Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I don’t know what to make of this one. I was wandering the web when I came across a Reuters article about a scientific study called “Global Floating Ice In “Constant Retreat”: Study“.
The Reuters article opens with this arresting text (emphasis mine):
LONDON
Wed Apr 28, 2010 1:38pm EDT
(Reuters) – The world’s floating ice is in “constant retreat,” showing an instability which will increase global sea levels, according to a report published in Geophysical Research Letters on Wednesday.
Floating ice had disappeared at a steady rate over the past 10 years, according to the first measurement of its kind.
“Hello,” sez I, “how can the sea ice be in constant retreat?” I knew from my previous research that the global ice was not in any kind of retreat at all.
I was also suspicious because of the next part of the quote:
“It’s a large number,” said Professor Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds, lead author of the paper, estimating the net loss of floating sea ice and ice shelves in the last decade at 7,420 cubic kilometers.
I went out to find a graphic to explain how that kind of huge ice loss might have happened, and the best explanation I could find was this one:
Figure 1. Oooops. How the floating ice shelves cracked off and lost 7,420 cubic kilometres.
Next, I went off to find the actual paper, and discovered a curious thing.
So what did I discover … and why is their quote suspicious?
Let me start with why their quote is suspicious. It is their claim that the earth has lost 7,420 cubic kilometres of ice. As I have mentioned elsewhere, when I see numbers I automatically do an “order of magnitude” calculation in my head to see if they are reasonable or not.
I knew from my previous research that there is about twenty million square kilometres (km^2) of floating ice on the planet. I also knew that much of it out towards the edges is only a metre or two thick.
So if the ice averaged say 1.5 metres thick out at the edges where the loss happens, a seven thousand cubic kilometer loss would mean a total loss of ice area of about five million km^2, or a quarter of the area of the world’s floating ice. I think someone would have noticed that before now …
Of course, that made me wonder if the problem was in the study, or in the Reuters quote. However, that same number (7,420 cubic kilometres lost) appeared in no less than 81 other online publications. So I went haring off to find the article.
One of publications reporting the story, NewScientist, 5 May, 2010, gave the “doi:” for the article. The DOI is the “Digital Object Identifier”, and it should link directly to the article, which was supposed to have been published by Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) on Wednesday, April 28th … but the curious thing I discovered was that the DOI didn’t work.
Someone had commented on that, saying “The DOI doesn’t work.” This was replied to by someone called Marshall, from newscientist.com, who said:
Hi Eric, it’s because the article hasn’t been published on GRL’s website yet. The DOI is taken directly from our press copy of the paper, so once the article is published it should work.
OK, fair enough … although the original Reuters article was allegedly published on April 28, and today is May 28, and the DOI still isn’t working. So I went to the GRL web site to see what I could find.
I first did a search for any articles by “Shepherd” in “GRL” for “2010”, and I got this:
Figure 2. Ooooops …
Thinking it might have been misfiled, I searched through all of the May articles for anything by Shepherd. Nil. I looked through the May articles for anything regarding “ice”. Nada. I repeated both searches for April. Once again, zip. Niente. Nothing.
I thought “Well, maybe it appeared in another journal”. So I took a look on Google, but I found nothing. Google did find 32,500 instances of “ice in constant retreat”, of which 7,550 also contained “GRL”.
Google also revealed that the report of the study has been picked up by ABC News, NewsDaily, Yahoo News, New Scientist, Arab News, and ScienceDaily. It was featured on Joe Romm’s global warming blog “ClimateProgress”. It has been referred to in blogs and news reports from India, Australia, Russia, and China. It shows up on TweetMeme, Huffington Post, and Facebook. Even Scientific American has an article on it.
So at this point, it has gone round and round the world. It has been illustrated with all kinds of pictures of melting ice, and of global ice extent, and (inevitably) of polar bears. It has been discussed and debated and dissected around the web.
And with all of that publicity, with all those news reports, with all that discussion and debate … as near as I can determine, despite Reuters saying it was published a month ago, the study has never been published anywhere.
Not only that, but nobody seems to have noticed that the study has never been published.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Scientific American must have noticed, because they quietly removed the page where they had published the report … but it is still in Google’s cache.
One last thing. In all of that, in the frenzy to get out tomorrow’s news today, in the rush to report the latest scientific rumour, people seem to have forgotten to ask … how is the global sea ice actually doing?
Glad you asked. Here’s today’s information, from Cryosphere Today:
Figure 3. Daily global sea ice anomaly (red line) compared to 1979-2008 average. Link contains full sized image.
As you can see, as of today, the global sea ice is exactly on the line representing the 1979-2008 average. So over the last ten years, instead of a loss of 7,420 cubic kilometres, the loss has been … somewhere around zero. Go figure.
You know, when I was a kid I liked stories with morals, you know, like “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched”, that kind of thing.
But what is the moral of this story?
Perhaps the moral is what my Grandma said, which was, “Kids, you can believe half of what you read, a quarter of what you hear … and an eighth of what you say.”
Of course, Grandma didn’t live to see the Internet. If she had, the percentage for believing what you read would have been much, much lower.
Oh, yeah, one final note … did I mention how much I dislike the current practice of “science by press release”? I suppose you gotta do it, it’ a competitive world, but my goodness …
So I guess the moral of this story is, “Never laugh at a climate science press release … you’ll have plenty of opportunity when (and if) the study is published.”
w.
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To file under science by press release is this little-known gem that is on-going:
The Polar Bear Specialist Group (www.pbsg.npolar.no) had their last meeting in early July, 2009. A press release was issued at the conclusion (July 4) with much fanfare. Even more fanfare came two days later with the release of the meeting “Resolutions” (July 6). Many of us wait restlessly for the report. And waited.
On March 11, 2010, they released the new status table and population reviews (assessment of each of 19 subpopulations) but still not the report which should contain the details of how the population assessments were done. All of the above are available freely from their website (as will the final report when and if it is ever released).
It is now May 29, 2010 and the report on the PBSG 2009 meeting has still not been issued.
Phil says “The loss of thickness over the whole Arctic is ~0.6m over the last 5 years (Sea Ice Cover, D. Perovich, R. Kwok, W. Meier, S. Nghiem, J. Richter-Menge). In the summer that would be 1,800 m^3 and in winter 9,000 m^3 which seems to match the figure Willis read. So the value looks right!”
Phil, the figure “9000” might look right, but you are several orders of magnitude out with your units.
The article quoted Km3 you calculated in m3.
So according to you ice loss in km3 is 9000/1,000,0000 = 0.009Km3.
i.e. about zero
Looking at the graphs I don’t see a thing unusual. Everything is fine.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that real world observations over the next few years will naturally debunk all of these garbage papers alongside its garbage science.
You can only BS for so long before actual observation is so blatantly obvious to the point that it can no longer pass muster to even the most brainless of nitwits.
Time is our friend.
Phil. says:
May 28, 2010 at 7:55 pm
The loss of thickness over the whole Arctic is ~0.6m over the last 5 years (Sea Ice Cover, D. Perovich, R. Kwok, W. Meier, S. Nghiem, J. Richter-Menge). In the summer that would be 1,800 km^3 and in winter 9,000 km^3 which seems to match the figure Willis read. So the value looks right!
_______________________________________________________________________
So Phil, how does that tally with this Sea Ice Compaction Your stuff sure looks like the usual CAGW spin instead of real science.
Really, take the published -0.6m change in winter thickness and pick your winter area from any of the extent sites and that’s the number you’re going to end up with.
Regarding the Sea Ice Compaction that’s a model result that as I showed doesn’t agree with the satellite observations. Surprisingly it appears ‘whenever you hear the study was based on a “model” but it agrees with your prejudice your BS detector doesn’t goes off’!
Don Keiller says:
May 29, 2010 at 7:55 am
Phil says “The loss of thickness over the whole Arctic is ~0.6m over the last 5 years (Sea Ice Cover, D. Perovich, R. Kwok, W. Meier, S. Nghiem, J. Richter-Menge). In the summer that would be 1,800 m^3 and in winter 9,000 m^3 which seems to match the figure Willis read. So the value looks right!”
Phil, the figure “9000″ might look right, but you are several orders of magnitude out with your units.
The article quoted Km3 you calculated in m3.
So according to you ice loss in km3 is 9000/1,000,0000 = 0.009Km3.
i.e. about zero
As I posted afterwards there was a typo and the k was missing, for some reason that post didn’t make it past the moderator. So to clarify the correct version is:
“In the summer that would be 1,800 km^3 and in winter 9,000 km^3”
Willis realized that that was the case (0.6×10^-3 x 15×10^6 km^3).
Pamela Gray says:
May 29, 2010 at 7:20 am
Phil, that would be the loss of “modeled” thickness, would it not?
No, measured.
Or are you referring to areas of the Arctic that have lost 24/7 ice cover?
No, but that accounts for about 3% / decade in the winter.
Brad says:
May 29, 2010 at 3:38 am
‘Brit Hume asked “Where’s the oil?” Hey Brit, here’s the oil:’
Hey Brad, Brit Hume hasn’t posted on this page. Is BigOil paying you to put up the video?
A pause for examination of current poly-speak:
Scientists fear… (hiding in laboratory caves)
previously imagined… (where did that envelope get off to now?)
much worse than we thought… (ya think?)
faster than… (no, not the speeding bullet thing again!!)
tipping point… (We’re taking the car keys away until you sober up)
Catastrophic Sea Ice Loss… (Look at the globe, stupid. See…2 poles.)
Pamela Gray writes,
“Gneiss, your statement about the last three years showing more ice but that it is still consistent with a downward trend, should be sent by you to every statistician skilled in data analysis of psuedo-random AND oscillatory fluid systems. More than likely they will use it in their next seminar about statistical representation and interpretation do’s and don’ts.”
I’m dense so please explain to me why every skilled statistician (are you one of them?) will want to use my statement in their seminars.
You left out the middle part of my sentence, but here it is for reference.
“The last three winters were higher than the three before that, but still well below the 1979-2000 average, and consistent with an overall downward trend.”
To elaborate a bit on my reasoning … simple regression of maximum ice extent on year using just 1979-2006 data yields a significant downward trend. The 2008 and 2009 minima are both about one standard error from the predictions; nine other years in the series are farther from the line than that. Closeness to a trend based on previous years is what I meant by “consistent with the overall trend.”
How on earth do you measure an ANNUAL sea level rise of 49 micrometers?
Good morning, all. I ran the numbers again this morning, a different way, and I came up with the same conclusion. They have assumed that the arctic ice is the same thickness everywhere, so that an area loss is a loss of full thickness ice. I re-ran the numbers assuming that the thickness is greatest up by the North Pole, and that it decreases to zero out at the edges.
The difference is quite significant. Above I had estimated that the true figure would be around half of the 891 km^3 / year loss in the Arctic. My actual calculations, using a conical shape for the ice, give a 452 km^3 loss.
This, of course, means that instead of a total global 742 km^3 loss, the loss would be only about 40% of that, 303 km^3. So this is a significant difference.
It also highlights the ad-hoc nature of their calculations. Surely with five years of ICESAT data for the northern regions, we can do better than simply assuming a constant thickness ice pack, and using a guesstimated annual loss rather than seasonal losses …
Sunshine today for the first time in a while, I’m off to ride my bicycle.
Self-correction: in my post above, I wrote that
“The 2008 and 2009 minima are both about one standard error from the predictions”
but what I meant to write was
“The 2008 and 2009 maxima are both about one standard error from the predictions”
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
Mark Twain,
Rocky Road,
“If all the world’s floating ice melted it would add about 4 centimeters to sea levels.”
I came across a study some time ago that said melting sea ice did indeed produce a very, very small increase in sea level. (Sorry I no longer have the source). It may amount to 4 centimetres if all the sea ice melted but, really, what are the chances that this will occur?
Mari Warcwm says:
May 29, 2010 at 1:34 am
Does anyone else think that someone is deliberately orchestrating this kind of marketing for AGW? So many organisation have their snouts in the very large trough that a PR department could easily be affordable to support the collective delusion.
Or am I becoming paranoid?
No Marie you aren’t becoming paranoid. Gore has a very big PR player by the name of James Hoggan working for and with him.
Google James Hoggan.
He is the director of Gore’s Canadian “The Climate Project”, and runs desmogblog.com Mr. Watts has had several run ins with him.
Having read his book, “Climate Cover-Up” I see his hand in a lot of the things going on in this realm of light vs. darkness, good vs. evil.
Make no mistake this is a battle. If we lose this battle or slack in our efforts cap and trade and worse will be crammed down our throats. We cannot sleep or slumber, we must be ever vigilant.
You might want to click my login name or go to http://tinyurl.com/29mywmo
to see my comment about a column James Hoggan wrote in a Canadian on line newspaper. I’m sure Mr. Hoggan isn’t the only PR person on the side of Darth Gore and Darth Mann but he is certainly the most outspoken one.
Mari Warcwm says:
May 29, 2010 at 1:34 am
Does anyone else think that someone is deliberately orchestrating this kind of marketing for AGW? So many organisation have their snouts in the very large trough that a PR department could easily be affordable to support the collective delusion.
Or am I becoming paranoid?
________________________________________________________________________
No you are not paranoid. Here is another Spinmeister. Stan Greenberg is married to Rosa Delauro and the pair have gone from pauper to multimillionaire along with other members of Congress. Guess who the wealthiest are?
John Kerry (D) $900 Million
Herb Kohl (D) $315 Million
Jay Rockefeller (D) $275 Million
Nancey Pelosi (D) $268 Million
“Republican pollster Frank Luntz says “Stan Greenberg scares the hell out of me. He doesn’t just have a finger on the people’s pulse; he’s got an IV injected into it.” http://ilf.ndi.org/panelists#StanleyGreenberg
“…He is also a strategic consultant to the Climate Center of the Natural Resources Defense Council on its multi-year campaign on global warming….” http://tpm.apperceptive.com/profile/Stan%20Greenberg
“Stan Greenberg provides strategic advice and research for leaders, companies, campaigns, and NGOs trying to advance their issues in tumultuous times.” http://www.americanprogressaction.org/events/2010/05/inf/GreenbergStan.html
Stanley Greenberg “ Greenberg’s work for private sector organizations – including major corporations, trade associations and public interest organizations – focuses on managing change and reform….Greenberg has conducted extensive research in Europe (particularly Great Britain, Germany and France), Central and South America (Argentina and Brazil), and Africa (South Africa). He specializes in research on globalization, international trade, corporate consolidation, technology and the Internet. For organizations, Greenberg has helped manage and frame a number of issues – including education, school financing, American identity, the economy, environmental regulation, international trade, managed care, biotechnology, copyrights, privacy and the Internet….
Greenberg has advised a broad range of political campaigns, including those of President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore, Senators Chris Dodd, Joe Lieberman and Jeff Bingaman; Governor Jim Florio and gubernatorial candidate, Andy Young; former Vice-President Walter Mondale; and a number of candidates for the U.S. Congress. For many years, he served as principal polling advisor to the Democratic National Committee. ” http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Stanley_Greenberg
There is a lot of money to be made with the global warming scam and a lot of power to be consolidated. “They” can afford the best and pay them very well.
From Willis Eschenbach’s post on
May 29, 2010 at 1:55 am
“The problem with this is quite simple. They are using the average thickness of winter ice (2.75 metres, or about 9 feet) for their area loss calculations. But the Arctic is not losing winter ice. It’s losing summer ice, which in general is much thinner. And in particular, it’s losing area around the edges of the summer ice, which is the thinnest ice of all. So their calculations of the areal loss are overstated, likely by a factor of about 4 or more.”
======
Perhaps I am misinterpreting your statement “the Arctic is not losing winter ice,” but NSIDC says the Arctic is losing ice in all months, which I presume means the trend.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq.html#really_declining
If there is a trend to less Arctic ice in summer, I don’t know why there wouldn’t be a trend to less in winter.
Brad says:
May 29, 2010 at 3:38 am
And this is related to the topic how?
Dave Andrews says:
May 29, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Rocky Road,
“If all the world’s floating ice melted it would add about 4 centimeters to sea levels.”
I came across a study some time ago that said melting sea ice did indeed produce a very, very small increase in sea level. (Sorry I no longer have the source). It may amount to 4 centimetres if all the sea ice melted but, really, what are the chances that this will occur?
—
Thats correct but somewhat overstated. You would have to look back a few months ago on a post here at WUWT that addressed that very topic and I included figures within, seems it was a bit over 1 cm or the thickness of the soles of your shoes. (by the way, a search for “sole of your shoes” should lead you directly to it)
Wren says:
May 29, 2010 at 8:16 pm
Wren, you are correct. I should have said that the majority of the ice loss is in the summer months. The trend in September is about twice as large as the trend in February.
Willis: “Thanks to subterranean channels underneath the ice…”
Subterranean means “beneath the earth” — so your channels weren’t subterranean and underneath the ice unless they came via Greenland or Antarctica… perhaps the channels are subglacial? 😉
Your excerpt indicates that thickness estimates for 5 ice shelves (at least) were obtained from “airborne ice penetrating radar measurements (Lythe and Vaughan, 2001) and satellite altimeter elevation observations (Bamber and Bindschadler, 1997).” Given the dates of those citations, how did they estimate volume in 2008? Or are those the items with the extraordinarily large error bars?
Net global sea ice area has fallen by about 400,000 sq km in the last 10 years, with a larger loss in the arctic but an increase in the antarctic.
http://i50.tinypic.com/35iackn.gif
If you assume 1.5 meter thickness, as per Eschenbach, that accounts for 600 cubic km loss.
However, in the arctic, the melt is not just around the edges but presumably across a large area of the ice, and also there is data claiming a loss of arctic ice thickness. [Sorry, no reference]
If we assume an average arctic sea ice area of 12MM km (in round numbers, as per Willis Eschenbach’s polar bear family portrait-ice area disk graphic), then a 7420 cubic km ice loss, minus the 600, amounts to an average arctic ice thickness loss of
0.57 meters (1' 10") over 10 years, or about 2 inches per year.However the quote also speaks of loss in “ice shelves”. Antarctic ice shelves are reportedly thinning due to warming of the southern ocean. This ice loss is not reflected by sea ice area statistics. Anybody remember how some years ago a large Antarctic ice shelf suddenly and unexpectedly disintegrated in a matter of hours? Throwing in the amount of ice volume lost to ice shelf thinning and permanent ice shelf loss further reduces the above-estimated required loss of arctic sea ice thickness.
In this context, is a 7420 km3 ice loss in 10 years really so hard to believe??
So I agree with the moral of this tale.
Perhaps the moral is what my Grandma said, which was, “Kids, you can believe half of what you read, a quarter of what you hear … and an eighth of what you say.”
Yes, Grandma was wise. We can believe an eighth of what Mr. Eschenbach says!
did I mention how much I dislike the current practice of “science by press release”?
But you are completely OK with “science by blog”??
Pardon me, but isn’t that holding two mutually-contradictory beliefs simultaneously???
Jbar says:
May 30, 2010 at 9:07 am
Using a random graph with no provenance is a poor way to start a discussion. In fact, global sea ice area is currently right at the “historical” average. See my Figure 3 in the head post, as well as the linked site. (“Historical” is in quotes because we only have satellite records since 1979, which was a cold period in the Arctic.)
But even if you were correct, so what? 40,000 km^2 per year is a tenth of one percent change in the total ice area. You may think we should hyperventilate over that. I find it to be another example of the fact that climate is always changing. At any given moment the area of the sea ice is either increasing or decreasing. You seem to think that there is some preferred value that it should maintain, such that the current decrease is a bad thing. Me, not so much.
My friend, if you can’t tell the difference between on the one hand, a scientific blog such as this one, with vibrant discussion, dispute, exchange of ideas, and back-and-forth debate, and on the other hand, a press release, I fear that what ails you is far beyond my “poor power to add or detract” …
Indeed, and we can believe an eighth of what you say as well. This is because belief in general is lethal. My advice is don’t blindly believe my numbers, or anyone’s numbers, or what anyone says. Eschew the belief, in me or anyone else, and go straight for the facts. Check the data. Look at the evidence.
HaroldW says:
May 30, 2010 at 8:01 am (Edit)
I wondered when I wrote that if someone was going to bust me for it … busted.
I don’t know the answer. Regarding the ice shelves, I’m investigating and wondering, not drawing any conclusions.