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.
Leif Svalgaard (08:18:47)
Leif, while I respect your work and it is very interesting, could I ask you and your co-discussants to either limit it to the parts that actually affect sea ice, or to move it to a thread about solar wind and the like? Thread drift never sleeps, and I prefer to discuss one issue per thread.
Many thanks,
w.
Svalgaard: I’m not aware of any phenomenon that runs counter to the theories of relativity.
The cosmic ray anomaly mentioned has been debunked, but then there’s this:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-First-Test-That-Proves-General-Theory-of-Relativity-Wrong-20259.shtml
And also this, which is also still unconfirmed, but highly interesting:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?full=true
John Egan (08:32:20)
Dang, my writing must be less clear than I thought. My “serious assumption” was not that the total negates variation at either pole as you claim.
It is that the decline at one pole is not sufficient to understand the entire system, and that when looked at as an entire system, we are not seeing any change in sea ice. It is going up at one pole and down at the other … shocking.
People keep saying things on the order of “OMG, we’re losing our sea ice, we are racing towards thermal armageddon, the last days are upon us, everyone panic”. But the fact is that the sea ice is not shrinking. Nor is it growing. It is stable, that is to say that there is nothing out of the ordinary happening …
I see that the word “nothing” disturbs you, but remember, I’m talking about the entirety of the sea ice. If you see something unusual happening to the global sea ice, let me know. Until then, I’ll continue to say that there is nothing happening to the global sea area, it continues unchanged.
Justa Joe (11:04:20) said:
Truly, these alarmists must be stupid then, since Arctic sea ice is floating on the sea and thus its melting will have minimal impact on sea-levels, it would seem. However, should the ice on Greenland melt, there will be some impact, and, of course, the melting of all the Antarctic ice would have an impact.
I suspect that neither of these things will happen any time soon (say, next 1000 years, although my certainty gets lower the further out we go — we could get hit by a large meteor …).
Lennart,
It was not a sneaky comment. If somebody says “x does not stop”, then somebody else replies with something that is meant to be a counter to “x does not stop” by saying that “x almost stopped”, then I have to wonder what sort of point they think they are making? There is an infinite distance between “stopped” and “almost stopped”, so imo your statement is infinitely silly.
gryposaurus,
““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). ”
Well of course it is. The models were designed to forecast ice loss due to anthropogenic global warming, whereas in fact, the current ice loss has been the result of unusual and unpredicted winds.
Steve Goddard (10:21:56)
I, on the other hand, don’t see any reason to be concerned about Arctic sea ice. In 2007, summer ice extent decreased by almost a half from the long term average … where are the corpses and the terrible results from that? Polar bears are thriving, Inuit are still doing their Inuit thing. Yes, it was a change … but climate changes. Where is the loss, the cause for concern?
This idea that warming is always bad is a modern fantasy pushed inter alia by people who have plenty of money to heat their houses. The warming of the globe so far has manifested itself mostly in warmer temperatures in the extra-tropics in winter during the night. Ask the poor people in Moscow or Winnipeg if that is a bad thing …
And meanwhile, in the tropics where the doomsayers are always saying the poor will be hit the hardest, there is no statistically significant warming in either the UAH or the RSS datasets from 1979 to the present … no warming of the land, no warming of the ocean, I hesitate to say it but …
Nothing.
conradg (11:36:30) :
http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-First-Test-That-Proves-General-Theory-of-Relativity-Wrong-20259.shtml
“If confirmed”, but it ain’t
And also this, which is also still unconfirmed, but highly interesting:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?full=true
This one has more legs. But does not conflict with relativity.
Let’s put these things on ice, so not to irk Willis too much.
Willis,
If Arctic melt/freeze dates started coming further apart, it would likely stress wildlife which depends on the ice.
“If Arctic melt/freeze dates started coming further apart, it would likely stress wildlife which depends on the ice.”
Does wildlife depend on the ice, or has wildlife merely adapted to deal with the ice? And mayn’t they even thrive without it? Just askin’.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/icrutem3_hadsst2_0-360E_70-90N_na.png
Look at the Arctic from some perspective and you see that except cyclical changes and maybe solar background, there is no “anthropogenic footprint”. The whole agenda is based on exaggerated trend the last 30 years and on falsifying previous climate history.
@gryposaurus
‘It depends on where in Antarctica you study.’
I do not believe that it matter to which geographic area you localize yourself for you’re studying. It’s more a matter of statistical skills, or should it be a lack of perhaps?
You might have noticed that the actual base line used doesn’t really mean anything when it comes to ice. Just like with temperatures it’s an imagined reference point, but a bit more I say. One can state that the normal range has been between 15 and 25 square kilometers, but closer to 25, since 1980, and that’s with the supposed AGW effect, and the supposed normal GW effect, and of course the supposed recent cooling effect.
Some say that the ice isn’t back to it’s “normal” pre 80’s size, but nobody has been able to prove if that was the normal size, after all looking at a little less short sighted perspective, and with more proper use of statistics, global ice extent will not reach normal size until the next ice age.
Vincent,
“Well of course it is. The models were designed to forecast ice loss due to anthropogenic global warming, whereas in fact, the current ice loss has been the result of unusual and unpredicted winds.”
I’m not sure what you mean here. The only work I have seen done regarding ice and winds is in Antarctica (that particular study that you quoted was done in the Arctic) and this causes increased ice.
“Based on a new analysis of passive microwave satellite data, we demonstrate that the annual mean extent of Antarctic sea ice has increased at a statistically significant rate of 0.97% dec−1 since the late 1970s. The largest increase has been in autumn when there has been a dipole of significant positive and negative trends in the Ross and Amundsen‐Bellingshausen Seas respectively. The autumn increase in the Ross Sea sector is primarily a result of stronger cyclonic atmospheric flow over the Amundsen Sea. Model experiments suggest that the trend towards stronger cyclonic circulation is mainly a result of stratospheric ozone depletion, which has strengthened autumn wind speeds around the continent, deepening the Amundsen Sea Low through flow separation around the high coastal orography. However, statistics derived from a climate model control run suggest that the observed sea ice increase might still be within the range of natural climate variability.”
(Turner 2009)
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL037524.shtml
Do you have other information about winds causing ice loss in the Arctic? If so, I’d like to read it.
Vincent (12:10:32) :
Bears depend on the ice to hunt seals, which is their primary source of food.
The Antarctic peninsula is warming very much agree with AGW. But the Brazilian station in Antartica says something else:
http://antartica.cptec.inpe.br/~rantar/PDF/Queda_Temp_Ferraz.pdf
More details:
http://antartica.cptec.inpe.br/
Climatologia de Ferraz/Ferraz Climatology(.xls)
Read, very interesting
Regarding cosequences of ice free Arctic: The negative effects (they are always all neagtive of course) will be elimination of polar bears and other wildlife, lower Albedo resulting in more warming leading to accelarated Greenland Ice melt, and, well being lazy I quote from the NRDC:
“A warmer Arctic will also affect weather patterns and thus food production around the world. Wheat farming in Kansas, for example, would be profoundly affected by the loss of ice cover in the Arctic. According to a NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies computer model, Kansas would be 4 degrees warmer in the winter without Arctic ice, which normally creates cold air masses that frequently slide southward into the United States. Warmer winters are bad news for wheat farmers, who need freezing temperatures to grow winter wheat. And in summer, warmer days would rob Kansas soil of 10 percent of its moisture, drying out valuable cropland”
Read more at:
http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/qthinice.asp
Willis Eschenbach (10:59:55) :
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.
It was posted because I thought it odd that UofC declared that GW appears to be causing glaciers to slide into the ocean at the north and south poles and contributing to sea ice, a conclusion that appear to match what’s actually happening to global sea ice. Has there been a noticeable increase of bergs and growlers in Iceberg Alley? None that I’ve heard.
What about this?:
And what if global warming melts the permafrost?
Yuri Averyanov, a member of the Russian Security Council Administration, declared this week in an interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta that climate change will pose a serious threat to Russia’s national security and that the melting permafrost could cause Russia “serious trouble” within ten to fifteen years.
The result of this, according to Averyanov, will be that thousands of kilometres of pipelines, railways and roads will be in danger, along with a great number of towns and villages. He predicts that in Yakutsk, Tiksi and Vorkuta up to a quarter of all homes could be rendered useless due to unstable conditions of the soil arising from the meltdown
http://english.pravda.ru/russia/politics/25-03-2010/112732-climate_russia-0
Svalgaard: “If confirmed”, but it ain’t”
True, but three years of testing and review suggests a likelihood of it being confirmed by others.
“This one has more legs. But does not conflict with relativity.”
Actually, it does, in that GR is not compatible with the notion of space being a quantum phenomena. It suggests that GR is merely an approximation of something along the lines of quantum space theory.
And yeah, we should ice this to keep the mods happy, but I couldn’t resist.
jack mosevich (12:29:05) :
Worries about warmer winters in Kansas are looking pretty ridiculous.
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/WaterTDeptUS.png
Kansas just had it’s 11th coldest winter on record.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/get-file.php?report=national&image=Statewidetrank&byear=2009&bmonth=12&year=2010&month=02&ext=gif
Keep and lock this posterity
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
Nearly 100% certain that CT, Jaxa, Norsex, NSCDC will not show or adjust DOWN ASAP! (from many past experiences see here:
http://mikelm.blogspot.com/2007/09/left-image-was-downloaded-from.html
@1DandyTroll
“I do not believe that it matter to which geographic area you localize yourself for you’re studying. It’s more a matter of statistical skills, or should it be a lack of perhaps?”
Without an understanding of what’s happening in each target localized area where outcomes are differing, I’m not sure how to come to any meaningful conclusions with regard to causes.
Willis, Steve:
Read this: http://antartica.cptec.inpe.br/ ranta ~ / PDF / Queda_Temp_Ferraz.pdf
gryposaurus (12:18:14) :
Do you have other information about winds causing ice loss in the Arctic? If so, I’d like to read it.
Check out the area between Greenland and Svalbard (the Fram Strait)
You’ll see the sea ice fragmenting and being pushed out of the Fram, the cloud lanes indicating the wind (it’s been like this for some time, the trans polar drift out of the Fram has been strong lately.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2010088/crefl1_143.A2010088122500-2010088123000.500m.jpg
Here’s the 6-day drift for the Arctic from a few days ago, you can also see why the Catlin group are having sucha tough time making headway!
http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn107/Sprintstar400/Drift20100317-20100323.jpg
The North water polynya is also open a symptom of a strong northerly wind pushing ice out of the Arctic. (bottom of image)
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?T100881720