We all cringed, then laughed when Dr. Mark Serreze of NSIDC first said it, then marveled about it as it got a life of its own, being the buzzphrase for every alarmist who wanted to shriek about declining Arctic sea ice.
In 2007 we heard him say:
“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colorado.
So far, the “screaming” hasn’t kept anyone awake at night, and we have not returned to the low of 2007 in the last three melt seasons.
In 2008 Serreze made the bold claim:
The ice is in a “death spiral” and may disappear in the summers within a couple of decades, according to Mark Serreze, an Arctic climate expert at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
And in 2008 we had the forecast from NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze of an “ice free north pole”. As we know, that didn’t even come close to being true. Summer 2008 had more arctic ice than summer 2007, and summer 2007 was not “ice free” by any measure.
With those failed predictions behind him, in an interview in The Age just a few weeks ago, Serreze pulled a Harold Camping, and changed his prediction date. Now he’s saying the new date for an ice free summer is 2030.
”There will be ups and downs, but we are on track to see an ice-free summer by 2030. It is an overall downward spiral.”
Now from a most surprising source, Andy Revkin at the NYT, a strong statement saying he’s not buying it anymore:
On Arctic Ice and Warmth, Past and Future
But even as I push for an energy quest that limits climate risk, I’m not worried about the resilience of Arctic ecosystems and not worried about the system tipping into an irreversibly slushy state on time scales relevant to today’s policy debates. This is one reason I don’t go for descriptions of the system being in a “death spiral.”
The main source of my Arctic comfort level — besides what I learned while camped with scientists on the North Pole sea ice — is the growing body of work on past variability of conditions in the Arctic. The latest evidence of substantial past ice variability comes in a study in the current issue of Science. The paper, combining evidence of driftwood accumulation and beach formation in northern Greenland with evidence of past sea-ice extent in parts of Canada, concludes that Arctic sea ice appears to have retreated far more in some spans since the end of the last ice age than it has in recent years.
…
Michael MacCracken, a veteran climate modeler and chief scientist at the Climate Institute, noted on the Google group on geo-engineering that this new paper adds credence to proposals for an Arctic focus for managing incoming sunlight as a way to limit greenhouse-driven impacts. (Personally, I don’t see this kind of effort going anywhere unless and until climate impacts trend toward worst-case outcomes.)
He’s referring of course to this paper we covered here on WUWT:
New study suggests Arctic ‘tipping point’ may not be reached
I wrote then:
This is interesting. While there’s much noise from alarmists that we are on an “Arctic death spiral” the team for this paper’s press release today found evidence that ice levels were about 50% lower 5,000 years ago. The paper references changes to wind systems which can slow down the rate of melting (something we’ve seen on the short term, even NASA points this out for recent historic ice retreats). They also suggest that a tipping point under current scenarios is unlikely saying that even with a reduction to less than 50% of the current amount of sea ice the ice will not reach a point of no return (i.e. a tipping point).
“So far, the “screaming” hasn’t kept anyone awake at night, and we have not returned to the low of 2007 in the last three melt seasons.”
Does that mean that 2007 ice which was “new ice” is now “old ice” or is it still classified “new ice”? LOL
NJ says:
August 9, 2011 at 5:19 pm
OK. Do you believe that the arctic will be “ice free” – that is NO ICE IN THE ARCTIC?? For the entire summer??
My observation really wasn’t about Mark “The Arctic is Screaming” Serreze’s predictive powers (such as they are)…it was about the veracity of the NOAA press release headlines, and how they are designed for maximum alarmism. You can’t deny that. I was simply asking if Dr. Meier agreed with the headline, or if he (like me) thought it was way over-the-top.
Again, the public is tuning out the climate scientists precisely because the people in charge of government press releases are, to put it charitably, out of control! If you have a cogent counterargument, please provide it. Thanks.
Mosh, the ” media agenda ” you say is spread only by scientists and with deliberate intent. And it is done by scientists on the pro-AGW side of the camp and it is relayed in big words worldwide. The statements about artic ice have been done by scientists from NSIDC and NOAA. How about you ask them to shut up and follow the scientific method, study natural variations, past history and report facts truthfully? Don’t come here defending that crap. It is pro-AGW scientists who are spreading false statements and alarmism in the name of science. When their predictions or projections or whatever soothsaying crap they name it with don’t turn true they don’t even have the decency to put up their hands and say that they were wrong. Instead, they change the goalposts to some unverifiable future date and keep spouting the same bullshit. It is exactly the scenario that is being repeated again and again. That’s exactly what is being discussed here.
So please get the gist of what the post says and what the comments are about. We know that the world is going through a warming phase after the little ice age. There’s nothing that has shown that this warming is anomalous to what has happened in the past and nothing that has shown that what is happening now is out of the ordinary. Natural variation is the null hypothesis that needs to be falsified if current situation is to be shown as anomalous. The artic has also shown to be ice free in the past.
The GHG theory is well known and understood. One of the presumptions is that the earth acts like a perfect greenhouse and traps everything. Off late some work has been done which seems to show that this is not the case and a lot of heat seems to be radiated back into space. Dr.Spencer’s paper explores this theory. Dr.Salby’s forthcoming paper seems to say that CO2 lags warming and not the other way round. These papers my either prove true or may be debunked later. Time will tell.
So best way is to keep an open mind and see all the evidence. That’s what science really is about.
Steve Mosher says (condensed down):
“There is known tested science that explains how C02 and other GHGs ( like water vapor) raise the effective radiating height of the atmosphere….Science so secure that we used it to design star wars and fighter aircraft….But C02 or other GHGs added to the atmosphere will cause the temperature to be higher than it would be otherwise.”
You appear to be juxtaposing CO2/AGW theory with aeronautical engineering. I cannot accept that the theory of AGW via CO2 is “science so secure that we used it to design star wars and fighter aircraft”.
As for the “effective radiating height”, well as I understand it physical models of the atmosphere have made predictions that the atmosphere should show a tropospheric “hot spot”. That prediction appears to have failed. In fact, I am not aware of any unique predictions made be AGW theory-driven GCM’s that have been clearly demonstrated against any data. And “hindcasting” doesn’t count, not when there are so many free parameters.
Regarding the idea that CO2 causes some warming, I accept the views of any number of atmospheric physicists that this is true. Howeve, I notice that Spencer, Lindzen and (not forgetting he is a distinguished atmospheric physicist) Singer all agree CO2 will cause some warming but they all consider the effect to be much smaller than given by more alarmist scientists informing the IPCC reporting.
As for water vapour, well its a strong GHG on paper, but it also forms clouds. As far as I can see the jury is still out on whether the feedback from water vapour is even positive or negative. Just from very simple “back of the envelope” common sense reasoning I find it very difficult to see how it could be anything other than negative – on the higher temperature bound the climate of the planet has been pretty stable for the last few million years, and has plataued consistently for the last 10,000 years post Younger Dryas. As I said above in an earlier post responding to your “anti-science” comments, a quick glance at the last 10,000 years of the GISP2 ice core data will show very clearly that MWP, LIA, Roman warming, Minoan warming, Bronze age warming etc are all comparable too or in some cases likely warmer than the latter half of the 20th century.
Typhoon says:
August 9, 2011 at 5:41 pm
Alex the skeptic says:
August 9, 2011 at 4:22 am
“How many blunders must an ‘expert’ make before he is declared inept? at best?”
In the imminent doomsday racket being consistently wrong is not a liability.
Paul Ehrlich has been consistently wrong in his doomsday predictions for over four decades and is still frequently quoted as a supposed expert
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The difference between yesteryears prophets of doom (names forgotten in the dustbin of history) and modern ones such as Erlich and Serreze is that those of yesteryears were taken down to the town square and pilloried with rotten cabbages, while the modern ones are taken to the townhouse, given a modern office full of expensive computers and awarded 5 to six figure salaries so that they would be able to continue feeding us eotw (end of the world) and other bs.
Alex the skeptic says:
August 10, 2011 at 2:16 am
“In the imminent doomsday racket being consistently wrong is not a liability.”
To add to this statement, doomsday headlines by NOAA, NASA/GISS, IPCC and their ilk serves primarily to increase and protect their government funding levels. Again, it’s all about money and fame with these people…
Well, I’m late to the party again, and as usual no one’s taken a critical look at the source material.
2007 – The “ice screaming” quote from Serreze comes with no prediction at all.
2008 – The ‘death spiral quote’. Serreze suggests the ice could be gone “within a couple of decades”. A bit lower down the article he says, “we’ll lose the summer ice cover probably by the year 2030.”
Yep, that’s roughly a couple of decades from 2008.
At this point Anthony says:
“And in 2008 we had the forecast from NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze of an “ice free north pole”.
Serreze wasn’t talking about total ice cover. He was talking about a hole possibly opening up at the North pole based on the conditions that were being observed. This is quite different from total ice cover, which extends far beyond the ‘North Pole’. The difference is even explained at NSIDC, where Serreze is director.
You can verify that here.
2011 – Serreze says, “”There will be ups and downs, but we are on track to see an ice-free summer by 2030. It is an overall downward spiral.”
…which Anthony describes as a “new date” from Serreze. But it’s the same projection he made in 2008 for total summer sea ice cover. He even gave the year (2030) as a rough estimate in the 2008 article – but Anthony appears to have missed that part.
Serreze has been consistent.
But in case I’m wrong, you have Serreze’s ear, Anthony. Perhaps you could ask him to clarify?
Steve Mosher, I don’t think fighter aircraft are designed strictly inside of computer models. The designs are still tested in wind tunnels. The earths climate system is vastly more complicated than air resistance and turbulence that can’t even be computer modeled properly today. Your analogy fails.
Chris Long says: August 9, 2011 at 5:05 am
The concept of a tipping point for arctic ice extent pre-supposes the existence of at least two stable configurations – our current one, with a lot of ice, and another one with no ice. Does the peer-reviewed literature contain any evidence the such a ‘no-ice’ stable system is possible?
Hi Chris. Between a lot of ice and none is the absence of ice in summer only. Tietsche, Notz, Jungclaus, Marotzke (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2010GL045698.shtml) have used model studies to suggest that if summer ice completely vanished today the resultant escape of warmth from the Arctic would lead to a return to much the same summer ice within two years or so. It must be noted that this “recovery” would be to a systemically falling level of summer ice coverage. Ice free Arctic summers are on the way.
Another random observation. The NWS Anchrorage ice page depicts actual new ice formation in the Barents over the next week. Looks like temperatures are cooling earlier this year than they did last year.
R Gates commented a week or two ago that the abrupt shallowing of the Arctic ice extent curve was merely “convergence” – the wind blowing the ice floes together, and predicted that this would be followed by a steep fall in extent as this convergence dissipated.
This has not happened. The extent curve continues to follow a normal gradient and according to some metrics, such as the IMS (Interactive multisensor) this year’s extent has “joined the pack” of other recent years.
Cryosphere Today’s colour map has shown for much of the summer alarmingly red and thin ice, predictive of rapid decline, but the rate of decline has been if anything below normal, and for July the decline rate was a record low.
As others have commented there is something strange and different about the Cryophere images this year. Have the folks at Cryosphere Today received the knock on the door that has been long overdue?
Hard to know how to interpret much official climate data when the instrumentation and databases are in the hands of warmista activists. Rather like interpreting official data on production of tractors in the Soviet Union during the 50’S and 60’s.
Correction: Sorry – RGates described “divergence” – wind spreading out ice extent, not “convergence” as stated incorrectly in the previous post. My logic got inverted somehow. (Senior moment.)
Ice area is now below last years Sept. 21st minimum.
Summertime minimum ice extents in the Arctic are now ranging from 5.5 million to just over 4 million km2 of ice. And, over the last 30-odd years, have been measured by satellites as declining from their earliest values of about 6 – 6.5 million km2.
The ice only can melt during the summer – the rest of the year averageg winter temperatures hover near -25 degrees.
But during this same period of declining sea ice minimums, actual summertime temperatures at 80 north (the southern edge of the Arctic ice above Greenland, and an arc across the middle of the ice near longitude 180) have been measured since 1959 as declining. No measured temperatures – other than NASA-GISS’s 1200 km extrapolations across the tundra! – can show demonstrable Arctic temperatures increases.
1) My question to Hansen, Mosher, RGates, Mieirs, and others who have used these “tipping points” to destroy the world’s economies and force billions into early deaths mired in poverty and disease by their government-funded CAGW death-spiral threats, is to show by their calculations how an assumed 1/2 of one degree average world temperature increase (an increase only “measured” further south in temperate latitudes) can “melt” 1.5 million km2 of of Arctic ice, when the Arctic temperatures near the ice itself are declining during the only period of the year when the ice can be melting?
2) Hundreds of sources claim an Arctic albedo “positive feedback” but none can show how the sun can warm Arctic waters under the actual illumination angles present during the September minimums.
4 million km2 corresponds to an ice-covered “cap” covering the entire area between latitude 79.2 and 90 north. (Not a perfect match, but close enough. The real summertime minimum ice extent varies from year-to-year, but tends to be a near-circle centered about latitude 85, longitude 180.)
Assume all of this ice melts for some reason one year: There is a completely ice-free Arctic in September.
The result? My calc’s using the actual reflectivity of ice and water show that there will be no change in received energy to the earth regardless of how much ice has melted.
That is, both ice and ocean water reflect the same percent of solar energy at the actual solar incident angles found above latitude 80 north. Albedo (color of the ice or of free ocean water) itself is irrelevant at these low angles. In fact, one can show that the insulating effect of ice-covered water prevents additional cooling due to evaporation, while both ice-covered surfaces and open water sources radiate the same amount of energy through the same skies and clouds to space. Received radiation from the sun during that very short period that the sun is visible stays the same, while losses (radiation and evaporation) increase over the entire 24 hours per day.
Thus, an ice-free Arctic contributes to additional cooling, and the feedback of an ice-free Arctic is actually towards colder summers worldwide.
where he said:
Indeed, if the weather bureau says there is the possibility of rain tomorrow and it doesn’t rain then they should lose their jobs.