Its always important to remember what has been predicted by the elders of science, and to review those predictions when the time is right. In four months, just 132 days from now at the end of summer on the Autumnal Equinox September 22nd 2012, the Arctic will be “nearly ice free” according to a prominent NASA scientist in a National Geographic article on December 12, 2007. That is also the same article in which the future NSIDC director made himself famous with this quote:
“The Arctic is screaming,”
…said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colorado.
Here’s the article as a screen cap, highlights mine:
Seth Borenstein of AP wrote the story.
Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071212-AP-arctic-melt.html
Which I’ve webcited the printer friendly version (sans advertising) for posterity here:
http://www.webcitation.org/67cXXHEjg
Some people are taking this prediction very seriously, for example, watch this video:
Children just aren’t going to know what an Arctic Icecap is.
So, given the proximity of this upcoming event, I’ve added a countdown for it in the right sidebar. We watch and wait until 7:49AM Pacific Time 14:49 UTC on September 22nd, 2012.
In the meantime, here’s the current sea-ice situation on the WUWT Sea Ice Reference Page
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jsg;
Yep, gotta avoid that gas stuff! It’s so invisible and suffocating and all-blanketing and …
Oog. Trying to get into some people’s minds and POV is really a bad move. Stupefying, even.
And repeated in 2009, and re-broadcast on June 17th 2010.
“Now, one sobering forecast is that the Arctic Ocean will be seasonally ice free by the summer of 2013.”
David Suzuki
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2009/arcticmeltdown/
‘by the summer of’ not ‘in the summer of’ or ‘after the summer of’, meaning sometime Before the summer of 2013, ie. in the low point of 2012
According to David Suzuki it will be Ice Free (No Ice, None) not ‘Nearly Ice Free’ but flat out Ice Free, no qualifiers, No Ice at all, None, Nada, Zip, by the summer of 2013.
“Now, one sobering forecast is that the Arctic Ocean will be seasonally ice free by the summer of 2013.”
David Suzuki
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2009/arcticmeltdown/
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
May 12, 2012 at 9:09 pm
No Mark, it’s you that’s screaming about the sky falling.
Indeed – talk about projection. All the screaming is coming from Mark Serreze.
Big nancy.
The original statement is not “at the end of 2012 arctic will be ice free”, the statement is “at this rate (of decline), at the end of 2012 arctic will be ice free”. Now just a simple check of sea ice page reveals that the rate of decline did not stay, the decline slowed down drastically right during 2007 (but who could have seen it by then?) and while arctic ice is way under average of previous years, it’s more or less stable since 2007. So the rate of decline did not stay and using elementary logic, the statement “if A then B” is true either if both A and B are true, or if A is false – which is this case. The original statement is true because the assumption it is based on did not come to be true.
‘could be nearly ice-free’ there is much more wiggle room in those words than you think
As I keep saying: The globe can be getting warmer or colder, but the idea that the human contribution from burning carbon fuels has anything to do with it is not only IMHO the biggest political and intellectual fraud ever – but so says the IPCC itself: http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.com/2011/10/west-is-facing-new-severe-recession.html.
The ongoing discussion pro and con is becoming akin to the scholastic argument as to how many angels can dance on the head of a needle. Which is, of course, exactly what is intended, to achieve worldwide disorientation away from the actual IPCC aims of their monetary and energy policies – and bringing a whole discipline, if not all, of science into disrepute in the process. Even the UK Royal Society has become Lysenkoist.
That’s not to belittle the effort by thousands of scientists fighting for the truth in climate research, but I dismay over the practical effect of diverting all this brain power in a direction not at all relevant to the IPCC’s actual and declared political and financial intentions – or more importantly: away from the actual work that needs doing.
All IMHO, of course. My musings for what they may be worth on my various blogsite entries, and at http://www.lmhdesign.co.uk/sustainability.php and the Planet page on that website.
Would it be reasonable to force these people to buy beachfront condos on the Arctic Ocean and make them live there? What I mean to say is that “there is a very public record of who has been lying to the public and who hasn’t – and it’s time to start using this information to make the liars and shirkers pay.” (Steve Zwick, Forbes, 19 APR 2012)
[Note site policy – please supply a valid email address to comment ~jove, mod]
Please note, to falsify Dr. Mark Serreze’s prediction it is not enough to show in late September, 2012, that “the Arctic Ocean has in fact not become nearly ice-free”, but you will have to prove a vastly stronger proposition, which is “the Arctic Ocean could not have been nearly ice-free by now under any circumstances”. Tergiversation rulez.
An ‘The Great Cooling’ started in 2007, i seem to remember
http://wattsupwiththat.com/widget/
I won’t be holding my breath about Arctic sea ice disappearing in the next four months. I’ll be breathing in and out as always, discharging my fair share of carbon dioxide. In the meantime for the next couple of months starting in June, I’ll be visiting up in the Great Midwest, in order to (hopefully) beat the Texas heat.
With new quantum computing hardware and polynomial-time algorithms I am sure that Climate Science will be able to maintain the Ice Free by 2013 prediction well in to the next century. Time is after all not a required component in the general theory of relativity and in Quantum Computing al possible outcomes occur.
Climate Science in the Multi-Verse.
“It all melted in a parallel dimension and we are guilty destroying a sister Earth in another universe, we must purchase carbon credits and entangle them in a quantum state and send them off to another universe”. Climate Scientists could even issue a news releases about how they have examined the P-Branes to verify their conclusions.
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_time#Polynomial_time)
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-brane)
“Nearly”
It’s always nearly gone.
Kasuha:
Any prediction is provided with a get-out-clause (ask Madam Zara in her fairground tent), but the accuracy of a prediction is provided by comparison of the prediction with subsequent outcome. And the reliability of a predictor is demonstrated by the accuracy of his/her/its predictions.
However, your post at May 13, 2012 at 12:35 am says, in full;
“The original statement is not “at the end of 2012 arctic will be ice free”, the statement is “at this rate (of decline), at the end of 2012 arctic will be ice free”. Now just a simple check of sea ice page reveals that the rate of decline did not stay, the decline slowed down drastically right during 2007 (but who could have seen it by then?) and while arctic ice is way under average of previous years, it’s more or less stable since 2007. So the rate of decline did not stay and using elementary logic, the statement “if A then B” is true either if both A and B are true, or if A is false – which is this case. The original statement is true because the assumption it is based on did not come to be true.”
As KnR says (at May 13, 2012 at 12:51 am) your excuse was to be expected, but it is a classic fail. Consider the following issues.
Was the statement by Serreze logically true? Perhaps (that is debatable).
Was the statement by Serreze misleading? Yes.
Was the statement by Serreze intended to induce a political reaction? Yes.
Was the statement by Serreze objected to by any of his colleagues? No
Has the statement by Serreze proved to be a correct prediction? NO! It was plain wrong.
Should such predictions of Serreze and his colleagues be trusted in future? Try to work that out for yourself.
Richard
Kasuha:
In retrospect, I think I need to explicitly state something that I did not include it in my post addressed to you because it is obvious.
When Serreze said “at this rate (of decline)” he was stating the method he used to make his prediction (i.e. the method was extrapolation).
The method proved to be wrong and that proves Serreze either
(a) did not know what he was talking about
or
(b) was deliberately presenting a falsehood.
Richard
[snip. Not a valid email address. ~dbs, mod.]
Did you hear the one about the climate scientist that cried polar bear?
Berényi Péter says: May 13, 2012 at 1:13 am
(A load of bull)
Since the Arctic could have been Ice Free if the Earth had been broken in half and driven towards the Sun by a Moon sized asteroid (‘Any Circumstances’) your proposition is nonsense.
If there is Ice then the prediction is wrong, simple, make a prediction, take a measurement from nature, if the prediction disagrees with nature then the idea that was behind the prediction is wrong, as is the prediction. Unlike you, nature does not use semantics or philosophy or sophistry.
Its just like religious doomsday predictors, they calculate a “the end is nigh” date and when the day comes and nothing happens they just say they got the calculations wrong and then give you an alternare date for the event.
With the exception of the admitting that an error was made of course.
I wonder if they’ll backtrack like the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 incident? “Oh, I said 2120, not 2012, the journalist must have transposed the numbers.”
“There is this thin first-year ice even at the North Pole at the moment,” says Serreze. “This raises the spectre – the possibility that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year.”
After the due date had past in 2008 I sent him an email regarding this and his response was we were wrong.
The only thing that will be lacking in Sept 2012 is already lacking now and it is simply his Organisations credibility.
But hey some people will do anything to get noticed 🙂
There was a young man called serreze
Who’s jumpers were knitted from Polar Bears
Which were very nice and allowed him to skate on thin ice.
Sorry for the doggerel 🙁
It’s late:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=22250
February 27, 2001:
“The Arctic ice cap is melting at a rate that could allow routine commercial shipping through the far north in a decade and open up new fisheries.
It was in 1906, after centuries of attempts, that Roald Amundsen finally navigated the North-West Passage through the sea ice north of Canada. Even today, only specially strengthened ships can make the trip.”
So how did Amundsen do it? Amazing that it had taken “centuries of attempts” though.
“But in 10 years’ time, if melting patterns change as predicted, the North-West Passage could be open to ordinary shipping for a month each summer
.
Peter Wadhams of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge agrees that the Arctic could soon open up. “Within a decade we can expect regular summer trade there,” he predicts.”
Wadhams is the one who declared in 2000 that ice thickness had declined by 43% over 20 years, during the Arctic summer, with data from submarines, (also supported by Rothrock), later quoted by Al Gore.
Holloway and Sou, (2001 ) found that
“In the case of submarine-inferred rapid loss of Arctic sea ice, combined modelling and data argue that a more physically plausible inference is that the ice was not “lost” but only shifted within the Arctic. The pattern of submarine sampling happened to miss the shift. Observations to date, together with model physics, imply only that the loss of sea ice volume is not inconsistent with the 3% per decade loss of ice area, a modest rate itself not inconsistent with multi-decadal natural variability.”
Wadhams is still the “go to” person for the BBC on all matters Arctic and of course he was scientific adviser to the Catlin expedition….
There is a lot of talk about wiggle room in the words used in the prognostications. Not only does that make them worthless as predictions, but imagine if the Arctic were ice free this summer !!
There would be no talk about wiggle room from the catastrophists then, it will become cast iron science based predictions that prove the models came down from mt. Sinai on tablets of stone
If I was paid a very large grant I wood come up with the same crap as they are peddling too
Yogi Berra quotes which apply:
1. It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
2. The future ain’t what it used to be.
3. If you don’t know where your going, you might end up someplace else.