By Steve Goddard
NCEP has changed their forecast, and it now appears there will be above normal temperatures over the Beaufort Sea for the next few days.
This will cause continued melt of the low concentration ice, and a downwards drift of the extent line. Daily loss has been declining steadily over the last month, but not enough to keep extent above my 5.5 million JAXA forecast.
Looks like it will be close at the finish line between 2009 and 2010 for JAXA 15%.
The DMI 30% concentration graph looks like 2010 will probably finish ahead of 2009.
Average ice thickness is highest since 2007 and 10% higher than 2009. Hinting at a 10% increase in ice volume next spring relative to 2010.
Barring 2007 style winds, next spring should see a third straight year of recovery since the winter of 2007-2008, when much of the thick ice blew out of the Arctic and melted in the North Atlantic.
Remember the “rotten ice” in 2008, which led to Mark Serreze betting on an ice free North Pole that summer? Looks like we have come a long way since then. Here is what the North Pole looks like today :
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Virveli says:
August 24, 2010 at 12:34 pm
“Noticed it right away…and so once more, you could in theory circumnavigate the Arctic sea ice (going around the southern tip of Greenland of course!). Some year soon, I’m sure someone will…just to say they were the first!”
R.Gates, in fact there are two such enterprises going on in full swing presently. One Russian and one Norwegian expedition. The Norwegian team has recently passed the iciest part of the NE passage. See http://www.ousland.no http://rusarc.ru/expedition/route/
______
Thanks. Looks like they’re getting to it sooner than I thought. And here I was hoping I would be part of the first expedition to do it!
Still looks like the total antarctic + arctic ice is pretty close to the long-term means……
Since Barber coined the term and since we have widely discussed the matter and since even someone like me who doesnt run for the ice, INSTANTLY saw the disconnect between the picture of the North Pole and the mention of “rotten” ice, my reaction was like Phil.
If the picture was photoshopped polar bear on an iceberg, I think we would hold the folks to a different standard. I’ll suggest the same standard for all. Do a correction, in as much as rotten ice is a term of art now, and since Serreze cannot be QUOTED
using that term in 2008..
“Remember the “rotten ice” in 2008, which led to Mark Serreze betting on an ice free North Pole that summer? Looks like we have come a long way since then. Here is what the North Pole looks like today :”
This is misleading and wrong. Own the error,Correct the error. spare us the explanation of how it was gotten wrong, promise to quote accurately in the future.
Simple.
Reply: It’s more like Barber recently popularized the term. It’s been around for awhile. ~ ctm
R. Gates says:
August 24, 2010 at 3:16 pm
Thanks. Looks like they’re getting to it sooner than I thought. And here I was hoping I would be part of the first expedition to do it!
One yacht (Scandinavian) had a good shot at it last year but having reached the Bering strait were escorted to port by the Russian navy to deal with problems regarding their paperwork!
Reply: One a very tangential note, I did witness the Loca Lola navigating around the Antarctic peninsula in 1993. ~ ctm
Smokey:
“The whole Arctic ice debate is a tempest in a teacup, and will remain that way unless the warmist contingent is able to falsify the hypothesis that the observed temperature changes are a consequence of natural variability. So far, they have failed.”
natural variability is not a cause. It is an observation in search of a cause. Until you specify a null correctly ( as you have failed to do so) you dont have a Null to “falisfy.” Further, no null is falsified. they are rejected with a certain confidence level. Not falsified. but rejected. “we reject the Null with 95% confidence” . Not falsified. A rejected Null may very well be true, as chance would have things, by definition.
And further, rejecting a NULL does not make its opposite true. That is a type two error.
Günther Kirschbaum says:
August 24, 2010 at 3:15 pm
What if we hadn’t had six weeks of cloudiness and stalling of the Beaufort Gyre and Transpolar Drift Stream, but just 3 weeks, or 0 weeks like in 2007?
What if an asteroid hits Greenland? Hasn’t happened this year.
In short: Where is the recovery?
Probably the same reason Ice Ages take so long to reach bottom, and Interglacials run up so fast.
Macrocosm/microcosm.
Now, what if every 100,000 yrs an enormous Ice Comet drapes Earth in Ice & Dust but doesn’t slam into it?
We understand not the mechanisms for Ice Age/Interglacials nor the Polar Cycles (North taking a viscious hit & South spouting ice like an Eskimo Candle) .
[snip]
Ilulíssat Glacier, Greenland IceCam
http://sermitsiaq.ag/icecam/
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Ilul%C3%ADssat,+Greenland&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=18.860836,39.067383&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Ilulissat,+Kitaa,+Greenland&ll=69.209404,-51.064453&spn=0.705861,2.441711&t=h&z=9
Well, as I said recently. . . “revenge of the establishment consensus” (Mark S. is not part of that consensus, no matter how establishment he is).
Also revenge of “if it hasn’t happened 3 times in a row in the last 30 years, don’t expect it to this time either”.
I did, obviously, think that the recovery from 2007 would get us that 3rd year of min extent growth, because I considered 2007 enough of an outlier to do that. I was wrong.
But next year is still important. “3 years out of 4” would still be a trend upwards in my book (if it is a signficant increase anyway). If not, then we may just be returning to the pre-2006 downward trend line. Which isn’t the “worse than we thought it was” meme the AGWers are so fond of, but is still not good. . .
Perhaps “Phil” is using Steve’s surname as thats what most boys do at school. The thing is most people who leave school and grow up realise its incredibly rude.
Too many years in education can lead to an institutionalised outlook evidently.
Roll on Cryosat2 so you can all stop this ludicrous childishness.
On “rotten” ice:
So “rotten” ice is moth-eaten old ice. And “rotten” ice is small chunks of old ice glued together by thin layers of new ice.
For such a well-known term among those working with sea ice, you’d think there’d be better agreement as to exactly what is this well-known type of ice.
To lighten the mood, jeez’ “Baby Ice” is now going to make it through the terrible twos and will be a rotten adolescent soon.
Meanwhile Fellas…..Long range Model still showing Cooldown by the beginning of Sept & even showing some more premature early snow showing up on russian (land) side with higher elev of alaska getting white also…cannot see much melt after the 6th & hoping for that rapid ice over to make most minimum extent arguments mute…Stay tuned!
The conversation here is once again turning quite amazing, with the usual cast of characters.
In 2008, NSIDC discussed the “rotten ice” as an indication of a record low forecast minimum. Mark Serreze based his ice free North Pole bet on the thin first year ice.
That is exactly what I said in the article. I can’t (and don’t have any interest) in reading Phil, Mosher, or anybody else’s mind.
Steven,
Demonstrated to be untrue, incorrect, not factual, perhaps one might even say, in error.
Kinda sorta, not related to first sentence.
Your unwillingness to admit error, to continue to evade, bob, and weave has been made quite clear on this thread. If you could man up and own your errors you would gain a little credibility, albeit not much at this point, but instead you behave as we complain The Hockey Team does, no error must ever be admitted to to the public. This is my last comment in this thread, I expect you to accuse of some ad homs or a vendetta or something as you get in the last word.
geo says:
August 24, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Yet another comment throwing in the towel.
The ice has NOT yet gone below the 2009 minimum. If the rest of the year’s melt follows 2004 or 2006, then it’ll stay above it. This may be a small probability, but it’s still quite possible!
-Scott
Steve, if you have a link that says Mark Serreze talked about rotten ice in 2008 I hope you can share that with us. Mark was talking about the first-year ice at the pole that year and the possibility that the first-year ice could melt out.
Günther Kirschbaum says:
August 24, 2010 at 3:15 pm
“Where is the recovery?”
_____
It will be a “recovery spiral”, taking many centuries and even millenia to fully spiral up, (at least until such time as the next glacial period gets going) and interrupted by many years of a seasonally ice free summer Arctic.
This is a question I’ve been wanting to ask for a while, and it’s not just relevant to the Arctic sea ice discussions but to climate change in general: What would it take for you to believe that human activities are influencing the climate system and components of it such as the Arctic sea ice cover?
geo says:
August 24, 2010 at 3:37 pm
“But next year is still important. “3 years out of 4″ would still be a trend upwards in my book . . .”
****************************************************************************
It may be so “in [your] book”, geo, but not in the book that scientists use.
Also, the “worse than we thought it was” phrase, was not conjured up with the last 3 years of Arctic ice melt in mind. It is, instead, a retroactive look at the predictions that were being made about “ice free summers in the Arctic by 2050 or 2040. As soon as they saw the massive and accelerating loss in <b.VOLUME they realized that the situation was indeed worse than they thought.
Even in the 2007-2008 expansion of surface area composed of pathetically thin 1st year ice; the multi-year ice was shrink, shrink, shrinking; and more importantly, thin, thin, thinning. So what exactly do you mean by “recovery”?
Please look at the ice thickness images below. Yes I know Steve, you favor PIPS so here they are:
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pips2/archive/retrievepic.html?filetype=Thickness&year=2007&month=9&day=12
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pips2/archive/retrievepic.html?filetype=Thickness&year=2008&month=9&day=12
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pips2/archive/retrievepic.html?filetype=Thickness&year=2009&month=9&day=12
Counting from 9-12 to 9-12 I find a pathetic increase from 2008-2009. By the way, it pays to wrench one’s head out of charts every once in a while and check up on more concrete matters. Like the fact that 2008-2009 were La Nina years, which helped chill out things a little.
So tell me? Are you going to rely on La Ninas and other transient situations, like our late spring melt forever?
Well, here is a quote from CNN in 2008 from Mark Serreze that doesn’t use the word rotten, but is even more direct in describing what Steve was first taking about at the top of this post; the status of the ice at the north pole:
“We kind of have an informal betting pool going around in our center and that betting pool is ‘does the North Pole melt out this summer?’ and it may well,” said the center’s senior research scientist, Mark Serreze.
It’s a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen in autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said.
Find it here: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/weather/06/27/north.pole.melting/
blackswhitewash.com says:
August 24, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Perhaps “Phil” is using Steve’s surname as thats what most boys do at school. The thing is most people who leave school and grow up realise its incredibly rude.
Too many years in education can lead to an institutionalised outlook evidently.
***************************************************************************
It’s a military tradition as well. I’ve seen former military persons both use their last names as their preferred name as well as refer to people by their last names in a formal job situation (working security).
Julienne Stroeve said on August 24, 2010 at 4:34 pm:
Doesn’t Hansen have out a recent paper attributing a sizable portion of Arctic melt to soot? I’ve read mention here before of papers showing glacier melt attributable to soot, aka “black carbon,” as well as nearby land use changes.
Voila! Human activities, changes to climate systems including Arctic sea ice cover. What’s so hard to accept about human-generated soot getting warm in sunlight and melting the ice it is laying on?
mecago says:
August 24, 2010 at 4:38 pm
++++
Thank you for telling me what scientists don’t say. Are you willing to also tell us what they do say? If 3 out of 4 isn’t “recovering” than would “4 out of 5” qualify? If not, tell us what the minimum standard you’d accept would qualify for speaking of “recovering” rather than “recovered”?
Perhaps Cryosat 2 will help us, over time, credibly convert to using volume as a standard. Until the reliability and granularity of volume data gets a whole lot better than it is, then extent is what we have with any length of record, granularity, and reliability to perform (still too short, but vastly better than volume) historical comparisons.
I’m aware of the limitations of using extent. But volume data quite simply sucks at the current time. Would that it were better, more granular, and longer. We all look forward to the day.
jeez
Please cut the mindless personal attacks. You are desperate to discredit me and are not thinking clearly. I wrote this article in 2008 satirizing the “rotten ice.”
“Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered
There’s something rotten north of Denmark”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/15/goddard_arctic_ice_mystery/
That was more than a year before the Barber piece some of you are obsessed with.
Maybe it wasn’t in an NSIDC publication. It might have been a personal conversation with Walt Meier or Ted Scambos. I don’t remember and don’t really care.
I’m sure you remember this 2007 article, since you are so familiar with the topic.
September 24th, 2007
Rotten ice over pole
http://www.farnorthscience.com/2007/09/
“We were seeing unusually thin, rotten ice, all the way to 79 degrees north,”
Julienne Stroeve says:
August 24, 2010 at 4:34 pm
This is a question I’ve been wanting to ask for a while, and it’s not just relevant to the Arctic sea ice discussions but to climate change in general: What would it take for you to believe that human activities are influencing the climate system and components of it such as the Arctic sea ice cover?
_______
Excellent question Julienne, and I shall be interested to see how the hardcore (and quite educated) WUWT skeptics respond. I find them to be the most interesting group to converse with, and I’ve learned a great deal by being here.
As a “75% warmist” I’m pretty much already there in terms of believe that AGW is likely happening, as you can probably gather from my posts, but I do hold out the remote possibility that there might be some longer term solar or ocean cycle that we don’t fully know about. I especially look at the climate shift of 1976, when the big run up in late 20th century warming got started and wonder if some longer term PDO, or other natural ocean cycle might not have helped pushed that warming. But then, I consider the distinct possibility that AGW could already be affecting these natural ocean cycles, and so we might never know what the planet would be doing without any human interventions. But really, I’m just stubborn enough that I would never want to be 100% certain of anything, as it would mean that I might close my mind to other possibilities. After all, what if Einstein was 100% certain that Newton was correct in all cases?
I stated for a long time that the Arctic is my watershed case, and even though I’m aware of ocean acidification, permafrost melt, and stratospheric cooling, etc. I look to the Arctic as being that final test case, that either takes me from 75% certain to 99.9%, and I expect this to happen within a few years. I do expect a new record low by 2015, and also do strongly feel that the long and deep solar minimum of 2008-2009, combined with the last La Nina, gave AGW skeptics a bit of breathing room to promote their skepticism to those not looking a the bigger and longer term picture.