WUWT Sea Ice News #2

Well, that’s good news for me.

And right now, despite all the gains in the Arctic Ice, the brutally cold winter, the unmasked METAR fubar of hottest ever months on record, the Goldman-Sachs stlye ClimateGate emails, Al Gores fading website rankings, the faked Hockey Sticks, etc….
Reid & Co. are shoving the Climate Bill onto the Senate floor just as fast as they can.
Excuse: They want to give the committees time to work out immigration.
Right. And this balmy El Nino has another Winter-type Low Pressure system over the top of California.

Great job Steve. Excellent maps! Very interesting.
By carefully ignoring all red areas, I believe I can, with genuine “breathtaking ignorance,” predict that at the current rate of growth ice will cover the earth by 2035… or was it 2350. Close enough.
In any case, if this trend continues it will be better for polar bears than for the people wearing polar bear suits.

Dear Shirley –
As Monsieur Sandler said over at Huffpo, “You are polluting the blogosphere.”
Can’t you understand that your problem is that you have failed to open your mind?
Who needs to look at 40-year averages when we all know that the Arctic is in a “DEATH SPIRAL”?
😉 😉 😉

If you lot at WUWT are supposedly ‘breathtakingly ignorant’ then how dumb does that make most so-called mainstream ‘science journalists’ look?
Just an observation.

rbateman, I hear ya on the localized weather. It is still middle of winter temps and rain pattern currently. Lows in the 40’s and Highs in the 50’s with an inch of rain on any given day. I am planning a new trip to Sacratomato, to thaw out. I might have to become a seasonal coastal dweller. I am missing my valley heat this spring.

My failure to understand this is surely a sign of “breathtaking ignorance.” But don’t call me Shirley.
….. Well, all together, that is obvious….;-)

Leif, Tell that to the NSIDC; Steve is just reporting what they’re saying.
If you have data that shows otherwise, I’m sure others will be interested.

Does this mean I can’t book a Holland America cruse through the Northwest Passage again this year?
Perhaps this call for a little humor or better yet song
From the late Canadian singer-songwriter Stan Rogers, called Northwest Passage. (Rogers was killed in a 1983 aviation tragedy.) This is part of his take on it. just think of a standard sea chantey sung A cappella.
Northwest Passage.
“Ah! for just one time — I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line — through a land so wide and savage
And make a Northwest Passage, to the sea.
Westward from the Davis Straight ’tis there ’twas said to lie
The sea route to the Orient for which so many died;
Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones
And a long forgotten lonely cairn of stones.
Ah! for just one time — I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line — through a land so wide and savage
And make a Northwest Passage, to the sea.
Three centuries thereafter, I take passage over land
In the footsteps of brave Kelso, where his “sea of flowers” began
Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again
This tardiest explorer, driving hard across the plain….”

Leif and MB,
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
I’ve never been there so depend on our scientists for observations. Can you provide us with any kind of links or pictures to back that up or even better links to Scandinavian or Icelandic observation data/history??
Also, are you saying there is NEVER (or almost never) ice there historically this time of year or are you claiming that there could not be ice there this time of year in the last 1 or 5, 10 years??

Leif and mb – presumably you can look out the window and see there is no sea ice. So what the heck is NSDIC up to?
Can we trust ANYTHING these people put out?

Nice webcam and weatherreport of Longyearbyen, Svalbard (Spitsbergen)
http://www.svein-nordahl.com/webcamlyb-01.htm
Still looks pretty cold to me.

The caption to the first picture of this post reads:
“Climate change activists Lesley Butler and Rob Bell ‘sunbathe’ on the edge of a frozen fjord in the Norwegian Arctic town of Longyearbyen”
So the webcam I mentioned earlier is pretty much in the same place.

The Baltic Ice Map does not show any ice around Denmark.
http://portal.fma.fi/sivu/www/baltice/ice_map

KimW :
Yes, it might be rain in the Arctic, but it’s also another cold blast on the Pacific Northwest.
More snowpack & rain for us, more fresh water to freeze @ -15C up there on the Hadlow Ice Follies.

DMi is my favorite flavor.

Leif is right, there is NO ice in danish waters and temperatures are aproaching 15 degrees celcius. There has been NO ice in danish waters the last month at the least, I also noticed that satelites showed ice in danish waters in november and december, there was NO ice in danish waters in november as the temperatures here had not even dipped below freezing in noveber.

Experiments??? Observations???
Sine when did these have anything to do with climate science? The half-dozen trees that we needed to measure were done years ago. And now we have super-fast computers that have taken away any necessity to do ‘experiments’ or ‘observe’ anything.
After all, where would we have been in the Volcanic Ash Crisis if people had wasted their time making actual observations to find out how much of the ash there was, and where it might be dangerous to fly? That might have delayed the closure of European airspace for days…and then what would have happened? People would have been flying planes all over the place as if nothing significant had occurred! There was absolutely no point in doing such experiments since our computer models are perfect and from them we knew exactly what Nature should have been doing.
Big Oil funded ‘Sceptics’ try to say that Reality doesn’t always match the models and therefore that the models aren’t complete!. This is of course heresy and they should be executed on the spot. And in the next round of the inter-governmental talks we will be passing very stiff regulations with extremely severe penalties for any recalcitrant bit of the real world that wilfully fails to comply with our models. Penalties will be deliberately harsh to deter any backsliding. Nature must be taught how to behave correctly.
So, please, no more talk of such outdated and retrograde concepts as ‘experiment’ or ‘observation’. We left these behind years ago in climate science, and see absolutely no reason to return to the primitive thinking of the pre-Revelation Medieval Experimental Period (c. 1500-1998).
We have moved on…we have seen the light. We know that we are right. It is only evil-minded and slush-funded Deniers who naysay the Truths. Banish these evil words Experiment and Observation from the scientific vocabulary now!

Rain is weather, Ice Extent is Climate.
Except when you support AGW

Phil,
You cherry picked a six day period when the AO was positive. Nice picking.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao.sprd2.gif
As far as the open water goes, I suspect that you do understand the difference between a mechanical fracture (known as a “lead”) and melting?
Ice doesn’t melt at -12C.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/66275_atmos_recent.html

Off topic but loonies are off again WWF
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7638972/Rivers-in-England-and-Wales-face-drying-out-because-of-climate-change.html
They should listen to the MET office which says its going to get wetter in the UK due to Climate warming, so in fact the situation would be worse without warming. But that would reduce the alarm.

mb,
There are also a few places along the east coast of Greenland which NSIDC shows slightly more ice than the median line. I did not attempt to mark every single above or below pixel, only regions that are of a size worth caring about. As you know, the NSIDC maps are not 100% accurate.

ctm, I posted a comment that had a couple of links. They disappeared. Can the second one be retrieved from the bin please? I don’t think I’ve done anything to be banned. It’s relevant to the post.
REPLY: It may simply be the way you formatted them. Just type in the URL’s directly
like http://www.google.com
– Anthony

Here’s an example of the ‘thickening ice’ near the North Pole from a few days ago:
“He said flat pans never last for ever as they turned into an interesting mix of heaved and cracked multi year ice slabs and small pans bordered by wide swaths of jumbled blue block ridges. ”
“We are pushing hard to make miles, but are also fighting against ice that is pushing us south as we sleep and time chewing veers around thin ice, big drifts and huge ice blocks.”
“As a result of the break in the ice, these structures ended up on an ‘island’. A small block of ice that had luckily floated right up to the evacuation site was used to ‘ferry the tents from the ‘island’ to the ‘mainland’.”
It sounds like pack ice, they were lucky that a ‘small’ block of ice was able to ferry them and their equiment. I wonder what they mean by ‘wide swaths of jumbled blue block ridges’, far as the eye can see perhaps?

That link didn’t format correctly. Try http://www.kane-tv.com/wuwt/ and select the relevent jpeg.

“Leif Svalgaard”
Those extent numbers are for as low as 15% ice, or 85% water. You can easily have 15% ice coverage this time of year in some places as it is breaking up. Some might even still be coming out from rivers as their ice breaks up and washes downstream.

Peter Hessellund Sorensen says:
April 27, 2010 at 11:09 pm
Leif is right, there is NO ice in danish waters and temperatures are aproaching 15 degrees celcius. There has been NO ice in danish waters the last month at the least, I also noticed that satelites showed ice in danish waters in november and december, there was NO ice in danish waters in november as the temperatures here had not even dipped below freezing in noveber.
Does this have something to do with dinosaurs ? I’m thinking dinosaurs may be able to play the organ, but can they be trusted with satellites? Or, either they’re hedGing their betS, or someoNe hAsn’t got their modelS in sync.

Mark.R says: April 28, 2010 at 12:22 am
“Hi here you say that the air temp is -15c, is that in the shade or out in the sun ?.”
“Here when we get =5c and the sun is shining the forst in the sun shine still melts even tho it is -5c”
I assume =5 is Minus 5. Unless that was a submition for NASA:-)
Frost is not snow and snow is not ice.
At -15 c the snow squeeks it is so cold, have you ever been outside on a sunny day walking on squeeky snow? I’ve never noticed that is was melting or even damp, more like spakrles of unaltered crystals refeleting in the sun. But that just the snow, ice at -15 c is unlikely to be affected by sunlight low on the horizon. At -15 c even pouring rock salt on the ice has no real affect, in the full noon sun or in the shade.
-15 is cold.

crosspatch: Those extent numbers are for as low as 15% ice, or 85% water. You can easily have 15% ice coverage this time of year in some places as it is breaking up. Some might even still be coming out from rivers as their ice breaks up and washes downstream.
No, there’s no way there is any trace of ice in danish waters now.

Mark.R says:
April 28, 2010 at 12:22 am
Hi here you say that the air temp is -15c, is that in the shade or out in the sun ?.The ice thats in the sun shine will be melting because the heat from the sun will be warmer than -15c as in the shade. Here when we get =5c and the sun is shining the forst in the sun shine still melts even tho it is -5c and the areas in the shade has on melting.So i would say that the green arears in the map above i would say would be areas that are shaded by hills or it has been clouder their.( sunnier summers at the poles mean more melt).
I have spent virtually all of my 60+ years of life in Minnesota and as a consequence have had the opportunity to witness more than a half century’s worth of Nature’s annual experiments in turning liquid H2O to solid and back again. Having lived through more days of 5F with bluebird skies than I care to tally, I’d say your estimates of the sun’s power to overwhelm temperature don’t match with my experience. Even at -5C the only melting that is likely to occur is in the snowplow windrows along the street that are virtually black.

In re the phantom ice in Danish waters, here’s a note from the IJIS Sea Ice Extent graph page
In principle, SIC data could have errors of 10% at most, particularly for the area of thin sea ice seen around the edge of sea-ice cover and melted sea ice seen in summer. Also, SIC along coastal lines could also have errors due to sub-pixel contamination of land cover in an instantaneous field of view of AMSR-E data.
　

Sorry, Mods, forgot to add – No features about current Arctic (or Antarctic) ice.

Leif Svalgaard — that map also shows “ice” in the Canadian southwest. It looks like their algorithm gets confused around busy shorelines. So Denmark will have ice south of Jutland all summer long!

Dave Springer; April 27, 2010 at 11:51 pm
No need to be alarmed about Global Cooling Dave, I can put your mind at rest. Our sceptic friend, Dr Roy Spencer (http://www.drroyspencer.com/) at the UAH has been recording global temperatures by satellite and has put up a handy web site showing figures since 1999 at various altitudes.
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
In his monthly bulletins he usually quotes “channel 5” at 14,000 ft. Every month this year has so far been warmer than the hottest year in his record, 2005 (he does not show full data for 1998), so there is no break in the trend of ever rising temperatures. All “natural variability” of course!
http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/6189/satellitetemps2010.jpg

But..but…but….but….it’s…all…..rotten…..ice…..as my teeth chatter@-15C.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam ’round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way that he’d “sooner live in hell”.
On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn’t see;
It wasn’t much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.
And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and “Cap,” says he, “I’ll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I’m asking that you won’t refuse my last request.”
Well, he seemed so low that I couldn’t say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
“It’s the cursed cold, and it’s got right hold till I’m chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet ’tain’t being dead — it’s my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you’ll cremate my last remains.”
A pal’s last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.
There wasn’t a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn’t get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: “You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it’s up to you to cremate those last remains.”
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows — O God! how I loathed the thing.
And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I’d often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.
Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the “Alice May”.
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then “Here”, said I, with a sudden cry, “is my cre-ma-tor-eum.”
Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared — such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.
Then I made a hike, for I didn’t like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don’t know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.
I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: “I’ll just take a peep inside.
I guess he’s cooked, and it’s time I looked”;. . . then the door I opened wide.
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm —
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Robert Service

So far, at 10:55 hrs. cool, overcast, no sunshine at all! Mind you we should have had overnight rain on Saturday in Devon, it didn’t arrive until mid-afternoon!

Another Baltic Ice Map:
http://portal.fma.fi/sivu/www/baltice/ice_map
Homepage:
http://portal.fma.fi/portal/page/portal/baltice
Regards

All of a sudden Roy Spencer has become a hero for the AGW movement (only because the satellite temps are up and up). How pathetic, just a few months ago he was a super denier ! LOL. I have no reason to doubt the AMSU data (unless the usual drift problem) but I don’t think it means any warming/cooling as far as the Earth surface is concerned. IN other words it probably is meaningless data as far as the earth ‘s REAL temperatures are concerned.

Re ice in Baltic in April.
There is definitely no ice in Danish water this late, though there is still some rotten ice in the Gulf of Finland and Riga Bay.
For current ice conditions in the Baltic see: http://www.smhi.se/oceanografi/istjanst/produkter/sstcolor.pdf
Incidentally “rotten ice” is an accepted term for ice in a late stage of melting, and consequently is the normal state of ice close to the ice edge in summer, not some kind of AGW induced horror as a lot of people seems to think.
As for NCDC etc indicating ice in coastal waters where there actually isn’t any, this seems to be a normal fault of all satellite sensors, especially in areas with a crooked coastline and/or a lot of islands off the coast. It was much worse in earlier satellite generations, and I strongly suspect that this factor has caused at least part of the decline of the north polar summer ice cover. If You take a look at the historical maps on Cryosphere now You will see that they regularly show lots of ice in e. g. the White Sea and the Baltic in June-July when there is never any ice there.
For older historical ice data of the North Atlantic I recommend:
http://acsys.npolar.no/ahica/quicklooks/looks.htm
It is instructive to compare ice extent in e. g. the 1930’s and 1970’s with current conditions. The latter are far from unprecedented while seventies had considerably more ice than average.

[quote Stephan April 28, 2010 at 3:11 am]
Why the hell have AMSU 600 mb temps been so high for last 4 months?
[/quote]
El Nino.

In central Ontario, Canada, we have had these high pressure systems and way above average temperatures since January which could be holding the Arctic weather at bay.
There has been very little precipitation as well. Seems any weather systems coming from the south is pushed to the coastal areas.

Please help – the filter ate my comment…
[Reply: Patience. Your comment was posted after being in the moderation queue less than five minutes. ~dbs, mod.]

Ammonite says: April 28, 2010 at 4:42 am
“Global melting = global warming”
Does Global freezing = global cooling?
Is more ice caused by melting or freezing?
You just can not be sure these days.

Sorry, ~dbs, mod, and thanks for helping. 🙂

[snip – sorry Pamela, while humorous, this will open up a line of comments where I just don’t want WUWT to go -Anthony]

Shakespeare was the first to notice this problem.
Marcellus:
“There is rotten ice in the state of Denmark.”
BTW – Anthony got NSIDC to add the date to their graphs.

The Sea Surface Temperatures in the Baltic are still below 0.0C in the northern part (and ice is still present) while temperatures are up to around 5.0C near Denmark.
US Navy animation of SSTs in the Baltic.
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/GLBhycom1-12/navo/norbalsst_nowcast_anim30d.gif
North Pole view of Arctic SSTs.
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/GLBhycom1-12/navo/arcticsst_nowcast_anim30d.gif

Ammonite says: on April 28, 2010 at 4:42 am, “Hi Kim. Rising CO2 absorption by sea water does indeed make it more acidic.” Only right in the most inconsequential way. Actually, the pH of seawater – about 8.24 currently, could fall to 8.16 with a CO2 concentration of 454 ppm – a trivial difference, especially if rounded off to 1 significant figure – 8.2 to 8.2 – and consider the huge difference to a neutral pH of 7. There is a chemical process called ‘Buffering’ involved, and a simplified discussion is here http://www.icsu-scope.org/downloadpubs/scope13/chapter09.html. End result, no acidification. Oh, also in the archives of this site is a discussion of how shelled creatures adapt rather well to so-called ‘acidic’ conditions.

SteveE,
It would be nice if someone published a regular map of ice thickness, but I have never seen that.

Well, my educated guess about the color of my snipped post turned out to be wrong. Maybe I spend too much time looking at “little” details.

About the Danish ice:
It’s ice packing. The Danish newspapers have looked into this because the readers could not understand why the ice would not melt i the harbors and other places. But is packed so extremely hard that melting take for ever. On land Denmark have ice packed so hard that climate experts say they are more like little glaciers. Again: melting take unusually long time. The winter in Denmark was very hard this year.
We do have a couple of Danish newspapers in English but they don’t mention it. However a Dane did upload pictures on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22385253@N06/4448421623/

Congratulations on the great sea ice report, very nice indeed. The truth has a way with making a brighter day for all.
We spotted no sea ice locally, but we have had a massive coconut palm tree die off because of all the cold weather in south Florida, due I am sure, to global warming …
Coconut palms fall victim to cold weather it really is sad to see all those majestic palms, now dead. We lost two in our back yard, 90 miles from Key West.

Jack “In Oregon” Barnes: Actually, we’re having an “unusually early and warm Spring.” I heard that on KPOJ (local progressive station). I was relieved to find that out as the cold and wet were getting me down.
Incidentally, I have a foolproof model of the stock market. The beauty of it is that it predicts stock price based on a single factor. You practically don’t have to do any real research at all. Why wait to see how correct it is? Invest all of your assets now before it’s too late!

Pamela Gray:
April 28, 2010 at 6:19 am
I’m glad you’re enjoying the day. It’s snowing here for the 3rd time this month, tying the 1928 record, and I cannot connect to a single dot edu site.

It would be nice if someone published a regular map of ice thickness, but I have never seen that.
The reason being that it can not be measured from a satellite with any degree of reliability. It can be measured from aircraft, but only in a narrow swath below the aircraft, and from submarines, in an even narrower swath above, so we really only have a very vague idea about the current thickness and even less about thickness.
This is the root cause of the current popularity of ice volume as the proper measure of north polar Sea Ice. It can be computer modelled with almost no constricting restraint from real-world data.

Phil. says:
April 28, 2010 at 8:11 am
What we have at present is thinning, spreading ice leading to many leads and a wind direction that has tending to move multiyear ice away from the coast to where it will tend to drift out of the Arctic. This year’s ice is very vulnerable to a 2007-like event.
That’s an unusual observation. I’ve kept an archive of every Cyrosphere Today image of the Arctic I could this season.
The Ice isn’t flowing out, it’s more like a pulsating tide. Goes out, retreats back. Unless I missed something, looks to me like it’s not going anywhere in any significant amount.

APRIL 28, 2010
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/features/green/2010/04/epa_turns_up_heat_on_climate_a.htmlEPA turns up climate heat as Senate dithers
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/features/green/2010/04/epa_turns_up_heat_on_climate_a.html“>With prospects for a Senate climate bill under a cloud, the Obama administration has turned up the heat.  The Environmental Protection Agency says in a new report that there is “clear evidence” that human activities are altering the Earth’s atmosphere and that climate is changing.
The EPA report lays out 24 “indicators” showing that climate is already shifting, most of them spotting trends in the United States.  Greenhouse gas emissions have increased 14 percent in the United States from 1990 to 2008.

About the Danish ice:
The Danish climate debate takes place in this link. I think the thread below has more on this ice issue. Machine translation, sorry. The debate is in Danish so you fine folks can’t participate. Only read: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=da&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.klimadebat.dk%2Fforum%2Fpart-2-opdaterede-sol-is-temp-hav-data-d12-e1066-s160.php%23post_20960&sl=da&tl=en

Mike Haseler says:
As for the press describing WUWT as “polluting the bollocksphere” (joke – does that translate in US?)
It does to US farmers – chuckle

Ammonite says:
April 28, 2010 at 4:42 am
Remote concentrations of ice do not melt due to political affiliation, desire to form a world government or Urban Heat Island effects. They melt due to increased temperature – and they are melting at both ends of the globe and in all the high mountain chains. Global melting = global warming.
Nice straw men! Did you think of those yourself, or did you have help?
As far as why ice melts, it appears your knowledge, like a lot of warmists is half-vast. For example, have you ever heard of sublimation? Now, that isn’t a melting process, and has nothing to do with temperature. There are, in fact many factors which go into both the creation and disappearance of ice. You might try reading a bit beyond the usual warmist claptrap.
Yes, we know there has been some warming since the LIA, which is certainly a good thing, and in no way unusual or alarming, despite the cries from the alarmists. And UHI has certainly created a falsely-high temperature record, meaning the actual warming has been about half of what’s been reported.

Steve,
How real is that top Guardian image; apart from the sunbabes.
In particular those clouds over the top of the snow covered mountains; is that real. That would suggest that there is plenty of cloud cover available in the Arctic despite the low temperatures; maybe it is all that open water that is a ready source of evaporation. So one would infer, that cloud negative feedback is quite active even at sub zero temperatures.
So how far north was that picture taken; or where was it taken.

@ leif: this article shows photos of snow in several places inland on the 12.th of April and the headline asks: why is there still snow in Denmark?
I honestly don’t see why there could not be ice at sea a fortnight later. It’s been pretty cold the last 2 weeks. Machine translation of Danish article: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=da&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fjp.dk%2Findland%2Ftrafik%2Farticle2035090.ece&sl=da&tl=en

Ammonite says:
April 28, 2010 at 4:42 am
You must be new to this site. I suggest you do a search on this site for some of the information you just stated.
For example
“Oh snap! CO2 causes some ocean critters to build more shells”
Posted on December 1, 2009 by Anthony Watts
And some thought ocean acidification would destroy everything. “We were surprised that some organisms didn’t behave in the way we expected under elevated CO2″…“They were somehow able to manipulate CO2…to build their skeletons.” From the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institute press ….” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/01/oh-snap-co2-causes-ocean-critters-to-build-more-shells/
Without CO2 we would all be dead. People seem to keep forgetting that.

Real time Satellite Images of North American ice is available from HRPT (NOAA polar orbiting) bottom of page here:
http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/satellite/index_e.html
It shows east side of Hudson Bay and James Bay opening. Also there appears to be open water north of Banks Island, otherwise it is pretty solid.

Anu,
Mann loved tree rings, until 1960 when they stopped giving him the numbers he wanted.
Pre-1960 tree rings are good, but post 1960 tree rings are evil. Makes perfect sense form a scientific point of view, given the proliferation of mind-altering drugs which occurred in the 1960s.

Dave Wendt, JJB 4:36 am
I was being ironic. A single year of hot weather is no more indicative of global warming any more than a single good year for the ice cap falsifies global warming. In order to separate “weather” from “climate” you need to plot trends over about 30 years. Sure there has been less warming in the last 10 years, however if you look at the 30 year trend temperatures are rising.
Stephen, 3:20 am
If you look at the link below you will see that the UAH temperature data is moving in line with the surface temperature records pretty well.
Now are you saying that all temperature records are wrong? Including all three terrestrial and both satellite sets? That would take a major leap of paranoia!
http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Comparing global temperature estimates
(probably won’t link directly as spaces in a link upset this blog – copy and paste full link into browser).
Talking of trends and getting back on topic. Sure 2009-2010 has been a good year for the ice, but two things to remember.
1. being close to the average is no great shakes, bearing in mind it is the average of a declining area. Now if it were close to the average of 1970-1979 that would be interesting, but we don’t have data for those years.
2. the linear trend is still clearly downwards over the long term. Again, a couple of good years does not make a “recovery” any more than one hot year makes for global warming.
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100406_Figure3.png

This just in…Daily Telegraph reveals break in laws of physics!…
“If all the floating ice in the world melted it would cause sea levels to rise by just 4cm.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7645112/Melting-sea-ice-would-cause-sea-levels-to-rise-by-hairs-breadth.html
Amazing, because I thought floating ice actually lowers a fluid level when it melts – I thought ice displaces a greater volume, so my science teacher must have been wrong! Still, science has changed nowadays.

REPLY: Post normal science doesn’t need physics. -A

Enneagram says:
April 28, 2010 at 9:59 am
Don’t worry Iceland’s Katla is coming:
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/Katla2009/stodvaplott.html
_____________________________________________________
OH (self snip) Just in time for spring planting season. Al Gore and Brown and Rudd won’t have to worry about Global Warming for a while, we will all be too worried about the food supply.

jeff brown:April 28, 2010 at 8:28 am. Am I understanding you correctly that you are linking the conditions at the pole to the activities of man? Not the possibility of the tail end of a 30 warm cycle? Or shifting of jet stream (amongst other possibities)? The assumption that it must be caused by man is far more naive. Ouvre les yeux (maybe your mind while you are at it). Nice team play by the way.

It will be interesting in the future to find anyone who will admit they fell for the AGW scam. Impending doom was preached to me by many associates and not one will admit that they were scared witless at the time. Cannot wait for the world to pull it’s collective head out of it’s ass on this scare and start working together for the betterment of all.

David Ball
I would describe looking out the window as “observational evidence.”

Phil, (genuinely) have I got this wrong in my head then? Fresh water has a density of 1.0 but salt water has a density of 1.025. So salt water is definitely heavier than fresh water. So if the fresh water ice melts, how does that raise sea levels? Either I need more coffee, or I’m temporarily away with the fairies… Can someone explain?

Leif Svalgaard @ April 27, 2010 at 9:02 pm
Blonde and winter-pale Danes sunning on the beach, fooling the satellite with their albedo? 😉

The line between “anecdote” and “data” is usually much closer to “established, published groups directly in the field only” in climate science though.
Entire history textbooks are mocked as “anecdotal” when they mention five growing seasons in Egypt during the Roman Climate Optimum, or make observations about Roman mountain mining, for instance.

In the mean time I’m getting really confused. Is it 14 months, 50 days, or 7 years until the Doomsday Machine starts ticking?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1236497/STEPHEN-GLOVER-50-days-save-world-I-listen-doomsayers-werent-ludicrous-hypocrites.html

Another nice update Steve. Still believe that the inclusion of sea ice mass needs to be included:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
The arctic has made a modest recovery of multi-year ice but this ice is not as thick as it has historically been (hence the lower volume of ice). Sea ice extent has made a nice rebound to near normal levels (still below the longest term averages we have):
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/sea.ice.anomaly.timeseries.jpg
But a nice reobound none the less. For anyone to suggest that the arctic sea ice is “back to normal” simply doesn’t understand the dynamics or the facts.
The heart of the melt season is still several months ahead of us, and it will indeed be interesting to see how the current ice extent hold up under the heat. The first few months of 2010 have been some of the warmest (2nd warmest actually) on instrument record, and, I know, heat doesn’t melt the arctic ice, it’s all wind! But I still am looking for about 4.5 million sq. km. for the summer minimum in Sept. based on JAXA data. I don’t think the low volume of arctic sea ice will hold up very well to a long warm arctic summer.

Phil. says:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/27/wuwt-sea-ice-news-2/#comment-378727
Ammonite says: on April 28, 2010 at 4:42 am, “Hi Kim. Rising CO2 absorption by sea water does indeed make it more acidic.” Only right in the most inconsequential way. Actually, the pH of seawater – about 8.24 currently, could fall to 8.16 with a CO2 concentration of 454 ppm – a trivial difference,….
A 30% increase in [H+] is not trivial!
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with Wootton, Pfister,& Forester 2008
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/48/18848.full.pdf+html
Although they focused most of their verbiage on the small downtrend in oceanic PH they discovered in their collecting of over 10,000 individual measurements over eight years, what I found most interesting in this context is found in Fig. 1 A&B where they plot the range of those measurements. Intraday ranges were 0.1-0.3, annual ranges were mostly at least 1.0, and the range over 8 years was 7.5 to 9.1. To me that would suggest, if ocean life forms were really unable to deal with 0.1 – 0.2 changes in PH, they would all have been on the extinction train long ago and the oceans would be as barren as the Attacama or the South Pole.

It seems an Earthquake just hit Katla, Iceland. The thing might very well blow of really soon…
http://poleshift.ning.com/profiles/blogs/katla-earthquake

Pascvaks says:
April 28, 2010 at 11:45 am
“…Humans are capable of great achievements and, at the sametime, enormous mistakes and misjudgements…”
Precisely!!!!! Your post couldn’t have hit that nail on the head any more solidly. My sentiments exactly!

Nice link here – live volcano webcams from Iceland: http://www.volcanolive.com/volcanocams.html

“The sea ice pack thawed to its second smallest size in 2008, followed by the third smallest in 2009.” Maybe 31’th smallest this year?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/28/arctic-sea-ice-loss-warming
§.-)

Typo. The vast majority of ice loss is due to “melting”, not sublimation etc. “Melting” should read “temperature increase”. (…and yes, phase change does not involve temperature change but rather energy absorption in this case…)

Positive feedback mechanism found occuring in the melting of arctic sea ice:
http://www.physorg.com/news191665797.html
But if you’d believe some posters…it’s all “the wind”…

stevengoddard says:
April 28, 2010 at 10:17 am
Anu,
Mann loved tree rings, until 1960 when they stopped giving him the numbers he wanted.
Pre-1960 tree rings are good, but post 1960 tree rings are evil. Makes perfect sense form a scientific point of view, given the proliferation of mind-altering drugs which occurred in the 1960s.
Some higher latitude tree ring density data started to diverge from the thermometer measurements in the 1960’s and 1980’s – growth rates started being affected by more than the usual suspects.
But that’s a good hypothesis, drugs in the water 🙂
I’ve heard there are hundreds of chemicals that show up in trace amounts in typical city water supplies, and even in rainwater due to airborne pollutants. I’m sure scientists somewhere are looking into these mind-altered trees.
I myself prefer thermometers to tell me the temperature numbers I want – I think that’s how my car measures the outside temperature, but it might be using ice cores, lake sediments, or tree rings …

Ocean pH :
I am constantly amazed by discussions of a change in the second decimal place of pH due to warming when data clearly shows that the ocean goes through DAILY changes of 0.24 units or more. The pH at the Monterey Bay (Aquarium data( varies daily and has varied from 7.7 to 8.2 over the last 15 years with many seasonal ups and downs. It makes the “projected” 0.24 GW amount seem rather small.
http://pondside.uchicago.edu/ecol-evol/faculty/Wootton/pH.htm
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/acid2.htm#how_acidic

Stephen Skinner says:
April 28, 2010 at 5:34 am
In the New York Times artcile the 2nd to last paragraph makes an interesting claim.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/nyt_arctic_77442757.pdf
“There is eveidence that the carbon dioxide content of the world’s air has risen from 10 to 15 percent…”
This seems a bit of an exaggeration. What happened to the general understanding of the proportions of the constituent parts of the atmosphere? Unless this is some journalistic transmogrification that happens.
The cited 1969 article said:
There is eveidence that the carbon dioxide content of the world’s air has risen from 10 to 15 percent during the last century.
This means that whatever “constituent part” of the atmosphere that CO2 comprised in 1869, that fraction had increased by 10 to 15 percent by 1969.
In 1969, CO2 was about 325 ppm:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CO2-Mauna-Loa.png
Before the Industrial Revolution, CO2 comprised about 280 ppm of the atmosphere.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html
From pre-1750 to 1969, that is 16% increase in “the carbon dioxide content of the world’s air”. I don’t have a figure for 1869, but if it was 295, then rising to 325 would be a bit more than 10%. If it was 290, that would be a 12% rise.

Data are reported as a dry air mole fraction defined as the number of molecules of carbon dioxide divided by the number of all molecules in air, including CO2 itself, after water vapor has been removed. The mole fraction is expressed as parts per million (ppm).
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.html
BTW, the CO2 now stands at about 390 ppm: this is a 39.3% increase in “the carbon dioxide content of the world’s air” since the Industrial Revolution. The CO2 has gone up by another 65 ppm since that 1969 article.

Ammonite
Is the “steady rise” in ocean temperatures responsible for the return to above average ice area?

The weapon is for personal protection. In some places, you are not allowed to carry openly, or loaded in your car. I agree with you regarding concealed or open. I wish open carry were the rule everywhere.
It isn’t for status. I take gun safety classes regularly (twice in 5 years with one of those classes at a police officers’ protection/gun safety range) and go to the range (just did so last week) often to keep my shooting and gun safety skills sharp. I shot a high powered rifle, a mauser, a 9 mil, and my revolver. Out of the 3 men I was with, I was the one that shot the clay (it was loaded with plastics so it really went boom and blew up the stump it was attached to) using a rifle with a laser scope. As a single woman, I will not be anyone’s target.

Just one more comment then I will get back to weather and climate. In Oregon, if you have a loaded weapon in the car, it must be out in the open or securely placed in a case, unless you have a concealed weapons permit. Keeping a loaded weapon visible in your car and ready for use, with the car locked or not, is an open invitation to a broken window and having your gun stolen.
http://www.usacarry.com/

This coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald today makes me ashamed to be Australian.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/melting-ice-makes-the-arctic-a-vicious-circle-20100429-tssb.html

Anu said:

BTW, the CO2 now stands at about 390 ppm: this is a 39.3% increase in “the carbon dioxide content of the world’s air” since the Industrial Revolution. The CO2 has gone up by another 65 ppm since that 1969 article.

Yes, and the biosphere is loving it. Great plant food. They run even higher in greenhouses … and it’s not for the greenhouse effect of the CO2.

Phil. says:
April 28, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Thanks for that link I hadn’t seen that site before.

Bill Illis says:
Bill, I’m not sure you understand that you cannot divide a climatology of ice volume by the actual ice areas for individual years. The ice volume has changed over time and you must include this if you are going to convert to mean thickness for individual years. Thus, your results are in error.

Ammonite says:
“The point is that these wide responses are being overlaid on a downward trend…”
———-
Another insightful and brilliant post. I wonder what Steve will be saying when the arctic sea ice extent dips below the level for the same date 2009 in the next few days, and then we see the summer low go below 2008 and 2009? And how are the AGW skeptics explaining this near record warm 2010, when the solar maximum is still years away, and the El Nino of 2009-2010 is not as strong as 1998’s? Where is all this warmth coming from? And what about the ocean heat index…how are the AGW skeptics explaining this:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
and then contrast it to this:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
and this:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg
In short, near instrument record global warmth, a high ocean heat content, Arctic sea ice mass is lower than average, and how could anyone think we’ll see the arctic sea ice continue to recover. I would posit that the modest “recovery” we’ve seen in thepast few years (not back to the norm, but at least it stopped falling off a cliff) has been mainly due to the solar minimum, La Nina, and the negative AO index. The cards are just too stacked against a strong and fully recovery of arctic sea ice. The multi-year ice that has built up during 2009-2010 is nothing like the multi-year ice we saw 5 or 10, or 20 years ago. When this years near record heat of June, July, and August hits the arctic, there will be some serious melting. I mean, look at these tropo temps:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
Continuing very warm…regardless of how you want to qualify it, those temps represent energy in the troposphere, and they continue at near 20 year record highs.
Steve, I just hope you continue to report on those days when the arctic sea ice is losing 500,000 sq. km. a day during the dog days of summer as it heads toward a summer minimum of around 4.5 million sq. km. (just barely above the 2007 minimum).
The only wild card out there is volcanic activity– which is of course very possible, but the relatively minor eruptions in Iceland so far won’t stop this year’s heat…