It’s refreshing to see NSIDC director Mark Serreze coming to grips with his role in stirring up Arctic ice scare stories (like the famous “death spiral”) in 2007:
“In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.”
Here’s some excerpts from the article:
With sea ice levels in the Arctic at record lows this month, a new report comparing scientists’ predictions calls for caution in over-interpreting a few weeks worth of data from the North Pole.
The Sea Ice Outlook, which will be released this week, brings together more than a dozen teams’ best guesses at how much sea ice will disappear by the end of the warm season in September. This year began with a surprise. More sea ice appeared than anticipated, nearing its mean level from 1979-2007. But then ice levels plummeted through May and into June. Scientists have never seen the Arctic with less ice at this time of year in the three decades they’ve been able to measure it, and they expect below average ice for the rest of the year.
But looking ahead, the ultimate amount of sea ice melt is hard to determine. Some trends, like the long-term warming of the Arctic and overall decreases in the thickness of sea ice, argue for very low levels of sea ice. But there are countervailing factors, too: The same weather pattern that led to higher-than-normal temperatures in the Arctic this year is also changing the circulation of sea ice, which could keep it in colder water and slow the melting.
“For this date, it’s the lowest we’ve seen in the record, but will that pattern hold up? We don’t know. The sea ice system surprises us,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
The loss of summer sea ice over decades is one of the firmest predictions of climate models: Given the current patterns of fossil fuel use and the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, sea-ice-free summers in the arctic are a virtual certainty by the end of century, and possibly much sooner. As the globe heats up, the poles are disproportionately affected. Warmer temperatures melt ice, revealing the dark sea water that had previously been covered. That changes the albedo, or reflectivity, of the area, allowing it to absorb more heat. That, along with many other feedback loops makes predicting change in the Arctic immensely difficult.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
They claim they are climatologists, not weathermen.
They can’t predict this crap either. Predicting this is no different than predicting the weather……..
….and we all know they can’t do that
David
“It seems that in the first part of this year, when temperatures were well above average, sea ice was at higher levels than in 2005-2009. Then from the end of April/beginning of May, with temperatures at or below average, the area of sea ice shrank dramatically, the opposite of what one might have expected”
I have noted the same observations. Some expert explainations appreciated.
Sean says:
June 20, 2010 at 5:08 am
I fully agree with both points. One of the fascinations with sea ice though are its daily extent values and satellite imagery, so it’s one of the few things available to “climatically impatient.” (Personally I revel in the upcoming changes to the Sun in just the next decade or so, and the ongoing changes to PDO and next AMO that weren’t well covered by satellite during their last phase change and don’t have coverage for a full 60± year cycle.)
I look at sea ice extent as something to keep an eye on, with only a little predictive power. Even the extremes have limited predictive power – the 2007 low signalled both recovery in 2008 (regression to the mean) and ice free summers (it’s worse than we thought).
Ice extent is the best refuge for the impatient, but patience remains a virtue.
It’s sort of the same thing with hurricane seasons, every year in the last week of May people get all excited about the start of the new hurricane season. Never mind that June hurricanes are pretty rare and things don’t pick up much in July until the last week or so. The hurricane forecasts from NHC and Colorado State ought to come out a month or before the hurricanes so they aren’t looking like hindcasting and to give people who would otherwise wait until its too late some encouragement to prepare.
“In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.”
And this man was promoted??
Of ya, that’s right, he was the perfect one to be promoted. What was I thinking.
“But then ice levels plummeted through May and into June…..“For this date, it’s the lowest we’ve seen in the record, but will that pattern hold up? We don’t know. The sea ice system surprises us,” said Mark Serreze”
Any mention of shear? Melt is the reader inference they want.
The loss of summer sea ice over decades is one of the firmest predictions of climate models: Given the current patterns of fossil fuel use and the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, sea-ice-free summers in the arctic are a virtual certainty by the end of century, and possibly much sooner.
Huh, I thought we weren’t supposed to have such a focus on Arctic ice and that it’s not worth blogging about.
But they couldn’t pass up they opportunity to scare people, could they!
Warmer temperatures melt ice, revealing the dark sea water that had previously been covered. That changes the albedo
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah
Clearly, the trend over the last 30 years is most important and not what happens during a certain month or even a particular year. Like the stock market, one should not expect ice extent to go straight down or straight up.
“Scientists have never seen the Arctic with less ice at this time of year in the three decades they’ve been able to measure it”
I’ve been told time and time again by those supporting the alleged AGW hypothesis that weather isn’t climate and that climate is over at least 30 year time scales… which means that they just barely have any data at all on arctic ice area and thickness. Without longer term data it’s not possible to make any sound conclusions regarding the ice data.
One climate data point, comprising the 30 years of weather data, is insufficient for any conclusions at all. This is especially the case when natural cyclic climate patterns have been shown to have 30 year, 60 year or longer cyclic rhythm time spans.
BillD says: June 20, 2010 at 7:07 am
“Clearly, the trend over the last 30 years is most important and not what happens during a certain month or even a particular year”
That sounds like back-peddling.
The Prediction Is: “The Arctic will be Ice Free in 2013”.
Ice Free.
I have heard it on the Front Page of every newspaper for years.
They must drop the ‘theory’ if the prediction is not observed.
No changing the prediction without first admitting that the ‘theory’ was just speculation by a few dozen people and admitting that they need to go back to the drawing board and use measurements and observations and do science.
They need to admit that their models are garbage and that they have No Clue.
The whole is more telling than the parts.
The Arctic has been here before and will be here again. Ice is nice but is only a piece of the puzzle.
Suggested Viewing, rated PG for AGW Advocates:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
“Scientists have never seen the Arctic with less ice at this time of year in the three decades they’ve been able to measure it”
It depends who is looking: At NANSEN they see more sea ice than in 2007 and 2008:
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
Why watch arctic sea ice? Because it’s a hoot. Data comes in daily and forecasters are all over the lot and staking out their positions clearly. We get to see who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s like a slow motion horse race, with the leaders changing from time to time to keep it interesting. Of course whether any of the theories underlying the forecasts are correct, well that’s a different matter entirely. But the horse race is a hoot.
Douglas DC says:
June 20, 2010 at 6:22 am
There are others-like Joe Bastardi who say that July will tell the tale now that it appears that Nina’s pushed Nino out of the stroller……
++++
“Tell the tale” of what? Arctic minimum extent this year? So Joe is beginning to prepare a retreat from his former prediction of a larger melt than last year?
I’ve been saying since mid-April that July 1-July 15 is my next major milestone. Steve Goddard has been pointing at August for about as long. I don’t think Steve and I really disagree here. What those first two weeks of July will do is either take a “2007-like” year off the table or not as a possibility. If July 1-July 15 does take 2007 off the table, then August should give us a pretty good look at where the eventual minimum will hit amongst the “non-outlier” years (i.e. excluding 2007) of recent history.
“When this started in 2007, it was pretty scary for a lot of the scientists, putting these numbers out there,” said Helen Wiggins, program coordinator of the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States. “It’s a different way to do science. It’s more a community synthesizing exercise.”
A different way to do science? Whose science? In my scientific community, researchers tend to want to put their numbers out there so that others may validate their work.
I’ve made the same point a number of times in some of the articles here tracking the monthly and even weekly sea ice data. I trust you feel the same way about WUWT sea ice article #1, 2, 3, 4 etc…
Not so. NANSEN is currently (June 18) showing the same sea ice area as 2007. Extent has fallen below 2007 and is now just on the lowest track in the satellite period for this date.
3 other sea ice extent products show extent at clear record lows for this time of year.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent_L.png
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/ice_ext_n.png
ROOS is the youngest producer of sea ice data. They got going in 2007.
But it’s only a few data points. As BillD says, it’s inconsequential in terms of trends.
What calculations can be done that would show what the minimum amount of energy the arctic and antarctic get given the current orbital mechanics of the Earth-Moon-Sol system, the current and historical range of solar energy radiation entering the Earth-Moon system, the seasonal variations, the atmospheric temperatures, the ocean temperatures, etc…?
Scuse me for asking, but even if the Arctic were ice-free in a 100 years or so, why should I give a monkey’s? Nobody lives there apart from polar bears…and they can swim. The ice is floating so no change to sea level would be seen. Why the big fuss? Who cares?
“In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.”
Was it really that astonishing? Thirty measly years of satellite data, anecdotal historical evidence of Arctic ice cyclical fluctuations, still lots of ice left. These guys “astonish” like they were born yesterday.
“It’s a different way to do science. It’s more a community synthesizing exercise.”
So who authorized these people to do science in a different way? One weeps for the scientific method when one hears such drivel.
First they focused on extent. Then when extent picked up after 2007 they picked up on thickness / volume. Now they are back to extent.
AGW is Anthropogenic Global Wreligion. They predict everythig and blame it on weather, oops, sorry Climate Change. Their aim is to make sure that the ‘theory’ can never be falsified even up to the extent of statistical massaging biased towards the obvious warming. They call this science!!!
Bill Tuttle says:
June 20, 2010 at 3:53 am
R. Gates is running late…
*checking watch*
_______________
Sorry, been off line a few days in San Diego. I’m sure I was missed. This is a well done article, and hits squarely at the need for open data and sharing among groups who are trying to accurately model and predict what will happen to arctic sea ice. Before 2007, the global climate models were showing an ice free summer Arctic anywhere from the year 2100 to 2300. After 2007’s low mark, we saw the range shift down to 2013 to 2150. Some saw 2007’s low mark as a complete anomaly that was not related to any dynamic from AGW, and others saw it as evidence that the Arctic was changing faster than any single model had predicted. I personally still favor this second category. I think 2007 a sign that the Arctic was changing faster than any model had predicted, but I also think it’s far more complicated than simply looking at Arctic air temperatures. The sharing of data from the different models will help to begin getting all the different factors included to paint a much more accurate picture of what is happening. It’s nice to see that my 4.5 million sq. km. prediction, which I made back in March for this year’s summer low is still in the range of this summer’s predictions by the experts. I still don’t quite think we’ll see the low we did in 2007, but it will fall low enough (reversing the so-called “recovery” of 2008-2009) that we’ll see continued downward revisions in the average estimates for when the Arctic will be ice free in the summer. Even though I don’t see a record low extent for this summer, I feel very confident we will by 2015, hitting near the 2.0 million sq. km. in at least one summer between now and then, and I do think we’ll see an ice free Arctic summer before 2030.
What Serreze admitted was pure confirmation bias. While you’d think he would rethink his entire views, instead he reconfirms them but makes sure he won’t get caught again making any predictions.
The intellectual dishonesty is astounding.
Recall the kind of logic used to arrive at some of these estimations (from 2008)…
Estimating September extent based on past conditions (NSIDC, May 5, 2008)
As discussed in our April analysis, the ice cover this spring shows an unusually large proportion of young, thin first-year ice; about 30% of first-year ice typically survives the summer melt season, while 75% of the older ice survives. For a simple estimate of the likelihood of breaking last year’s September record, we can apply survival rates from past years to this year’s April ice cover. This gives us 25 different estimates, one for each year that we have reliable ice-age data (see Figure 4 – notice this goes back to 1985 only). To avoid beating the September 2007 record low, more than 50% of this year’s first-year ice would have to survive; this has only happened once in the last 25 years, in 1996. If we apply the survival rates averaged over all years to current conditions, the end-of-summer extent would be 3.59 million square kilometers (1.39 million square miles). With survival rates similar to those in 2007, the minimum for the 2008 season would be only 2.22 million square kilometers (0.86 million square miles). By comparison the record low extent, set last September, was 4.28 million square kilometers (1.65 million square miles).
Good point! I know the satellite data only goes back to 1979 but in an ideal world it would be better still if we could look at the trend over the past 60-100 years don’t you think. I’ve read plenty of evidence to show me that what has happened to Arctic sea ice over the past 30 years is nothing out of the ordinary. :0)