Study: Melting sea ice major cause of warming in Arctic

20,000 years ago, Chicago and New York were a mile deep in ice. Then the Neanderthals invented the Hummer, and all that beautiful ice started melting – forming the Great Lakes. This proves that the long-term trend is downwards.
55 million years ago, the Arctic was normally ice free. This proves that the long term trend is upwards.
Both trends can be correctly blamed on ancient soccer moms.

So what caused the expansion of the ice sheet in the past? When it gets warmer ice melts. Ok. But that seems only half the story: what caused the ice to expand since 2007?

Is this even worth blogging about?
😉

“In the study, we investigated at what level in the atmosphere the warming was occurring. What stood out was how highly concentrated the warming was in the lower atmosphere than anywhere else. I was then able to make the link between the warming pattern and the melting of the sea ice.”
Woaw it was the melting ice that warmed the lower atmosphere… Of course.

The full paper is here;
http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/files/arctique-ann%C3%A9es-2000-tures.pdf
An alarmist delight!

Martini anyone? lots of ice

I covered much of the reason for the Arctic warming here.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/29/diverging-views/
What the paper doesn’t realize is that much of the warming they describe is a result of shore station extrapolation and shore station exposure to open sea water.

That is….this is….. …do they not understand………damn it …..we’re capsizing!!!!!!

Does the fact we have more ice now than before bother this finding? Or are we really tipping over and going to capsize???

Can this be in the next IPCC report?? Does this concrete the belief we should all trust the scientist???

Heh, I didn’t realize, but I was RIGHT!!!!! It is bad ice!!!!! Yes, we have more, but it is the bad kind!!!!!

Did these “scientists” sleep through their middle school science classes? Melting ice absorbs heat, thus chilling the surrounding water and air.
Sheesh!

Steve: what happened to your “negative feedback” hypothesis? Oops.
Steve Goddard says:
March 31, 2010 at 10:54 pm
Open water at the poles means more heat loss to the atmosphere – i.e. cooling. That is a negative feedback.

I read this press release earlier today and dismissed it until I can see the full text. A bunch of selected quotes without seeing the full text and methodology leaves far to many unanswered questions. Perhaps they just have a different definition of the arctic.

“Melting sea ice major cause of warming in Arctic”
Every time I melt ice it causes cooling! 🙁 I must be doing something wrong…………….
It’s a good thing that the arctic sea ice is back to normal as I’m getting confused by this educated BS ( bad science) declarations of fact.

This paper was produced without actual observations of conditions in the Arctic by the researchers, courtesy of satellite data. I bet they never left their cosy Melbourne office. Its conclusions are likely as out of this world as the satellite itself. I notice that they do not provide any figures for the real, actual, measured, temperature of the ocean before or after the ice has melted, despite blaming higher water temps for creating a positive feedback. Methinks it probably changed by less than 1 deg C, & hovers near zero all year. The thickness of the layer of warmer water is likely 10 – 20 cm. Anyone know the facts?

Light, heat, and energy. THEY DO NOT EQUATE!!!! Yes, they are (poor) substitutes for each other, but, they are not the same. Kelvins = almost, but not quite. I had more to say, but, I’m too damned full of beer. Is it if I had the time and lunacy to spew whatever that I too could be called, “Doctor”? I hear that term today and almost spit it from my mouth.

I thought it used to be that warmth caused ice to melt. This paper now says melting ice causes warmth. In the 70s John Holdren linked the cooling to human activity. He now insists the warming is caused by human activity. He hasn’t weighed in regarding the recent cooling as far as I’ve heard, but I’d expect that to be human caused as well.
Some one needs to compile the long history of circular logic used by these people in support of their political ideology.

I went to look at the paper, but the first sentence, “The rise in Arctic near-surface air temperatures has been almost twice as large as the global average in recent decades”, indicates a paper by Mark “Death Spiral” Serreze as one of the sources. Not the best start…

George Turner says:
April 29, 2010 at 9:44 pm

Could this help explain the repeated observation that the sea ice grows in the winter and shrinks in the summer?

No, no, no. It is clearly indicating that the expansion of ice causes winter, and the melting of ice causes summer. We’ve just been getting it wrong all these years because we’ve been using non-post-normal science instead of the post-normal science that HGW has unearthed for us to benefit from.
[/sarcasm mode off (I think)]

I’m not usually too picky about typos.
But are you sure it is Dr. Screen, Anthony?
Not Dr. Scream?

The paper is pretty straight forward until the obligatory bowing to the AGW gods. Less ice allows arctic water to warm in summer. The connections to processes are conjecture, but that basic premise is reasonable. Of course not factoring in the expansion of ice since 2007 is problematic -Best to just ignore it then, right?

Derek B says: April 29, 2010 at 10:50 pm
I’m mystified by most of the other comments. …………. Why all the flak?

I think it’s because of a growing aversion to [snip]
/dr.bill

So the Arctic is warming due to positive feedback effects yet the ice is increasing at the same time. Well done, Alarmist Class 101.

“Findings published in Nature today reveal the rapid melting of sea ice has dramatically increased the levels of warming in the region in the last two decades.”
Okay, so the rapid buildup of ice since 2007 now should dramatically increase the level of cooling then?
Or?
That must mean the “increased the levels of warming in the region” nowadays is from “The hidden ‘M’.
Or maybe its “The Dark Heat” they are talking about.

But sea ice reduction is due to wind pattern, not melting. Just in yesterday: A Norwegian study that confirms the wind theory. The headline: “Ice extent a poor climate indicator”.
See: http://www.forskning.no/artikler/2010/april/248227
Google translate: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forskning.no%2Fartikler%2F2010%2Fapril%2F248227&sl=no&tl=en

This makes some kind of sense as an ongoing process, but poses a bunch of questions, including:
1) precisely what started it? Could changing cloud cover patterns have been the crucial factor?
2) if the trend has started to reverse – which is possible – then what, precisely, has happened to cause the change of direction?
3) If significant warming has been occurring in the Arctic in the last nine years when global temperatures as a whole have been stable, does that mean that there has actually been global cooling in the non-Arctic area of the globe?

I think young Dr Screen who graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of East Anglia has been well trained from a region that seems to specialise in proving theories given a set agenda.
But from the accent and the video clip:
http://newsroom.melbourne.edu/studio/ep-72
I believe he should have stuck to poems like Pam Ayres such as “Oh I wish I’d looked after me teeth” rather than getting involved in climatology:

“What we found is this feedback system has warmed the atmosphere at a faster rate than it would otherwise,”
Otherwise? This is a comparison, no? So, where is the comparitor, the control located? Or is it, as is becoming a wearying familiarity, another ‘sophisticated’ computer model?
I see the BBC has decided to run with this, although merely reprinting a summary statement is a poor return on the license fee. Sadly, contrary to popular fantasy the BBC has never been a fearless or well informed interlocutor or investigator.

Last week, we found out a change of winds caused the recent melting of ice (or rather, the pushing of ice into warmer waters south, thus effectively melting them)…. (“A” causes “B”)
Today, we learn that melting ice causes warmer temperatures… (“B” causes “C”). (I’m not disputing whether it’s true.)
So… if A causes B, and B causes C…
The conclusion: The change in winds is driving up temperatures in the Arctic. No?
So why did the winds change recently? Any guesses?
Surely there’s a tree-ring thawing in a bog somewhere which will show (via statistical magic) how my EasyJet flight to the south of France directly caused the winds to change in the Arctic.

I gave a few icecubes into my mug to keep the coffee warm, but the coffee was cold.
Any idea what probably went wrong?

stevengoddard says: April 29, 2010 at 9:24 pm
“20,000 years ago, Chicago and New York were a mile deep in ice. Then the Neanderthals invented the Hummer”
A neat trick considering that the Neanderthals became extinct at least 30,000 years ago!

This article was featured on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s [ ABC ] science site last night.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/04/29/2884900.htm
The taxpayer funded ABC is one of the leading alarmist [ and left wing ] sites in Australia and recently two of their senior executives were revealed as having decided that the ABC would not publish any evidence that contradicted the AGW theory.
And guess who screams loudest if “censorship” of any type is even remotely suggested for the media.
The ABC article referred to the study using satellite data from 1989 to 2008 so the press release above apparently studiously avoids admitting that the data is not up to date and is extremely short term by even climatology standards and could be classified as cherry picked data.
And in fact the whole study has been negated by the rise in Arctic ice areas and volumes in the 2008 / 2009 and 2009 / 2010 northern winters.
The quoted reasons for the supposed decline in Arctic ice are also negated by the latest developments in the Arctic and one of the discarded theories on the forces driving Arctic ice formation and melts seems a far more likely proposition than this “modelled” study by just another government rent seeker.

I think this is interesting analysis that has drawn the wrong conclusion. The greatest rate of warming is at 90N in the autumn and winter, with a smaller rate of warming as you move south. Surely if the surface temperature amplification is due to diminished sea ice cover, the amplification should be greatest closest to the diminished cover, i.e. at the edge of the ice not at the pole.
I think their conclusion that recent arctic temperature amplification is due to diminishing sea ice cover could equally be interpreted as diminishing sea ice cover is due to recent arctic temperature amplification. However, this would still raise the question of why the amplification is greatest furthest from the melting ice.
The paper: http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/files/arctique-ann%C3%A9es-2000-tures.pdf

“..Over the past 20 years the Arctic has experienced the fastest warming of any region on the planet. Researchers around the globe have been trying to find out why.”
Fixing that for you….
“Over the past 20 years the Arctic has experienced the fastest warming of any region on the planet. Researchers around the globe have been mounting extensive expeditions burning tons of fuel oil and installing scientific camps with heated acomodation across the region, as well as local airfields with a steady stream of turbo-prop aircraft movements, in an effort to find out why.
So far the cause has eluded them, but they all agree that it must be Global Warming…”

Oh, so the melting causes warming! And I always thought it was the other way round. God, I’m thick!

“Using the latest observational data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting,”
This must be the latest 20 year old data.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/cbc/100429/canada/canada_north_north_pole_rainfall
From the weather is not climate files….extremely strange….freakish event. No mention of whether this event has even the slightest, thinnest relationship on whatever level to the Icelandic volcanic eruption? Maybe, who knows?

I’m generally one to hate these sorts of things, but conceptually I can’t call BS on this one even if poorly phrased. Point out to me where I’ve got it wrong?
1) The ice acts as a partial mirror, reflecting energy back into the atmosphere/space in some ratio. Some gets absorbed into the ice, causing some melt. No energy reaches the water underneath the ice as it’s an insulator.
2) As the ice melts, the mirror shrinks, reducing the quantity of reflected energy. The excess energy hits the ocean waters, warming it (however slightly)
3) Warmer ocean water cools the atmosphere less than the same surface area of ice, leading to the air closer to water being warmer than the air near the ice. (or higher in the atmosphere, further away from the water vertically)
4) Warmer air and water circulates, will brush against the ice, and cause melting in that fashion as well.
Nothing particularly groundbreaking here that I can tell… just “duh”. That said, it doesn’t do anything to talk about the big picture because it looks at an isolated mechanism and attempts to use that to point fingers at an eventuality that that have limited insights into… the system in totality, not just melting ice.

But even in summer the sun in the Arctic is low in the sky so the extra energy entering the water is a fraction of what enters the oceans at the equator.
It is much more likely that the energy flow from the newly exposed water surface to the cool air above is far greater than any increase in water energy content from increased insolation.
I’ve long considered open water at the North Pole to be an efficent energy conduit to the sky at all times of the year.
The Arctic Ocean is maintained as a liquid by warmer water flowing into the Arctic Ocean past Spitzbergen not by solar insolation.
If the Arctic Ocean becomes free of sea ice for longer then the whole process of energy transport from equator to poles to space is accelerated with a negative effect on global temperature.
A bald head on a cold sunny day loses heat faster than the sunshine replaces it.
I think we are now seeing the collapse of the western scientific method as a result of poor teaching of our children at every level.

The technical paper ARCTIC AIR TEMPERATURE CHANGE AMPLIFICATION AND THE ATALANTIC MULTIDECADAL OSCILLATION published by various technical journals including the GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTER outlines the real cause of Arctic warming .
Here is what their abstract said
Understanding Arctic temperature variability is essential for assessing possible future melting of the Greenland ice sheet, Arctic sea ice and Arctic permafrost. Temperature trend reversals in 1940 and 1970 separate two Arctic warming periods (1910–1940 and 1970–2008) by a significant 1940–1970 cooling period. Analyzing temperature records of the Arctic meteorological stations we find that (a) the Arctic amplification (ratio of the Arctic to global temperature trends) is not a constant but varies in time on a multi-decadal time scale, (b) the Arctic warming from 1910–1940 proceeded at a significantly faster rate than the current 1970–2008 warming, and (c) the Arctic temperature changes are highly correlated with the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) suggesting the Atlantic Ocean thermohaline circulation is linked to the Arctic temperature variability on a multi-decadal time scale.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL038777.shtml
Also see
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/RS_Arctic.htm

P.F. says:
I thought it used to be that warmth caused ice to melt. This paper now says melting ice causes warmth.
No, it doesn’t say that. It says that the reduction of ice cover causes warmth, due to lower albedo. Nothing controversial there at all.

“jim hogg says:
April 30, 2010 at 1:22 am
……..
3) If significant warming has been occurring in the Arctic in the last nine years when global temperatures as a whole have been stable, does that mean that there has actually been global cooling in the non-Arctic area of the globe?”
Actually this is an intersting point. If huge areas of the world have high temperature increases [allegedly] and the ‘average’ is only .5 or so then other areas must have gone down or least stayed the same. I’d be fascinated to look at reports of climate change effects in areas with no change.
cheers David

mark.r says:
“but the long-term trend is still one of decreasing ice” HOW DO THY KNOW THIS?.
No doubt there is a more mathematical way to answer your question but does it look like there is any change to the long term declining trend, here?

Dr James Screen of the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne is the spitting image of the Dr James Screen at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia

But the AGW position has been, until now, that warming caused the melting.
If the melting causes the warming, that means the theory AGW promoters have relied on is 180° wrong.
If the mechanism of Arctic ice melt is not AGW, then its recovery is not depending on CO2, either.
That strongly implies that Arctic ice pack is not a great barometer of global climate irt CO2.
IOW, yet another AGW tenet bites the dust.

I now have incontrovertible proof that sea ice melt is caused by loops.
Well, that and government research grants.

This is a truly significant finding. Now that this process has been discovered many more modern and post-modern scientists will be able to see the connection between global warming and ice melting. Let us only hope that this trend continues and that soon they will put all these pieces together and have a better understanding of where we have been and where we are. What an amazing era we live in. We owe all this to Teacher’s Unions everywhere.

Anthony,
On every map an science paper that has come out, they ALL display the angle of sunlight as STRAIGHT ONTO THE PLANET.
They angles of sunlight travel MUCH farther through the atmosphere as the planets angle changes to the surface point.
Deflecting MUCH energy!

OT: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627583.700-designing-greenhouses-for-the-red-planet.html
Don’t worry they can just redesign our greenhouse, they just need to model it and plan. *phyew*

starzmom says:
April 30, 2010 at 4:45 am
So this positive feedback of ice melting causes warming and more ice melting. So exactly why is there more ice now than any time in the past 9 years on this date? Must have missed something in that analysis.
You didn’t miss anything. There is no feedback, otherwise recovery is impossible. They are mistaking the heat sink caused by ice for something that it is not. When the ice is gone, it’s back to blackbody behavior, nothing more.

stevengoddard says:
April 29, 2010 at 9:24 pm
20,000 years ago, Chicago and New York were a mile deep in ice. Then the Neanderthals invented the Hummer LOL!!
You are right!, too many “Hummers”…
So, now, the thing is: I put a glass of liquid water in my freezer and it will melt all the ice in it? Wow!, just couldn´t believe it!
All these post normal scientists should be subjected to the mayeutic Socratic method of questioning, to find the “primum mobile” of climate (not theirs, of course, we already know it is money). That is why we all must ask ourselves what the heck is that round ball of fire hanging up above?, what is it that “sunny breeze”, “solar wind” or that f#* current that connects that gigantic light bulb with the earth?, which is the most common meteorological event on earth?, is it the millions of lightnings?,etc.,etc.
What does it cause Climate?

stevengoddard says:
20,000 years ago, Chicago and New York were a mile deep in ice. Then the Neanderthals invented the Hummer, and all that beautiful ice started melting – forming the Great Lakes. This proves that the long-term trend is downwards. 55 million years ago, the Arctic was normally ice free. This proves that the long term trend is upwards. Both trends can be correctly blamed on ancient soccer moms.
Followed by:
Icarus says:
April 30, 2010 at 4:14 am
What exactly was the point of this comment? Long-term trends in climate are due to long-term forcings, e.g. the Milankovitch cycles. Now we have introduced anthropogenic forcings and they are causing long-term climate change too. Is there anything controversial about that? People here like to discuss the type and magnitude of anthropogenic changes, which is perfectly valid, but no-one sensible argues that we’re not having any effect at all on climate.
The Arctic temperature records determine that temperatures were greater in the 30’s and 40’s than now while human co2 emissions were 1/10 the current rate. (peer -reviewed, sources included)
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/RS_Arctic.htm
Please show the correlation between co2 and arctic temperature. Only then can you make the statement ” causing long-term climate change”. Otherwise, you’re just trolling.

Isn’t it rather painfully obvious there’s a positive feedback in this situation? Duh!

Does anyone know if stable high pressure cells develop over the Arctic in the summer, perhaps near the North Pole? I was thinking that descending air, warmed by adiabatic compression, at the very center of such cells might naturally cause a Chinook (ice-eater) effect that could, when combined with 24 Hr daily sunshine, cause localized melted zones to develop deep inside regions of thick multiyear ice.
As for the University of Melbourne study, I imagine the world will give a collective yawn and then ask “So, what else is new?”

starzmom says:
So this positive feedback of ice melting causes warming and more ice melting. So exactly why is there more ice now than any time in the past 9 years on this date? Must have missed something in that analysis.
There will always be interannual variability – that’s the nature of the climate system. NSIDC say:

Early in March, Arctic sea ice appeared to reach a maximum extent. However, after a short decline, the ice continued to grow. By the end of March, total extent approached 1979 to 2000 average levels for this time of year. The late-season growth was driven mainly by cold weather and winds from the north over the Bering and Barents Seas.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Terry says:
April 30, 2010 at 4:09 am

OT I know, but how do I get to paste quotes as per Jerome @ 11:17 with the indented italic or other format. Is this a WP plug-in I can get somewhere.

probably answered already but….
Check out the page source. You can add lt blockquote gt (lt=less than ) and an end-tag (with a / before the word). i in there does italics, u underline, etc. Remember to do the / in the closing tag.
It’s just HTML, see the page source. It’s a pain, but I’m a developer so I’m happy to mess with such stuff. I’m also getting it wrong 25% of the time (like all good developers – that’s why software has bugs. No other engineering profession is so fault-tolerant, I love it!)

What a load of old cobblers this report is! Seems these guys have forgotten their basic physics about the enthalpy of fusion. Ice melt is endothermic, meaning that the system absorbs energy on going from solid to liquid at 334j/g.
This means that the air temperature above melting ice is always close to zero. The atmosphere transfers little energy to the ice and only has impact on sea ice melt. The sun and ocean are the main providers of the huge amount of energy needed for the melt, with the sea providing by far the largest proportion.
The effect of the sun is less than would seem reasonable because the angle of it’s rays is low in the Arctic and is mostly reflected, of both ice and water.
The final pieces of the puzzle are provided by atmospheric and ocean current strength and direction, which effect the rate the melting sea ice is swept out the Arctic basin to melt in the warmer southerly seas.
It is also interesting that these people don’t mention the dramatic sea ice recovery since the 2007 minimum – although this hardly supports their shaky hypothesis!

Tim Clark says:

The Arctic temperature records determine that temperatures were greater in the 30′s and 40′s than now while human co2 emissions were 1/10 the current rate. (peer -reviewed, sources included)
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/RS_Arctic.htm
Please show the correlation between co2 and arctic temperature. Only then can you make the statement ” causing long-term climate change”. Otherwise, you’re just trolling.

My understanding is that the warming of the first few decades of the 20th Century was associated with increased solar irradiance. At that time the anthropogenic greenhouse effect was too small to be distinguishable from natural forcings – it only rose out of the ‘noise’ in the last few decades.

RockyRoad says:
April 30, 2010 at 3:50 am
(Maybe they believe CO2 was being captured by Arctic ice and, being fizzy, it WAS the flavor of the ice after all!)
Woo hoo! I was right, it was all about the flavo(u)r!!! 🙂

If only there were warm water currents coming from the equatorial regions. If only they released an increased amount of heat from the oceans to cool the planet in the arctic regions, and if only this effect would increase when warming causes ice to melt, increasing the area that the warm water could radiate to, thus cooling the planet. If only the melting ice turned into cold water that then got carried by those same ocean currents to equatorial regions, cooling them off. If only the amount of heat that got moved around this way was hundreds or thousands of times the change from albedo from the fluctuating ice. If only this were true then the ice cover and temperature would just fluctuate between some upper and lower limits. Less ice, more cooling, more ice less cooling. If only that were true, and if only we knew if the cycles were 60 years or so in length like the ones observed in the historical record. But, since we can’t rely on the historical record, all we are left with is the hysterical record.
Too bad about that. Hmmm… is the hysterical record cyclical too?

Icarus says: April 30, 2010 at 6:41 am “There will always be interannual variability – that’s the nature of the climate system.”
And then you go on to quote NSIDC on why there was a late Arctic ice spurt this year. However, you seem to be missing a key point: It is not just the late spurt this year. It is the continued high level. In fact, for today’s date, the largest ice extents measured by ASMR-E (which started in 2002) occurred in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Ice recovery has not just been a one year freakish event.
Likely, 99% of the commentators on this blog understand the albedo concept, but from the abstract and press release, it appears that this study oversells Arctic albedo. The angle and the increased travel through the atmosphere reduce the effect in the Arctic.

“Could this help explain the repeated observation that the sea ice grows in the winter and shrinks in the summer?”
That’s just Crazy Talk, man. Crazy Talk!!!

So… warming causes sea ice to melt, and melting causes warming? Why haven’t we exploded yet?

I would say less ice is a secondary effect of warmer sea (and air), but I doubt it is such a big positive feedback.
Warming, cooling, warming and again about to cooling pattern in Arctic ocean is obvious:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/ihadsst2_0-360E_60-90N_na.png
Alas, there is no correlation with CO2 rising, except 1980-2005 warming trend which just obviously finished.
If we agree that colder sea (and air as a secondary effect) means more ice, how NSIDC can claim the 20th century Arctic ice history like this
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg
if combined record of SST and met stations is like this?
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/icrutem3_hadsst2_0-360E_66-90N_na.png

The next step for these “atmospheric scientists” (they live up above, at the “Topus Uranus”) is to make a cooking range with four hairdryers as heating sources…that will be more environmentally friendly.

“In the study, we investigated at what level in the atmosphere the warming was occurring. What stood out was how highly concentrated the warming was in the lower atmosphere than anywhere else. I was then able to make the link between the warming pattern and the melting of the sea ice.”
According to the IPPC, the signature of AGW is heating in the mid upper atmosphere. What gives?

I’ve noticed that many recent alarmist ice studies prefer using old data… data ending in 2007. The same thing happened with global temperature studies after the 1998 El Nino… the studies after that for at least five years preferred to end on that point or extend the averaging to show a continuous upward trend. Apparently any cooling trends are inconvenient blips that must be hidden, not just by CRU, but by many researchers who want more of that lovely global warming grant money. If a study shows that AGW doesn’t amount to much, are the authors likely to get more grants to study what isn’t worth worrying about?

Icarus says:
April 30, 2010 at 7:13 am
My understanding is that the warming of the first few decades of the 20th Century was associated with increased solar irradiance. At that time the anthropogenic greenhouse effect was too small to be distinguishable from natural forcings – it only rose out of the ‘noise’ in the last few decades.
I wouldn’t call that an “understanding”; it’s more of a belief system.

If less ice causes more warming because of positive feedback doesn’t it follow that more ice [like we have experienced in 2008, 2009, and so far 2010] will cause more cooling ?
So 2010 should have more ice than 2009.
Positive feedback doesn’t just operate one way.
There are studies which show that wind patterns have a strong effect on ice buildup.
Then there is the fact that our records begin in 1976 and don’t mean much yet.

So . . . . melting arctic sea ice is both the cause AND result of global warming . . . . ? . . . . ?? . . . . .???
Well, at least in that respect they’re consistent with what we collectively know about CO2; it is both caused by and causes global warming.
(Follow me here)
Therefor, logically, CO2 IS Arctic Sea Ice and therefor . . . . (wait for it) . . . A WITCH . . . A WITCH, BURN HER, BURN HER . . .
(Witch); This is not my sea ice, it’s false sea ice, and they dressed me up like this.
(Local Magistrate); Did you dress her up like this?
(Peasant); Well, we did do the nose
(LM); The nose?
(P); And the sea ice, but she is a witch.
(Crowd): Burn her, Burn her anyway.
But I digress.
What are the qualifications to be a scientist again? Did they stumble onto this by accident, or sheer will of investigative, deductive and epistemic might?
I think we need to put these guys onto the whole chicken vs. egg controversy, they just may be qualified to give us an answer.
Back to our story;
This new learning fascinates me, tell me again how sheep’s bladder’s may be employed to prevent earth quakes?

OK, the soot from last year’s melt is in the ocean. New ice starts off with no soot, so soot primarily melts older ice.
If this is a POSITIVE feedback that can overpower the creation of new ice, why did the ice form faster in the fall of 2007 than any other year listed?
Looks like a NEGATIVE feedback to me. Probably why Arctic Ice doesn’t dissapear every 3 years.

If CO2 is a problem, it is a problem with a 38/100000 probability of occurance.
In other words, the chances of a CO2 atom taking part in warming, above and beyond other atoms in the atmospere, are astronomically poor.

In summer 2007 the Arctic had the lowest sea ice cover on record. Since then levels have recovered a little but the long-term trend is still one of decreasing ice.
And just how far back does the record go??
Seems like this guy ought to be on the Caitlin team. Incidentally, are they still out there?

Arno Arrak says:
April 30, 2010 at 9:41 am
Arno, you seem to be missing the point. First off, reanalysis data based on 1979 to present is the most accurate data because it incorporates satellite observations. Renalaysis uses observational data in combination with modeling (to fill in missing data) to provide atmospheric information. What they are looking at is recent warming trends in the Arctic, which show a clear autumn warming signal linked to the loss of the summer ice cover. The physics work like this: earlier development of open water in spring and more extensive open water areas throughout summer allow the ocean to absorb the incoming solar radiation that would have normally been reflected back out to space by the ice cover (remember the summer Arctic sea ice trends from 1979 to today?–that conversely means more open water which conversely means the ocean is absorbing heat during summer in its mixed layer).
So, in autumn when the sun dips below the horizon again and temperatures drop, the ocean must first release the heat gained in the ocean mixed layer before the ice can once again reform. It does this by releasing the heat back to the atmosphere. Serreze et al., 2009 show this better in terms of anomalies from the last 5 years versus the long-term mean. Large heat fluxes from the ocean to the atmosphere characterize the last few years of the most extreme summer ice losses. You can see this not only in the temperature anomalies, but also in the latent and sensible heat fluxes.
For a very long time now, climate models have been predicting that arctic amplification would occur because of the ice/snow-albedo feedback affect. Today the observations are supporting what the models long ago predicted. And it makes complete physical sense. The paper is not really a new result except to update the Graverson et al. paper which made a number of mistakes. The concept of Arctic amplification has been known for a long time, observations are now showing it to be true.

Dr James Screen of the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne has found NCAR scientist Kevin Tenberth’s “missing heat”. The answer is as plain as day: The missing heat is hidden in the Arctic Ice! As the ice melts, it releases the heat to the atmosphere over the Arctic. This is a positive feedback loop that will continue until the Arctic is ice free, probably in the year 2013 or even sooner.

David Jones: Now that you mention 2007, that warming was not on the Gulf Stream side of the Arctic but on the Bering Strait side. The Bering Strait is another source of warm water reaching the Arctic, although a lot less than what the Gulf Stream brings to the Russian Arctic. Normally it is enough to keep the Chuckchi Sea, just north of the strait, open, but it may extend to the Beaufort Sea just north of Alaska. Apparently thanks to a pattern of winds unusual amounts of warm water entered the Arctic through the Bering Strait that year and opened up a large bubble of open water that included the Beaufort Sea while the Gulf Stream side at the same time hardly changed. It’s the vagaries of these warm currents that control Arctic warming, not carbon dioxide as you have been propagandized to believe.

“In the study, we investigated what would happen if we amputated all of a frogs legs. What stood out was after repeatedly yelling at the frog to jump the frog just sat there. I was then able to make the link that frogs with no legs were deaf.”
My conclusion is just as valid as his.

“”” Study: Melting sea ice major cause of warming in ArcticPosted on April 29, 2010 by Anthony Watts “””
Well my cut and paste doesn’t preserve the formatting; but it preserves the erroneous word order; so herewith, the hand done correction:-
Study: Warming in Arctic major cause of melting sea ice Posted on April 29, 2010 by Anthony Watts.
There now, isn’t that much better ?
There’s an actual reason why they have all that sea ice up there in the first place; it’s cold up there; and it’s cold up there because they don’t get much solar irradiance up there. And that ice is also cold, so it doesn’t radiate thermal LWIR at the same rate as the tropical oceans do, so it doesn’t warm the atmosphere via GHG as much as happens in the tropics.
Also because of those lower water and ice temperatures, and air temperatures; the humidity tends to be lower and the total atmospheric water vapor content tends to be lower, so the atmospheric GHG warming is also lower than in the tropics.
But then you have these ocean currents from the tropics; that bring warmer surface waters up into the arctic ocean; where we are told they cool, and sink so the water can return to the equatorial regions along the cold bottom. One of the reasons for that cooling up there is that you have all that ice floating in the surface water, and most of the ice volume is actually under the water; and the total ice surface area in contact with the water, is greater than the ice area in contact with the air. Air is a much better thermal insulator than water is, so the conduction of “heat” from water to ice is vastly greater than from air to ice, so the warmer surface waters can melt ice better than the air can; and all that latent heat comes out of the ocean; not the air. Hey not all of it, but most of it.
Well then there’s the sun. Hey you can’t have it both ways. No fair crediting the ice for the earth albedo; while at the same time blaming it for melting the ice. Either it bounces off to albedo purgatory, or it is absorbed to melt ice.
One effect you don’t hear much about results from the obliquity of the solar input in the arctic.
My IR Handbook gives a proposed standard Solar Spectral Irradiance with a peak of 2074 W/m^2/micron for air mass zero (extraterrestrial). I should caution this is for an older TSI value of 1353 W/m^2; which is the value I grew up with in high school. Ac ouple of graphs in the handbook place the air mass one peak at 75% of the AM-0 value; but I don’t have tabulated values. For AM-2. Now for an atmospheric height (H), and a sun altitude angle (A), corresponding to a surface incidence angle (90-A), the slant range is H/Sin(A); so Air mass two corresponds to a sun altitude of 30 degrees.
My Mercator maps generously put the perimeter of the arctic ocean at 70 deg north, which skirts the top of Alaska, but most of greenland and a lot of Canada, and Siberia protrude even north of that. So at the Equinox in September; when the refreeze starts, (A) is zero at the pole; so it would be 20 degrees at the perimeter of my ocean. At the Summer Solstice we would get another 23 1/2 deg or 43.5 deg solar Altitude, which presumably is the maximum. That would give us a minimum of AM 1.45 at the edge of the Arctic ocean, versus 2.92 at the Equinox.
the Handbook gives a peak of 1215 W/m^2/micron, for the AM-2 spectral Irradiance; but for some unexplained reason this value is for a TSI of 1322 W/m^2; so that presumably was some sort of Neanderthal observation, peeking out of a cave somewhere.
So bear in mind these are spectral peak values not integrated totals, and they need to be factored by the current TSI value of 1366 W/m^2; but you get the point; the ground level insolation in the arctic ocean is greatly reduced by Air mass absorption, and then by the ground obliquity factor; that’s why they have ice up there. Note that the AM factor results in an increase in the direct solar atmospheric heating; because of the increased slant path length. To some extent the outgoing (albedo) reflection also undergoes an increased outgoing pathlength so even on the outgoing, the solar heating of the atmosphere is increased. it’s nearly impossible to compute, because the outgoing albedo component is going to be highly scattered since the surface is not a flat optical surface with the ice there; but can be moreso, with the open water.
But in the end; all that solar warming of the atmosphere, results in a reduction of the surface level insolation which is what would be available to melt surface ice.
For some reason; the solar heated atmosphere, wants to expand, and thereby transport itself via the process of convection, to higher altitudes, where it tends to get lost to space. So don’t count on the solar heated atmosphere being responsible for very much conduction heating of the ice surface. It will of course give an LWIR component of radiative heating; but that will be very much a “skin effect” heating due to the huge absorption coefficient of either ice or water at those wavelengths. And no I don’t believe either the ice or the water has an actual “Skin”; just the IR heating is confined to the top few microns of the surface; which tends to promote either evaporation or ablation as the case may be; so not much in the way of melting.
Now I agree that with less sea ice, and more open water, you get more evaporation into the air; which transports a whole lot of heat to the atmosphere; something like 540-590 calories per gram. I really have to convert those numbers to Joules; and commit them to memory; since htese daya a calorie is a quantity of food.
But I am much more ready to believe that it is the melting ice in the arctic that is leading to the warming up there, than I am to believe the opposite.
I’ve flown over the Arctic Ocean in daylight precisely once, going from SFO to London, and it was choc-a-bloc wall to wall ice. That would have been round about this time or a bit earlier in 1979-80 (when is the Pentecostal Weekend in Europe). So that would have been about the time when the Arctic ice reached its all time, never exceeded, maximum extent, that yielded those great pictures that Nobellist AlGore took back then, to show how bad it was going to look in 2007.
I don’t know enough about what is going on up there or how it all works; and I certainly have no prediction for this September’s minimum ice extent; but I am currently not alarmed by what I keep reading and seeing in photos.
When Svend Hendriksen decides to leave Greenland for a safer place; then I might get alarmed.
Well this ended up getting shaggy dog like; but maybe I got my points across.

skye says:
April 30, 2010 at 11:58 am
Tim, GHG induced warming is different from a surface albedo feedback affect. These are not the same things, or changes in atmospheric circulation, you will not be able to understand the paper. Perhaps a crash course on physics and energy balance will help.
Oh wow, what a smackdown.
From the paper:
Increased concentrations of atsmospheric greenhouse gases have driven Arctic and global average warming…. … The Arctic region has long been expected to warm strongly as a result of anthropogenic climate change…………In the Arctic, this greenhouse effect dominates during autumn, winter, and spring.
I’m not really interested in your labile physics knowledge. The assertion in the paper is that increasing greenhouse gases initiate the amplification affect. If the original assumptions used to make ther argument are invalid, the paper is useless. In the modern record, the 30’s and 40’s centered on 1939 are the hottest in the Arctic record, citation above. Explain to me how the Arctic in the 60’s and 70’s cooled,/b> while [CO2] exploded. Where was this alledged amplification then. If this amplification existed as a result of [CO2], then the Arctic ice would be gone, zip, nada, post 1939. I suggest that “understanding the difference between a surface feedback affect and that from changes in atmospheric GHGs” doesn’t mean squat until you can correlate [CO2] with Arctic temperature, or else it’s just weather, move along.

Well I wouldn’t put much stock in anything coming out of Melbin; those Ausies are nutz. Hell I just saw a news Bulletin that one of my colleagues received from down there. Seems like the Ausies aren’t happy with the number of holidays they get to drink Fosters; which they will tell you in their own words, is Australian for beer.
So the crazy buggers decided to invade their southern nieghbor to establish a new victory holiday date that they could drink to.
Wow what a mess that turned into; you ever seen an Abo Canoe; well we Kiwis know canoes; just ask our Maori
Cobbers about canoeing; and damn good sailors they are too; so the Aussie Navy was totally outclassed. So then they resorted to their Air Force; hey; earth to Oz, Kiwis don’t fly; Moas don’t fly; Wekas don’t fly; what the hell was it you expected to run into in the air over there; well of course there is always Aotearoa; land of the long white cloud. Well that cloud of course hides a lot of Cumulo-Granite; some of it high enough to have ice on it. Height is not a concept that is understood in the land of Oz where it is all at about sea level; so there was a lot of bent aeroplanes, and not much bang from the AAF.
Fionally it got down to the hand to hand ground fighting, and the outclassed diggers, all got tossed into a big tank of Stein Lager. Well, poor chaps couldn’t drink fast enough to keep their heads above water; and they all drowned.
Hey Earth to Australasia; both of you blokes don’t know anything about Beer. Lager is a Ladies drink, and real men don’t drink lager. We have the same problem here in Colorado; where they make a lot of lager; comes naturally, because evidently nobody ever warned them about eating yellow snow.
So the two of you oughta just kiss and make up; and take a trip to Bavaria, where they also have snow and ice; but they know something about Beer.
Talk about mayhem over there on the other side of the pizza; both of you lot oughta be ashamed of yourselves.
Besides when was the last time you actually waited for a beer to cool down before you drank it , anyway.
I don’t think your arctic thesis is gonna work out for you; try studying poisonous snakes, and spiders; that’s more up your alley !

Skye: Let’s keep the eye on the ball. If Screen and Simmonds don’t even know that arctic warming is more than a century old why bother with irrelevant details they bring up. The warming is best documented by Kaufman et al. in Science 325:1236-1239. Their field work uncovered a two thousand year old cooling trend that ended abruptly when the twentieth century began. From that point on their curve turns up and looks very much like a hockey stick only this time it is real. The warming itself has lasted, with an interruption in mid-century, to this day. The interruption was from 1940 to 1960 and brought some cooling. The warmest period in the twentieth century was in the thirties and this level of Arctic warmth was not reached again until 2003. So what do the authors themselves think of it? Just what you would expect a real warmist to say: “This shift correlates with the rise in global average temperature which coincided with the onset of global anthropogenic changes in global atmospheric composition….warming in the Arctic was enhanced relative to global average, likely reflecting a combination of natural variability and positive feedbacks that amplified the radiative forcing.” A wonderful concatenation of global warming mantras, all wrong. First, global average temperature did not increase at the start of the twentieth century but decreased according to temperature graphs from NOAA and the Met Office. Second, at the start of the twentieth century the greenhouse effect from all sources was only twenty percent of what it is today. In addition, published curves of carbon dioxide abundance in air show that it took no notice of the passing of the century. This fact alone tells us that it is impossible for carbon dioxide to have had anything to do with that warming. And that is because laws of physics demand that its partial pressure should have simultaneously taken a jump, and this did not happen. Which leaves us looking for a cause that can act suddenly and massively and be capable of affecting Arctic temperatures over a wide geographic area. And be flexible enough to retract temporarily as it did in mid-century and then resume its influence. Eliminating the sun, carbon dioxide, and volcanoes leaves just one possibility: it must be ocean currents. We know that the Gulf Stream today delivers huge amounts of warm water to the Russian Arctic. But what do we know of its history? If a rearrangement of North Atlantic Ocean currents directed the Gulf Stream to its present northerly course at the turn of the twentieth century this would explain the sudden start and the present course of Arctic warming. Together with additional currents entering through the Bering Strait this can account for all the observations of Arctic warming now and in the past. Neither the greenhouse effect nor a hypothetical “Arctic acceleration” can do that and must be rejected as causes of warming.

Bob Kutz says:
April 30, 2010 at 9:25 am

This new learning fascinates me, tell me again how sheep’s bladder’s may be employed to prevent earth quakes?

Allow me to explain the real situation.
You see, what we need to do is create a new tax. That tax will be on everything. This is because it will mainly target energy use and that is pretty much tied to everything we produce.
That tax will, in and of itself, prevent all these nasty earthquakes and even volcanoes, along with the HGW (Hidden Global Warming) that causes every one of these nasty things to disturb our otherwise perfect and completely stable environment.
Nothing to do with sheep’s bladders, you see?
[/sarc off (again)]

Hey everbody.
Please calm down.
This paper was not just from Melbourne,
It was printed by NATURE
so it must have been PEER REVIEWEd
by real EXPERTS in their field.
So wot’s this Latent Heat of thinagdy,
What’s he kow aboit it anyway.
It must be right.
It’s in Nature,
and so on and on and on.
(some of the spelling errors in this post were intential,
some were mine).

Arno Arrak says:
April 30, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Arno, I think you are confusing annual temperature variations with seasonal temperature changes. BTW…look at Steve’s other post where he shows UAH temperature trends. Notice first off warming in all seasons (this was not the case in the 1930s-1940s warming). Nor was the 1930s-1940s warming widespread in the Arctic, it was on the Eurasian side. Unfortunately there are not Arctic wide observations of sea ice from that time-period, so the link between any autumn warming during that time and sea ice cannot be examined. But it can be examined today using 30+ years of satellite observations.
Again, it seems that the basic energy balance of surfaces is not being understood by many of the posts I see. The amount of energy absorbed by the surface depends on the surface albedo. If you have a surface with a lower albedo (such as water), you will absorb nearly 90% of the incoming solar radiation. This will cause a warming of the ocean. Air temperatures in autumn are much colder than the ocean, thus there is a heat transfer from the ocean back to the atmosphere. That is all this paper is saying. It is not necessarily anything groundbreaking, it is exactly what one would expect given the ice extent trends. You all are making a much bigger deal out of this paper than it merits.

I can only see one thing thats common with the sea ice (and all ice). That is the sun . When you get up to 6 months of light the ice melts and when you get up to 6 months no sun light you get more ice growth .So in 2007 was there more sun shine hours recorded than normal in the Artic?.

skye:
Melt ponds and the melt-back of the snow means that the Albedo of sea ice falls quite a bit during the melt season (when open ocean water starts to appear). In normal conditions, there is not much difference in the Albedo between frozen sea ice and open ocean at this time of the year.
Here is the annual cycle of Albedos for different areas/regions in the Arctic from 1982 to 1999. Note that Greenland has a fairly high number throughout the year but the sea ice has quite a drop-out during the melt season.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/action/showFullPopup?doi=10.1175%2FJCLI3438.1&id=_e8
From Lindsay and Rothrock: Our friends at the Polar Science Cetnre at the University of Washington.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/lindsay/pdf_files/albedo_from_avhrr_jclim_1994.pdf
From 1980 before anyone was concerned about Arctic ice melting. The average surface albedo at 80N (where the ice does not really melt out yet) is 0.508 in August. The only way that number can occur is for sea ice albedo to be relatively low at the height of the melt season.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/stateclim_v1/robinson_pubs/refereed/Kukla_and_Robinson_1980.pdf
Even our own Judith Curry has written two papers about it here.
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/currydoc/Curry_JC5.pdf
http://lightning.sbs.ohio-state.edu/geo622/paper_ice_Curry1995.pdf

From AlanG on April 30, 2010 at 11:07 pm:
JER0ME: OR just press the Control (CTRL) button and spin the mouse wheel, for those of us in the 21st century…
You can write but you cannot make them read… Your sarcastic comment is wrong. That only changes the web site you are looking at. (…)
Errrrrr! (annoying buzzer sound)
AlanG, as mentioned here, you are giving Firefox advice. What versions are you giving advice for? With the pointer in the area displaying the site, the advice given by JEROME works on the latest versions, with the caveat that you shouldn’t spin the scroll wheel but slowly turn it a click at a time. I tried a big turn when I read that advice on the “New Theme” thread and my P4 machine w/ on-board graphics hung for a bit processing all the view changes. The ctrl-dash(minus sign) and ctrl-plus sign (or = without shift if using the key next to the backspace) combos also work to go smaller/larger.

From skye on May 1, 2010 at 8:27 am:
(…) (http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?mosaic=Arctic.2010121.terra.4km).
(…)
But again, I will let the visible satellite imagery speak for itself. If water had the same reflectance as ice, you wouldn’t be able to see the difference between the two in the imagery. But, you do.
Such wonderful imagery looking straight down!
Now post some pics showing what it looks like at the small angles, let us see what the reflectance looks like as incoming light from the Sun would actually “see” it.
After all, people on this site are likely aware that a body of water can appear dark looking straight down into it, but as you look out over the water it doesn’t look so dark, and as you look further out it isn’t “dark” at all since you’re seeing reflections. At the small angles is there really a great difference between still water, smooth shiny ice, and a mirror?
So let’s see the pics (and measurements) based on the actual “solar view” of the Arctic, rather that comparisons in ways that don’t matter since those conditions don’t happen.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
May 1, 2010 at 9:40 am
The sun angles are still rather low right now in the Arctic especially at the most northern latitudes. But go ahead and look at September imagery and you will see the same thing (dark=water, bright=ice or clouds).
And so that you understand, MODIS is measuring the reflected solar energy. And it scans up to angles as oblique as +/- 55 degrees. I’m not sure what you mean by “incoming light from the Sun would actually see it”.
Snow and ice do not reflect the incoming solar radiation equally in all directions. In the forward direction (i.e. if your sensor is in the same position as the sun), snow is very forward scattering (i.e. you are receiving more energy in that direction than if you were opposite the sun). You can google snow BRDF and water BRDF to see for yourself the distribution of reflectance at different angles and how viewing the surface in the forward or backward direction and at nadir or oblique viewing angles looks like. You will notice that both water and snow show strong forward scattering, so you can still discriminate between the two.
Also, the albedo is the integral of the albedo over all angles.

TomRude, Reur April 29, 2010 at 9:48 pm
Thanks for your:

The full paper is here;
http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/files/arctique-ann%C3%A9es-2000-tures.pdf
An alarmist delight!

That link is worth repeating again!
BTW, I’m thinking of changing my ID to “Embarrassed of Melbourne’
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bill Illis, Icarus, Skye, Phil, et al: Did you see that link above?
At a quick first look I did a search for the word albedo, and found a handful of hits in the text, but guess what: no mention of any values, probably because it is a very complicated topic, that is fraught with naïve contradictions or ambiguity in some of the literature.
To check-out what Bill has been saying about water reflection when the sun is low in the sky, look out over open water whilst the sun is setting towards the normal horizon on a clear day. (this cannot be seen from a satellite). As for the claim that snow and ice albedo changes similarly, well, that is even more complicated depending on grain size and age etc. And anyway, any increase from a nominally high normal (90 degree vertical) value has less significance. It is probably less confusing to talk of reflection and incident angles of light.
I’m not totally sure about this, but I believe the very real optical difference with water is in its surface tension layer.
Anyhow, see my next post which will show graphically that the solar energy input does NOT correlate with the seasonal regimes of freezing and melting. (which in turn means that albedo arguments are not significant in effect)

Bill Illis, Icarus, Skye, Phil, et al: Did you see that link above?
and Kadaka.
The points about the albedo feedback affect seem to be missing from these posts. The issue is that during summer the ocean absorbs solar energy from the sun and this is released back to the atmosphere during autumn with the sun dips below the horizon again and air temperatures fall. There is no way the ocean can refreeze w/out the ocean first releasing that heat back to the atmosphere. The ice-albedo affect comes into play as the ocean loses it’s highly reflective sea ice cover during summer, thereby allowing the ocean to absorb more of this energy during the summer. The argument about September low sun angles is completely mute.
But Kadaka, both snow/ice and water show strong forward scattering at low sun angles (or high solar zenith angles however you want to define it), and this is even stronger at low sensor viewing angles (or high sensor zenith angles). All satellite visible instruments observe the surface at 1 combination of viewing/solar angles. But in the Arctic there are many of these observations per day, thereby allowing some characterization of the surface BRDF to be achieved. This is what the MOD43 (MODIS albedo and BRDF data product) achieve on an 8-day time interval.
Kadaka, if you don’t want to believe in the ice-albedo feedback that Skye has tried to explain to you, there are several recent journal articles that discuss this in depth. Papers by Perovich do a good job explaining this in relatively easy to understand language. You can also plot anomalies and trends in total absorbed solar radiation from NCEP, JRA-25 or ERA-40 Interim analysis and see for yourself how the amount of solar radiation absorbed in the Arctic has been changing as the sea ice has been declining during summer.

Wildred wrote in part May 2, 2010 at 2:54 pm

The points about the albedo feedback affect seem to be missing from these posts. The issue is that during summer the ocean absorbs solar energy from the sun and this is released back to the atmosphere during autumn with the sun dips below the horizon again and air temperatures fall. There is no way the ocean can refreeze w/out the ocean first releasing that heat back to the atmosphere. The ice-albedo affect comes into play as the ocean loses it’s highly reflective sea ice cover during summer, thereby allowing the ocean to absorb more of this energy during the summer.

Wildred, further to my May 2, 2010 at 3:52 pm which crossed yours:
It is a matter of scale that you need to consider; YES, there is arguably an albedo feedback but it is evidently small compared with many other processes. A fundamental thing that you seem to overlook is that the nominal solar energy per unit area is greatly reduced in the region where sea-ice prevails. (nominally zero at the “solar poles“). Also, its path length through the atmosphere is greatly increased. (although there is some scattering) Another fundamental oversight is that you seem to imply that the sun is the primary heating source in the region. However more importantly heat is transferred from lower latitudes via various air and sea circulations, and, erratically via various oceanic oscillation highs.
There has been mention that the newly exposed ocean, (a fraction of the winter ice area), absorbs solar energy all summer, and that this is then only released to the atmosphere in autumn. (when thermo’ law 2 then permits that). Well for a start, the “early heat”, when comes autumn, is no longer in the region or at the ocean surface , because of ocean dynamics.
I’ve highlighted some text in yellow in the composite graph that I showed earlier. Wildred, please study that text, and if there is anything you disagree with, or don’t understand, please let me know.
Incidentally, sea-ice as usually defined may have significant areas of exposed water. (up to 85%?). So how does that albedo thing work again?
And, don’t forget wind-packing variations, and wind-drift into warmer waters. And……. And submarines in open water at/near the poles, out of relevant satellite sight.

Phil. said on May 2, 2010 at 5:03 pm:
The reflected light will be the horizontally polarized light, vertically polarized light will be absorbed.
Only fully true at Brewster’s angle, which is about 53 deg from the normal (from vertical) air to water. At greater angles, as would be seen in the Arctic, the reflection coefficient for the vertically polarized light rises quickly to total reflection (per the Fresnel equations) Yes, the vertically polarized light will also be reflected, by differing amounts on both sides of Brewster’s angle.

And to close the loop on the above; for incidence on water at the Brewster angle the reflection coefficient of the polarisation perpendicular to the plane of incidence; is about 4-5%; so the rest of that polarisation is also transmitted into the water, and subsequently absorbed.
So at the Brewster angle the reflected light is indeed plane polarised; but the transmitted light is only elliptically polarised; and quite weakly at that.