File this under short term trends matter when we say they matter.
From The Montreal Gazette
BY RANDY BOSWELL, CANWEST NEWS SERVICE
Arctic Ocean ice cover retreated faster last month than in any previous May since satellite monitoring began more than 30 years ago, the latest sign that the polar region could be headed for another record-setting meltdown by summer’s end.
The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center had already warned earlier this spring that low ice volume — the result of repeated losses of thick, multi-year ice over the past decade — meant this past winter’s ice-extent recovery was superficial, due mainly to a fragile fringe of new ice that would be vulnerable to rapid deterioration once warmer temperatures set in.
And, driven by unusually hot weather in recent weeks above the Arctic Circle, the polar ice is disappearing at an unprecedented rate, reducing overall ice extent to less than that recorded in May 2007 — the year when a record-setting retreat by mid-September alarmed climatologists and northern governments.
The centre reported that across much of the Arctic, temperatures were two to five degrees Celsius above average last month.
“In May, Arctic air temperatures remained above average, and sea ice extent declined at a rapid pace,” the Colorado-based centre said in its June 8 report.
The centre pegged the retreat at an average of 68,000 square kilometres a day, noting that “this rate of loss is the highest for the month of May during the satellite record.”
Ice loss was greatest in the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, “indicating that the ice in these areas was thin and susceptible to melt,” the centre added.
“Many polynyas, areas of open water in the ice pack, opened up in the regions north of Alaska, in the Canadian Arctic Islands, and in the Kara and Barents and Laptev seas.”
Read the rest of the story here
Hey Joe…thanks for stopping by. Huge fan here.
Can you tell me if the Arctic will be ice-free next year? I plan on taking my motorhome up to Newfoundland for the Targa in Sept, and it’d be spankin’ if I could load onto a freighter and come straight across the passage ;)…save a whole whole bunch of C02 also 😉
O/T, but speaking of C02, there were a dozen or so people walking around the F1 race in Montreal with big C02 graphic balloons during the qualifying and race laps.
Seriously?…how do you think a race crowd is going react to a C02 balloon?
JimB
Be nice. DMI did report an average +1.33K average anomaly… so it *was* unusually warm in the strictest sense. It’s also not too surprising to anyone that the late season accumulation didn’t last much.
Meta topic rant — Viewing the time lapses of the ice migrating south along the Greenland coast alway makes me want to scream — Arctic Ice melts because it’s no longer *in* the Arctic.
That seems to have everything to due with winds and currents and nothing to do with a 1.3K temperature anomaly.
Hi, I’m new to WUTW.
Great Article I read it all the way through and it seems pretty concerning to me especially the quote “average Arctic ice volume in May was 19,000 cubic kilometres, “the lowest May volume over the 1979 to 2010 period.”
But what about your commentary “File this under short term trends matter when we say they matter.” It begs the question , so when is average Arctic ice volume in May going to matter? And who is we ?
Salutations Hengist McStone
“”” sandyinderby says:
June 15, 2010 at 10:40 am
Mods you can snip this if you feel it’ll hijack the thread.
Seeing as we’re on a topic which at least indirectly touches on the subject of open water in the Arctic Ocean I’m hoping someone can she some light on something which has been bothering me for a number of months now.
Casting my mind back 40 years I seem to remember that the critical angle for a water-air or air-water interface is about 48 degrees. At angles of incidence less than this you’ll get total internal (external in this case?) reflection. Hence why on still days you get perfect reflections of mountains on lakes etc. “””
Well sandyinderby; you clearly haven’t been paying attention; well at least during the last 40 days.
Simply put; Snell’s law says N1.sin(I1) = N2.sin(I2) where N1, N2 are the refractive indices of the two media on each side of the boundary (relative to vacuum) and I1, I2 are the angles of incidence (relative to the normal) on each side of the surface.
Consider the case N2 > N1 . Then I2 must be less than I1 . Assuming that I1 can range from zero to 90 degrees; then I2 necessarily is restricted to lass than 90 degrees. NOTE that this restriction is ONLY in the higher refractive index medium; there is no restriction of incidence angle in the lower index medium.
This is true no matter in which direction the light is travelling. The principle of reversability, says the ray follows the same path in either direction NOTE: this reversibility is true ONLY for the case of geometrical ray optics. It is quite erroneous to say that all light paths are reversible; the Physical paths are not reversible, even in the simplest case if more than one medium is involved.
Simplest stick in the sand proof of this, is a single light beam impinging on a single refracting surface; where it splits into two beams; one refracted into the other medium according to Snell’s law; and the other reflecting back into the incoming medium. This also can be handled by Snell’s law if we simply make the index following reflection be the negative of the index before the reflection.
So we have a single input ray; and we get two output rays; (assuming semi-infinite media on each side of the boundary).
Well what happens if we simply reverse the two output rays, and send them back to the surface. Well they do NOT reconstitute the single original input ray; in fact both of them split; giving us now four rays instead of one.
So “light” is NOT reversible; no matter what the text books tell you; ONLY the paths of geometrical ray optics are reversible; and that of course is NOT a real Physical description of what is going on; it is a MODEL. In physical reality; you get diffraction laws apply; and you do not get what ray optics predicts. Nonetheless 99.99 % of lens design can be done extremely well using only ray optics. But diffraction optics not only gives a different image; but it also is generally not in the same place as the geometry says it should be.
But back to the water surface. Snell’s law does not restrict the passage of light from air into water; for any incidence angle from zero to 90 degrees. But once inside the water; the rays are confined to a cone of half angle equal to the critical angle Arcsin(N1/N2).
The Fresnel laws of reflection/refraction at the interface; will however increase the surface reflectance for incidence angles of the order of the Brewster angle or larger; IB = Arctan (N1/N2).
We have been over this more times than I care to relate.
Tom in Florida,
Have you ever heard of albedo?
The difference between energy reflected by ice towards what would be absorbed by dark open water is quite significant. You should look it up some time.
sandyinderby, you’re ignoring the word “internal”. Total internal reflection occurs only on the side with the higher refractive index. Reflection in a lake may look perfect but it is significantly dimmer than the unreflected image. What’s reflected and what isn’t depends a lot on polarisation.
See left-hand graph at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations
Hengist McStone,
Some other sites you should consider visiting are climateaudit, skeptical science and climate progress. There is frequently a back and forth between these sites which is relatively entertaining.
OK! Am I missing something here? Last night I did a side by side comparison of Arctic
ice concentration on Cryosphere Today. It appeared to me that the concentration of ice (%, perhaps not extent ) on 6-13-2010 is greater than any previous year of that date
back to 1979.
Surely this will slow the melting?
Perhaps someone could do an animation of this.
sandyinderby says:
June 15, 2010 at 10:40 am
> So my question is just how much of the energy from the sun makes it into the Arctic Ocean?
Some of that was discussed recently, but I don’t think anyone came up with useful numbers.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/11/visualizing-changes-in-arctic-ice-since-the-2007-record-low/ Search for things like reflect, snell, and George E. Smith.
Pamela Gray says:
June 15, 2010 at 10:10 am
In other words, …, I can say that in my opinion, natural conditions explains it quite well.
Yes, I agree – no need to invoke supernatural conditions to explain the record Arctic sea ice melt.
Re: 1979-2000 average and “anomalies”:
It’s not an average until it includes all data, including 2007. I would accept 1979-2009, but cutting it off at ANY place to exaggerate an anomaly is not Science. Period.
“Joe Bastardi says:
June 15, 2010 at 12:53 pm
The hysteria, if ( when) I am proven correct, will simply shift to the southern hemisphere, were the warmist refuse to look now.”
What really gets me annoyed. Is when we have halfwits going on about the Antarctic melting when it at the height of winter down there. Not sure if it was last winter or the previous one. Incluiding a report from an Australian University. Claiming a large hunk of Ice broke off one of the ice shelfs during that winter. They put it down to global Warming. Yeah right.
The numbers for May are meaningless. Lets look at some other numbers from the JAXA data to show you the range of fluctuation. All number are in sq kilomterers.
May 2009 26,781
June 2009 55,937
May 2010 67,661
June 2010 (14 days) 58,398
June 2010 (7 days) 56,116
Make of it what you will. I personally will wait and see what happens in July before making any predictions.
Ooops those numbers are average daily ice loss.
Robert says:
June 15, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Firstly, many “warmists” are already forced to look down south because of thousands of years old ice shelves collapsing (see larsen A, B, Muller ice shelf, wordie ice shelf, prince gustav ice shelf, Wilkins ice shelf… etc…)
Do you have fingernails? Have you ever had one snap on you? Was it because it was too long, or too short?
as well as large land ice losses from the continent as a whole (250 GT/Year and accelerating) (Measured with altimetry, gravimetry, synthetic aperture radar and so on…)…
I’ve seen this one before, and laughed at it. One gigatone ~ 1 km^3. Antartica will finish melting in about 300,000 years time – or approximately after 3 glacial periods have come and gone. It’s a big place.
Assuming it’s not going to stop melting during a glacial period that is.
That’s not withstanding the elements of error in mass loss. Altimetry doesn’t work all that well when the rock beneath is sagging at an unknown rate. Ditto gravimetry. Always try to keep in mind the errors. Might be too high – might be too low, but they always exist.
I’ll take Barber’s thoughts over yours thank you very much. He spent a lot longer than 4 years studying arctic climatology…
Why don’t you take your own thoughts and do your own research? Be sure to look every so often to assess what you’re told actually means. Otherwise, you’re going to end up thinking 300,000 years is an immediate disaster.
The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center had already warned earlier this spring that low ice volume….
And of course they have the PIOMAS graph to prove it.
And, driven by unusually hot weather in recent weeks above the Arctic Circle…
Wait, wait, wait….. did he say unusually hot??
It’s been unusually cold here in Northern, California (until this past weekend) so I better go up there and catch up on my tan. And I’ll find that girl in a bikini that Steven Goddard is always posting here too!
the year when a record-setting retreat by mid-September alarmed climatologists
Of course they’re alarmed. Alarmism is their bread and butter.
The centre reported that across much of the Arctic, temperatures were two to five degrees Celsius above average last month.
Oh my God that is so hot!
jakers says:
June 15, 2010 at 9:17 am
Short term trends in February and March were much more significant.
You really are Joe Bastardi or were you making that up?
Hi Robert, Thanks for the reply . I’m familiar with a couple of those sites but I’m not looking for entertainment.
In a nutshell I’m asking for the reasoning in the statement “…short term trends matter when we say they matter.”
Salutations Hengist McStone
Did they mention anything about shear?
Wait, what am I thinking! Of course they didn’t!
Jason Bair-“How can they get away with bold faced lies like this?”
Disinformation techniques are an essential elective in Canadian journalism programs; without it the chance of landing a CBC position would be nil. However, the Canadian news industry still provides many job opportunities for less competent deceivers and I think a case in point would be Mr. Boswell and his proferred science thriller.
The only thing thinning is the number of reliable stations recording temperature.
Hello, Greetings from England by the way where it is late night and about average temp for the time of year .
Ok anybody, what is the reasoning behind the statement at the top of the page “File this under short term trends matter when we say they matter.”
I’m gonna hazard a guess that it’s dogma.
Salutations Hengist McStone