Joe Bastardi's 2011 Arctic Sea Ice Prediction

Günther Kirschbaum says:
November 25, 2010 at 7:22 pm
So the Arctic death spiral will contine – unless it doesn’t.

Matt G says:
November 25, 2010 at 5:32 pm
R Gates,
You have contradicted yourself, for example how can AGW not possibily be nonsense when you own up to not even knowing the sensitivity is to climate. This issue that grabs so much attention is because the claims suppose to cause dangerous global warming that causes chaos for milllions/billions of people. There is no evidence at all for this, so with the usual claims AGW is nonsense. There are not thousands of scientists that agree this, but rather CO2 should have at least some effect on global temperatures in future. What is the sensitivty of CO2 with climate, high or low?
The reason why I ask this is because if it is high there would have been no stable global temperature period for numerous years. Hence, false that most of the recent warming is anything to do with CO2. If it is low you will find that virtually all the rise in global temperatures has occurred in sudden bursts mainly related to El Ninos or ocean shifts. Therefore where is the evidence for this sensitivity?
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The sensitivity of the climate to changes in CO2 levels is EXACTLY the point of all the study going on. No one knows exactly how sensitive it is. This gets back exactly to the point about the climate being a system “on the edge” of chaos. How much of a nudge does it take to change this system to different state of equalibrium? There are some skeptics who wrongly believe that because CO2 has a logarithmic effect as a greenhouse gas that this must mean the total effect on climate is purely logarithmic, but this is not how systems on the edge of chaos work. Energic systems on the edge of chaos, such as the climate can react in a very smoooth manner, (linear or logarithmic) to a change for a period of time, and then reach some deterministic but not predictable point when there will be a shift to a new regime. There are several potential mechansims where these tipping points could be related to CO2, from changes in the thermal profile of the deeper ocean current (affecting things like the PDO & AMO, El Nine,etc.) to changes in the thermal profile of the atmosphere, which would then affect major weather patterns and the hydrological cycle, etc.

R. Gates says:
November 25, 2010 at 9:19 am

The climate (and hence weather) are systems existing on the edge of chaos, with small changes leading to big differences. From Milankovitch cycles to El Nino/La Nina cycles , we see this happen at all levels. The central issue in the AGW debate is not about whether the climate is a system existing on the edge of chaos, but rather, how sensitive is the climate to the year by year increase that humans have caused since the 1700′s?

A) Big assertion in regard to weather & climate being “on the edge of chaos”. Perhaps they appear that way due to insufficient external factors being considered and/or too short of observation periods.
phlogiston says:
November 26, 2010 at 2:13 am

The geological as well as the evolutionary records and persistence of complex ecosystems for hundreds of millions of years points to climate stability and resistance to forcing – certainly not to a system on the edge, ready to fly off into positive feedbacks at the slightest variation of none of the very many potential climate drivers. If you are indeed interested in edge of chaos nonlinear dynamics, read up on Lyapunov stability.

This sounds more like someone who understands systems. So R. Gates, when you completely understand Lyopunov’s equations enough to be able to explain them, you can help refresh my memory, since it’s been almost 20 years since I studied them for 6-degree force control…

R. Gates says:
November 26, 2010 at 9:14 pm
phlogiston says:
November 26, 2010 at 2:13 am
The geological as well as the evolutionary records and persistence of complex ecosystems for hundreds of millions of years points to climate stability and resistance to forcing…
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? I am wondering what planet you are talking about? Certainly on earth we’ve not had any stable complex ecosystem lasting “hundreds of millions of years”, rather we see constant change and disruptions leading to the extinction of many species on one hand which creates new ecological niches for others. Tell me of an era of “stable complex ecosystem” lasting hundreds of millions of years here on earth please?
Crocodiles have lived on this planet for 200 million years, and sharks and coelacanths for about 400 million years. The horse shoe crab has lived for 450 million years. The list could go on.
The long survival of any species tells us a lot about the earth’s ecosystem and climate. The survival of a species depends on many things – a favourable temperature regime has to exist, without too much variation, and a continuous supply of appropriate food organisms. Each of these food organisms in turn needs to be supported by its own climatic demands and its own supply chain of food organisms and resources. It is an analogy to the survival of a business – an uninterrupted cash flow is needed, and a chain of other businesses which are suppliers must themselves survive. A degree of economic stability is needed for a business – particularly a large one – to survive for a long time.
Thus the persistence of complex multicellular life, including large organisms, for about half a billion years, points to the clear fact of a relatively stable climate and environment on earth for all that time. Our own existence and that of the wonderful biosphere with which we share the planet, is evidence of this.
Of course, it is true that a remarkable property of life and living organisms is their ability to adapt to change and modify their lifestyles accordingly. An it is also of course true that periods of climatic stability have been punctuated by major extinction events:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/extinction_sidebar_000907.html
Catastrophic events such as flood basalt volcanism and meteorite or comet impacts, along with global ice ages such as the Ordovidican-Silurian (or Andean-Saharan) were the cause. The largest of these was the end-Permian mass extinction, possibly associated with Eurasian-Siberian flood basalt volcanism, with or without help from an extra-terrestrial object; this was a particularly severe extinction since the oceans became briefly anoxic. In addition to these epoch-defining catastrophes, there have been more prolonged climatic shifts. The spread of living organisms – particularly plants – onto land changed the land surface from arid to verdant and sharply reduced global temperatures (toward a much more life-friendly regime) due to increased clouds and rain. There has also been a sustained fall in temperatures during and since the Cretaceous, favouring the spread and dominance of furry mammals over hairless dinosaurs.
(It is also worth mentioning in view of your interest in chaotic systems and nonlinear dynamics, that an ecosystem as a nonlinear network is capable of generating mass extinctions spontaneously, with a very low probability, out of a low background level of extinctions, as an inevitable consequence of the operation of log-log power law behaviour of such systems.)
None-the-less, the history of the biosphere points to remarkable climate stability. There is an organic linkage between the biosphere and climate – Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis is largely true, the biosphere has hugely affected climate in its own favour – first by photosynthetic bacteria achieving the colossal feat of changing the planet’s atmosphere from a reducing to an oxygenated state – this also profoundly changed the planets geology, stripping iron from the oceans by oxidation for example. Then by plants and trees for accelerating the hydrological cycle over land.
It would be extraordinarily arrogant if the AGW movement, having edited our recent climate history, found it necessary to re-write climate and biosphere palaeo-history, to create a completely false picture of instability, in order to give artificial support to the notion of CO2 driven catastrophism. The evidence to contradict this – pointing instead to remarkable stability – is overwhelming and is all around us.
So I guess we humans are the exception to the Gaia hypothesis, ruining the biosphere by urbanisation and bringing catastrophic warming by CO2 emissions? This view may not be fully justified (although humans have without doubt significantly damaged the biosphere). CO2 levels in the recent glacial period have dipped below 200 ppm. This approaches the level of about 160 ppm where photosynthesis becomes limited. This is a serious threat to the biosphere which stands on a trophic pyramid with photosynthetic primary production at its base. It is reasonably arguable that the emergence of H. sapiens and our emission of CO2 by burning fossil fuel – is in fact a positive Gaia response to preserve a life-supporting planet, by restoring higher and more life-friendly CO2 levels (see the recent WUWT thread on Californian redwoods).

The ice cube in the middle came from solar dimming. The only reason much of the NH wasn’t an ice cube is that Eyja rarely shot anything into the stratosphere. The warmth away and often well away from the cube in the middle came from ash aerosols, which readily absorb solar energy and produce heat in the surrounding air. The humidity from all the water vapor was downright unpleasant.
Place a glass container full of air outside in the sun and place another outside that is full of smoke, which one will be hotter in an hour?
Eyjafjallajökull
http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=16539&ew_0_a_id=369471
The total weight of volcanic debris is estimated to be between 300 and 400 million tons and it is believed that almost 100 million cubic meters of ice melted during the eruption.
For an idea of size
Eruption rates at volcanoes
http://blogs.agu.org/magmacumlaude/2010/11/20/average-lava-fluxes-at-volcanoes/
Eyja was pushing out the equivalent of 150, 2 ton F-150 pickup trucks in ash a second, at times for days on end. Probably melting 20+/sec in ice volume.