Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Inspired by this thread over at Bishop Hill’s excellent blog, I thought I’d write about sea ice. Among the many catastrophic things claimed to be the result of “global warming”, declining sea ice is one of the most popular. We see scary graphics of this all the time, things that look like this:
FIgure 1. Terrifying computer projections showing that we may not have any Arctic sea ice before the end of this century. Clearly, the implication is that we should be very concerned … SOURCE
Now, what’s wrong with this picture?
The problem with the picture is that the earth has two poles. And for reasons which are not well understood, when one pole warms, the other pole cools.
Looking at just the Arctic sea ice is like looking at someone who is pouring water from one glass to another and back again. If we want to see how much water there is, it is useless to observe just one of the person’s hands. We need to look at both hands to see what is happening with the water.
Similarly, to see what is happening in the frozen parts of the ocean, we need to look at global sea ice. There are several records of the area of sea ice. One is the Reynolds Optimally Interpolated dataset (Reynolds OI V2). A second is the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) record. Finally, we have the Hadcrut Ice and Sea Surface Temperature dataset (HadISST1). All of them are available from that most marvellous resource, the KNMI data portal .
It turns out that the NSIDC and the HadISST1 records are nearly identical. The correlation between the two in the Arctic is 0.995 (1.0 is perfect agreement), and in the Antarctic it is 0.999. So in Fig. 2, I have not shown the NSIDC dataset, but you can imagine that there is a third record almost identical to the HadISST1 dataset. Here is what has happened to the global sea ice area from 1982 to the present:
FIgure 2. Global Sea Ice Area 1982-present. Data from satellite observations.
As you can see, while it is certainly true that the Arctic has been losing ice, the Antarctic has been gaining ice. And the total global sea ice has barely changed at all over the period of the record. It goes up a little, it goes down a little, it goes nowhere …
Why should the Antarctic warm when the Arctic cools? The short answer is that we don’t know, although it happens at both short and long time scales. A recent article in Science Magazine Online (subscription required) says:
Eddies and the Seesaw
A series of warm episodes, each lasting several thousand years, occurred in Antarctica between 90,000 and 30,000 years ago. These events correlated with rapid climate oscillations in the Arctic, with Antarctica warming while the Arctic was cooling or already cold. This bipolar seesaw is thought to have been driven by changes in the strength of the deep overturning circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, but some have questioned how completely that process can account for the fine details of Antarctic warming events.
Keeling and Visbeck offer an explanation that builds upon earlier suggestions that include the effects of shallow-water processes as well as deep ones. They suggest that changes in the surface salinity gradient across the Antarctic Circumpolar Current were caused by the melting of icebergs discharged from the Arctic, which allowed increased heat transport to Antarctica by ocean eddies. This mechanism produces Antarctic warming of the magnitude observed in ice core records.
However, not everyone agrees that this is the full explanation. Henrik Svensmark adds another factor to what may be happening:
The cosmic-ray and cloud-forcing hypothesis therefore predicts that temperature changes in Antarctica should be opposite in sign to changes in temperature in the rest of the world. This is exactly what is observed, in a well-known phenomenon that some geophysicists have called the polar see-saw, but for which “the Antarctic climate anomaly” seems a better name (Svensmark 2007).
To account for evidence spanning many thousands of years from drilling sites in Antarctica and Greenland, which show many episodes of climate change going in opposite directions, ad hoc hypotheses on offer involve major reorganization of ocean currents. While they might be possible explanations for low-resolution climate records, with error-bars of centuries, they cannot begin to explain the rapid operation of the Antarctic climate anomaly from decade to decade as seen in the 20th century (figure 6). Cloud forcing is by far the most economical explanation of the anomaly on all timescales.
Regardless of why the polar see-saw is happening, it is a real phenomenon. Ignoring it by looking just at the Arctic leads to unwarranted conclusions about what is happening to sea ice on our most amazing planet. We have to look at both hands, we have to include the other side of the ice, to see the full situation. The real answer to what is happening to global sea ice is …
Nothing.
The problem with the picture is that the earth has two poles. And for reasons which are not well understood, when one pole warms, the other pole cools
The one above is SEA, the one below is a CONTINENT, and when the one above is in summertime (and Catlin expedition starts, and she polar bears are in estro season so attracting male polar bears) the one below is in wintertime.
AusieDan (19:09:14) : You asked, “What is their correlation?”
Correlation = 0.037, using the smoothed data, because there were gaps in the raw data.
You asked, “Have you tried to invert one and lay it on top of the other?”
It doesn’t help:
http://i39.tinypic.com/n1ui6s.png
You wrote, “Now even if I am completely wrong in the above, Willis’s main point still holds true.”
My comment was only about the “when one pole warms, the other pole cools” comment over shorter terms than millennia.
Marx Hugoson (20:11:12) :
As one old fuddy duddy said to another old fuddy duddy: DEAD ON!
There are numerous Earth environmental (including as you pointed out, atmospheric) conditions to which the human collective has little current data, if any at all, much less any accurate historical records thereof, that ARE directly relevant to any analysis of global weather in general or specifically to “temperature” globally, regionally, locally, Etc.
While all this makes for great politics, a great website (WUWT, Congrats onn 40 megs!) and great discussion – as in the case here about the relevance of (less than accurate?) historical air temperatures and their relation to total polar ice extent – the global average “temperature” is totally irrelevant. It’s meaningless to any given human on or off the planet because it’s NOT climate we have to deal with on a moment by moment basis, it’s weather and other land/water conditions. Even if some event occurs that effects weather globally (or even regionally), averaging it wont mean a damn thing to you or me!
(Bob & Willis, what DO they have to do with each other? Without knowing and taking into account the; total BTU (kinetic energy) content, density/pressure, flow (wind speed) and, as Max pointed out, moisture content of the atmosphere, over the/any selected period of time – how can we possibly ascribe any specific effect by that given volume of atmosphere on the solid form of H2O it was over?)
Basil: You replied, “However, since the 1960’s, the trend in the trend has been opposite in the two hemisphere’s — moving from less cooling to more warming in the North, and from less warming to more cooling in the South. That broadly supports what Willis is saying, I think.”
The actual trends since 1960 are both positive:
http://i39.tinypic.com/2ppjz0p.jpg
Maksimovich,
Dave F (23:56:04) :
@ur momisugly Anu (23:19:11) :
Rotten ice. It could equally recover faster than open water, yes?
Sure, entering the Arctic winter, rotten ice is probably much better for forming more ice than open water.
But entering the Arctic summer, rotten “multiyear ice” will be much more vulnerable to melting and disintegration by waves than healthy, thick multiyear ice.
Is this a new thing in recent decades ?
Barber spoke shortly after returning from an expedition that sought — and largely failed to find — a huge multiyear ice pack that should have been in the Beaufort Sea off the Canadian coastal town of Tuktoyaktuk.
Instead, his ice breaker found hundreds of miles of what he called “rotten ice” — 50-cm (20-inch) thin layers of fresh ice covering small chunks of older ice.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 30 years of working in the high Arctic … it was very dramatic,” he said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE59S3LT20091029?sp=true
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/365869main_earth2-20090707-full.jpg
The expectation is that multiyear ice is best suited to survive the summer melt season – if it is “rotten”, it is much more prone to melting.
How much of that “thick” ice is really rotten and vulnerable ?
Although this rotten ice regime was quite different that the expected MY (multiyear) regime in terms of ice volume and strength, their near-surface physical properties were found to be sufficiently alike that their radiometric and scattering characteristics were almost identical.
It depends on where in Antarctica you study.
In the west, the ice loss is significant and accelerating, while in the east, it is remaining stable (Chen 2009) or easier, land ice is decreasing, and despite the Southern Ocean warming, sea ice is increasing. *
*”Recent observations indicate that climate change over the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere is dominated by a strengthening of the circumpolar westerly flow that extends from the surface to the stratosphere. ” (Gillett 2003)
In the North, Greenland is accelerating at 30 Gigatonnes/yr2. In Antarctica the “mass loss increased from 104 Gt/yr in 2002–2006 to 246 Gt/yr in 2006–2009, i.e., an acceleration of −26 ± 14 Gt/yr2 in 2002–2009” (Velicogna 2009)
“A striking conclusion from these comparisons is that Arctic sea ice is declining faster than projected by the majority of the models (current ice conditions are more than 1 below multi-model mean extent). From 1953-2006, the observed September trend is -7.8 + 0.6 %/decade, compared to the
multi-model mean trend of -2.5 + 0.2%/decade. For 1979-2006, the numbers are -9.1 +1.5 % (observed) and -4.3 + 0.3% (modeled). Even larger differences are found for the last 10 years.” (Stroeve 2007)
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n12/full/ngeo694.html
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL040222.shtml
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/302/5643/273
http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGU2007/01362/EGU2007-J-01362.pdf
I don’t see how this discussion negates concerns about Arctic ice.. Whatever is going on at the south pole is mainly irrelevant to the discussion of Arctic ice.
Bill Tuttle (08:44:48) :
Kate (06:34:54) :
Fresh on the heels of my concern for the corruption of democratic processes, James Lovelock says “It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while” in “the fight against climate change”.
One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is “modern democracy”, he added. “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while….”
Exactly right — that’s why the US has always postponed its Presidential elections during wartime, right, *Mister* Lovelock?
Democracies don’t put democracy on hold during emergencies — dictatorships do.
I’m covering your six whenever you want to close for the kill, Kate. Go get ‘im!
There’s a difference between a democracy and a democratic process. A democracy becomes more malevolent the larger the number of people affected by the decisions of a democracy. We are seeing this malevolence – the forcing of a democratic decision on a minority. Ironically, the mechanisms ans instruments involved [in a democratic process] do allow the appearance of a democratic decision to impose a minority will on the majority.
In this case, the emphasis on a ‘consensus’ – a ‘democratic’ majority? – exploiting the peoples belief that a democratic process is all that is needed. How many state that we ‘live in a democracy’? Are we sure this is actually a good thing?
The issue at hand, that a democracy can have the ability to put ‘on hold’ its own process, demonstrates that a democracy is a fragile thing and can be bent to the will of, as noted, a dictatorship.
Really, what this lunatic Lovelock is really doing is exposing the pseudo-democracy for what it is – a minority (trying) to convince the majority which way to swing (think). “Democracy isn’t working for us, so throw it out”.
Luckily for us, the US is not a democracy; the democratic principles are adhered to and realized in a Constitutional Republic. Any principle that must be put on hold under any condition is by definition, flawed, and must be revised.
(Sounds a bit OT, here, but Constitutional law is a pet project/hobby).
Since the world often experiences floods, droughts, blizzards, heat waves, hurricanes, and you name it then following the warmists’ logic the world must be too hot. We can’t just assume the optimal temperature for the Earth is what we’ve been experiencing the last century. There’s tons of shoreline that we need to recover. We not only need to abate global warming we need to aggressively pursue global cooling.
“Terrifying computer projections showing that we may not have any Arctic sea ice before the end of this century.”
Can someone explain to me why this is, ipso facto, terrifying? Honestly.
Is it terrifying for a reason, or is it just because it’s different (and therefore terrifying to nervous nellies)? I guess I’m re-asking the question I’ve heard asked many times before – what is the perfect climate? What is the “right” temperature of the earth? What is the “right” amount of ice in the arctic? Why do these people think they have the answers to those questions?
Re: Jaye (Mar 29 08:01),
Jaye, your sneaky comment is unwarranted. I was just asking for the explanation to “The Day the Solar Wind Disappeared”
The citation “The solar wind never stops” was from Leifs comment.
Do you, Jaye, have an explanation to this unusual event? The event was realy remarkeble, three days with almost zero solarwind. That is worth asking the experts – do you agree or not?
John Egan (08:32:20) : “That the overall total of sea ice is a parameter that negates variation at either pole.
Such an argument is patently false..”
That is again a very scientific response, Perhaps you would like to share with us your “Scientific Evidence” to show that it is patently false rather than just stating it.
So the alarmists who tout what is happening in the Arctic are cherry-picking. And there are only two cherries.
Is there anything out there that show the error bands of the sea ice area, extant and volume?
There are 7-8 digits of data values, but if I remember correctly, ice area alone has a error of 5-10%. Using that, there is a error of about 1 mill. sq. km., so these figures would need to be used with caution.
Bill Tuttle (05:26:34)
That’s curious, because I didn’t think that I couldn’t be very sure that I hadn’t seen anyone that didn’t look like you who wasn’t in the area of the polynyas …
Alan D McIntire (06:19:27)
That’s basically it, the details are in the paper I cited.
@max — Thank you for slapping me with the Enthalpy reminder.
Yet another check box in the list of things I didn’t adequately amalgamate in my education.
Kate (06:34:54)
Which makes me thankful for Newton’s Second Law …
w.
Sean Peake (06:35:23)
Funny, you don’t sound all that sorry … in any case, you didn’t notice that they are talking about the Greenland Ice Sheet, and I’m talking about sea ice.
“Can someone explain to me why this is, ipso facto, terrifying? Honestly..” – kcom (10:34:01)
The alarmists have a ton of appropriately alarmist consequences if the Arctic were to melt. Including but not limited to Massive flooding of coastal regions, and altering for the worse (it’s always for the worse) of the ocean currents.
Peter Miller (06:44:38)
Interesting, Peter, I had not considered that aspect of the question. Nature amazes, always more to learn.
Lennart S Sweden (10:34:48) :
The event was really remarkable, three days with almost zero solar wind.
Well the ‘almost zero solar wind’ is much too strongly worded, and it is not all that unusual, here are other recent examples:
http://hirweb.nict.go.jp/sedoss/solact3/do?d=2009,11,21
http://hirweb.nict.go.jp/sedoss/solact3/do?d=2009,10,25
These are localized small bubbles and don’t really mean much. The solar wind comes from localized areas on the surface. If there is a restructuring of the coronal field at a given location, there flow from there can be temporarily choked off and a “bubble” of rarefied plasma results. Like you can have a moment of no wind [a lull] at a location on the surface of the Earth, without that meaning that atmospheric circulation has stopped.
gryposaurus (10:19:31) : Fortunately ice is not diasappearing as fast as jobs in the US.
John Egan (07:06:37)
Dear Mr. Egan:
Take a deep breath. There is nothing in what I wrote that either directly or indirectly compares you to my aunt, or her tea tray. It is not an ad hominem argument of any type. It is just a saying indicating the misuse of the word “if”. The meaning of the saying is that once you introduce the word “if” into a proposition, anything is possible … as in the statement “if my aunt had wheels, she’d be a tea-tray”.
Here’s another more ancient example dealing with the same issue, a Sufi story. The Mullah Nasruddin fell of the roof of a high building. But with his usual luck, he landed on a man walking by below. The Mullah was only slightly injured, but the man was killed.
When the Mullah’s students came to the hospital to see him, they asked “Mullah, what can we learn from this incident?” He replied, “Shun reliance on theoretical questions, like ‘If I fall off a roof will I be killed?'”
OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER: That was a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No sea ice was harmed in the preparation of the story.
Certainly the climate implications are separate if the ice at one pole shrinks and it grows at the other pole. However, considering that the “climate see-saw” referred to in the Science article I cited above has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, and considering that the Arctic ice is recovering, what significant implications are you expecting?
Finally, you say you expect a “rigid structural analysis”. Fine. Perhaps you should give an example, so we can examine the rigidification of your structural analysis and understand what the heck you mean by the term. What “structure” are you talking about, and how do you propose that one might analyse it rigidistically?