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.
S. Gates:
“One positive note for you AGW sceptics…the antarctic sea ice continues to creep closer to being normal (though still showing a negative anomaly):”
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png
Given the fact that the anomaly was positive for the bulk of the 2-year period in the graph, and previously recovered from any negative period (except for the slight one now), what does this graph do to support AGWT? I thought the whole world was warming, ice shelves were breaking off Antactica, and there was not return.
I guess I’m just not smart enough to get it?
R. Gates,
Thinking sceptics (TS) accept that there has been a degree or maybe two increase in earth temps since the 1850s, what one would expect climbing out of the Little Ice Age. Your estimate could be right on and it wouldn’t bother most of us one bit. Our objections have been to the egregious erasure of the MWP and earlier warm periods, reduction in the drop of the LIA temps, depressing of the 20Century record highs, choice of a cold period for the 30 year base for claiming the hottest days on record, and the numerous deliberate statistical gamesmanship maneuvers with tree rings, raw temp data….etc. etc. Of course NSIDC has been trying spin results for many years and they would have had us already surveying beach front properties in Greenland and Antarctica, but I see there is some moving away from their earlier outrageous prognostications and insulting remarks about the people who turned out to be right.
You’ve been coming here long enough to not categorize sceptics into a monolithic lump . We can’t help being joined by bandwagon sceptics (BS) like Limbaugh or anyone else who has nothing to offer to the debate. You have seen the fine work done here by TS. Surely, you rejoice that real scientific sceptics put a stop to the unholy alliance of politicized, the-science-is-settled, the-world-is-spiraling-into-disaster, fraudulent scientists, environmental organizations, 19th Century marxist iconoclasts and politicians, and they did it by application of science, not money and advertizing. I think you’ve found that there is a core classy bunch here who, unlike the other half of the blogosphere, accept your thoughtful offerings whether one agrees with you or not.
S. Gates:
Regarding the recent buildup in the Bering Strait, can you please point to documentation on what the Bering Strait was like during the 1979-2000 period, and, if possible, what it looked like from, say, 1000-1978?
Without this data, why specify a buildup that you consider unusual?
Richard111 (11:07:20) :
R. Gates (10:29:54) :
I like your explanation for “death spiral”.
One would expect a longish time scale.
Why have there been claims the Arctic will be “ice free” by 2013?
In part because of data (incl. submarine) from the likes of Maslowski such as shown here:
http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn107/Sprintstar400/Maslowski_Page_16.jpg
ICESAT data since then has shown a continued decline in thickness at a slightly slightly faster rate since 2004. So despite hedging of bets etc. the data still points to around that time. With the declining thickness the rate of drift would tend to increase too.
Doesn’t matter, once it breaks the plane of the normal it’s a score . . . Realists 6, Warmists 0.
Richard111 asked:
“Why have there been claims the Arctic will be “ice free” by 2013?”
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I think to understand this prediction in context, you should read this BBC article from 2007:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm
The 2013 prediction was not made by a large group of scientists, but a single scientist. Prior to the record low of 2007, the consensus had been that the sea ice would be gone by 2100. Even after 2007, the consensus was not 2013 (that was just one scientist), but more in the range of 2030 for the arctic to be ice free at the summer low. I believe the date of approximately 2030 for an ice free summer arctic remains the consensus, and nothing seen so far in 2010 would change that.
Speling haz neber bin my stronge sute…
And many thanks to the excellent editors I’ve had over the years!
Stephen Wilde (11:52:25) :
Does logic work in only one direction for them ?
A neurological diode is indicated, and thier trendline theory operates in a physical vacuum in which Newton’s 1st Law of Motion does not apply.
In that computer-generated world, the primary force is Carbon Dioxide, and all others are either subjugated or void.
ScottR said (regarding global sea ice):
“I look at the data and it shows a bouncing decline…”
———–
Hmmm…what would another phrase for “bouncing decline” be….just on the tip of my tongue now, oops, now I’ve lost it, okay, now it’s back, now I’ve lost it again, only worse this time…okay, now back again, but not quite as strong…oh, darn, now lost it again, really far down this time…oh well…sorry.
(guess I’ll just go read about death spirals instead…)
looks like the sea ice is trying to match up with the “average”. Just under reached its goal. It may be thinking 2003 was an outlier and shouldn’t be considered part of the average. In which case it has done a magnificent job. Well done arctic sea ice.
Don’t worry folks! Ms. Pope at the Met Office says all this so-called new ice is all just a pause in the Earth’s upward temperature trajectory:
“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.
“Instead you have to look at long-term trends. These show that Arctic summer sea ice is decreasing by 232,000 square miles a decade, nearly 2.5 times the area of Great Britain.
“On current trends it will still become ice-free in summer by around 2060.”
Get that? “Ice-free” in 2060; long after she’s gone, and been forgotten.
Does she think the more she repeats it the more likely we are to believe it? Even Phil Jones from CRU was forced to publicly admit that there has been no warming for the past 15 years.
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Stephen Wilde (11:52:25) :
“Does logic work in only one direction for them?”
…Yes, it does. When the weather is hot (like in Summer) they all start screaming and wailing that it’s “proof of man-made global warming”. But when half the World seems to be under ice and there are record low temperatures and 130,000 Americans are dying of cold-related ailments, they declare that “weather is not climate”.
Weather is only climate when it’s hot.
When it’s cold, it’s just weather.
There was a demonstration of this very thing today on the BBC’s “Broadcasting House” program. They had AGW fanatic Nobel Laureate Professor Sir Martin Evans reviewing the papers, and he declared the past winter was “a little bit colder” and the CRU emails were “this silly little email thing” which doesn’t alter the fact that “global warming is going on because burning fossil fuels throws carbon up in the air”, etc.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rqkr3
If the NSIDC graph is using a 5-day running average, then they have a problem to reconcile data latency with data creep. I assume the average looks ahead 2 days and back 2 days. Therefore their final figure will be 2 days late, so each datum “creeps” for 2 days. They have the alternative of not displaying a datum until 2 days later, but then everyone would look elsewhere for the latest update. So they accept the data creep, and this is what we see here.
Steve Goddard (11:42:21) : “At 70N, the sun is now almost 25 degrees above the horizon.”
At it’s daily high point. Midpoint (of the day) more like 13 degrees above the horizon.
The story as I hear it from the within the gov is that the sea ice is just thin and spread out. Sea ice extent is, as per NSIDC definition, at least 15% to count. So, as the wind causes the ice to be more spread out it is also thinner (wind more easily pushes thin ice around) and less concentrated ~~ therefore it is more susceptible to melting.
SO…most people who are fully bought into the Climate Change “system” expect this thinner and more spread out sea ice to melt quickly and continue the death spiral… That’s the story and you’ll hear it again! Mark my words!
The interesting aspect is that this scenario could go either way given he uncertainty associated with the current understanding of what drives Arctic sea ice formation and melt. Most research states the mechanisms for influencing sea ice formation are poorly understood…at least the connections and dynamics are…
Any way the more ice (even if it’s spread out) increases albedo and decreases sea surface absorption, which leads to more ice over time, BUT if we’ve crossed the tipping point it’s too late anyway and it will just melt and continue down the death spiral… There you have it, The executive summary of “The Party Line.”
The Wild card in all of this, and the one that happens to be the one that is the most poorly understood in all of this is THE WIND!!!
CRS, Dr.P.H. (10:46:38) :
Thank you for your response. Actually, I was hoping R. Gates would answer, because he sneaks the “T” in at the end of AGW all the time without explanation, even though I’ve asked before. I knew it had to mean either theory or thermogeddon.
Catastrophic AGW [and AGW] are not theories and never were, as desperate as Gates is to label them theories.
AGW doesn’t even matter at this point. Few people on either side of the debate say there is no effect at all from human activity [although there is zero empirical evidence that human emissions of CO2 have any measurable effect on the global temperature]. Here’s the problem with plain old AGW:
If the tiny fraction of human CO2 emissions [click] causes any global warming at all, the effect is so small and insignificant that it can be completely disregarded. The human component on temperature is certainly too small to be measured, despite the one-third increase in CO2. And that is assuming that CO2 caused all or most of the 0.6° warming over the past 150 years — a big assumption.
So the climate alarmists have painted themselves into a corner with their scary CO2=CAGW hypothesis: the trace gas carbon dioxide must cause catastrophic global warming. Otherwise, there’s no sense in throwing good money after bad, when so many other areas of science are in need of the immense funding being sucked up every year by the climate science clique.
So they are forced to speculate on imagined “tipping points,” and blame sea level rises, ocean acidification, frog extinctions, changes in sea ice, receding glaciers, increasing hurricanes, and anything else that comes to mind on a harmless and beneficial trace gas that has been many times higher in the past without causing runaway global warming.
But CO2 causes none of those things, because on all time scales, changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature; effect cannot precede cause.
There is a specific meaning to a scientific theory. The hierarchy is: Conjecture, Hypothesis, Theory and Law. Only Theory and Law are widely accepted as science [although nothing is entirely safe from falsification, as Einstein repeatedly stated regarding his Theories of Relativity].
CO2=CAGW is not even a true hypothesis, because much of the raw data, code and methodologies purporting to support it are either missing, or kept secret. That makes it simply a baseless conjecture. I’m being polite when I refer to AGW and CAGW as hypotheses. They are not, really.
For a scientific explanation of what constitutes a Theory vs a Conjecture, see here: click
Oh, good grief… graph… very good graphs!
This one at Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center shows we just had a 5 year Arctic ice area record…
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
But due to the error range in projections we can have more ice for, say, 20 years or so before we are outside error margins. The AGW bAndWaGon will “confidently” refer to this graph:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_54-lzQmrpB4/SrSZdKWIFQI/AAAAAAAAAFs/nuOIEWti6S4/s1600/icemin2009.JPG
R. Gates (12:15:38)
Phil. (12:10:15)
Will you two please get your stories straight? You’re scaring the horses.
NZ Willy (12:43:30) :
The formula for midsummer noon solar elevation above the horizon = 90 – latitude + 23.5 degrees.
At 70N that is 43.5 degrees above the horizon. At 90 degrees it is 23.5 degrees above the horizon. At the Tropic of Cancer, it is 90 degrees above the horizon.
If it’s a 5-day trailing average, then the present can affect the past plotted positions. They should borrow one of Dr Hansen’s computer models; then they could have a 5-day leading average.
I spotted the same thing, the NSIDC curve really almost hit the average gray line, and now as of 4th of April it is clearly ADJUSTED . downward.
sorry chaps, but we from Holland like to say it as it is. (my grandmother even spotted this one 😐 )
One thing that keeps cropping up on thread about arctic sea ice, especially by AGW skeptics is “the wind”. It’s really important to keep in mind that AGW
AGW is all about energy…energy flows, energy balance, etc. and energy on earth shows up in many different ways, and one of them is…WIND. If, as AGWT would posit, there is more net energy in the oceans, atmosphere etc. it would certainly stand to reason that one of the ways that energy would show up would be wind. Whenever there was wind, there was heating of the earth somewhere, and of course, all that energy came from the sun initially. In short, saying the ‘wind’ did it, does not in any many disassociate the wind from warming (for we know warming caused the wind initially) nor by extention, disassociate it from AGW.
“If it’s a 5-day trailing average”
It looks more like a 5-point typical median filter function that generally doesn’t affect the last 2 points. So any given value should change 2 days later and then remain stable.
Someone is responsible for this. That person is a propagandist. That was a deliberate act.
Who did this? What is his name?
Magnus A (12:56:18)
Just put “ant” in front of “arctic” in the address bar, and you get the Cryosphere chart of the Antarctic: click
Not nearly so alarming, is it?
Here’s Cryosphere’s global ice extent: click
Reverting to the mean: natural variability.
CO2≠CAGW
of course, the current increases make “experts” like serezze, loudspeakers like gore or spamposters like gates look stupid. they will look even more stupid in the future as they still deny the existence of the upwards leg before 1979 due to ocean current cycles. sea ice today may be not much different from the 1930s or 1940s and in 1957 projections were then, that it would have disappeared by 2000.
http://i680.photobucket.com/albums/vv161/Radiant_2009/popularmechanics1957-2.jpg
(though in 1957 scientists knew, that even temperatures with ice free arctic would have been still lower than 2000 years ago.)
however, any projection for next september is nothing but a wild guess, as nobody knows what the dominant factors – wind and ocean currents – will do this year.
looks like just another “see, I was right” chance, for those who were wrong in general and particularly for the last 2 years and those who made already disproven doomsday predictions in the past.
Being an objective scientist, or for most of us, being an objective scientific observer, means, first, acknowledging the existence of evidence, second, considering the evidence by applying reasonable skepticism and an open-mind to the evidence at hand.
Failure to acknowledge and consider evidence plays into the hands of those that may foist faulty evidence, or even valid evidence, but which is not relevant to the proposition the evidence is purported to support, or does not support the proposition as strongly as its proponents claim.
And, yes, scientific evidence may emerge that goes against previously held understadnings. How we react to evidence adverse to our previous understadings is the test of objective scientific observers.
Hiding from evidence does not help anybody’s cause.
In Science “truth for its own sake” is the aspiration. Correct understanding of physical relationships is the goal.
Thanks, Anthony, for bringing this to the readers attention.