By charles the moderator
From the “No matter what happens we can attribute it to Anthropogenic Climate Change” Department.
In a story in physorg.com James Overland of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, makes a few claims which will give some of our readers pause.
While it may seem counter-intuitive, warmer Arctic climes caused by climate change influence air pressure at the North Pole, shifting wind patterns in such a way as to boost cooling over adjacent swathes of the planet.
“Cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception,” said James Overland of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Continued rapid loss of ice will be an important driver of major change in the world’s climate system in the coming years, he said at an Olso meeting of scientists reviewing research from the two-year International Polar Year 2007-2008.
The exceptionally chilly winter of 2009-2010 in temperate zones of the northern hemisphere were connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic, he said.
“The emerging impact of greenhouse gases in an important factor in the changing Arctic,” he explained in a statement.
“What was not fully recognized until now is that a combination of an unusual warm period due to natural variability, loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage, and changing wind patterns all working together to disrupt the memory and stability of the Arctic climate system,” he said.
The region is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification.
Resulting ice loss is significantly greater than earlier climate models predicted.
The polar ice cap shrank to its smallest surface since records have been kept in 2007, and early data suggests it could become even smaller this summer.
Source here. Bolding mine.
Now just over a year ago, NOAA put this out, again quoting Overland.
“The Arctic is changing faster than anticipated,” said James Overland, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and co-author of the study, which will appear April 3 in Geophysical Research Letters. “It’s a combination of natural variability, along with warmer air and sea conditions caused by increased greenhouse gases.”
Overland and his co-author, Muyin Wang, a University of Washington research scientist with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean in Seattle, analyzed projections from six computer models, including three with sophisticated sea ice physics capabilities. That data was then combined with observations of summer sea ice loss in 2007 and 2008.
The area covered by summer sea ice is expected to decline from its current 4.6 million square kilometers (about 1.8 million square miles) to about 1 million square kilometers (about 390,000 square miles) – a loss approximately two-fifths the size of the continental U.S. Much of the sea ice would remain in the area north of Canada and Greenland and decrease between Alaska and Russia in the Pacific Arctic.
“The Arctic is often called the ‘Earth’s refrigerator’ because the sea ice helps cool the planet by reflecting the sun’s radiation back into space,” said Wang. “With less ice, the sun’s warmth is instead absorbed by the open water, contributing to warmer temperatures in the water and the air.”
Bolding mine. Source again here. So… while this is not a direct contradiction, it is sort of a morphing of ideas. To paraphrase the what was not fully recognized.
We used to think that a warming Arctic with melting ice would be part of a warming trend, but instead, we got a lot of snow and cold weather, so the warming Arctic kinda messed with all those, you know, patterns and stuff like that we expected like. So that snow and rain and cold and other stuff we didn’t predict or expect… you know what I’m sayin’? It was caused by, you know, the crazy mixed up stuff caused by all that melting and warming and stuff, yeah…that’s it.
or to phrase it another way:
AGW moves in mysterious ways.
But the money shot is here from the physorg.com article.
It is unlikely that the Arctic can return to its previous condition, Overland said. The changes are irreversible.
It is likely someone will remind Dr. Overland of that statement in a few years.
h/t “K”
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“What was not fully recognized until now is that a combination of an unusual warm period due to natural variability, loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage, and changing wind patterns all working together to disrupt the memory and stability of the Arctic climate system,” he said.
How insultingly naieve is this statement?
If the Arctic gets warmer and causes colder N. Temperate Zone temps, it’s a zero-sum game.
A zero-sum game with the mass of us poor slobs getting the short end of the climactic stick.
100’s of millions of people on this planet get the end result: warming Peter Popsickle Land to freeze the crud out of Paul Pedestrian Land.
How much sunlight actually hits the ground in the high latitudes, anyway?
Minor typo: “In a story in physicorg.com” should refer to “physorg.com”. The link is right, so it’s a very minor typo.
“early data suggests it could become even smaller this summer.” Does that constitute a prediction? If so (and even if not), can we create a new WordPress category, “prediction” and tag posts that include predictions thusly? Now that I’m collecting links to categories that would make it easier to find such claims.
Reply: No excuses. I wasn’t even drunk. Fixed. ~ctm
Translation: Just like the Arctic, as I get older my memory plays tricks on me too and affects my stability.
AGW “proponents” remind me of when little kids play cards and they make up the rules as they go so that they always win. No one plays with those kids.
At some point, they will have to be dismissed and mocked because if reason hasn’t reached them by now, it never will.
“…to disrupt the memory…of the Arctic climate system”
Gaia is getting Alzheimer disease from breathing all that CO2.
Idiots.
It’s called weather and you can’t use it to disprove AGW.
You can of course use AGW to predict that the weather will be different.
Since the weather is constantly changing that means AGW must be true 🙂
This must qualify as a variation of reductio ad absurdem.
So what happened after September 2007? Did we enter a death spiral ie less and less September sea ice? From what I have learned quite the opposite – 2008 greater than 2007 and 2009 greater than 2008. Why????
Why do these people continue with their failed predictions?
Continued rapid loss of ice
But that isn’t happening since 2007. Ice has increased year by year, in 2008, and 2009, since then. And it looks like an increase this year too. We will see in 3 months if the increase continues.
Sean @2:19 “The positive AO”
It was a record Negative AO.
The region is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification.
It’s actually from the Arctic Oscillation (AO), a normal occurrence in climate.
It is unlikely that the Arctic can return to its previous condition, Overland said. The changes are irreversible.
I know, it’s the ‘death spiral’.
But Arctic ice is increasing. 2008 and 2009 saw an increase in Arctic ice. So nothing to see here. 🙂
“Olso”?
I guess he meant Oslo, the capital city of Norway, Scandinavia, Europe, the World.
In other words, the bones in the bowl didn’t line up right (ie: this is not science) or to put it bluntly they haven’t got a clue about the scope of what they understand or the precision in which they are able surmise the future.
What I remember from engineering is when dealing with a turbulent fluid …
Not even summers are getting warmer here in Norway anymore.
In northern norway it never even reached 30-40s temps: http://eklima.met.no/metno/trend/TAMA_G5_22_1000_NO.jpg
And Norway is supposed to be one of the places that is supposed to experience most global warming..
Here in middle of Norway we havent had more than one single “summer” day with temps of 20c or higher and that one was in may. A week ago we even set the lowest recorded june temp”2c” in 35 years and such records have been set every month so far this year.
Amazing what these people will do and say in order to get both our money and control of our lives. Almost everything is being attributed to AGW.
This is funny:
“What was not fully recognized until now, blah blah blah”
So prior to now, telling everyone you knew what you were talking about was total BS.
Mr. Overland: You are an extreme embarrassment to all of the competent meteorologists and scientists employed in this agency.
Please quit your obsfucations, distortions and contradictions that so obviously are trying to protect the fraudulent CO2 warming hypothesis and yearly multi billion dollar federal funding racket that so desperately needs the plug to be pulled on it so as to bankrupt the Chicago Climate Exchange, Goldman Sack’s and Al Gore.
“… all working together to disrupt the memory and stability of the Arctic climate system,”
The Arctic has a memory?
We have not become “sane” in terms of AGW. Remember Orwell:
‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.
‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’
‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
“Reply: No excuses. I wasn’t even drunk. Fixed. ~ctm”
That reminds me of the two beers in my fridge that i had completely forgotten. Thanks, Charles! Gotta check whether the arctic conditions there still prevail…
I think the people that write this AGW rot have reached the tippling point and then proceeded beyond it.
Generational memory is amazing. You see it in the stock market with a generational memory of about 10 years. During that period, you have had close to 100% turnover in the staff of most investment firms. People forget the sovereign debt crisis of Russia in 1998 and thus miss the signs for the current one in the EU. Loans to objects with poor credit ratings was the sub-prime disaster in the 1980s and guess what we have now again. The problem here is the AMO is so long that few people seem to remember it. Add to that a little “adjustment” to the data record and we are now warmer than ever. To be sure, land use and energy use in and about urban areas has increased the temperature in those regions. But for the balance, sorry guys, there has not been much change since the 1930s. I do not have to consult my copy of Nostradamus to prophecy that there will be a batch of “coming ice age Malthusian disaster” articles in the popular press around 2035.
When the polar high pressure cells drift equatorward during a period of negative polar oscillations that allows more inflow of warm air into the polar regions at the same time as there is a greater flow of cold air to the mid latitudes.
That seems to happen more often and/or with greater intensity when the solar surface is inactive as now.
The net effect is to increase the rate of energy loss to space from the poles whilst at the same time warm tropical air is restrained from moving poleward by the more equatorward air circulation patterns. Thus a cooling of the mid latitudes despite general global warmth.
The warmer the tropics become the more they try to push the air circulation systems back poleward again.
So there is a constant battle as regards air circulation system latitudinal positioning and regional climates will change depending on that region’s position in relation to the air circulation positions at any given time.
The global trend in temperature is quite seperate and as often as not will go in the opposite direction to the trend in individual regions.
One of the greatest errors by climate science is to wrongly conflate regional changes with background global trends
I keep seeing bits from my earlier propositions coming up in ‘new’ research such as this but no one else is anywhere near incorporating those bits into a coherent climate overview.
From the few times I’ve been on a boat it seems to me that open water does a pretty good job at reflecting sunlight too. As someone else mentioned earlier, the sun spends most of it’s time hitting the arctic region on an angle, not dead on as you would imagine in the tropical latitudes. I would think that whether ice or open water it would reflect quite a bit of the sunlight.
Then again just this afternoon while sitting out on the deck I said to the wife, “Hun, I think the temp just increased half a degree. We better go back into the air conditioning.”
“The region is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification.”
How the heck would they know??? Aren’t they getting their Arctic temperature information from GISS?