2007 Sea Ice Post Mortem

When it comes to the Arctic nothing now surprises me about the paranoia. I just wrote this piece about a stunning factual error made by a guest writer on the BBC website:
http://blackswhitewash.com/2010/06/10/bbc-polar-diary-its-nothing-to-do-with-penguins/

Sea Ice Extent. 2009 melt start 5 March at 13.97 million sq/km. 2010 melt start 31 March at 14.41 million sq/km. Head start for 2009 413,000 million sq/km.
At 31 March 2010 had made up the difference both now at 14.41 million sq/km.
MELTING; in 2010 the first million sq/km melt took 26 days (2009 35 days) Second million sq/km took 13 days (2009 17 days) Third million sq/km took 15 days (2009 19 days) Fourth million sq/km took 15 days (2009 18 days) It took 69 days in 2010 to melt 4 million sq/km and it took 89 days, 20 days more, in 2009. Multi-year ice in 1980 between 80 and 90 %. Multi-year ice now just 18%, the dying remains jammed against Canada and north Greenland. Arctic sea ice recovered? Definition of recovered please. Ice volume increasing? The arguments are highly unconvincing and improbable; wishfull thinking if you like.

stevengoddard says:
June 10, 2010 at 4:11 am
Tom P
The concentration of ice is the Arctic Basin is pretty close to 100% this year. If you are concerned that PIPS does not consider concentration when calculating the average thickness of a grid cell, then multiply all of my 2010 numbers by 1.0 . For example, if I report an average thickness of 2.55 metres, then multiply that number by 1.0, and you will get a corrected number of 2.55 metres.
Hello, 2.55 x 1.0 equalls 2.55 Have I learned something today?

CO2
Hopefully you have “learned” how to identify sarcasm.

I think we are obsessing over small amounts of noise in the signal. To my physicist eyes, using the last graph Steve’s article, I see a slight downward trend from 1979-1997, then a more pronounced downward trend from 1997-2006, and then level from 2006 to present.
Also the noise level seems to be around + – 0.5 million sq km, so the above trends do not appear to be significantly outside the noise level of the signal. Another 10 years of data and something more signifcant could maybe be said. Otherwise, I don’t see how much more could inferred from the data.

Tom P.,
Why do you persist with the uncertainty related to concentration?
The thickess ice is in the area with the highest concentrations.
The thinner ice is in the areas with the relatively lower concentrations.
If you multiply each local pixel by the concentration value, you increase the weighting of hte thick ice and decrease the weighting of the thin ice. Hence, the result is an average thickness that is GREATER THAN the average derived without such a correction.
The uncertainty in Steve’s calculation is small and has a conservative bias. Since the analysis is of TRENDS, so long as he uses the same method throughout, for all data points, the error to the trend is very small.

David L. says:
June 10, 2010 at 5:02 am
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, did it make a sound? If the North Pole warms up and no one is there to measure it, does it melt ice?”
Not if they were deaf. As for melting, no it doesn’t, being there to measure is a melting law of nature. Good night, I’ll sleep peacefully.

* An ice free pole could not occur without dramatic summer warming.

So you “win the game” by setting the goal to the worst case possible, complete and total loss of all ice. Anything short of everything means you were right and “they” were wrong. And by implication, the fact that the amount of ice has progressively decreased for decades, and will eventually result in an ice free summer pole, is meaningless simply because a complete and total melt hasn’t happened yet.
It’s like saying you are going to live forever, because you haven’t died yet.

* There has been almost no summer warming in the high Arctic over the last 70 years.

A convenient cherry pick. There has been dramatic warming in the spring and fall, but summer warming is pretty much capped by the fact that there’s just no way to get more than 24 hours of sunlight out of a summer Arctic day, and any GHG (or any other) effect is of course dwarfed by that volume of non-stop sunlight.

* The melt season is too short to have an ice free Arctic.

This is false, but even if it were true, what if the melt season gets longer, due to rising temperatures (as happened last year)? But at the base of it, you have no foundation for saying the melt season is too short. If spring and fall temperatures are warm enough, that will do it, and if those seasons also stretch to start and end sooner, and if cumulative years reduce ice thickness (yes, yes, keep reading), it’s a done deal.

* 2008 started with first year ice at the pole. It was a warm summer at the pole, and the ice did not disappear. There will never be a summer which starts with younger ice than 2008.

I’m afraid your phrasing is ambiguous. Are you defining the pole as that single point at 180˚ N, or some area around it, or is this just a moniker for the Arctic Sea? Since I know there was ice at the pole throughout 2007, and so 2008 could not have had first year ice there, I will assume you merely mean “the Arctic Sea.”
As such, your first statement is patently false. The only way for the entire pole to have only first year ice would be if it had all melted the previous year. So as soon as a year melts more than 2007, the following year will have more first year ice than 2008, but not “only first year ice.” Your statement equates to “if it didn’t happen in 2008, it will never happen,” which is just silly. You’re back to your “I can’t die, because I haven’t died yet” mantra.

* Linear projections of an ice-free pole are incorrect. It is much more likely that the slope will tail off asymptotically.

I assume this means tail off upward so that it never happens… a series that converges to some value short of zero. Some scientists, who get paid to study this more closely than you (and therefore spend a lot more time thinking about it) say the opposite, that when it happens, it will be shockingly abrupt.
The idea that a process might accelerate, however, is neither counter intuitive nor at all unexpected, and so your statement that a particular outcome is “more likely” is unfounded — unless you’d actually like to prevent reasoning and evidence to support that assertion.
There is no reason in the world to believe that Arctic ice would behave like a falling object (where air resistance increases with velocity) or a decaying element with a half life (where the loss is fractional, so less to lose means less loss), rather than like a nuclear explosion which reaches critical mass (which is a cascading chain reaction, which accelerates because each reaction results in ever more triggers for future reactions).
More specifically, if you think of the simple case where exposed surface area results in more melting, if you have one very large chunk of ice, it will melt more slowly (less exposed perimeter) than a whole lot of small chunks. Eventually, that large chunk will get small enough to be broken by uneven melt, and wind and wave action. So mechanically, there is every reason to believe that this could be an accelerating process, if the ice gets thin enough to reach that point.
And this is pretty much how the Arctic is structured, with a main mass clinging to the north coast of Greenland. It melts inward, from the edges, but it’s anchored by Greenland. If it gets thin enough, though, you could see it quickly and dramatically fracture and melt.

* I propose that 2008 ice volume was close to the theoretical minimum, until Arctic summer temperatures increase dramatically.

Time will tell. And yes, I have bookmarked this page.

* Dress appropriately [for] the high Arctic. It is too cold for a bikini.

Ah, dry humor which plays to people’s naive emotional side, equivalent to saying “look, everyone knows it’s cold up there, so how could anything possibly melt.” When all else fails, try a sarcastic, logic free appeal to emotion and personal experience.
Well, time will tell how good your logic is, Mr. Goddard. And while you can smile for a few days if you turn out to be right, and say “look, I’m smarter than all of those silly scientists,” I want to be sure that you have the courage to make an appropriately humble post if you turn out to be wrong (actually, a whole series of them, given how much time and energy you’ve put into this whole “Arctic Ice isn’t and won’t melt” kick) — and we live to see an event which hasn’t happened in 700,000 years.

Tom P.,
The Posey paper ice volumes are largely for MARCH, not MAY. Your comparisons to the early May effective volume levels are thus erroneous.
The most recent PIOMAS results don’t match the most recent facts that we seen for 2010. The area and extend in April and May of 2010, on average, were greater than the levels for the last several years, noteably 2008 and 2009. We have seen that published measurement data and PIPS calaulated thickness levels for 2010 are greater than the thickness levels in 2008 and 2009. We know that in each of those years the amount of multi-year ice has increased from the prior year, so the trend toward thicker ice in 2009 and 2010 makes sense.
While both the area and thickness inputs to volume have INCREASED, the PIOMAS plot indicates a relative volume decrease. THAT DECREASE, does not fit the data available from other reliable sources. Hence the questions.

Crashex,
Thickness and concentration are not well correlated, so any volume calculation needs to use both. I am unsure whether Steve is unwilling or unable to combine the two datasets, but while he persists in using just thickness he is producing erroneous results. The impossible decrease in total volume after the fall equinox in his 2007 plot is just one example of the misleading nature of Steve’s calculations.

Tom P,
Obsess much?
The ice front continued to melt “after the equinox” in 2007 because of unusually warm water and winds in the Beaufort Sea. The only thing that is “impossible” is trying to have a sane conversation about this topic with you.