By Steven Goddard
Break out the Speedos and Bikinis. Springtime has finally arrived in the Arctic!
Temperatures have risen about 15C, and are now averaging a balmy -15C (5F) north of latitude 80N – with sunshine 24 hours a day. Under those conditions, you can get frostbite and a tan at the same time.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
But despite the balmy weather, NORSEX ice area continues to run above the 1979-2006 mean – as it has for the entire month of April.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_area.png
Since the melt season started, the Arctic has lost about one million km2 of sea ice. Below is a composite graph showing all of the popular (NSIDC, JAXA, NORSEX, DMI) extent measurements, superimposed on the NSIDC mean and two standard deviation region. The thin blue line is NSIDC extent from 2009. Note that all measurements have been nudging up against the mean line – for the entire month of April.
Disclaimer: All maps below are taken from NSIDC maps, and modified by the “breathtakingly ignorant” writers at WUWT.
During the last three weeks ice has melted mainly at lower latitudes, as seen below in red. Areas in green have actually increased in extent, due to drift. Ice is probably still getting thicker in much of the Arctic, because temperatures remain well below freezing.
The map below shows changes over the past week.
And the map below shows changes since the same date in 2007. Green indicates ice growth.
The next map shows current areas of deficient ice (relative to the median) in red, and excess ice in green. The total amount of excess minus deficient ice is close to zero. In other words – Arctic ice extent is normal.
The Arctic Oscillation remains negative, so circulation is clockwise – as seen below in the buoy drift map. This pattern is keeping older, thicker ice from the Canadian side inside the Arctic Basin, and bodes well for another summer of increased ice thickness and extent – relative to the record melt of 2007.
http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/maps_daily_track-map.html
People counting on bad news from the Arctic to keep their agenda alive are staring at a long, (rhetorically) cold summer……. The good news is that they can keep raising the red flags about Montana glaciers, if the Arctic refuses to melt.
It has now been over 41 years since the New York Times headlined “Expert Says Arctic Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea.” triggering the Arctic Death Spiral. After 41 years of dangerous and increasing melt, ice area is again above normal.
My failure to understand this is surely a sign of “breathtaking ignorance.” But don’t call me Shirley.
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
April 28, 2010 at 10:26 am
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.
Your teacher was doubtless talking about freshwater ice in freshwater rather than freshwater ice in seawater. Density considerations lead to a small increase in volume, the 4cm value came from Dr. Peter Noerdlinger, a professor at St. Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, Canada a few years ago as I recall.
Universalgeni says:
April 28, 2010 at 10:00 am
I honestly don’t see why there could not be ice at sea a fortnight later.
People that keep track of these things [dangerous to shipping] report no ice:
http://www.smhi.se/oceanografi/istjanst/produkter/sstcolor.pdf
Seeing starts with looking, so give that map a look.
My family in Denmark reports no ice. You can always find isolated [shaded, North-facing slopes with deep snowdrifts, etc] on land where the snow hangs on a bit longer. Remember, I come from there.
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.
Yet at the same time, the Catlin Expedition is freaking out about encountering rain on their farcical trip:
“”We have been told there will be more unpredicted events like this as the climate of the region warms”
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.
Careful, Leif, you have admonished others for using anecdotal evidence. Some have claimed that Canada had a “warmer than normal” winter. If I said it was not “because I come from there” what would your response be to that? Good for the goose and all that, ……
Universalgeni says:
April 28, 2010 at 10:00 am
@ur momisugly 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.
Snow can longer longer on North-facing slopes, in shade, etc.
But there are people that keep track of the ice [danger to shipping] and they [as my family who can just look out the window] report no ice. You can better see things if you look, so take a look at these maps of ice conditions in the Baltic:
http://www.smhi.se/oceanografi/istjanst/produkter/arkiv/sstcolor/sstcolor_20100201.pdf
http://www.smhi.se/oceanografi/istjanst/produkter/arkiv/sstcolor/sstcolor_20100301.pdf
http://www.smhi.se/oceanografi/istjanst/produkter/arkiv/sstcolor/sstcolor_20100401.pdf
http://www.smhi.se/oceanografi/istjanst/produkter/arkiv/sstcolor/sstcolor_20100428.pdf
There has been no ice the last month.
David Ball says:
April 28, 2010 at 10:59 am; In this post I was refering to the Y2K fear machine. Apparently no one fell for that one (?). Sociology and psychology may not be considered “legitmate” sciences, but it sure has some interesting observations.
David Ball says:
April 28, 2010 at 11:03 am
Careful, Leif, you have admonished others for using anecdotal evidence. Some have claimed that Canada had a “warmer than normal” winter. If I said it was not “because I come from there” what would your response be to that? Good for the goose and all that, ……
I’m always careful. so I provided detailed evidence as well: “Leif Svalgaard says:
April 28, 2010 at 11:06 am”, but a report from my daughter-in-law [in Denmark] who is a meteorologist/glaciologist I rate a bit above ‘anecdotal evidence’
I see that Leif has backed up his statements with more solid evidence. That is as it should be.
David Ball
I would describe looking out the window as “observational evidence.”
[quote Ammonite says:]
These trends are very clear on any graph presented with a timeframe of over twenty years.
[/quote]
Yes they are. The same trends are also very clear with a timeframe of over 150 years.
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?
We’ve gone to the Moon, we’ve sent machines to Mars and other planets, we’ve built a Space Station in orbit around the Earth, we’ve built all sorts of gadgets to do these things that we now use daily in non-space related jobs, but we don’t “know” how much ice is at the poles or if there’s ice in the Baltic Sea south of the Danish islands. It looks like we have a pretty far ways to go before we can make a dent in the ‘question’ of global warming, let alone “fix” the problem –if we find out that there actually is a problem.
Humans are capable of great achievements and, at the sametime, enormous mistakes and misjudgements. I guess if we want to know if there is a problem, we first have to hire some people smart enough to answer the question, and look out the window at the Baltic Sea south of the Danish islands to see if there really is any ice. When NASA was given the mission to go to the Moon, how many socialogists, movie stars, politicians, financiers, historians, climatologists, statisticians, gurus, anarchists, biologists, economists, high school dropouts, punk rockers, ministers, retirees, grandmothers, third graders, and rappers did NASA hire to do the physics, the design work, the technical work, and the million and one other jobs needed to accomplish the mission?
Today, the blind are leading the blind. They can’t even say how much ice is on the planet, or where it is –or not.
Leif Svalgaard @ur momisugly April 27, 2010 at 9:02 pm
Blonde and winter-pale Danes sunning on the beach, fooling the satellite with their albedo? 😉
TLM says:
April 28, 2010 at 10:25 am
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.
I realize that it takes a AWG climate scientist 30 years to identify a trend (Or even recoginize when one has ended). That seems to me to be a serious flaw in thier religious indoctrination.
You need to be very careful with trends. Espically with starting and ending points. Mix data from different trends and your analysis become flawed. Expecting a trend to continue after it is ended is unreasonable.
I think it is very foolish for warmers merge two sepearte trends in order to claim warming is still continuning. The trend from approx. 1974 to 1998 was clearly a warming trend but it lasted less than 30 years and is therfore statistically little more than noise. Statistical noise proves nothing regarding warming. Adding data from the trend from 1998 to date (which is a period of noise, no warming or cooling worth mentioning) in order to claim a 30+ year trend might work mathmatically but it is clearly flowed logically. The assumption that trends based on the merged data from these two trends has any meaning for perdiction or evaluation is incorrect.
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.
Based on the Danish (rotten ?) ice, I think its time for a new letter to
The President of the United States:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=bdc24964-7f82-4f7a-863c-f0ff43010278
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
Paul A Peterson says:
April 28, 2010 at 12:13 pm
I realize that it takes a AWG climate scientist 30 years to identify a trend (Or even recoginize when one has ended). That seems to me to be a serious flaw in thier religious indoctrination.
A most serious flaw when the cycles of warm or cool are about 30 years.
10 yrs should be enough to see the handwriting on the wall.
With the last 10-15 years showing no warming to cooling, it’s time to drop the hypothesis off at the recycling center.
Nobody was that stubborn when the 1870’s warming scare, 1900’s cooling scare, 1930’s warming scare or the 1970’s warming scares had run thier course.
What’s different now?
Money. The proponents are invested up past their eyeballs.
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.
Even NSIDC admits there is little known about the thickness of Arctic ice. Naturally, we’ve all seen these claims of thin ice since the ice extent did not behave according to AGW theory. Now with the new satellite we’ll find out a what the thickness is. However, we will never know what it was. The increased ice congestion would seem to indicate that it is likely to be thicker than most (confirmation-) biased reports have claimed.
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.
@ur momisugly Gail Combs says:
April 28, 2010 at 9:54 am
One of my favorites also. First read his work back in 1958 (while living in the Aleutians ). Here’s a site that has more of his stuff as well as other greats. http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
April 28, 2010 at 11:37 am
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?
You could try googling the name I gave earlier, however I believe the logic is as follows:
1 kg of ice displaces 975 cm^3 of seawater (1000/1.025) however as freshwater it occupies 1000 cm^3. Thus an increase in volume of 25 cm^3/kilogram of ice.