Arctic Toolbox: Did 300,000 km2 of ice suddenly melt?

Stepping away from the political side and arguing a bit for an update, the 08/19 preliminary JAXA number is up for 2010 and shows a second day of below average loss. This brings up the current extent predictor for the final value to just a touch over 5e6 km^2. It’s nice to see two below-average days, but all they do is counteract the two days before that, and not even fully.
-Scott

David Gould
Catastrophic global warming. Temperatures have not risen anywhere near as fast as even Hansen’s most conservative predictions. Sea level rise has not accelerated.
It is time for some people to admit that they were wrong, and stop lying to themselves and the rest of us.

David Gould
Do you believe that all climate scientists accept Hansen’s claims?
Even from the IPCC report, it is abundantly clear that there is a very wide range of ideas. But they are drowned out by politicians posing as scientists.

Günther
I mean exactly what I say. Please don’t try to psychoanalyze or read any other meanings in to it.
What “becomes more discernible by the day” is that Hansen vastly overestimated climate sensitivity.

Gunther, your last paragraph is bunch of cherry picked stuff too. Talking about ice transport out of the Elizabeth Islands because the Fram Straight basically shut down for awhile? Give me a break.
In the end, sea ice has become a poster child for the AGW political agenda when it’s convenient. Right now it is the arctic. Back in the early 1990s and even late 1980s, most of the rant was about Antarctica. In 2007, we were presented with the “death spiral” quotes and “ice free arctic by 2013”. That is supposed to be taken at face value without any sort of actual investigation into the science? All those “experts” that picked 2008 to pass 2007? What are we to say to them?
I find it interesting that there is little talk on the PDO/AMO cycles in regards to arctic sea ice. All you hear about is AGW being the cause.

And what’s more from the MODIS image posted previously it looks like the northern direct route is actually more than possible, in fact there is more open water there than in the more narrow passages to the south.
Günther, thanks very much with your link to the Norwegian circumnavigators. I think they may run out of time as they have a lot of ice to go around, but I hope they do it, it would be a fantastic achievement.
On a similar note:-
stevengoddard said
August 19, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Amazing what you can do with ice breakers in front of you, satellites, phones, planes helicopters, a climate controlled cabin and GPS navigation. Just like the Vikings.
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What did Oscar Wilde write? “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing”. You just stick to blogging in your nice warm house where the only ice is in your G & T :p 🙂
You’ll probably respect the British marines more, they seem to be struggling against Northerly winds at the moment
http://www.arcticmariner.org/ ( Go to JOURNEY and then BLOG )
Andy

AJB says:
August 18, 2010 at 3:56 pm
View in order:
1. http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/730/febsept15day.png
2. http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/3205/augsept15day.png
3. http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/5853/augsep7day.png
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Nice. It puts what is happening in the Arctic in perspective…. Nothing is really changing.
Governor Hunt??? as in North Carolina?

David Gould says:
August 19, 2010 at 5:38 pm
kakada,
We believe that it can be prevented. The point of the IPCC AR4 is that we are headed for serious trouble if we continue down the current path. If, however, we take steps to significantly reduce CO2 emissions then we can prevent that serious trouble. Thus, trying to convince those who are sceptical of this may be a worthwhile, although very difficult, endeavour.
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David,
Given that CO2 has a measurable influence on the global temperature, have you ever bothered to think about the other side of the argument?????
This what I mean.
Joe Romm over at Climate Progress states:
Absent human emissions, we’d probably be in a slow long-term cooling trend due primarily by changes in the Earth’s orbit — see Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds.
When he speaks of changes in the Earth’s orbit he is talking about the Milankovitch cycles that ushers in ice ages.
This peer reviewed paper also agrees:
Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception (2007)
“Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….”
And so does this paper:
Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic
“..Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ca 11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3° C above 20th century averages, enough to completely melt many small glaciers throughout the Arctic, although the Greenland Ice Sheet was only slightly smaller than at present… As summer solar energy decreased in the second half of the Holocene, glaciers reestablished or advanced, sea ice expanded, and the flow of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean diminished. Late Holocene cooling reached its nadir during the Little Ice Age (about 1250-1850 AD), when sun-blocking volcanic eruptions and perhaps other causes added to the orbital cooling, allowing most Arctic glaciers to reach their maximum Holocene extent…”
The point I am trying to make was put very nicely in this article:
Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried? – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
“Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global temperatures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earthvs climate can shift gears within a decade….
But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur…“
As far as I am concerned neglecting change towards a COOLING world is down right criminal negligence – my biggest gripe with CAGW.
So what if the sun has had more of an effect on the recent climate than is acknowledged by the IPCC, after all it IS a variable star and just recently even Dr. Lief Svalgaard acknowledged some of the recently held theories were wrong.
We now know that lately there have been changes in the sun:
During the last century the sun has been very active but with cycle 24 the sun has now gone into a long minimum with “unusual characteristic”s according to NASA and the Solar Dynamics Observatory Mission News
“We want to compare the sun’s brightness now to its brightness during previous minima and ask: is the sun getting brighter or dimmer?”
The answer seems to be dimmer. Measurements by a variety of spacecraft indicate a 12-year lessening of the sun’s “irradiance” by about 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at EUV wavelengths.”
This is in contrast to what was happening in the solar cycles before cycle 24.
Solar activity reaches new high – Dec 2, 2003
” Geophysicists in Finland and Germany have calculated that the Sun is more magnetically active now than it has been for over a 1000 years. Ilya Usoskin and colleagues at the University of Oulu and the Max-Planck Institute for Aeronomy say that their technique – which relies on a radioactive dating technique – is the first direct quantitative reconstruction of solar activity based on physical, rather than statistical, models (I G Usoskin et al. 2003 Phys. Rev. Lett. 91 211101)
… the Finnish team was able to extend data on solar activity back to 850 AD. The researchers found that there has been a sharp increase in the number of sunspots since the beginning of the 20th century. They calculated that the average number was about 30 per year between 850 and 1900, and then increased to 60 between 1900 and 1944, and is now at its highest ever value of 76.
“We need to understand this unprecedented level of activity,” Usoskin told PhysicsWeb.”
There is also the changes in albedo from cloud cover as measured by the Earthshine Project
“…..The earthshine observations reveal a large decadal variability in the Earth’s reflectance [7], which is yet not fully understood, but which is in line with other satellite and ground-based global radiation data….”
Climate Scientists really do not actually know what is going to happen and the unhealthy focus on just one variable, CO2, could leave mankind unprepared for a very nasty surprise. This is especially true if we have a large volcanic eruption in the right place during a solar grand minimum, a cool ocean cycle and during the wrong point of the precession of the equinoxes.
Well David, have you ever even LOOKED at the other variables that effect climate and what it could mean to mankind’s future???

Günther Kirschbaum says:
August 19, 2010 at 6:57 pm
Steven, AGW is just one of many symptoms of an unsustainable society. I don’t see much use in a crusade denouncing all of climate science as a hoax or a big bunch of crap. The end effect of that is most probably that you are keeping the forces in place that perpetuate the unsustainable society.
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First, none of us here at WUWT are interested in “soiling our nests”- most of us are conservationists.
You talk of “sustainability”. Do you KNOW what “sustainability” really is??? It is the code word for Global Governance and Agenda 21 Before you decide I am crazy please read the links.
Here is the context and history:
A key player is Maurice Strong:
Maurice Strong started in oil in the 1950’s working for the Rockefeller’s in Saudi Arabia and became CEO and president of Power Corporation, Petro-Canada and Ontario Hydro and others. He is on the board of trustees for the Rockefeller Foundation who funds Greenpeace and WWF, a senior adviser to the World Bank. He is also an acomplished conman with the Denver oil, AZL Resources, lawsuit, the Molten Metal Inc swindle involving Al Gore, tax payer money and the UN Food for Oil scandal After that scandal Strong escaped to Beijing China to escape questioning. Now he is a senior adviser to the Chinese government and also works for CH2M Hill, “an employee-owned, multinational firm providing engineering, construction, operations and related services…” [Sustainability, what sustainability…]
Here is the Global Warming tie in:
Climategate e-mail on Global Governance & Sustainable Development (B1)
Here is more on the (B1) scenario IPCC Emissions Scenarios
Here is who Ged Davis is (Shell Oil executive with IPCC connection) who wrote the B1 scenario.
Here is the start:
In Maurice Strong’s 1972 First Earth Summit speech, Strong warned urgently about global warming
Obama’s Chief Science Adviser is John Holden.’In their 1973 book “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions,” Holdren and co-authors Paul and Anne Ehrlich wrote:
“A massive campaign [read global warming] must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States. De-devolopment means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation. Resources and energy must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries.”
“The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge,” they wrote. “They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.””
The de-development plan is UN Division for Sustainable Development – full text of Agenda 21
UN REFORM – Restructuring for Global Governance
Our Global Neighborhood – Report of the Commission on Global Governance: a summary analysis
a lot of research and links about Agenda 21 in the USA
Despite the finger pointing by Greenpeace, it is the Big Oil companies (and banks), David Rockefeller, Maurice Strong and Shell who are behind CAGW.
In Sept. 14, 1994 David Rockefeller, speaking at the UN Business Council,.
“This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long – We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”
Rockefeller also stated “…the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
YOU may want a world government by non-elected bankers, corporate CEOs and oilmen, I do not.

Julienne,
Looks to me like summer 2010 will finish well above 2007, and that the NSIDC official prediction is too low.