The undeath spiral

Bookmarked. I’m still with you, Steve, and have been since late March.

I’d like to see continued recovery, and your points are well taken. It would be nice to shut down some of the clamor. But I’m not hanging my hat on any outcome. I don’t think it (extent) means anything beyond some combination of regional parameters.

This article is an independent data point reaching the same conclusion as my own expectation that this will be a 2006-ish year.
Lets see how it goes.

Steve Goddard writes,
“Conclusion : Should we expect a nice recovery this summer due to the thicker ice? You bet ya. Even if all the ice less than 2.5 metres thick melted this summer, we would still see a record high minimum in the DMI charts.”
I’m impressed by how unequivocally and often WUWT has committed to the proposition that Arctic sea ice is recovering, in disagreement with most Arctic researchers. As you say, these will be pages to bookmark.

Steve,
Another intersting and well done analysis, based on that wonderfully erroneous PIPS 2.0 data. GIGO…and so I must once again, very humbly disagree with your conclusions, despite how convincing they appear, the fact that they are based on garbage data is cause for concern. In response, I would ask readers to go through the following very excellent presentation, given just this past March of 2010, at the State of the Arctic Meeting held in Miami Fl.:
http://soa.arcus.org/sites/soa.arcus.org/files/sessions/1-1-advances-understanding-arctic-system-components/pdf/1-1-7-maslowski-wieslaw.pdf
Now, I have fairly cautioned you that the PIPS 2.0 data is erroneous at best, and that much better models exist, such as PIPS 3.0 and PIOMAS, both based on CICE modeling.
But you have made your case in an excellent manner, and you’ve stated quite plainly what you expect (a summer low that is higher than 2008 or 2009) and why you expect it. I take the opposite view, and base my case on what I consider to be more accurate models than PIPS 2.0, meaning that I think that PIOMAS model, and the summary given in the link I’ve given above are reasons why 2010’s summer minimum will be less than 2008 or 2009. One of the things that is clearly stated in the report I’ve given in the link above to is the ocean heat content. There is a lot of warmer water coming in at depths below the surface into the Arctic from both the Pacific and the Atlantic. (i.e. you can’t just rely on SST’s!!!) The report states:
“Oceanic heat has contributed critical preconditioning to sea ice melt in the western Arctic since the mid-1990s”
So we await September. Everyone should bookmark this discussion, as suggested…and as always, if your analysis proves the more thorough and your data more valid than…mea maxima culpa!

It’s the back-to-life spiral.

WOW! The arctic ice thickness trend is turning up like a hockey stick chart! Could this inconvenient truth have real consequences also? Apparently, Al Gore and wife have reached (ahem..) a Tipper point in their 40 year relationship, with many icy years predicted to follow! I’ll refrain from references to gorebal cooling….
A bit more seriously, a big THANK YOU to Anthony Watts, contributors like Steve Goddard, and the long suffering Moderators, for providing this venue for publishing, perusing, and pontificating on our planets many climatic influences! The open forum and open access to data and analyses presented are delightfully refreshing! You are my daily “must read” and my first reference to others seeking current topical knowledge.

Mercator Ice-thickness etc.
http://bulletin.mercator-ocean.fr/html/produits/psy3v2/ocean/regions/bull_ocean_arc_en.jsp?nom=psy3v2_20100526_22060

Looking at the data presented by Mark Serreze, it seems hard to predict with confidence ANY major deviation (+/-) from a notional average of Arctic ice extent. With these types of websites in general, the usual side issues always come up in reader comments, but I am struck also by a lack of attention to the ambiguity of the data trend on that site, which seems so obvious.

Those poor Polar Bars (:). Because of rapid ‘climate change’ they will be TOOOO far from the water and will not be able to feed, breed or take happy snaps on icebergs.
They will be separated from lunch like AL & Tipper. 🙂
regards

You may recall I suggested you contact the researchers and ask them for help. Well, it looks like another blogger stoll my idea:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Abraham-shows-Monckton-wrong-on-Arctic-sea-ice.html

Come September, someone or other is going to have some serious egg on their face.
It is fun watching Romm and fellow travelers rant in the meantime. I’m still waiting for the ice free Arctic and pole we were promised in 2008.

Here are the integrated volumes, in units pixel-metres. I haven’t worked out a conversion factor to metres^3 yet, though it should be pretty straightforward. Pixels seem to be about 1.5 km^2 in my maps.

2006    40,164
2007    32,818
2008   24,253
2009   26,505
2010   36,746

“WUWT is really hanging it’s hat on the Arctic ice recovery. Will be interesting in August.”
Jakers, look at it another way:
2008 minimum ice increased from 2007. 2009 increased from 2008. What evidence do you have that the trend of the past two years is going to reverse? All data indicate that the inventory of old ice is increasing. Old ice is harder to melt than new ice (note, I am not talking about thickness, I am talking about age).
If you have something that suggests that the trend of the past two seasons is set to reverse this year, please share it.

sunderland steve
Serreze has little patience for the “breathtakingly ignorant,” such as myself.

Mike says:
June 2, 2010 at 12:52 pm
“You may recall I suggested you contact the researchers and ask them for help. Well, it looks like another blogger stoll my idea:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Abraham-shows-Monckton-wrong-on-Arctic-sea-ice.html”

Its interesting isn’t it that your reference has such a short timespan? So it gleefully shows a trend line from the 1978 just after the decade when everyone was concerned about a new ice age and then runs it to current time when everyone is talking global warming.
Get a sine wave with a wavelength of say 30 years and then you can cherry pick dates with a 30 year simplistic straight trend line to prove whatever you want. Look at the same sine wave for say 200 years and you may consider that there is no trend but some cyclical changes.
If you are talking CLIMATE what length of time is appropriate?

PIOMAS is a worthy endeavor, but much too immature to be laying any significant credence on.
If you look at this: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/IceVolAnomaly19792010.MarNov2.png It doesn’t pass the smell test. 2009 lower than 2007? I don’t think so.
But then I start looking closer and a few things occur to me.
1). “November ice volume anomaly”. *November*? Are you kidding me? Look at November here: http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm You can throw a hat over the whole lot of them. November and December are just as uninteresting as May and June. If you want to maximize your ability to say something that has meaning, look at March or September (and much preferably September).
Yes, I know –“volume is not extent”. That doesn’t change the fact that when looking for signal you want to reduce the noise as much as possible, and there is a whole lot of volume (and extent) in May, June, November, and December that is just “noise” so far as trying to discern meaningful long-term trends. If that wasn’t true, those extent graphs for those months would not be so tightly grouped. The day will hopefully come in another 20 years or so when we’ll have enough historical data to make something meaningful out of those months, but in the meantime when searching for a needle in a haystack, the wise sleuth first reduces the size of the haystack as much as possible.
2). Look at the error for the last ICESat calibration, for 2007. Pretty significant. Extrapolate that to error bars for PIOMAS results for 2007, 2008, and 2009 on that graph and all three become meaningless relative to each other. You could, within the error bars, come up with pretty much any relative relationship you wanted between the three, including having 2007 the highest.

Tom P says:
June 2, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Tom,
It just does not matter what facts you throw at Steve–he is clearly in DENIAL about Arctic ice extent and thickness.
MJK

crosspatch says:
June 2, 2010 at 1:19 pm
If you have something that suggests that the trend of the past two seasons is set to reverse this year, please share it.
Joe Bastardi – who once was quite popular on here…

It’ll come down to the weather during the summer as to whether we have lower minimum or not. 2007 was a weather related event with the unusual winds. Barring that, the Arctic ice should survive a deep minimum.
The Atlantic side has taken a good hit causing the lower numbers in area and extent. The Barents helped cause the late bump in extent and a big factor in the quick fall off. These are generally ice-free seas during the minimum anyway, so what going on inside the basin will be more important. Seems to be holding it own for now.

I find it hard to get very excited about whether more (or less) ice than “usual” will melt in the Arctic this Summer.
Such evidence as there is suggests strongly that Arctic sea ice has fluctuated widely for ever.
And if it all melts (which seems exceptionally improbable), I don’t think it will be a big deal.
And it certainly won’t demonstrate that a trivial increase in a harmless trace gas has anything to do with it. And it is not even certain that human emissions are the main cause of that increase.
Yawn.

Brian D
Given that temperatures inside the Arctic Basin are still well below freezing, it is not particularly surprising that the ice is “holding it’s own.”

And Joe still is. But no one is so popular here as to be unquestioned on all issues at all times. Anthony would probably shoot root beer out his nose if you tried to say he gets that kind of respect “in his own house”.

I read Joe’s blog from time to time and I have read his weather prognostications and generally agree. I can’t say that I have seen him make any Arctic ice predictions, though I could have missed it.

How did it get twisted around that warmer and less ice is a bad thing………
colder and more ice and more polar bears is a good thing?
Personally, I’m for warmer

Gail Combs says:
June 2, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Yes, we dig into raw data and do our very own analysis, without the benefit of supercomputers and millions in grant $$$.
Holy smokes, are we economically correct or what?

Steve,
ImageJ, with the 3D Color Inspector plugin using Wu quantization unambiguously assigns the pixels of the PIPS 2 maps to the thickness bins. All this software is publicly available.
I now understand why you can no longer rely on external funding for your private software endeavours.

Just a clarification to Xi Chin and meemoe_uk: the area under the curves is the total area of ice, not the ice volume. That’s why it looks roughly constant, since it is pretty much equal to the area of the Arctic Ocean. What may confuse you is that the Y axis is not actually an area, but a kind of derivative of area wrt height. The ice at exactly 2m thick is not an area, it’s a set of contour lines.
To get the volume of ice you have to integrate y*x.dx.

I have a supercomputer.
My PC has two Nvidia 9800 GT cards, ($80 each) which deliver over 600 GFlops. It would have been one of the world’s top supercomputers 15 years ago.

richcar 1225 says:
June 2, 2010 at 2:27 pm
If the NAO goes negative the ice volume will build fast. This a warmists worst nightmare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Winter-NAO-Index.svg
_________________________________________________________________________
Well guess what Richcar, NAO has gone negative in the last few months:
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/ENSO/verf/new.nao.shtml#current
that and the negative/neutral Arctic Oscillation
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/hgt.shtml
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao.sprd2.gif
And a negative/neutral Pacific-North American Pattern
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/pna.shtml
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/pna.sprd2.gif
These are a change from the long term (20-30 yr) mainly positive trend that accompanied the “melting” of the Arctic ice. I do not know what that is going to do to the weather patterns but given the recent strange patterns in my local weather, I think we are definitely looking at “climate change” in the Arctic this summer.

bubbagyro says:
June 2, 2010 at 3:05 pm
You and others have described the futility of ascribing the word “normal” to climate. When I see normal used to say whether we are in an ‘event” or not, it is to me like scraping of nails on a backboard.
Maybe I’m not normal?
_________________________________________________________________________
No you you are not normal, “normal” people do not have any understanding of statistics. That is why they can be lied to so easily.
How to Lie With Statistics

That thin ice was famously described by NSIDC as “rotten ice.”
Yes it is famous. Trolls are still talking about it in rotten comments.

More than 70% of the ice this year is thicker than 2.25 metres thick
The trolls are saying “uh oh”. At least they’re thinking it. 😉

Gneiss says:
June 2, 2010 at 11:57 am
I’m impressed by how unequivocally and often WUWT has committed to the proposition that Arctic sea ice is recovering, in disagreement with most Arctic researchers. As you say, these will be pages to bookmark.
There are many? Would you list these Arctic researchers and tell what they are saying?
Or did you make that up and will be unable to list them?

Rob says:
June 2, 2010 at 11:59 am
i do have a slight issue – and excuse me for being a layman – but how can climate progress and WUWT be looking at ‘real’ data and come with equal and opposite views for the current state of ice in the arctic, let alone future predictions ??
Glass half empty, glass half full.

Murray Carpenter
June 2, 2010 at 1:26 pm
The ice looks thinker too in 2010. And there’s more snow on the ground in the surrounding area of Canada, Alaska, and Russia in 2010.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=06&fd=01&fy=1990&sm=06&sd=01&sy=2010

R. Gates says:
June 2, 2010 at 4:24 pm
“…
The first 4 months of 2010 were the warmest on instrument record:
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2010/05/17/NOAA-January-April-2010-warmest-on-record/UPI-74281274125050/”
Did you read the little chestnuts in that link? My head still hurts from all of the qualifiers:
“That’s 2.1 percent below the 1979-2000 average extent and the 15th smallest April extent since records began in 1979.”
Let’s see, 2010-1979=32 years including the end years. 15th smallest out of 32. Um, isn’t that pretty close to the median (16th)?
“It was, however, the 18th largest April Arctic sea ice extent since 2001.”
Wha? Does that mean 18th largest in the 79-’10 period but after 2001? I not read goodly.
“The North American snow cover extent for the fourth month was the smallest on record.”
And yet:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/13/october-through-march-was-the-snowiest-on-record-in-the-northern-hemisphere/
Good thing they picked April…
Now I think Steve is awfully brave to be predicting a big rebound in minimum ice extent this year for the simple fact that I don’t think we’ve got a collective clue of the evolution of polar ice on this planet, but I also think he’s got a better grasp on the climate sensitivity than most of the hysterical greens that seem to be nearly running the show. So, good luck, Steve.

A lot of credible-looking sources are saying that sea ice extent and thickness are declining dramatically.
Here we have a blog post that is saying the exact opposite, that arctic sea ice is recovering.
What are we to believe? How can this ‘cognitive dissonance’ be resolved?

Zombie ice!

Steve —
Ibrahim @June 2, 2010 at 12:14 pm mentioned the Mercator site, interesting. Those maps would prove an easy extraction by image decomposition, concentration and depth, join the two for volume… though I’m not sure of the source of their data. You might take a look for a seconary source.

Mike says:
June 2, 2010 at 6:30 pm
What are we to believe? How can this ‘cognitive dissonance’ be resolved?
Look at the graphs. You’ll suddenly be seeing 20/20.

This is what Joe Bastardi says.
http://www.accuweather.com/ukie/bastardi-europe-blog.asp
“FRIDAY MAY 7
THE STATE OF THE WORLD (OKAY, ICE MELT, GLOBAL TEMP).
ICE IN A NOSE DIVE, GLOBAL TEMPS START THEIR FALL.
I publicly stated earlier that global sea ice will take another beating this year, descending below levels it was at last summer, and perhaps 2008, but I don’t think it will get back to 2007 levels. This is the natural offshoot of the El Nino, BUT REMEMBER it will come roaring back this winter, and the melt season next summer (2011) will have it at higher levels than the melt season of 2009. In any case, looking at the sites that monitor this, we see them all in agreement now, the ice is crashing. Remember the forecast I made was done so before this started! I am simply calling ’em as I see them.”
While I like the reasoning of Steve Goddard a lot, if I understand well, Arctic summer ice melt depends mostly on wind patterns and the warmth of the water that flows from the Atlantic Ocean into the Arctic Ocean.
Joe Bastardi expects more than average warm water to flow into the Arctic Sea and melt the ice from below. If by chance that is combined with wind patterns that break up the ice and pushes it into the Atlantic, summer 2010 might well be another 2007.
I still think a prediction should take into consideration all the relevant factors:
wind patterns,
temperature of the water of the Atlantic Ocean,
the amount of warm water flowing from the Atlantic into the Artic Ocean,
thickness of the ice.

Caleb says:
June 2, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Mr. Bastardi did comment on what he surmised the ice extent would be. He stated it seemed likely to be lower than last summer and the summer before, but not as low as 2007. Most of the ice-loss would be on the Atlantic side, due to the warm AMO. However he also stated quite firmly the recovery next winter would more than make up for the ice-loss. In the long term he expects increasing ice and cooling, and describes the current melting as “one step back before two steps forward.”
In my opinion his videos are well worth the 29 cents a day I pay to view the Accuweather professional site.
__________________________________________________________________________
Yes, but since then the warm NAO has flipped to negative
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/ENSO/verf/new.nao.shtml#current
And the overall picture shows SST of the Atlantic and Indian oceans headed down
http://i39.tinypic.com/m7wf7t.jpg
As is the global SST
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/AMSRE-SST-Global-and-Nino34-thru-May-19-2010.gif
“Loehle, Craig. 2009. Cooling of the global ocean since 2003. Energy & Environment 20(1&2): 99-102.
ABSTRACT
Ocean heat content data from 2003 to 2008 (4.5 years) were evaluated for trend. A trend plus periodic (annual cycle) model fit with R2 = 0.85. The linear component of the model showed a trend of -0.35 (±0.2) x 1022 Joules per year. The result is consistent with other data showing a lack of warming over the past few years.”
http://www.ncasi.org//Publications/Detail.aspx?id=3152

Mike says:
June 2, 2010 at 6:30 pm
If you were to take your pizza dough that is rolled out, fold it in half twice, would the volume decrease, increase or be the same?
Why would the Arctic Sea Ice be any different if the forces up there bunched it up?
2007 was unique in that the thicker ice got blown out to the Atlantic and melted.
It’s now 2010, and the ice is getting thick again. Mass has increased.
If it doesn’t get blown out this year, it will get thicker still. More mass increase.

In 2007, the alarmists would say Look, the sky is falling, the area of Arctic ice decreased!
When it increased, they would say: Look, the area may have returned but the sky is falling because the thickness of the ice has surely dropped.
I wonder what they will say now. The only thing I am sure is that the statement will contain “the sky is falling”. 😉

Thanks for that Pamela, it does point out why there is so much free water in Hudson Bay for instance this year already, the warmer temperatures were well described over the winter.
Bremen page has got stuck sadly.
http://www.iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/amsre.html
Andy

Perhaps you could do a linear fit to the peaks of the three years and then make a prediction as to the year the Arctic Ocean will be frozen from surface to seabed!

Just like Al Gore, the Norwegian government say one thing, and do something else.
Just look here;
http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/ostlandssendingen/1.4385097
Now, who would build an opera like that, if they believed sea-levels would rise?
But then again, it seems Mr. Stoere, the Norwegian foreign minister, is a good friend to Mr. Gore.
And yet, they force every town to make cathastrophy plans regarding seal level rise….

“I don’t believe the “But this month is the HOTTEST on record” meme, seeing how they’re throwing away all the thermometers that give the real picture until they’re left with just one, which just happens to be in somebody’s shirt pocket).”
————————————–
And he happens to be on the beach in Texas!

Steve, perhaps an even more interesting study;
compare the ice melted in situ with the ice flushed out through the strait between Svalbard and Greenland and melted south of the Arctic Ocean.

Ric Werme
Many grid-based data parallel scientific models can be mapped to GPUs at close to 100% efficiency. The trick is to make sure that arrays are organised so that all memory accesses can be done in parallel. – i.e. thread 0 accesses bank 0, thread 1 accesses bank 1, etc.

Been on a hunt for indices related to the North Pacific Gyre and the Alaska Current. Fascinating stuff. Reminds me of our earlier discussion of the AO. Are these two oscillating atmospheric pressure systems located near the Bering and Fram Straits primarily responsible for Arctic Ice variability? hmmmm
http://ocean.eas.gatech.edu/npgo/

Pamela Gray says:
June 3, 2010 at 5:53 am
The study of salmon populations always produces interesting papers related to the North Pacific system.
http://www.nwcouncil.org/library/ocean/05_trends.htm
______________________________________________________________________
Very interesting stuff. I bookmarked both so I can read them again. I hope others come back to this article and check out your comments

Roger Knights says:
June 3, 2010 at 2:21 am
Thanks for the summary. The reason I’m amazed at the even money on the issue of arctic ice is because of the huge hype machine for global warming. If it were so damned certain that ice is retreating, a warmist can get a 50% return on investment in about 3 months. Every time I ask for a warmist to give me the extreme odds that their rhetoric implies, they back out. I would like to see this market get bigger exposure. I realize it’s a gamble because the minimum extent can be affected by so many things, but, the odds should be larger based on rhetoric alone.

R. Gates
I don’t know about anyone else but every time you say something based on “models” I get the willies. What do the actual measurements tell us? Mostly they tell us that the measurements have huge uncertainties. Than people take that reality and pretend to understand these uncertainties and use this belief to make models which you then treat as more real than actual data.
How much silly does it take to set off your BS detector?
It sure would be nice for the planet if we could get some warming, that fact is, of course, lost in the entire AGW monologue.

phlogiston says:
June 3, 2010 at 2:17 am
“As climate cooling continues and deepens, the AGWers will need to find a parallel dimension in which earth is warming.”
They can join the stringtheory-bunch. Im sure thogether they can make a model that shows its warming in the 21’st dimension.

Ian W said (June 2, 2010 at 1:46 pm): “Its interesting isn’t it that your reference has such a short timespan? So it gleefully shows a trend line from the 1978 just after the decade when everyone was concerned about a new ice age and then runs it to current time when everyone is talking global warming.”
That is when satellite measurements began. There are many factors that effect climate, including natural cycles, natural chaotic phenomena and now an unnatural increases in CO2 as well as other pollutants.
Say, I found this:
“The most striking feature of our pan-Arctic sea-ice cover reconstruction is the abrupt and sustained decrease in summer ice extent observed during the second half of the 20th century, which is apparently unprecedented in the previous 9 centuries. Our results suggest that as of 1985, Arctic summer sea ice cover extent dropped below the lower bound of the reconstructed minimum for the Medieval Warm Optimum (ca AD 1150). These findings support the contention that human influence on Arctic sea ice became detectable after the early 1990s.”
Reconstructing sea ice extent in the Arctic over the past ~900 years using a multi-proxy approach, Kinnard et al, Geophysical Research Abstracts, Vol. 12, EGU2010-14048, 2010.
http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2010/EGU2010-14048.pdf
I do not know enough to say whether this is study is correct or if it represents mainstream scientific opinion.

Gail & Pamela,
See also:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Climate_change_effects_on_arctic_freshwater_fish_populations
http://www.aslo.org/lo/toc/vol_41/issue_5/1102.pdf

RACookPE1978 siad: “Worldwide, freezing (colder weather in general at any levels) greatly increases death rates.”
You should cite evidence for your facts. I did not find world data. For the US: “During 1999–2003, a total of 3,442 deaths resulting from exposure to extreme heat were reported (annual mean: 688).”
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5510a5.htm
“During 1999–2002, a total of 4,607 death certificates in the United States had hypothermia-related diagnoses listed…”
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5529a2.htm
Thus, it appears you are correct for the US at least. I doubt this is true for India, although I have not checked.
Your contention that: “There is no harm from a 2-3 degree increase in the world’s temperature over the next 200 years,” is of course absurd. For one thing the temp increase could well exceed 2-3 degrees C. It appears unlikely we will reduce emissions to stay below the 2 degree C target. The people whose job it is to research the environment have made clear that the negatives such as crop failures and species loss will most likely out weigh benefits: IPCC, NAS. The Stern report projected a 20% loss in global GDP. You can dismiss all this as a vast conspiracy, but you cannot find a major scientific body that backs your claim.

Mike.
–>
Your analysis of deaths related to heat and cold is a bit oversimplified. Exposure to extreme temps would include, for example, children left in cars, men sucked into pizza ovens and other such trifles, whereas hypothermia can certainly be induced by other factors than climate such as leaving grandma’s air conditioner on too low.
In fact, the only reasonable way to make such a conclusion would be to take the average mortality rates (from all causes) of several spring and fall seasons and compare those during winter and summer to this “baseline” to form a “death anomaly” curve and to use this curve to create best fit models with which to observe trends. This may ignore the causality, accuracy and rigor, but any trend shown is logically derived and therefore must be true.
<–

Roger Knights
Now that GISS has freed themselves from trying to be consistent with HadCrut, they can pretty much guarantee whatever result they want. I wouldn’t bet against a team where the head coach is also the head referee.

Buffoon says:
June 3, 2010 at 8:32 pm
“Mike.
–>
Your analysis of deaths related to heat and cold is a bit oversimplified. Exposure to…”
I certainly was not attempting a detailed analysis. This is kind of OT, but I did see a site that gave death rates for the US by month. Death rates are higher in winter months mainly because of seasonal flu deaths are higher. Some scientists have expressed concerns about increases is death from tropical diseases in a warming word. I don’t know if fewer deaths from flu are taken into account. Personally I think the biggest health effects of AGW would be from economic losses resulting in less spending on healthcare especially in poorer countries. But, I’m just speculating.

And yes, that reference to the Oxford debate can be construed as citation OR an appeal to authority (it was intended as a citation to reference,) thus making me a scientist or a schill. Schroedingerly, I may be in either state at the current time, or might indeed be influenced by external behaviour, or even the identity of the person making the observation, in an iterative irony it is myself this time, thus making the question of which it was quite difficult. We may, however, predict a future choice on my part through this simple 3 step plan:
1) Measure my past behaviour by proxy, which may include character witness, previous examples of either behaviour or reconstructions based on presumed moral character.
2) Further, create a model of my reaction to such situations using the simplest regression possible. Must have at least 2 points which intersect a graphical representation of your model.
3) Use this model to make a future prediction as to whether my next contentious appeal to authority OR citation to reference, will in fact be either. Discard the result of the current situation (as given by me at the start of this post) if it does not fit the model by quoting “model inaccuracies” but posit your model as a reliable indicator of “future trends.”
Hopefully the brilliance, sarcasm and snark of these last three entries (inclusive) made sense to somebody.

Roger Knights says:
June 3, 2010 at 8:46 pm
I think I’ll join you and put 3 or 4 trades on Arctic recovery this September.

Excuse my ignorance, but who posts as Joe at Climate Progress?
He has a real attitude problem, not to mention a definite inferiority fear about WUWT.
A second question, if I may? What is causing the steeper decline in ice extent during May of this year?
REPLY: 1st question, that’s Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress. Second, I’ll defer your question to Steve Goddard. – Anthony

Policyguy
A lot of thin ice formed late in the season in the Barents Sea. It got pushed back rapidly in April, causing a “steep” drop in extent.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.6.html
It is important to realize that a wide extent in spring often means a rapid summer melt, because the ice is thinner. This year the ice is very compact, which most likely means a slower summer melt.

The plot of the distribution of ice thickness for the years 2008, 2009 and 21010 bear no resemblance to the PIPs maps to which they purportedly represent. If one looks at them it is clear that in 2008 there was thicker ice than in 2010. So how were the misleading plots constructed??

Excuse me, Barents Sea.

Tom, thank you for providing the correct method.
A breath of fresh air.