Many of you watch sea ice as closely as some people follow the NFL, soccer, or NASCAR. So when something of interest happens, I’m not without an inbox full of notices.
Today it is encouraging to see the NANSEN is reporting that both Arctic Sea Ice area and extent are above the normal line. Usually we don’t see both in this mode. Here’s area:
And here is extent:
Source: http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
By itself, this is just a small thing, but it is just one more indication that there’s some improvement in the Arctic Ice situation again, and the indications are that we’ll have another summer extent that is higher than the previous year, for the third year in a row.
Of course our friends will argue that extent and area don’t matter now, that only volume and ice quality (the rotten ice meme) matters.
Interestingly, if you go back to the press releases on the record minimum extent in 2007 at NSIDC here:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2007.html
And search the entire set of release for the word “volume”, you won’t find it used anywhere that year. The volume worry is a more recent talking point that first appeared in October 2008 when it became apparent that extent wasn’t continuing to decline. They couldn’t tout another record low extent, so volume became the next big thing:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/
Arctic sea ice minimum press release
Please see the NSIDC press release, “Arctic Sea Ice Down to Second-Lowest Extent; Likely Record-Low Volume” for a detailed analysis of this year’s Arctic sea ice minimum and a synopsis of the 2008 melt season.
With nature still not cooperating with “death spiral predictions”, what will be the press release ice meme this year? Color? Texture? Cracks per square kilometer? It will be interesting to watch.
Jimmy Haigh says:
April 29, 2010 at 7:33 pm
“The next worry will be the extreme wishy-washiness of the ice.”
Good one! I really did laugh out loud. The possibilities on this tangent are boundless, and I worry we will actually hear some of them.
Bill Parsons says:
April 29, 2010 at 8:25 pm
“James: Clearly, you have not been keeping abreast of the Eskimo village of Kivalina.
Kivalina is a traditional Inupiat Eskimo community of some 390 people about 625 miles northwest of Anchorage. It is built on an 8-mile barrier reef between the Kivalina River and Chukchi Sea. Sea ice has historically protected the village, whose economy is based on salmon fishing with subsistence hunting of whale, seal, walrus and caribou…”
———
Funny… “a traditional Inupiat Eskimo community”
If you didn’t know anything you might almost think that this use of the word “traditional” meant that this village had been there since the Stone Age or something like that – and thus this erosion was something truly significant.
There is, conveniently, no photo of the “traditional” wooden buildings there. So how long has this village been there? Not very long. Thus this is not significant at all, except of course to the people who live there. Something tells me some government agent was involved in putting them there.
In any case, the way things work now, all it will take is a few elders telling some “traditional” stories and these folks will get some serious cash.
Bill Parsons says: In order to avert catastrophe, the tribe of 390 people is requesting 400 million dollars to relocate inland a couple of miles. This is why more ice = good.
So over a million a person to move inland a couple o miles…. Uh huh.. Kinda reminds me o one o our local tribes trying to sue nasa for flying satellites through “their” air space. 😉 If there is a dollar to be made, why not eh.
Sure, the extent and volume are over the long term averages… but doesn’t that ice smell kinda funny???
Phil. says:
April 29, 2010 at 5:18 pm
++++
See you in September for a “scoreboard”, Phil.
Oh, Phil –my bad. I’m on record for a 6.0-6.2M km/2 minimum for several weeks now. What are you on? Just so we have some male apparatus waving rights when we get there. . . . unless, of course, you’re just of the bray defiance at everyone else without putting your own prediction on the line tribe. . .
skye says:
Are you really that stupid?
Check this out: http://www.john-daly.com/obituary.htm
skye said on April 29, 2010 at 8:35 pm:
Anu, thank you for being a voice of reason.
Anu (aka An), mythical Sumerian god of the heavens, supported and encouraged by skye.
Do we have other cultists on this site besides CAGW believers? 😉
“An existed in Sumerian cosmogony as a dome that covered the flat earth…”
It has been noted how the climate modelers used this model of the Earth.
However, one could consider Irish Mythology as the source of the name:
For an interesting quirk, it says at the top of the linked article “Not to be confused with Annan.” Following that link, one finds a list of names, one of which is “James Annan, a climatologist.”
Oh look, James has a blog, with RealClimate and “Tamino” on the Blogroll, but no WUWT or CA. Then there is “James Annan’s homepage at Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC).” Wow, look at those publications. He co-authored with Michael Mann, what a great honor that must be!
A strange and curious example of “Six Degrees of Separation (Celsius)” here in the Climate Blogosphere, to be sure.
skye says:
April 29, 2010 at 8:24 pm
What is John Daly afraid of? Why not sure the FULL observational record?
John Daly died in Jan 2004
There seems to be quite a large number of polynas now appearing in the Arctic which tends to agree with Phil’s comments above about the ice state.
Andy
Phil M says:
April 29, 2010 at 4:22 pm
I see your 3-year trend and raise you 27 years:
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100406_Figure3.png
Looking at this graph I can see that the average Artic Ice Extent in 1981 was 15.6 million square kilometres. Now it is 15.3 million square kilometres.
How scary … that’s a decline of approximately 2% in 29 years. If this trend keeps up all the ice could be gone by 3431!
(A trend graph will look much less scary when the “Y” axis shows all the values…)
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 29, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Leif Svalgaard says:
How’d we miss that? Is average reported in that graph a different time period than they used last year?
The only thing I see from WUWT titles that month at http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/toc-2009-05.html is a piece by Steve about temperatures, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/13/arctic-non-warming-since-1958/
skye says:
April 29, 2010 at 8:24 pm
See http://www.climategateemails.com/climategate-emails-1001-1073/climategate-emails-email-1032-fwd-john-l-daly-dead
Bill Parsons says:
April 29, 2010 at 8:25 pm
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to relocate them to an abandoned neighbor of Detroit and set up a trust fund to cover their expenses for the next 20 years?
I’ve heard the 400 M$ claim before, I sure would like to see that itemized. The Detroit Zoo has Polar Bears and cubs, perhaps they could start a PB farm and get a special dispensation to sell PB meat and pelts.
Ric Werme,
That story about the Eskimos was posted here a week or two ago. IIRC, the amount allocated to make the move was $350 million, and it was being argued that the money was insufficient. The couple of hundred villagers were being moved a few miles to a ready-built new village. The picture of the old village in the article showed one rundown wooden building. I remember because I commented on it.
And thank you for setting skye straight. John Daly absolutely destroyed the CRU position on global warming through reason and data, which is why the despicable Phil Jones was practically standing up and cheering at the news of John’s untimely death.
Here is the John Daly site. It still gives the alarmist crowd a case of indigestion and tanglefoot.
AndyW said on April 30, 2010 at 12:07 am:
There seems to be quite a large number of polynas now appearing in the Arctic which tends to agree with Phil’s comments above about the ice state.
Poly-what?
Formation:
So are you saying Phil-dot’s comments indicate lots of new ice is being produced, with lots of pack ice getting formed? Or do you believe there is some source of warm water upwelling? Better check for those undersea Arctic volcanoes.
So this can be an ordinary expected event. Nice to know. Nothing to be alarmed about.
geo says:
April 29, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Oh, Phil –my bad. I’m on record for a 6.0-6.2M km/2 minimum for several weeks now.
That’s your prediction ?
About 2 standard deviations below the 1979 – 2000 average ?
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20091005_Figure2.png
Two standard deviations should include 95.45% of all measurements.
So much for an Arctic sea ice “recovery”.
I predict the summer minimum extent, as calculated by NSIDC, will be less than 5.8 million km^2.
Pamela Gray says: “I know! I know! They will start taking temperature readings up the ice’s ying yang (which kind of thermometer would you use for that?)”
A thermometer designed for iceholes I believe 🙂
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
April 29, 2010 at 10:38 pm
Before science, humans would “explain” things like climate by invoking the gods.
The Sumerians were the oldest civilization, Uruk was the oldest city, Anu was their sky-god – the name “Anu” is to remind people of how far we’ve come.
Well, some of us.
There’s alot of trepidation and hair-splitting about the amount of sea-ice. But I suppose people 15000 yrs ago were worried about the once unchangeable & unmoving glaciers suddenly beginning to melt…
Jim Clarke said: (regarding models of sea ice extent/loss)
“If they have skill, then you need to explain why they have been wrong lately.”
———
Jim, generally there are no models that predict the exact ice extent for any given year…let alone for any month or season. AGWT would only say that the trend in arctic sea ice (and eventually antarctic sea ice) over the next century is down on a year to year basis, and eventually the arctic will be ice free in the summer months. AGWT is about the longer term trend, not a period of 5 or even 10 years. When the 2007 summer low turned so low, the thought was that “maybe” the melt was happening much faster than the models would indicate, and this acceleration in the model was (and still is) being looked at closely. Was 2007 downward noise on top of a general downtrend, or did it indicate that indeed, the pre-2007 predictions of an ice free arctic by 2100 need to be moved up. A very few scientists jumped the gun (I think) and moved the ice free summer arctic up to 2013, but there is now a general range of 2030 to 2050 for an ice free summer arctic. 2008 and 2009 have shown that at least sea ice extent can come back (and certainly, this is related to wind and currents, as the 2007 low seemed to be), and there may be other cyclical events, such as PDO, La Nina, and even a period of a “quiet sun” with weak solar maximums, etc. which all can be seen as relatively short term noise on top of the longer term trend of decreasing year to year sea ice leading to an eventual ice free arctic in the summer sometime between 2030 and 2050.
One final note, I’ve NEVER used the term catastrophic, or even discussed the consequences of whether an ice free arctic is “good” or “bad”. I think it will have negative consequences for some species, and potentially positive consequences for others. I’m currently more interested in the longer term trend and watching the yearly pulse of ice in the arctic and antarctic. I personally also can look at this years near normal level of extent in the context of the bigger picture and see the primary cause, which was the very negative AO index, which did indeed form a lot of thin ice in the Bering sea mainly, as a northeast wind over a period lasting nearly 4 weeks blew across the Bering sea from NE to SW and created a lot of extra thin ice relatively quickly. The happened in March and early April, and was the cause of the “bump up” in ice that was much talked about here, but just as fast, much of that thin ice has since melted.
Anu,
“Notice how the model overestimates the sea ice volume, which was measured by ICESat in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/IceVolAnomaly19792010.MarNov2.png
What do you say when ice volume is in the eye of a satellite ?”
I notice the chart doesn’t actually show the ICESat data since 2007. Why?
From: Anu on April 30, 2010 at 7:18 am (emphasis added)
Before science, humans would “explain” things like climate by invoking the gods.
The Sumerians were the oldest civilization, Uruk was the oldest city, Anu was their sky-god – the name “Anu” is to remind people of how far we’ve come.
Uruk:
The Wikipedia “Cradle of civilization” article is interesting reading. By a certain definition Sumer is the first known civilization, but there are other places that also have a good claim to it, with “civilization” existing long before then.
Of course when talking of things more mythological than actual, claims like “oldest,” “first,” and “unprecedented” are easier to make.
BTW Enlil was the Sumerian god of the sky. He was also the god of the weather. Despite weather not being climate, I can not find mention of a Sumerian god of the climate. Guess their civilization really wasn’t that advanced since they apparently never noticed the difference.
#
Dave Wendt says:
April 29, 2010 at 10:55 pm
skye says:
April 29, 2010 at 8:24 pm
What is John Daly afraid of? Why not sure the FULL observational record?
John Daly died in Jan 2004
that’s too bad…but since he’s analysis does not include the last decade when the most profound changes in temperatures and ice cover has taken place, doesn’t make much sense to reference something so out-of-date.
Anu says:
April 30, 2010 at 7:18 am
“Before science, humans would “explain” things like climate by invoking the gods.”
Now, they do it by invoking trace gases. The justification springs from the same well: “do you have a better idea of how it can have happened?”