Sea Ice News #25 – NSIDC says 2010 3rd lowest for Arctic sea ice

Peter Plail says:
October 6, 2010 at 4:59 am
As you say, the outlook is poor for arctic ice if the wind, and not AGW effects, flush ice out through the Fram Straits. Which brings me back to the point, the wind seems to be a major influencer of ice mass in the Arctic, a point which NSDIC doesn’t seem to want to highlight.
NSIDC does highlight wind at times. The thing is, wind can be a major factor but it isn’t always. With daily satellite monitoring, ice getting flushed out the strait is quantified, and it is reported when it’s a major contributor. This summer, very little seemed to be going south.

The last 3 days of extent increase:
Oct 2-3: 129843 km2
Oct 3-4: 95625 km2
Oct 4-5: 108750 km2
This summers combination of below normal air temps and above normal sea temps, with el Nino ocean heat as usual finding its way to the Arctic, combined with the low extent minimum and large areas of open sea – all combine to put 2010 close to the records in one parameter: the amount of heat lost from the Arctic sea to air / space. This could be close to an all time high.
This contributes to the bigger picture of global OHC decline.

Phlogiston,
Where do you think there are “below normal air temps”?
Don’t see much evidence in fig. 8 here: http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html

EFS_Junior says:
October 7, 2010 at 11:40 am
The Arctic heats up in the spring and summer, last time I checked. The air, the ice, the land, and the water all heat up
There is net heat flux into the system during the spring and summer.
Where is the direct evidence to support your claim, which BYW, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
The last time I checked, heat moved from objects of higher temperature to those with lower temperature. To most people with a cursory familiarity with thermodynamics or just school physics, it will be self-evident that, if we are talking about heat movement from water to air, then if the air temperature is decreased, and the water temperature increases, then heat flow from water to air will rise.
But that this “makes no sense” to you, in fact, makes perfect sense.
I have noticed that AGW apologists are very similar to door-stopping Jehovah’s witnesses in the method they use to prepare and argue their position. (It is an appropriate comparison since AGW belief bears many characteristics of religious faith – more on this later).
Door-to-door JW evangelists, if you give them the chance to state their case, have a small number of narrowly defined statements of faith and accompanying narratives, which they research in great detail and depth. The key to their arguing skill is to steer the debate onto these few key articles of belief, and keep away from other subject areas.
Likewise your door-stopping AGW evangelists also have their equivalent of the Watchtower tracts, equipping them with detailed argument on the AGW articles of faith, such as Arrhenius CO2 radiative greenhouse warming, computer models of ocean and air circulation built on amplified CO2 forcing, and computer models of glacial and Arctic ice loss. These smart-suited devotees have similar skills in steering the debate onto these well prepared theaters of illusion.
Two topics that are absent from this AGW approved list are the ocean and clouds. But your AGWer is quite content in the belief that neither of these can significantly affect climate.
Thus it is not surprising to see your discomfort and surprise at having to consider a novel and unfamiliar concept such as loss of ocean heat to the atmosphere. If you want a primer on heat moving from hotter to colder things, here is one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat
I’ve been noticing more resemblances between AGW belief and some types of religion
(it is too narrow to bracket all religion and faith together). Particularly, there is a major category of religious groups characterised by a very negative attitude toward and concept of the physical world. There are branches and sects of all the world’s major religions that despise “mortal flesh” and the physical world as evil and irredeemable, so that the devotee’s quest is to attain a metaphysical destiny of enlightenment, bliss or eternal life in rejection of the world. Many of these religious groups also have an apocalyptic world view of inevitable catastrophic destruction and termination of the world and of physical existence.
This world-despising apocalyptic psycology is strongly present in what we can call the “Messianic AGW” religion. While believing in a past Edenic paradise, the present world is doomed to catastrophe and all human activity is unavoidably contributing to this catastrophe and thus evil.
The scriptures of messianic AGW faith are written largely in computer code, the blessed GCM models which hover ethereally like the disembodied benevolent thetans of Scientology. The devotees of messianic AGW are not generally consciously aware of these religious forms but they subconsciously characterise their world-view. There is always an instinctive aversion to any direct interpretation of climate data or measurements of oceanic or solar processes, but an instinctive affinity for complex theoretic models involving series of assumptions all leading inevitably to the core belief of CO2 forcing just as all masonic forms and rituals lead eventully to the deity Jabulon.
PIO-in-the-sky-MAS is a good example of this. It is quoted with reverence and veneration fitting to an article of scripture. Like the GCM models, it is used in the place of data by climate scientists, emphasising the status of such models as established articles of faith.
PIO-in-th-sky-MAS failed miserably to make an accurate forecast of ice loss in the Arctic this year, as meticulously documented by Steve Goddard:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/arctic-forecast-verification-3/#comments
A true scientific understanding of underlying causes of variation in Arctic ice extent will require better experiments measurement, not more and more complex modeling based on a few scraps of data. Why cant some-one fly planes over the Arctic every month or so with radar to assess thickness for instance? Then we would have something to talk about. In the absence of such data, elaborate over-complex and unstable models like PIO-in-the-sky-MAS are no substitute, except for those with unconditional faith.

The Barrow Ice cam is down (since 9/30) & it will be a shame if it is not fixed because I think that we could see ice on the beach very soon..within a week.
Back in 07 we saw ice on the cam oct 19th but it came & went till early nov unlike some years where it comes & stays.