By Steve Goddard and Anthony Watts
If you zoom in far enough, most anything looks scary, like this picture of a human head louse.
But when you look at it in the scale of our normal experience, not so much.
Be it lice or ice, the scale of presentation matters.
There is often criticism of cherry picking when it comes to time scales of climate data. In the case of satellite sea ice data presentation, both time scale and vertical scale are magnified. There’s only about 30 years of satellite ice data, whereas Arctic sea ice has been around for millions of years. Vertical scale is magnified to show the smallest fluctuations. Willis Eschenbach made and excellent point about scale when he comparatively demonstrated the scale of ice melt in Greenland in his essay: On Being the Wrong Size. When compared to the bulk volume of ice, the current Greenland melt is statistically insignificant.
There has been a lot of talk about commercial shipping opportunities through the “soon to be ice free” Arctic. These are normally based on highly magnified graphs published by organisations like NSIDC, similar to the one below.
A different view emerges when you take the raw data from NSIDC’s web site and plot it on graphs with a more appropriate vertical scale. Done that way, the downwards trend for April ice is 0.039 million km²/year.
The surprise of scale?
When you calculate the slope, it suggests that April sea ice extent won’t reach zero until the year 2385.
Oh, that can’t be right. How about May? May will be ice free in the year 2404, only 394 years from now. (The US is 234 years old. Copernicus was placed on the “Catholic Forbidden index” 394 years ago.)
June will be ice free in the year 2296.
July will be ice free by the year 2151.
August will be ice free by the year 2103
September will be ice free by the year 2065. (Note that September 2009 was right on the trend line.)
All of the data and plots are available here in this Google online spreadsheet.
September is the minimum and ice starts to freeze up again. No chance of an ice free Arctic in October. But something must be wrong. The experts said that the Arctic would be ice free by 2008, and that it would be ice free by 2013.
“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. “So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.” “In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly”
NSIDC director, Dr. Mark Serreze also says this in this 5/20/10 Globe and Mail article:
“We are going to lose the summer sea-ice cover. We can’t go back.”
Dr. Serreze is still on the ‘death spiral’. He hasn’t changed his tune.
While skeptics see cycles, by saying “we can’t go back” Dr. Serreze apparently assumes the linear trend will continue to zero.
You can see from the graphs above how ridiculous those claims are. Even if the current trends continue, there is no reason to expect an ice free Arctic anytime in the next 50 years. And even more interesting to me is the fact that September, 2007 was really not that interesting. It was only 1.5 standard deviations off the trend line, i.e. almost following the 30 year trend.
All of the the main Arctic ice experts underpredicted the 2009 minimum, except for WUWT – which predicted it correctly and early.
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Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts
-Richard Feynman
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Pamela Gray,
I did provide data. However, if you missed it, here is a relevant quote from it:
“Arctic amplification is a clear feature of the warming over the 1989–2008 period based on the ERA-Interim reanalysis (Fig. 1). We diverge considerably from ref. 8 in finding that the maximum Arctic warming is at the surface and that warming lessens with height in all seasons except summer. This vertical structure suggests that changes at the surface, such as decreases in sea ice and snow cover, are the primary causes of recent Arctic amplification. The trends at the near-surface (herein the atmospheric levels at 950–1,000 hPa) are 1.6, 0.9, 0.5 and 1.6 °C per decade, averaged over the Arctic (herein latitudes 70–90° N) during winter, spring, summer and autumn, respectively.”
from: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7293/full/nature09051.html
This seems to suggest, based on the expected profile of temperature changes from various causes, that albedo changes are driving the increased warming in the Arctic, and hence the increased melt.
This is why I think that the phrase ‘death spiral’ is indeed an appropriate one: as albedo decreases, the temperature increases, decreasing albedo …
You get the picture. 🙂
However, it should be noted that other papers, such as ones referenced by the above paper, come to different conclusions.
The abstract isn’t data. Give me a graph from a public source. Show me the data. I want a measured albedo change over the time period under consideration that mathematically is significant enough to cause the trend, and is greater than oceanic current changes and weather pattern variations that are known to cause similar ice melt and flush. If they amplify together (natural and manmade) which amplifies which? And if they don’t amplify, one has to have greater influence than the other, meaning that one of them doesn’t matter as the other will bury its influence.
You also need to explain how the ice melted in the first place in order to create the change in albedo. Did increasing CO2 cause it? How? In situ? Who’s pumping CO2 up there? Did it end up there? And did that cause (through greenhouse gas mechanism) an increase in temps enough to cause the initial melt that created the change in albedo? It seems to me that albedo changed because ice melted. So what caused the ice to melt before the albedo changed?
Pamela Gray,
It is not an abstract; it is the full paper.
I have not been able to find measures of albedo changes over time. However, the paper that I have referred to you uses a proxy measure – the temperature profile – to infer that it is albedo changes and not other things, such as the ones that you mention, causing the amplification of warming in the arctic.
As to what caused the warming that is being amplified in the first place, the global temperature is increasing due to human CO2 emissions. Normal heat transportation mechanisms, both atmospheric and oceanic, have transported this increased energy proportionately to arctic regions. I understand that that is not a popular theory around here, however. 😉
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticReflector/arctic_reflector4.php
This goes against my thesis: between 2000 and 2004, albedo change was effectively zero.
So you are saying that CO2 isn’t the cause in situ. It is heated air and water from greenhouse gasses elsewhere that is heating things up here and sending warmer water and air up there. Again David, what do the SST’s show? Data? What does the air temp data show for Arctic air? Data? I found only an abstract of the paper you mentioned and could not even see the references unless I gave coinage.
There are many public sources of information on SST’s and I don’t see anything unusual going on. I tend to see SST’s as less influenced by UHI affects, disregarding of course the larger oceanic floor heat vents, while land temp sensors are all fouled up around the Arctic. If SST’s aren’t showing anything unusual, why would I expect air temps to up there?
I follow SST data fairly closely and so far, SST’s increase or decrease in concert with known changes and mechanisms related to natural oscillations in upper Pacific currents, ENSO and AMO parameters. I also follow weather pattern reports in and around the Arctic. Arctic air temperature changes are in concert with changes in weather patterns.
How can you say that AGW is causing the temps to rise when by every account, the known parameters of natural variation in ocean and weather patterns are currently explaining temps? Are the oceans hotter than what would be expected under current ENSO and AMO conditons? No. Is the air hotter than what would be expected under current weather pattern systems? No. So it appears to me that there is no room for AGW to explain any part of what we currently are seeing. Is there a switch? Can its influence be turned on and off?
@george E. Smith says:
May 25, 2010 at 2:28 pm
“Steve; Critical angle does not restrict sunlight from entering the Arctic ocean surface; but increased reflectance does; at near grazing angles.”
Given that the water is flat as a mill pond, where there are waves, the angle is on the move.
Reflection will increase the light hitting the ice edges.
Pamela Gray,
I have to say that I cannot see how the increase in temperature can be explained by anything other than increasing atmospheric CO2, so we differ. I suspect your set of ‘every accounts’ differ from mine. 😉
It is odd that you can only see an abstract while I can see the full thing. Maybe my work provides a subscription that I do not know about.
Can you provide the SST data that you refer to in your post? If you follow it fairly closely and know that it increases or decreases in concert with known mechanisms, I assume that you have a source for it. Arctic air temperatures are, according to the paper that I referenced, increasing faster than global temperatures. This is what amplification is all about.
I will look for further information on arctic temperature change over time also.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
Okay, here is some data for north pole ocean and land temperature trends during the satellite era.
The trend on land is .43 degrees per decade; the trend at sea is .52 degrees per decade.
The r^2 values are .25 and .22 respectively (using monthly data). It would appear that something is going on in the arctic to make the temperature trends there 50 per cent more than and double of the global trends respectively. Albedo , according to the pay-walled article, seems to be the driver of this.
Re CO2: I am sure that CO2 has also been transported to the skies above the arctic. So it is both, really.
Whoops: it is actually warming three to five times more in the arctic. Sorry about the error.
Gail,
Barry, I do think the arctic ice will eventually recover.
I don’t see why. Increased CO2 must cause warming – whether much or little may be a controversial point, but no informed participant in these discussions can say there will be no warming. Lindzen, Pielke, McIntyre and Spencer all agree on this (they take issue with the degree of future warming).
Weather cycles are overlaid on top of the long-term warming from GHG increase, so we’ll always see patterns, but they will oscillate around a rising trend.
Unless CO2 emissions are considerably reduced, we’re going to see an ice-free Arctic at some point in the future. No weather cycle can stop that.
To return to my original question, when how soon are you willing to posit a significant cooling trend in Arctic sea-ice? Say we take 2007 as a start point ( a deliberately extreme anomaly).
If we see a measurable increase in sea-ice over over the next fifteen years (that’s the shortest interval I’m willing to posit), I’d consider that strong evidence that the mainstream view is wrong. If we break the 2007 record within the next 5 years, and the declining trend continues for the next 10, I don’t see how anyone could support the notion that, at this time, the climate system is moving into a cool phase.
Are you willing to make some kind of estimate, for interest’s sake? That would yield a testable function to your postulation that natural cycles dominating the climate system in the long term.
@ur momisugly David Gould
It would appear that something is going on in the arctic to make the temperature trends there 50 per cent more than and double of the global trends respectively.
Greater warming at the Arctic is a result of a warming planet, regardless of the cause. It’s to do with heat transport polewards, as well as a cluster of large land masses nearby (different dynamics for the Antarctic). Same thing happens when the Earth heats up out of an ice age to interglacial. The polar/Greenland ice cores show more warming than proxies from low latitudes (more than twice as much). It’s nothing (or very little to do) with local CO2 accumulation, although, the CO2 effect is more pronounced simply because it’s not very humid over the North Pole. But this is a function of the horizontal structure of the atmosphere, not a function of localised accumulation. CO2 is not perfectly evenly distributed throughout the atmosphere, but the clustering is fluid. for all intents and purposes, CO2 is ‘well-mixed’.
Here’s a video representation of concentration dynamics.
barry,
Thanks for that. I understand that it is due to a warming planet. But arctic *amplification* (not simply arctic warming) is not explained, apparently, by heat transport. The main player, according to my unfortunately pay-walled source, is albedo change – although heat transport does play a part. However, I accept that there are different views in the literature – my source was the most recent that I could find, and perhaps its recency is not a good thing.
@David Gould says:
May 25, 2010 at 10:43 pm
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
I had just dug that out to have a look at it again. Typically the stronger +ve anomalies in the Arctic are at the colder N.H. winter months, and usually the opposite anomaly shows at the S.Pole at the soltices. Conversely, a very warm January such as 1989 or 1990 yields -ve Arctic anomalies. Stronger +ve anomalies in the Arctic also occur at the vernal equinox, in unison with N.H temperature rises.
stevengoddard said on May 25, 2010 at 7:53 pm:
The Sun is expected to expand into a red giant phase during which it may engulf the Earth. This will be followed by it becoming a dwarf star. Therefore the correct forecast is warming in the short term with cooling in the long term (provided the Earth still exists).
@David Gould says:
May 25, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Erl Happ has done some nice graphs on N+S polar temperatures at summer and winter separately, summer at the Arctic is much less spikey and shows no particular rise compared to winter and the equinoxes. I prefer to break it down to monthly rather than seasonal periods, so you can see the winter warming spurts away from the equinox warming spurts. CET shows similar patterns to the Arctic but at a smaller scale, such that the months with the strongest warming trends are Nov/Dec/Jan, and also around the equinoxes, the vernal being dominant. The months of Feb and May show no warming trend on CET for the last century, and summer warming is minor. work by Wilson Flood shows summer CET temp`s higher in previous centuries.
@ur momisugly “PJB says:
May 24, 2010 at 4:59 am
I am very afraid. What if this “cyclical” downturn reverses and the cycle goes back to an upward climb?
I live in the Canadian Shield. I don’t want to be under 3 km of ice (just too much pressure to bear…)
Won’t somebody get hot for a warmer, kinder world?
Won’t somebody think of the chilled wren?
;-)”
You may want to read what Dr. Lindzen says – I think he said we are headed to a major cooling – but it will take quite a long while to set in.
But, one must add the Greens attempts at Cooling us down?
Still not worried about Arctic Ice. A few years ago, much research was done on wind vectors and yes, even modeling of climate variability in the Arctic. Once again, the past two years of weather pattern variations within each climate zone in the Arctic are telling me that ice concentrations are good, basin ice will be pretty darn thick, and ice in general will not easily be driven and mushed into a death spiral out of Fram Strait. I believe that what you are seeing is predominantly ice edge melting in place and not spreading out by wind as it has in the past, falsely giving the impression of greater ice coverage than we currently have.
http://www.oc.nps.edu/~pips3/ModelingRecentClimateVariability.pdf
Arctic SST back to 2005.
http://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/sst/ophi/Welcome.html
Soot.
Congratulations. That’s a word everyone should have in his vocabulary.