Open Sea Ice Thread

don penman,
These arguments do go in the same circles.
It’s odd to me that global warming believers are posting numerous and long comments in this thread. They really are dominating it. I think it’s a way of dealing with their doubts over their beliefs in what is happening in climate. Global warming is not obviously happening. Everything happening can be explained by natural variation. So maybe these long comments are a way of reinforcing in their mind what they believe, or hope, will happen in years to come. Over time I’m seeing that they have those beliefs and hopes for varying reasons.

Repsonse to Scott
September 5, 2010 at 12:40 pm
______
A genuine congratulations on your success thus far with your publications. I would like to make a big distinction between being, as you say, an “emotionless automaton” and not getting wrapped up emotionally in the whole AGW issue. From you post, when you claim you were “excited” about the direction the Arctic Sea ice was headed, this is quite different than getting exciting about conducting an experiment. If you are honest here for a moment, you know quite well that your excitement means you want to prove your “side” to be right in the AGW debate, or at least prove that the other side hasn’t got the data to support its contention.
Passion in the act of scientific discovery is quite a bit diffferent than having a wish to see your side right and the other side wrong. I don’t know exactly what field of science you are in, but despite your success thus far, I think you’ll even do better by keeping your passion but leaving your expectations and prejudices behind as they obscure and dull the clear vision that is required for the truly extraordinary discoveries.

R. Gates says:
September 5, 2010 at 2:21 pm “If you are honest here for a moment, you know quite well that your excitement means you want to prove your “side” to be right in the AGW debate, or at least prove that the other side hasn’t got the data to support its contention.”
IOW Scott you ar either a [snip] or too stupid to realize what your own emotions are w/o R. Gates to interpret (project?) them for you.
Seriously R. Gates just stick to your own interpretations of data and stop pretending to understand other peoples motivations and emotions.

Just For Reference:
If anyone would like to see what the Arctic Region Sea-Ice Anomaly looks like after removing (subtracting) the average annual melt-freeze cycle from the data, here are the terms I use to calculate the average melt-freeze curve over the largest available integer-year span in the NSIDC data. For AMSR-E data I use the same curve, except the constant value is a similar integer-year average for AMSR-E data. I did fill the data gaps in the original files with linear interpolation. I believe this subtraction gives a better view of year to year changes.
In Microsoft Excel, I create a table of cosines and sines for each date and use recursion relationships to create the higher order (n>1) values. I use the SUMPRODUCT() function of the cosine-sine values for each date against the Fourier table coefficients, all in a single row, to calculate the approximation.

Unofficial Fourier Series Terms for the Approximation of
the Average Melt-Freeze Curve of Arctic Region Sea-Ice
NSIDC
order n    0         1         2         3         4         5
cos(nx)  11.87624  -3.75218  -0.50341  -0.08146   0.08140   0.01741
sin(nx)   0.00000   1.74899   0.50190   0.33105   0.12596   0.07983
AMER-E
order n    0         1         2          3         4         5
cos(nx)  10.43384  -3.75218  -0.50341   -0.08146   0.08140   0.01741
sin(nx)   0.00000   1.74899   0.50190    0.33105   0.12596   0.07983
x=2*pi()*(Decimal_Date-1994.750)

Another 50 k loss yesterday. Now extent is 5.1 milj km2. It seems that R. Gates’s 4.5 will be more close than Steve’s 5.5

R. Gates says:
September 5, 2010 at 10:48 am
R. Gates, this link gets you to the monthly ice extent fields used in NSIDC’s sea ice news and analysis web site (ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/). Just click on the month you want to look at and you can download the text files. For the actual maximum (not the monthly mean), some of that data is available here: (ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/seaice/polar-stereo/trends-climatologies/ice-extent/nasateam/) though the most recent data based on near-real-time fields are not in that last link. Those you would have to get from NSIDC’s user services, or derive from the near-real-time ice concentrations that are also available on the ftp site.
The last few years maximum’s were (based on 5-day averages):
2007: 14.64
2008: 15.23
2009: 15.14
2010: 15.25
The last few years minimum’s were:
2007: 4.13
2008: 4.55
2009: 5.10
2010? below 5.0 (right now at 4.97)

AndyW
To me that suggests that you take the opposite view to other people who think it open, as would anyone else reading it.
I think people see what they want to see. So I don’t think it’s correct to assume ‘anyone else’ would think like you do. I guess you want to see that everyone thinks like you.

Either it is open or it is closed.

Just for reference, a very minor observation. When I compared extrapolated NSIDC sea-ice extent data with AMSR-E sea-ice extent data over the period of 7/29/2002 through 7/29/2010 I found that the NSIDC values were, on average, about 0.72135 million square km higher than the equivalent AMSR-E readings over the same period of time. I assume this is some ‘built-in’ offset between the two measurements.