve gotten claims of “rotten ice” in the news media. That “rotten” ice is “duping the satellites” they say. This all from one fellow, Dr. David Barber on a ship that took a short expedition in the Arctic and observed what he called “rotten ice”. Here’s Dr. Barber using the poster child for sea ice loss in a presentation.
Seems that his “rotten” message resonated, even the media in Alaska (who can observe sea ice on their own) are saying it: New study: Arctic ice is rotten (Anchorage Daily News)
Over at the Greenbang Blog, they say that: ‘Rotten’ sea ice creates false impression of Arctic recovery
They cite:
Satellite data in 2008 and 2009 appeared to indicate that Arctic sea ice cover had started to grow again after reaching a record low, leading some to claim that global warming was reversing. However, University of Manitoba researcher David Barber found that wasn’t the case after he viewed the ice firsthand this September from an ice breaker travelling through the southern Beaufort Sea.
What the satellites had identified as thick, multiyear ice, it turned out, was in fact thin, “rotten” ice, Barber and his colleagues discovered.
This apparently was the conclusion from watching Dr. Barber’s YouTube video:
You can read Barber’s study here (Word DOC file)
So if the satellites are “duped” into seeing more ice than actually exists, then 2007 ice must have been really, really, rotten:
Compare for yourself, here.
Looks like it has firmed up since then. So no matter how you spin it, there has indeed been improvement in sea ice in 2007. Going from “really, really rotten” in 2007 to simply “rotten” Arctic sea ice in 2009 is definitely an improvement.
One other note, if this “rotten ice” problem and satellite duping proposed by Dr. Barber is in fact real, I’d fully expect that the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) would make some sort of announcement or post a caveat about it on the “Arctic Sea Ice News and analysis” web page where they present the satellite data. I couldn’t find anything on that page about “rotten ice” or satellite data being inaccurate.
Looking further, I used a Google search for “rotten” within NSIDC’s web site (available from their search tool in the upper right of their web page) reveals no recent documents or web pages using that word. Odd.
OK maybe Cryosphere Today? Nope nothing there either.
JAXA‘s sea ice page? Their News page? Not a peep.
Nansen’s Arctic ROOS sea ice page? Or their news page? All quiet on the Arctic front.
Maybe the Danish Meteorological Institute (in Copenhagen no less) sea ice page? Surely, something must be “rotten” in Denmark, no? Alas, they don’t mention it either.
Gosh, the Arctic ice is rotten, the satellites are duped, and none of the major scientific organzations that track sea ice have anything to say about it?
It seems Dr. Barber’s conclusions are being left out in the cold by his peers.
Adderw:
The truth being stranger than fiction, that is what Tony Blair said on daytime telly.I paraphrase.
“Even without the threat of WMDs I would have still wanted Britain to invade Iraq”.
The threat of WMDs was the only reason parliament voted to go to war in Iraq and Blair knew in advance there wasn’t any.
He don’t like facts getting in the way of his agenda.
He cites frustration with journalism and also personal fatigue …
That increasing sea ice extent is really warming
Those decreasing global temperatures are just natural variability, and would be decreasing faster if not for CO2… so that’s warming too
/sarcasm off
Richard (13:38:28) :
You got a link for that? That’s great!
JonesII (12:39:28) :
Saint Gore again:
Gore: Polar ice may vanish in 5-7 years
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091214/ap_on_sc/climate_gore
That’s odd. A year ago (Dec. 13, 2008) he said the ENTIRE north polar ice cap WILL disappear in 5 years, and here he is a year later saying it MAY vanish in 5 to 7 years?
How will people know what to believe of what he says, if he keeps not only changing the content, but keeps moving the goal posts?
If this keeps up, Saint Gore may need to give up his halo.
Dave Wendt (13:44:09) : two sigma? wow! Someone told Obama he couldnt make a bigger mess of the economy than it was already in. In that sphere, at least, he has proved that yes he could.
Time Magazine has such an aura of old media decrepitude. The stranded polar bear must now be the ultimate stock image. Does no one tell them?
I found a copy of Time in a toilet a few weeks ago and tried to read a bit.
Gawd!
I also find it instructive to view the DMI arctic temperature graph in the sidebar.
If you click on that you can see not only the current year but previous years back to 1958. Clicking on each year in Arkiv allows you to easily compare summer temperatures with reference to the 1958 to 2002 average. To my untutored eye it would seem that summers have been generally below average for the last few years and then around average until the early 1990s, when there were some excursions above the average curve.
Now, I an prepared to be corrected, but it looks to me that there is very little evidence of increasing arctic temperatures from this set of measurements.
Nice Monckton video. It is a shame more people don’t look at global ice, not just arctic ice.
I’m aware this is off topic on this thread – very sorry – but had not seen any reference to this latest Google promotion and not sure where to comment.
On their search page I notice Google are now actively promoting an explore global warming with Google Earth – all the usual alarmist stuff and Al Gore. Google are now well and truly out of the closet about whose side they are on and actively promoting ‘classic’ AGW.
So the answer TanGeng looks to be for quite some time and clearly Google would not have stepped in so publically if they thought it was the losing side of the discussion.
Ah, they can say whatever they want, we will only laugh at them, and never believe a word…
Perhaps the Dr., having spent 25 years of his life examining the region, felt he was entitled to some naming rights. The Rotten Sea? It makes much more sense that way.
Just who are the denialists?
Roald Amundsen
1872-1928
“On December 14, 1911,
Amundsen and four others stood at the South Pole, a month before Robert Scott. This expedition was an incredible masterpiece of organization. Here is the story.”
http://www.south-pole.com/p0000101.htm
E.M.Smith (10:03:17) :
> The only thing rotten here is the ‘rotten ice’ theory. Ice does not rot.
> There is no physical mechanism for it.
How long have you lived in California?
One example of rotten ice – consider a nice healthy icicle formed in pretty cold conditions. Solid ice, nearly clear, pretty strong, capable of kill you if you stand under the eaves while knocking icicles down.
A few days later the temperature climbs a little above freezing, and thin layer of cracks – sort of a general crazing – covers the icicle. Its strength is a lot lower, it fractures along the cracks, I suspect the crystalline structure inside the icicle is rearranging itself. Basically it’s a very different chunk of ice, a rather sorry end of a once proud decoration.
That may or may not be related to what happens to ice on ponds. While I was quite happy as a kid to walk on fresh “black ice” that that was only a couple inches thick early in the winter, the rotten ice in springtime was another story. Instead of the good solid black ice, that rotten ice holds a winter’s worth of frozen slush (white ice), layering due to water flowing into snow that weighted down the early ice, odd melting patterns, old cracks that can no longer be ignored, and other processes we probably don’t understand well.
No point in going out on rotten ice – can’t slide on it, can’t skate, so weak that I wouldn’t trust 6″ of it.
While I agree “rotten ice” is not a very scientific term, I wouldn’t be surprised to find it in places in the Arctic at the end of a melt season. Espcially in salt water which freezes very differently than fresh.
Oh – don’t go out on thin ice like I did, at least don’t unless you weigh what you did at 13 ya, are 20 feet away from anyone else, in shallow water, and know how slippery wet ice is if it does break. BTW, I never have broken through anything deeper than a puddle.
On the first really cold day with thick black ice, do go out and jump on it to trigger cracks to form and propagate away from you. It makes a really neat sound and terrifies the less bold. The ice on top shrinks and puts a huge stress on itself. Once the crack starts it propagates at a hundred feet per second of so.
Eternal Melting? An interesting blog post detailing NY Times articles that discuss arctic melting:
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/eternal_melting/
From the New York Times, 128 years of looming polar doom:
• 1881: “This past Winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting …”
• 1932: “NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents”
• 1934: “New Evidence Supports Geology’s View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmer”
• 1937: “Continued warm weather at the Pole, melting snow and ice.”
• 1954: “The particular point of inquiry concerns whether the ice is melting at such a rate as to imperil low-lying coastal areas through raising the level of the sea in the near future.”
• 1957: “U.S. Arctic Station Melting”
• 1958: “At present, the Arctic ice pack is melting away fast. Some estimates say that it is 40 per cent thinner and 12 per cent smaller than it was fifteen years [ago].”
• 1959: “Will the Arctic Ocean soon be free of ice?”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to remember reading that last years sea ice extent didn’t all melt away this summer, and IMHO that means there’ll be a multi-layer ice for next summer to try and melt, i.e. multi-layer ice is expanding the coming year.
This is just silly. Obviously every other year has exactly the same problem.
I’m sorry but on my trip through the artic in 2007 there was way more rotten ice. And I have the data to prove it! Unfortunately, it’s covered by confidentiality agreements, which I lost. If you want the data, send me an FOIA, David Palmer of CRU is handling all these matters for me. #Si
This is no longer a scientific battle. This fight is a full propaganda war. The enemy has the upper hand because they control the mass dissemination of news. How can the rebels counter this formidable weapon? It seems all but hopeless.
The rebels must trust in the Force. The Force is truth. Truth is the ultimate weapon and we will use it to overcome the global empire of deceit. Keep up the good fight, Mr. Watts. We’re in it to the end.
Waiter- my ice is rotten. And I want a C-14 date on that Scotch.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/5261586/Nuclear-bomb-tests-help-to-identify-fake-whisky.html
@ur momisugly Richard Castro (12:01:40) : If you visit the good RSS site at http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html you will note the warming of the Arctic area due to the AMO cycle. You will also note that it is beginning to fall off as the cycle goes into its downswing. A slight blip up this year due to the El Nino, but figure 8 shows the increase in the anomaly through 2005/6 and is starting to show the decrease in the anomaly as we hit the downside of the AMO cycle.
May the Gore effect be in full force later this week. I can see the headline now: “Final days of global warming conference called off due to severe blizzard conditions.”
The BBC weather report tonight is for rotten snow this Wednesday and maybe Friday.
The weather man seemed to cringe when he mentioned there might be snow !?!
It’s not that unusual at this time of year in the UK. I know. I’ve been here 70 years.
My $2000 challenge is still open to Prof Barber.
Tom Moriarty
From: http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/environment/departments/geography/staff/494.htm
Dr. Barber raised over $38M in research funding over the past 5 years.
complete text (before they pull it out from the web, as usual)
Dr. David Barber
Professor
Canada Research Chair Tier I
Arctic System Science.
Associate Dean (Research)
Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources
Director, Centre for Earth Observation Science (CEOS)
Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources
476 Wallace
474-6981
Email
Website
Courses Offered:
Climate Change
GEOG 4670 Winter Term
GEOG 7440 Winter Term Research Interests
Dr. Barber obtained his Bachelors (1981) and Masters (1987) from the University of Manitoba, and his Ph.D. (1992) in Arctic Climatology from the University of Waterloo, Ontario. He was appointed to a faculty position at the University of Manitoba in 1993 and received a Canada Research Chair in Arctic System Science in 2002. He is currently Director of the Centre for Earth Observation Science (CEOS), and Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Environment, the University of Manitoba. Dr. Barber has extensive experience in the examination of the Arctic marine environment as a ‘system’, and the effect climate change has on this system. His first Arctic field experience was in 1981 and he has conducted field experiments annually since then. His early work, with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, examined Arctic Marine Mammal habitat detection and change. His later work focused on the geophysics of snow and sea ice and in particular the response of the snow/ice system to oceanic and atmospheric forcing.. His research group has a special interest in the coupling between physical and biological marine systems in the Arctic and in the use of Earth Observation technologies in the study of ocean-sea ice-atmosphere (OSA) processes.
Dr. Barber has published over 100 articles in the peer reviewed literature pertaining to sea ice, climate change and physical-biological coupling in the Arctic marine system. He leads the largest International Polar Year (IPY) project in the world, known as the Circumpolar Flaw Lead (CFL) system study (www.ipy-cfl.ca). He is recognized internationally through scientific leadership in large network programs (e.g., NOW, CASES, ArcticNet, the Amundsen, and CFL), as an invited member of several Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) national committees (e.g., NSERC GSC 09; NSERC IPY, NSERC northern supplements, etc), international committees (GEWEX, IAPP, CNC-SCOR, IARC, etc) and invitations to national and international science meetings (e.g., American Geophysical Union (AGU), Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS), American Meteorological Society (AMS), American Society for Limnology and Oceanography (Spain), IMPACTS (Russia), European Space Agency (ESA, Italy), Arctic Frontiers (Norway), etc). Dr. Barber supervised to completion: 5 honours theses; 10 MSc theses; 9 PhD dissertations and 6 postdoctoral fellows. He currently supervises 7 MSc students; 11 PhD students, 4 post doctoral fellows and 9 full time research staff. Dr. Barber raised over $38M in research funding over the past 5 years.
Major Research Projects
In addition to his university teaching and administrative commitments, Dr Barber has established the Community Based Monitoring Program (CBM) which links several Inuit communities to measurement and monitoring of sea ice and climate change related variables in the Western High Arctic and Hudson Bay. He was also instrumental in establishing the ‘Schools on Board’ program, which outreaches Arctic Marine science to high school students and teachers aboard the Canadian Research Icebreaker Amundsen. In recognition of his commitment to environmental research and education he received the RH award in Physical Sciences from the University of Manitoba and has been nominated for the NSERC Steacie Award. Dr. Barber is regularly asked to present to media (TV, radio and print), to policy bodies (Senate committee hearings, policy workshops, Canadian Arctic Sovereignty, ADM committees, etc.) and industry (oil companies, hydroelectric utilities, marine shipping) regarding climate change and the Arctic.
Recent Publications
Galley, R, B.J. Hwang. D. Barber, E. Key and J.K. Ehn. 2007. On the spatial and Temporal variability of Sea Ice in the CASES Study Region: 1980 – 2004. Journal of Geophysical Research. In Press (March’08).
Ehn, J.K. T. N. Papakyriakou, D. G. Barber. Inference of optical properties from radiation profiles within melting sea ice. Journal of Geophysical Research. In Press (Jan’08).
Langlois, A., T. Fisico, D. G. Barber and T.N. Papakyriakou. The response of snow thermophysical processes to the passage of a polar low-pressure system and it’s impact on in situ passive microwave radiometry: A case study. Journal of Geophysical Research. 113, C03S04, doi:10.1029/2007JC004197.
Trembley, J.E, K.Simpson, J. Martin, L. Miller, Y. Gratton, D. Barber and N. Price. Vertical stability and the annual dynamics of nutrients and chlorophyll fluorescence in the coastal, southeast Beaufort Sea. Journal of Geophysical Research. VOL. 113, C07S90, doi:10.1029/2007JC004547
Hwang, B. J., and D. G. Barber, 2008. On the impact of ice emissivity on ice temperature retrieval using passive microwave radiance data. Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 5(3):doi:10.1109/LGRS.2008.917266
Langlois, A. and D. G. Barber. Passive Microwave Remote Sensing of Seasonal Snow Covered Sea Ice. Progress in Physical Geography. 31(6), 539-573, doi: 10.1177/0309133307087082
Jin, X., J. Hanesiak and D. Barber. Time series of daily-averaged cloud fractions over landfast first year sea ice from multiple data sources. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. DOI: 10.1175/2007JAMC1472.1. vol (46)1818-1827.
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