Apparently, not all the Arctic is warming to script. This is an interesting graph from PICES, titled The Bering Sea: Current Status and Recent Events.
It is accompanied by this text:
Normally, a moderate El Niño (as in winter 2010) would have resulted in a warmer Bering Sea and La Niña in winter 2011, and weakening in spring would have supported cooler conditions. However, in recent years it appears that the location of the Aleutian Low had more influence on the Bering Sea in 2010 and 2011 than did the intensity of the low or the ENSO connection.
Additionally, the report suggests the ecosystem of the Bering sea is not so bad after all, with plankton and fish volume on the rise.
There’s too much to reproduce here, read the entire article at PICES here:
http://www.pices.int/publications/pices_press/volume19/v19_n2/pp_35-37_BS_June2011.pdf
h/t to reader “Rosey”
Finding this stuff is fun because there’s so much good, interesting research nowadays, and I haven’t read it all either. I should mention that I’m looking it up myself, these aren’t from links that some blogger has pointed me toward.
Brigham-Grette in PNAS, 2009
“What do the interglacials in this and other Arctic lake records inform us about the future? In short, if it happened before, it could happen again, and it’s happening now. A growing number of observations show that summer Arctic sea ice was much reduced during MIS 5e [marine isotope stage 5e, around 120,000 years ago] and may have been almost seasonal because of Milankovitch-driven summer insolation as much as 11–13% above present (11). Emerging records from the central Arctic Ocean [Arctic Coring Expedition (ACEX) and Greenland Arctic Shelf Ice and Climate Project (GreenICE); Figs. 1 and 2] also point to seasonally open water during MIS 5e (15, 16). The GIS was reduced in size and tree line advanced northward across large parts of Arctic (11). The early Holocene was another period only slightly warmer than today and forced by enhanced summer insolation approaching 10% in the high latitudes (8) that drove marked changes in tree line (9) and a significant reduction in sea ice along the Canadian Arctic (17) and northern Greenland (18). These warm periods inform us about the sensitivity of the Arctic system to warming in response to Arctic amplification (1) and provide the testing ground for climate model verification.
But modern climate change is driven largely by atmospheric CO2 concentrations in the face of decreasing insolation (5). Therefore, we need only look to Arctic records of the mid-Pliocene to capture our geologic moment of déjà vu when CO2 is estimated to have been in the range of 350 to 400 ppm like it is now (19). Intermittently throughout this time period sea level may have been +5 to +40 m above present (ref. 19 and references therein), driven in part by massive reductions in Antarctic ice sheets (20). Syntheses of this Pliocene interval and later interglacials (ref. 21 and http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientificassessments/saps/sap1-2) leave little doubt that renewed studies in the high latitude are well justified to test and improve the chronological coherence of Arctic records. With a seasonally ice-free Arctic now projected to be only a few decades from now, perhaps Yogi Berra was right: “it’s déjà vu all over again.” “
[snip try again ~mod]
Gneiss,
Thanks for posting that paragraph, where the authors admit that the temperature over the past 2K years is sparse. So how do they get around that? By going through the extensive historical record, as Tony Brown has done?
No. They use their model instead, and then do reconstructions. Why? Maybe because the Antarctic debunks their conjecture.
Your arbitrary rejection of the verified historical account of the dirigible explorers who witnessed open Arctic ocean as far as the eye could see from altitude, and your ignoring of the Royal Navy account posted above [“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated”], in favor of a model-based assumption is certainly not science. As Prof Richard Feynman made clear: when there is a conflict between an observation and a model… the model is WRONG.
There is no evidence that GHG’s, and CO2 in particular, are the cause of the current Arctic cycle.
Smokey,
Here is a more recent version of Antarctic Ice Area Anomaly:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
Intrigued as to why yours stops in 2009. Either way, no debunking as the Arctic is predicted to lose ice faster than the Antarctic.
And I believe the exact Feynman quote is, ““It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong”. Couldn’t agree more, but I don’t think your newspaper artcle counts as “experiment” in the way Feynman intended.
I am trying to program a set of spreadsheets to predict the solar heat energy available to the ocean and ice surfaces in the far north: that is, above 70 degrees latitude.
Solar incident levels (the angle of the sun above the horizon) are easy to predict for any day of the year. This equation also provides the hours of sunlight per day, which ranges from 0 through 24 depending on day of year.
Absorption in the atmosphere can be approximated from the thickness of atmosphere that the light energy passes. (Cloud reflection and amount of haze in the air are significant and have to be addressed, but that will be later.)
I have not found a reliable reference for albedo – but have read hundreds of times with little more than “ice reflects 97% of the sun’s energy” or “the (open) ocean absorbs 90% of the inbound energy.” These might be adequate for some users for various approximations at various agencies, but are only good for very high (if not vertical) incident angles: which will only happen if the Arctic ice pack were offshore of an ideal tropical island below a perfectly clear sky on the equinox in a dead calm.
(1) So, at very low angles (below 0 degrees and 25 degrees above the horizon), what is the best reference to specify what proportion of the sun’s energy is absorbed (by ice and by by open water) and what proportion is reflected at each angle?
(2) In the real world case of moderately to very calm seas (waves between 6 inches and 1 foot), does the open-water albedo change significantly from laboratory conditions?
Gneiss says:
July 21, 2011 at 6:22 pm
ukus writes,
“OK, I took your bait.”
If you took my bait you would have looked up some studies, that was a real suggestion. You seem not to have tried it, but here’s one place to start:……….
========
Good job finding studies to support your viewpoint.
Did you bother looking for studies that might not support your viewpoint ?
u.k.(us) says:
July 22, 2011 at 4:14 pm
Good job finding studies to support your viewpoint.
Did you bother looking for studies that might not support your viewpoint ?
=============
Why don’t you look for yourself? If you can find any, I’d be interested to see them. But please find actual studies, not just newspaper articles, blog posts or out of context charts.
John B says:
July 22, 2011 at 4:47 pm
u.k.(us) says:
July 22, 2011 at 4:14 pm
Good job finding studies to support your viewpoint.
Did you bother looking for studies that might not support your viewpoint ?
=============
Why don’t you look for yourself? If you can find any, I’d be interested to see them. But please find actual studies, not just newspaper articles, blog posts or out of context charts.
——-
It seems I hit a nerve.
Control of the message has been brought into question.
I think Gneiss is more than capable, to reply to my inquiry, although your consternation has been duly noted.
ukus writes,
“Good job finding studies to support your viewpoint.
Did you bother looking for studies that might not support your viewpoint ?”
I just looked for recent studies, period, and I’m passing on what I found. John B is right, if you think you know otherwise, why not try?
“It seems I hit a nerve.”
You’re imagining that. Far as I can tell you haven’t even made a point. I think you’ve been trying to convey an attitude through sarcasm. But I’ve enjoyed the motivation to look up studies and learn some new things. Here’s another one, Kinnard et al. GRA 2010:
“Arctic sea ice extent and concentration have declined significantly over the last few decades, with thick multi-year ice being replaced by thinner first year ice. While the 2009 minimum summer sea-ice extent (~ 5.4 million sq km) was greater than that of the record low of 2007, it remained well below the 1979-2000 mean value of 7 million sq km. In order to properly identify the various mechanisms that drive sea-variability on inter-annual to centennial time scales, there is a need to document past sea-ice cover variations in the Arctic region. Here we present circum-Arctic and regional-scale reconstructions of sea-ice (summer) cover variations over the past ~900 years developed from a multi-proxy network of paleo-environmental data. These data include glacial ice cores, lake sediments, tree rings, and historical and/or documentary evidence. We adopt well-established multivariate statistical techniques to apportion the spatio-temporal variance in the multi-proxy network between temperature and other forcings. A stepwise multiple linear regression procedure is used to construct annually-resolved time-series of total and regional summer sea ice extent for the circum-Arctic. The resulting reconstructions are compared with known atmospheric circulation patterns (e.g., NAO) and key climatic variables in order to identify dominant processes responsible for the observed variability in the past millennium.
The most striking feature of our pan-Arctic sea-ice cover reconstruction is the abrupt and sustained decrease in summer ice extent observed during the second half of the 20th century, which is apparently unprecedented in the previous ~9 centuries. Our results suggest that as of 1985, Arctic summer sea ice cover extent dropped below the lower bound of the reconstructed minimum for the Medieval Warm Optimum (ca AD 1150). These findings support the contention that human influence on Arctic sea ice became detectable after the early 1990s.
Gneiss says:
July 22, 2011 at 6:27 pm
============
Well done, on your research (and your writing).
Are you willing to let politicians decide your future, based upon 1/2 of a 60 year cycle in temperatures ?
u.k.(us) says:
July 22, 2011 at 9:55 pm
Well done, on your research (and your writing).
Are you willing to let politicians decide your future, based upon 1/2 of a 60 year cycle in temperatures ?
===================
I think you may be missing the point of Gneiss’s posts. The satellite record may only go back 30 years but the evidence, as pointed at by Gneiss, is that Arctic sea ice has been fairly stable for hundreds, or thousands, of years (depending on the study). Even if there is a 60 year cycle, its effect appears to have been overwhelmed since the middle of the 20th century. But it is precisely because scientists don’t want to make predictions based on only 30 years of data that these studies were done.
ukus writes,
“Well done, on your research (and your writing).
Are you willing to let politicians decide your future, based upon 1/2 of a 60 year cycle in temperatures ?”
Ah, ukus, you read none of the abstracts? Can you find one word there about politicians, or confirmation of your 60 year cycles? Not one of the studies used just 30 years of data, either. As John B understood, that was the whole point.
Smokey writes,
“Your arbitrary rejection of the verified historical account of the dirigible explorers”
I don’t reject that they saw open water. Leads and poynyas have been features of sea ice for as long as we’ve known. I did laugh to see you had un-sceptically posted an old news clipping that reported rocky islands at the north pole. Perhaps they actually saw some rock-covered ice floes broken off from ellesmere, or they saw real islands but were not at the pole, or the reporter got the story wrong, I don’t know, but something’s not right with that tale.
As for an ice-free arctic ocean, that’s a whole different thing, as scientists very well understand. By all the research that I’ve seen (such as articles cited above), it has not occurred for at least thousands of years.
Gneiss, you’re grasping at straws. The planet was much warmer than it is now at various times during the Holocene. If your Belief convinces you that the Arctic was never ice free in the past, and that global, well-mixed atmospheric CO2 is melting Arctic ice but not Antarctic ice, you’re certainly entitled to your fantasies. Pay no attention to the snickering.
John B says:
“…I don’t think your newspaper artcle counts as “experiment” in the way Feynman intended.”
Prof Feynman discussed “observation” in the same lecture. [“If it disagrees with observation… it’s wrong.“].
Also, thanx for the graph of Antarctic ice, which shows that it is right at its average level. That nasty ol’ CO2 is probably just attacking the Arctic ice first. Then it will go after Antarctic ice, eh? That evil trace gas is capable of anything.☺
Smokey says:
July 23, 2011 at 7:58 am
John B says:
“…I don’t think your newspaper artcle counts as “experiment” in the way Feynman intended.”
Prof Feynman discussed “observation” in the same lecture. [“If it disagrees with observation… it’s wrong.”].
Also, thanx for the graph of Antarctic ice, which shows that it is right at its average level. That nasty ol’ CO2 is probably just attacking the Arctic ice first. Then it will go after Antarctic ice, eh? That evil trace gas is capable of anything.☺
————————
Watch the clip, Smokey. He does not say that. He says, “if it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong”. He says it twice. He does use the word “observation” or possibly “observations”, too, but not in the phrase you misquote. And surely even you realise that the “observation” or “experiment” has to be (a) relevant and (b) verified before it would prove a theory wrong.
Yes, CO2 goes after Arctic ice first, beause the Arctic is already warmer. You can look it up for yourself.
And your chart for the holocene shows Greenland, not “the planet”. Pretty sure you can’t use GISP ice core data as a proxy for global temperature..
Smokey writes,
“If your Belief convinces you that the Arctic was never ice free in the past”
Why not read what I actually said, or even read those abstracts?
John B argues like the typical true Believer. So does anyone else who believes that CO2 has a mind of its own, and decides which ice to melt. The Arctic is well below freezing. The melting is occurring at the edge of the ice cover, caused by warmer ocean currents and other local factors, not by a tiny trace gas.
Next, Prof Feynman clearly states in the video I posted that scientists “compare directly with observation” to see if their conjecture works. John B is disputing what can be heard verbatim — a bizarre affliction that George Orwell called “doublethink”: holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. In current parlance: cognitive dissonance. It is an affliction common to climate alarmist true believers, who are no different than true believers in Harold Camping’s doomsday predictions, or Jehovah’s Witnesses true believers. Cognitive dissonance is rarely curable. John B would still Believe that runaway global warming caused by CO2 is right around the corner even if the planet descended into the next great Ice Age, and glaciers covered Chicago under a mile of ice. Just as Leon Festinger’s Seekers’ belief system became even stronger when the flying saucer didn’t appear as prophesied, John’s evidence-free Belief that the climate is controlled by a tiny trace gas is just as strong – and just as misguided.
For rational folks, the current Arctic ice cycle [which prior observations have also shown to have repeatedly occurred, and in which the ice must necessarily have re-formed in between the melting episodes], shows that natural regional climate variability is the routine cause, not the tiny, harmless and beneficial trace gas that climate lunatics Believe controls the planet. CO2 follows temperature on all time scales, it does not precede temperature, but Believers assume that with CO2, effect precedes cause: doublethink.
There is zero testable evidence per the scientific method showing that CO2 is causing the current natural and routine Arctic ice decline. There are only computer models programmed by self-serving grant anglers. But models are not evidence, and their climate models can’t even hindcast, much less forecast. Stock market cycles are much simpler than regional and global climate cycles and weather patterns, but not one market program was able to predict the subprime market crash even a month before it happened. If a computer could be programmed to correctly predict the climate, the programmers would certainly use their knowledge to predict the stock market’s future actions, and become fabulously wealthy. Climate models are just rainmaking juju.
Finally, John B is also wrong when he claims that ice cores don’t reflect global temperatures. There are regional fluctuations as always, but the MWP and other significant global warming episodes can be plainly seen, and there is voluminous evidence that the MWP was a global event. None of this will convince Believers; this is simply correcting John B’s constant misrepresentations. Corroborating charts covering both hemispheres provided on request.
Smokey said: “Stock market cycles are much simpler than regional and global climate cycles and weather patterns, but not one market program was able to predict the subprime market crash even a month before it happened. If a computer could be programmed to correctly predict the climate, the programmers would certainly use their knowledge to predict the stock market’s future actions, and become fabulously wealthy.”
Smokey, you clearly understand the stock market even less than you understand climate. The reason models cannot predict the stock market is due to a thing called the “strong market hypothesis”. In layman’s terms it means that everything that is known about a stock is already factored into the price. In other words, the effect of “forcings” is immediate. The moment a corporation declares its annual profits, the price jumps to reflect the new knowledge. Immediately. The moment interests change, pries change. Immediately. Even if traders just think interest rates will change, prices jump. Immediately. The only sure way of making money on the stock market is knowing the news and acting on it before everyone else finds out about it – but that is called insider trading, and it is illegal. Climate doesn’t work that way. Temperature does not jump suddenly due to the effect of a forcing, no matter what the forcing is. So the future effect of that forcing can be modelled. Climate fluctuations may look to the uninformed like the stock market, but the similarity is only superficial.
And you originally quoted Feynman as saying “”If it disagrees with observation… it’s wrong.”. He didn’t say that, as you later corrected yourself. But more importantly, I think you have misunderstood him – possibly intentionally. I’m pretty sure he is making the point that experiment trumps theory, not that any old casual observation, cherry pick or “common sense” trumps science. Do you not agree? He also is quoted as saying, “Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” I fear you are in danger of fooling yourself with anecdotes like the newspaper clipping. I prefer to stick with the science.
Smokey said “John B is also wrong when he claims that ice cores don’t reflect global temperatures.”
Let’s look at what Dr Richard Alley, a principal investigator with the Greenland Ice Sheet Projects (the people who drilled the ice cores), had to say on the matter:
“the temperature is a local record, and one site is not the whole world.”
“I believe we are pretty good in the community at properly qualifying our statements to accord with the underlying scientific literature; the blogospheric misuses of the GISP2 isotopic data that I have seen are not doing so, and are making errors of interpretation as a result.”
“So, using GISP2 data to argue against global warming is, well, stupid, or misguided, or misled, or something, but surely not scientifically sensible.”
You can read the full statement from which these remarks are taken here:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/richard-alley-on-old-ice-climate-and-co2/
John B, it takes you two posts – one of hairsplitting nonsense, and one big appeal to authority – to respond to something I never commented to you about?? I was simply correcting misinformation. Things must be awfully lonely in your mom’s basement.☺
Nitpicking the quote I posted doesn’t change its meaning, so no need to respond. Readers know nitpicking when they see it, and they know it takes the place of a good counter-argument, which the nitpicker lacks. That’s why he nitpicks.
As for your appeal to authority, here is a chart showing the close correlation between ice core temperatures in different hemispheres. Note that it’s not Alley’s chart. Got more charts showing the same correlation if you want ’em. But somehow I doubt you’ll ask, because they verify that that the MWP, the LIA, and similar events were global, not regional like the current Arctic ice variability.
And the Bering Sea is still getting colder.
Smokey, It’s not nitpicking, just accuracy.
You were wrong about both the wording and interpretation of Feynman.
You were wrong about the stock market.
You were wrong about the use of ice cores as global proxies.
You were wrong about “appeal to authority” (it is not an appeal to authority to quote an expert talking about his field of expertise, an appeal to authority is to quote someone because who they are as if they should be believed for that reason alone)
You are definitely wrong about my Mom’s basement 🙂
And the Arctic is still getting warmer…
I’d like to see a salinity chart for Bering Sea. Is this just ice melt?
John B said:
I’m surely coming in to the middle of something here, but I am curious about the following. Does the evidence also show that there have never been declines in Arctic Ice similar to those leading up to 2007, or today, or whatever over the last thousands of years, or tens of thousands of years?
@richard Sharpe
Looking at the abstracts Gneiss posted…
Last thousand years: “Our results suggest that as of 1985, Arctic summer sea ice cover extent dropped below the lower bound of the reconstructed minimum for the Medieval Warm Optimum (ca AD 1150). ”
Last 120,000 years: “A growing number of observations show that summer Arctic sea ice was much reduced during MIS 5e [marine isotope stage 5e, around 120,000 years ago] and may have been almost seasonal because of Milankovitch-driven summer insolation as much as 11–13% above present (11). Emerging records from the central Arctic Ocean [Arctic Coring Expedition (ACEX) and Greenland Arctic Shelf Ice and Climate Project (GreenICE); Figs. 1 and 2] also point to seasonally open water during MIS 5e (15, 16). ”
Millions of years: “Although existing records are far from complete, they indicate that sea ice became a feature of the Arctic by 47 Ma, following a pronounced decline in atmospheric pCO2 after the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Optimum, and consistently covered at least part of the Arctic Ocean for no less than the last 13–14 million years. Ice was apparently most widespread during the last 2–3 million years, in accordance with Earth’s overall cooler climate. Nevertheless, episodes of considerably reduced sea ice or even seasonally ice-free conditions occurred during warmer periods linked to orbital variations.”
So, while nobody is suggesting the Arctic has never been ice-free in the summer before, the recent decline is out of the ordinary, particular in respect of the speed at which it is happening.