Back on April 2nd, it looked like Arctic Sea ice extent at NSIDC would cross the “normal” line. See: Arctic Sea Ice Extent Update: still growing
The image then looked like this:
Now before anyone starts trotting out claims of “adjustments”, I’ll point out that the independent JAXA data set, done with a different satellite and the AMSR-E sensor shows the same thing:
Note the area I’ve highlighted inside the box. Here is that area magnified below:
The NSIDC presentation is zoomed to show the current period of interest, whereas the JAXA presentation shows the entire annual cycle. So we notice small changes in NSIDC more often. Also, the NSIDC presentation is a running 5 day average according to Dr. Walt Meier.
Of course whether you are scientist, scholar, layman, casual observer, or zealot, nature never gives a care as to what we might expect it to do.
So worry not, no skullduggery is afoot. Nature is just laughing at all of us.
Amino Acids in Meteorites (20:54:46) :
“Steve Oregon (20:13:28) :
I guess he doesn’t know this about climate models”
I predict Appell will not reply to your post.
They have declassified US Navy submarine sonar measurements of ice thickness over 38% of the Arctic from about 1975-2000, and ICESat satellite laser altimeter measurements of ice thickness for 2004 to 2009 over 100% of the Arctic (minus the Pole Hole, which is not observable because of the details of the polar orbit).
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/seaice.html
Recent estimates of Arctic Ocean sea ice thickness from satellite altimetry show a remarkable overall thinning of ~0.6 m in ice thickness between 2004 and 2008 (Figure. S4a).
The last ICESat laser failed on 11 October 2009, and the satellite was retired in Feb 2010. The US has plans to launch an ICESat II perhaps in 2015. Europe has plans to launch a similar CryoSat this week (April 8).
Yes, climatologists are very interested in the thickness of ice – too bad the data is relatively recent, or only part of the Arctic. That’s the problem with continual improvements in monitoring the planet’s climate – the best data is the most recent.
Like the article above says, and which is explained here:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/about_images.html
the graph of Arctic sea ice extent is a 5 day moving average.
Daily Sea Ice Extent Graphs
Craig Moore (19:46:44) : note to moderators: Is there a way to have a review feature…
Greasemonkey will add this feature to WUWT if you run Firefox, Craig.
Anthony: This ap takes over the comments box on WUWT and makes it into a fully fledged preview panel.
R Gates,
Could you repost the link you gave to the article about how indigenous tribes have been affected by climate change? I’ve been trying to find where you gave it in a past WUWT posts, and can’t locate it.
I was interested in the third culture it mentioned, which was down in southern Mexico and affected by “unseasonable frosts” or “untimely frosts.”
I was also interested in the Inuit culture mentioned, as I enjoy studying how peoples (such as the Greenland Vikings) have adjusted to changes in the climate.
One thing that has become obvious to me is that “indigenous tribes” tended to live very “close to the edge,” and had a sort of love-hate relationship with nature. A single “bad year,” in terms of weather (or insects or blight,) could reduce the population by more than half, and at times could inspire an entire population to pack up and move.
Until quite recently there was no rescue from outside, or helicopters dropping food. No welfare. No checks in the mail. No UN. No one to blame, unless you were in the mood to blame a neighbor for offending the gods.
Once you start looking at things in terms of hundreds of years, rather than decades, it becomes fairly obvious that “indigenous tribes” don’t remain “indigenous” forever. If nature doesn’t evict them, another tribe comes along and evicts them. The people get told to “move along; nothing to see here,” and become “indigenous” to a new area.
One interesting people to follow are the Goths. They started out around the Baltic, but were driven south to the Caspian, where they formed Caspian Kingdoms which lasted over two hundred years, (as long as the USA has existed.) The Romans warred with them from the west, and unnamed peoples warred with them from the east. Eventually they packed up, likely due to climate change as well as pressure from the east, and headed west, sacking Rome and other European cities, with the Visigoths (West Goths) heading all the way to Spain, and then across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco and heading back east nearly to Egypt. In other words, a people “indigenous” to the Baltic wound up “indigenous” to the Sahara.
Sadly, when looking at these mass migrations it is not possible to blame nature alone. Man’s inhumanity to man often plays a large part. It appears in the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” and in Scotland’s “Highland Clearances.” It appears in the Navaho “Long March” and in the “Irish Potato Famine.” It appears in Hitler’s, Stalin’s and Mao’s ways of “relocating” people.
When one has an awareness of how some can dress-up the forced relocation of thousands and even millions in sweet-talk, it is impossible to accept Cap and Trade without a deep sense of unease. After all, I have known environmentalists who strongly believe reducing the worlds population by a couple billion is not only necessary, but urgent.
What is most amazing to me is to hear such people speak with deep concern about “indigenous tribes” one moment, and then of a “population reduction” of two billion the next.
Craig Moore (19:44:10) :
David Appell (18:17:44)
I agree, except those claims about the 2C degrees were made by scientists as their official offering of their professional craft. You correctly state such claims were bogus, however that did not stop those scientists from delivering the expected answer for the politicians. As the article I quoted stated: “To avoid even greater damage to human beings and nature, the scientists warned, the temperature on Earth could not be more than two degrees Celsius higher than it was before the beginning of industrialization.”
The Holocene Optimum and the Eemian interglacial were both before the beginning of industialisation. It would be a big job to get warmer than those times.
Preview panel: Read about it here.
It appears to have been made for Climate Audit, but works fawlessly on WUWT
What would happen when the “normal average” would include the whole time of satellite measurements? My guess is that we would be save in average territory??
Regrards from the Swiss mountains where it is still snowing??
The comment on the standard deviation in above reply, AGAIN show many people do not understnad statistics. Let me EXPLAIN:
the standard deviation is the variability of the population of data points, i.e. it shows the variability of the measurement sequence, which is from 1979 to 2000 . A mere 20 year period!
The thus established shown standard deviation does say nothing, but absolutely NOTHING about the varibaility in ice extent over 100 or even 1000’s of years, hence it is meaninless when used in variability type claims.
NB What’s happend with school levels in the US.. Damn some of you’re guys are stupid.
Caleb (01:16:21) :
What is most amazing to me is to hear such people speak with deep concern about “indigenous tribes” one moment, and then of a “population reduction” of two billion the next.
Welcome to the Court of the Green Queen, where it is mandatory to believe ten contradictory things before breakfast, and words only mean what Her Extremeness says they mean. But don’t bother memorizing the definitions — they’ll have changed before suppertime.
Re: sunsettommy (Apr 4 21:15),
There exists a plug in for Firefox that works and give a preview function to this board. It was developed for Climate Audit and it works here and at Lucia’s.
Go to http://climateaudit.org/ca-assistant/
and follow instructions.
What this provides today:
– Comment ‘Tag’ buttons above the Reply box
– Comment preview (click to toggle between preview/edit modes)
– Replies include thread links; “Paste Link” feature also provided for referencing multiple comments
– Comment sorting and thread enable/disable – new comments always collected together, even if nested!
– Color-coding of newer comments, and/or hiding old comments
– Ability to update to new CA Assistant version within the script (see the Settings popup)
– Works on all Open Science Web Ring blogs
– (new!) Reorganizes “Recent Comments” list to more easily see which topics have been updated
– (new!) Lucia’s blog has faster/better support
– (new!) Hides old comments while retaining their (author/date) context (on RomanM and Lucia’s blogs)
It works.
Reply: It works really well. I strongly recommend it birthday buddy. ~ ctm
Jordan (11:58:08) :
You quoted Vicky Pope of the Met Office:
“The reality is that greenhouse gases are making the world warmer, but it is a mistake to see short-term changes in weather, currents or Arctic ice cover as evidence of this,” Pope said.
Well, that’s a bit rich. I heard her on the BBC Today program about a year ago. She was asked what was the proof of AGW. And her answer was the heat wave in France! Perhaps she should listen to her own advice.
About the ice graph:
I think some people may have missed the real point. It was not curious that the trend might start to flatten or even go down. What was curious was the way this flattening trend seemed to have gone backwards in time.
It’s obvious that if the line went through the long-term trend then it would be of great political significance as well as a victory for the sceptics. The temptation to ‘adjust’ the trend downwards would be enormous.
But I’m not saying that’s what happened. There’s an obvious question: do these backward adjustments occur all the time? It would be really great to see a similar animated graph over a few months. Is that possible? Then it would be easier to judge whether a suspicious and unusual adjustment had occurred just before the line broke through the barrier.
Chris
Seems the NSIDC are still struggling to find words to express how scary a return to normal ice levels could be, or maybe delaying their report a few days in the hope that there will be a sudden melt to save their blushes
David S,
Uh it’s still Easter Sunday Weekend here in the US. Have a little patience. I’m sure the doublespeak will emerge soon enough.
sorry to ask such a silly question:
– most of the images I’ve seen refer to sea ice in terms of concentration or extent. Are the two terms intended to mean the same thing and do either account for concentration in terms of ice depth?
Nansen ice area and ice extent was off line for several days but they still come up now with a major rise above the long term average – and Norwegians invented the arctic didn’t they?
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
4 April 2010
From what I can see the sea ice extent for this time of the year is ahead of all the years since 2002.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Sea ice area seems ‘normal.’
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
Craig Moore wrote:
> As the article I quoted stated: “To avoid even greater damage to
> human beings and nature, the scientists warned, the temperature
> on Earth could not be more than two degrees Celsius higher than
> it was before the beginning of industrialization. ”
>
> That is capturing the essence of a tipping point.
No, it is not.
A “tipping point” is the point at which a physical system needs no further input to continue to change.
You can rock a canoe back and forth, but as long as it is below some critical angle the canoe won’t tip over. But if the rocking canoe passes a certain angle, it will flip over, regardless of whether you instantly cease your rocking motion or not.
Your quoted statement says nothing about any tipping points. It speculates about risk and damage. It’s like saying we really ought not tip this canoe past 10 degrees, because someone might hit their head on the gunwale or fall out or it will scare the children. That’s very different from saying you should not rock the canoe past some critical angle because the whole thing will tip over.
NZ Willy (18:12:00) :
Arctic ice always starts a rapid decline this time of year, because the sun is getting up high in the sky and is warming temperatures.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png
“Long-time baseline”. 21 yrs. Yawn. Worse, so far they have made a conscious decision to not increase the baseline to 2009 and get a 30 year baseline, which they admit is a standard thing to do as 30 years is one of those baseline periods that has traditional useage in science. They claim to be afraid of “confusion” if they change the baseline. Well, it’s pretty clear what “confusion” they are afraid of –for them, “confusion” means “if the comparisons look better, we’ll confuse our message of trying to scare people”. Here we are arguing about whether it is important to be above that line –if it was a 30 yr baseline, it’d already be significantly above that line.
The other reason this is so objectionable, is there is significant reason to think there is a real natural variability cycle of two 30 yr 1/2 cycles making a full 60 yr cycle, and that the start of the satellite age is roughly analgous with the start of the warmer 1/2 of that cycle.
We know there’s some lag in the reaction of the ice pack to changes in climate. It doesn’t happen overnight, it takes years –decades even.
Look at that submarine ice thickness data from the mid 70s to the early 80’s, at the tail end of the last 30 year cool period transitioning into the early part of the warm cycle. You’ll see that it is ramping upwards quickly at that point. Extend the trend it shows backwards and I wonder what you’d get around 1945? Maybe something that looks a lot like 2007? Could be.
But anyway, there are multiple credible reasons why NSIDC should be using a 30 year baseline instead of their “musn’t give skeptics any ammo” decision to stick with the 21 year baseline. Tho they are probably feeling pretty good about their decision right now –because here we are arguing about whether it has any meaning that we are dancing around the higher one they have artificially chosen to stick with, even when they admit the decsion was political rather than scientific.
According to the comments on CA, the plugin doesn’t work with Safari. Do you know if it will work with Camino, which is also a Mozilla product, and which I prefer to Firefox on the Mac?
/Mr Lynn
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/news.aspx?newsId=40
So the catlin picnic
uses a “cool box” which is of course
a heated hot box
to keep samples from freezing–
and they expect the heated samples will
not show any increase in
biological or chemical activity from
the heat–
and they boast about heating the
samples -seeking praise for
imbecility.
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/news.aspx?newsId=40
Anu (22:40:37) : “But in another sense, non-cyclic climate trends are significant especially if they were forecast as the early stages of a dangerous century-scale planetary climate change”
How would one know when the baseline is only 21 years? If one were to project this information onto a graph covering the last 12,000 years how would it look? Not so dramatic? Not so scary? So why is it done this way? See below.
“They don’t get $billions in funding to study this stuff because of their good looks”
They get funding because their published results agree with and help promote the political positions of the fundor.
Thanks Gary Pearse (05:15:43) :
The link explained area, extent, and concentration.
How does a 5-day moving average change this? If they are putting up data for yesterday, then either the five days must be trailing days, because tomorrow hasn’t happened yet and today isn’t complete, or the last few plotted points are not five day averages.
If the data averages five days ending on the day plotted (trailing), then future data can not change the plotted point for a past day, and the graphs shown are fudged. If the last few points are not five day averages, then their description which you quote is incorrect. Either way there’s something amiss.
So let’s look at the paper reference above
> On the credibility of climate predictions (peer-reviewed)
> … Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas
> a common argument that models can perform better at larger
> spatial scales is unsupported.”
>
> http://www.scribd.com/doc/4364173/On-the-credibility-of-climate-
> predictions
No climate scientist I know has claimed that today’s climate models work on regional or local scales — indeed, I see this goal as on their To Do list for this coming decade. So the Koutsoyiannis paper (hereafter “Kout”) seems to be a lot of words and charts about something that was not claimed in the first place.
It’s silly to compare models of water resources engineering to global climate models. The former will obviously be much, much simpler than the latter. Climate is an enormously complex phenomenon, and modeling it, with the state of today’s technology, is very very difficult. It is not expected to be accurate on small spatial scales. For example, Kout Table 1 looks at Albany NY, while climate models have a resolution (Kout Table 2) of about 2.5 deg x 2.5 deg. 2.5 degrees on the globe is about 173 miles, so the grid goes from about the NY/Vermont-Canadian border to central NJ. And from Rochester, NY to Boston. 30,000 sq miles. And they choose one station (Albany) as representative?
Likewise, looking at 30-yr averages of one solitary point (Albany) for a grid this large proves nothing.
On the other hand, the long-term, global accuracy of GCMs is discussed in great detail in the IPCC 4AR. Even Hansen’s 1989 climate model for BAU was not that far off, when projected to today. And that was a model run 20 yrs ago on vastly smaller computers with much less climate knowledge.
This is getting afield, anyway. The concern over AGW is that, based on fundamental physics, GHGs warm planets. Climate models concur (as they must), and as far as I know no calculation or model has ever shown anything different. THAT’s what all the big fuss is about, not whether 20-yr old climate models correctly predict the decade-to-decade conditions in Albany NY. Will global temperatures be 2 C in 2100, or 6 C? No ones knows (and, you’ll notice, IPCC composite models have rather large error bands that far out, and the scientists have never claimed otherwise). Could it be 2 C? Perhaps. It could equally well be 6 C. It could be higher. Do you want to just wait and find out? We can’t afford that. 2 C (4 F) would be bad enough. 6 C could well be devastating.
At some point (and we’ve passed this point) this ceases to be a scientific problem and becomes an environmental problem. That is, there is only so much science can currently predict (and this may not necessarily change in the future due to the underlying dynamics of complex PDE equations), and while research certainly needs to be done in that area, we need to accept that there will _always_ be uncertainties with things we don’t know or cannot project. SO WHAT?” GHGs warm planets. We keep emitting GHGs. And, to no one’s surprise, the planet is warming.
-=-=-
The Douglass et al paper was shown to be wrong by Santer et al. This has been discussed all over the Web and you can look this up for yourself:
“Consistency of modelled and observed temperature trends in the tropical troposphere,” International Journal of Climatology,
Volume 28, Issue 13, Date: 15 November 2008, Pages: 1703-1722
B. D. Santer et al.
Besides, Douglass’s strong ideological bent (as evidenced by his op-eds) concerns me.