Reposted from “Haunting the Library” (well worth a bookmark), another clueless journalist combined with an artist/activist makes The Guardian look pretty darned stupid. Five minutes or less of checking would have prevented this blunder.
Guardian Goes “Full Stupid” on Arctic Ice, Contradicts Itself.
The Guardian managed to outdo itself in it’s latest foray into global warming, claiming that Arctic sea ice has declined by three quarters in the last three decades. In a series of “factoids” following an interview with pop celebrity and latest Greenpeace spokesperson for the Arctic ice, Jarvis Cocker, Lucy Seigle, the Guardian’s environment reporter, informed readers that:
Of the Arctic sea ice, 75% has been lost over the past 30 years. Last year saw sea-ice levels plummet to the second-lowest since records began. It is estimated that the North Pole could be ice-free in the summer within the next 10-20 years.
However, the problem with this was not just it’s total departure from both reality and common sense, but the fact that an article in the Guardian only a couple of weeks beforehand had pointed out that this simply isn’t the case.
Quoting the Met Office’s Chief Scientist, Julia Sligo, the article noted that such claims were simply “not credible” –
She also said that suggestions the volume of sea ice had already declined by 75% already were not credible. “We know there is something [happening on the thinning of sea ice] but it’s not as dramatic as those numbers suggest.”
The problem, she explained, was that researchers did not know the thickness of Arctic sea ice with any confidence.
The Guardian. Met Office: Arctic Sea Ice Loss Linked to Drier, Colder UK Winters.
In fact, as the NSIDC points out, the extent of Arctic sea ice is very close to the average for the last three decades, not down by 75% as The Guardian’s environment reporter seems to be confused about:
Overview of Conditions
Arctic sea ice extent in April 2012 averaged 14.73 million square kilometers (5.69 million square miles). Because of the very slow rate of ice loss through the last half of March and the first three weeks of April, ice extent averaged for April ranked close to average out of 34 years of satellite data.
Someone should really help them out over at the Guardian’s environment section. Do you have an hour or two to spare, some basic common sense, plenty of paper and some crayons?
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Here’s the proof that Arctic Sea Ice has not declined 75% in 30 years, this graph of Arctic Sea Ice Extent from good buddy Dr. Peter Gleick using NSIDC data. Here is his original from his Huffington post article where he’s beating up Apollo 17 astronaut Dr. Harrison Schmidt for comparing 1989 and 2009 20 year differences.
I’ve extended that graph of Gleick’s down to the zero line, and annotated the 1980 and 2010 year values and the 75% loss of 1980 value line (3.125) for reference. As you can see, there’s a loooonnnng way to go from 12.5 million square kilometers in 1980 to 3.125 million square kilometers in 2010 to make a 75% loss in 30 years.
The Guardian is only off by 7.675 million square kilometers…close enough for journo work I suppose.
I followed the reference to http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/polar-meltdown/ and found (among many other interesting items):
*****
Russian report from 1940
The Norwegian, Captain Wiktor Arnesen, who has just returned from the Arctic, clains to have discovered an island 12 miles in circumference near the Franz Joseph Island, in latitude 80.40. He says that the island previously was hidden by an iceberg between 70 and 80 feet high, which has melted, showing the exceptional nature of the recent thawing in the Arctic.
******
Just this morning I heard a broadcast from (probably) BBC about an island that had been left behind by the retreat of a glacier. Maybe Norway – I’m not sure because I woke up partway through the program and didn’t hear it all. What goes around comes around. I’d like to be able to send the item from Steven Goddard’s website to the program for their edification.
IanM
Here is the annual cycle of the NH sea ice extent going back to 1972. Right now we are about 500,000 km2 below the average but there is clearly not anywhere near the change that some people like to point to. It goes up and it goes down.
http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/3967/dailyseaiceextentjune11.png
Here is the typical chart we are used to looking at. 2012 is lower than average but pretty typical. For the Arctic to melt out in September, huge changes are required such as the March Maximum has to start out the year 30% lower (which no year has come close to yet) and the melt throughout the year has to be 20% higher than normal (which never seems to happen).
http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/2573/nhsiejune112.png
The total melt from the Maximum has been exactly “average” so far in 2012 at 2.9M km2. 1996 and 2007 are the two outliers in the series (1996 was a really unusual year – anyone have an explanation for that).
http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/6356/totalmeltday69june112.png
Tomorrow we’ll do shapes and colors.
Rhys Jaggar says:
June 3, 2012 at 12:59 am
……
I now believe that they are comics. All of them. Playthings of rich proprietors. Tools of political influence and/or intimidation…….
————–
They were that when you were growing up, they just had to hide it better because the readership had more common sense. Or, are you talking pre-“Citizen Kane”?
So the ice is only melting in the middle and under water, not on the edges which is where the Extent is measured. Sorry, but over any extended period of time extent is a good indicator of volume and one will never contradict the other for any period. There can’t be significant ice loss without extent loss.
The Guardian is only interested in money (which equates to survival). Truth doesn’t enter into it. They would tell us martians have landed in Arizona if it would sell another paper.
@Silver Ralph says: June 3, 2012 at 1:23 am
.
“The Grauniad is not going to change the habits of a lifetime overnight. They were born as a Marxist pressure group,”
Twaddle. The Manchester Guardian was a “Liberal” newspaper, Liberal in that it loosely represented
the views of the old Liberal party. It’s downfall was being moved to London, and then taken over by Lefties, notably the arse Rusbridger.
Happily its circulation is collapsing, and it only survives as a result of using financial devices continually
bashed by the Guardian – tax havens and hedge funds. They are the very essence of rank hypocrisy. Once the Guardian was a very fine newspaper, with superb journalists. Now I wouldn’t wipe my arse with it.
Shell is delaying the start of an Arctic drilling project due to heavier than normal sea ice.
from the AP:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/26/2819327/heavy-ice-could-delay-start-of.html
The Guardian and WUWT alike would serve their readers better by reviewing the literature on the uncertainty in estimates of Arctic sea-ice volume. In a recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Reseach, Schweiger et al. conducted such an analysis. Here is a summary of their findings:
Many folks just want to know “By what year will the summer Arctic ice be 85% gone?” Per figure 13 of the Schweiger et al. analysis, a conservative answer is 2030-45 (sooner if the melt-rate accelerates).
Needless to say, if it happens that the Greenland and Antarctic ice melts similarly (albeit more slowly) to the Arctic ice, then the Earth’s geography and ecology will be hugely altered.
Summary The Schweiger et al. PIOMAS analysis affirms the Hanson-style view that AGW is real, serious, and accelerating. Both The Guardian and WUWT would serve their readers better by candid disclosure and discussion of this finding.
Nick Stokes’ link tells us that the Piomas folks’ latest model of ice loss is -2.8 thousand cubic kilometers per decade. Using their numbers for the maximum and minimum of the 30-year base period (28,700 and 12,300) the 30-year mean was on the order of 21 thousand km^3. Thus the Arctic would be ice-free in 7.5 decades (2087). However, if the 2.8 km^3 per decade figure applies to the full seasonal curve itself, the minimum would drop to zero in less than 2 decades. At last! A testable prediction that we don’t have to wait a century to disprove.
Nick said,
“Yes, I think the Guardian is wrong. I think they are misinterpreting this calculation, which says that the minimum ice volume in Sep 2011 was 75% down on the maximum for 1979.”
Now that is funny! Am SOOOOO glad you cleared up their misinterpretation with a piece of spin that should win an Emmy. I certainly hope the folks who created that statistic have jobs as political spin makers now. They would be brilliant at it! Heck, they could easily make Obama smell like a bed of roses while standing in a cesspool.
The 75% refers to the reduction in ice volume at the annual minimum in September, in round numbers from 16 cubic km in September 1979 to 4 in September 2011. Data provided by the Polar Science Centre at the University of Washington. You can download it here:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/
The Guardian’s facts are from Greenpeace and their derivation of the number is explained thus
n 1979, at its lowest point, there were 16,855 cubic kilometres of Arctic sea ice. In 2011 that had dropped to 4,017 – a little over a quarter of that original figure.
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/30-years-weve-lost-75-arctic-sea-ice-20120210
Hope this helps.
REPLY: Perhaps, but Four things. 1. PIOMAS is a model. 2. PIOMAS is not an actual measurement. 3. Saying a model predicts a 75% loss is no better than NASA’s Jay Zwally saying the Arctic could be nearly ice free by 2012. (See the sidebar and link above it) 4. Slingo said the 75% loss for volume isn’t supported.
So, no matter how you look at it, extent or volume, it doesn’t work. – Anthony
“Of the Arctic sea ice, 75% has been lost over the past 30 years.”
I’m just wondering, is it pure coincidence that in fact it appears to have dropped by roughly 25%, and therefore _to_ 75% of maximum, rather than ‘by’ 75% of maximum? It’s an easy enough mistake to make, if one is a moron.
Lance Wallace posts: At last! A testable prediction that we don’t have to wait a century to disprove.Lance, WUWT readers can readily verify that James Hansen and colleagues went irrevocably on-record in September 2, 2011 in with a decadal prediction: “acceleration of the rate of sea level rise this decade” (arXiv:1105.1140v2).
Hansen’s prediction required an appreciable measure of scientific courage, as satellite observations at the time were showing a marked deceleration.
Summary: we will all know, relatively soon, whether Hansen’s rise-prediction and the PIOMAS melt-prediction are correct. If confirmed, this scientific understanding will pose considerable challenges to political, economic, and religious ideologies of every variety.
OMG we have been privvy to the best spin I have read. Nick, I thought yours was worthy till I read *MORE*’s offering. Sorry. Give the award back. I’ve changed my mind. And the winner is A fan of *MORE* discourse. The nuance is exquisite. The serious tone unmatched. The slide from discourse to done deal imperceptible. A win on all counts.
Uncertainty in the Pan-arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) Arctic sea ice volume record is characterized. A range of observations and approaches, including in-situ ice thickness measurements, ICESat retrieved ice thickness, and model sensitivity studies, yields a conservative estimate for October Arctic ice volume uncertainty of +/- 1.35×103 km3 and an uncertainty of the ice volume trend over the 1979-2010 period of +/-1.0×103 km3/decade. A conservative estimate of the trend over this period is -2.8 103 km3/decade. PIOMAS ice thickness estimates agree well with ICESat ice thickness retrievals (<0.1 m mean difference) for the area for which submarine data are available, while difference outside this area are larger. PIOMAS spatial thickness patterns agree well with ICESat thickness estimates with pattern correlations of above 0.8.
Schweiger et al. JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 116, C00D06, 21 PP., 2011
doi:10.1029/2011JC007084
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/pubs/IceVolume-2011-06-02-accepted-with-figures.pdf
Cambridge Professor of Ocean Physics Peter Wadhams takes issue with Julia Slingo …
Prof Slingo placed her faith in model predictions and in future data to come from satellites on thickness (presumably Cryosat-2, which has not yet produced any usable data on ice thickness). Yet since the 1950s US and British submarines have been regularly sailing to the Arctic (I have been doing it since 1976) and accurately measuring ice thickness in transects across that ocean. Her statement that “we do not know the ice thickness in the Arctic” is false. In 1990 I published the first evidence of ice thinning in the Arctic in Nature (Wadhams, 1990). At that stage it was a 15% thinning over the Eurasian Basin. Incorporating later data my group was able to demonstrate a 43% thinning by the late 1990s (Wadhams and Davis, 2000, 2001), and this was in exact agreement with observations made by Dr Drew Rothrock of the University of Washington, who has had the main responsibility for analyzing data from US submarines (Rothrock et al., 1999, 2003; Kwok and Rothrock, 2009) and who examined all the other sectors of the Arctic Ocean. […] Even if we only consider a 43% loss of mean thickness (which was documented as occurring up to 1999), the accompanying loss of area (30-40%) gives a volume loss of some 75%.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmenvaud/writev/1739/arc26.htm
So a guy who has actually been there, collected and published data says the 75% figure is correct …..
Jarvis Cocker, hasbeen pop singer, says something, and the Guradian swoons?
Can someone from the UK please explain why a paper with around 230 000 (and falling) circulation in a population of 60 odd million attracts so much attention?
Trivia note – Jarvis’ old man, expatriate ‘Mac’ Cocker, was a presenter on 2JJJ, the Australian alternative music radio station in the 1970s and 80s. He had a velvet voice, a lovely Sheffield accent, and great taste in music. Sadly, Mac was a slave to booze who ended his days in one of the Last Chance Cafes in the Northern Territory.
I notice that some heavy and one sided moddng has started on that Grauniad thread. [SNIP . . . That was fun! ~ Evan]
This is the coldest June the 3rd this century in Central England. (Dosen’t mean much but sounds good.)
Just wondering… If all the Arctic ice did disappear, would anyone care? Would anyone even notice? I mean, besides Santa Claus and his elves… It isn’t like the sea levels will rise due to the melting of floating ice.
If the frozen north warms a bit, we get more forests on what is now tundra. (Never mind if the warming is natural or not, I am just saying “if”). In other words, Alaska would be returning to a natural state that existed in the past.
I suspect that the Admiralty was bemused by the President of the Royal Society’s report of November 1817, claiming that the Arctic was warming drastically. Wasn’t there some nonsense just the previous year of 1816, with the explosion Tambora and the Year Without a Summer? Throw another log on the fire, Jeeves.
They’re wrong about the Arctic being sea ice free in 10-20 years. Everyone who reads the Guardian knows that a few years ago they predicted the Arctic to be sea ice free by 2012.
Ooops.
Some comment on the Guardian circulation figures, so low they’re virtually underground. Turns out the only thing that keeps it going is, its owners fund it from other publications. Which include Autotrader. Blokes buying and selling motors.
Scuse me while I larf….
For those defending the 75% number by claiming it is volume…how can you argue that they’re using volume when you consider the sentences after it:
If they were talking about volume, then last year was the LOWEST, not second lowest. Thus, if they’re talking about modeled volume (at the summer minimum), then the second sentence is wrong. If they’re talking about extent, then the first sentence is massively wrong. And if they’re talking about area, then I’d say both of the first two sentences are wrong. If they’re talking about times other than the minimum, then they’re wrong regardless of the metric. If they’re comparing maxima to minima, that’s just disingenuous.
And the observant reader might notice I included the third sentence in the quote too. Why? Because it shows their bias. If they’re mentioning the ice being gone at the north pole in 10-20 years, why didn’t they also say that it was predicted to be gone at the north pole in 2008? That’s like saying Harold Camping is making an end-of-world prediction for 2020 while failing to mention is past.
Sorry, but there doesn’t seem to be a way out of it…a pretty poor report no matter how you slice it.
-Scott
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:June 3, 2012 at 1:12 am
You should know that here (in England) Cocker is known as a ‘twat’, and the Guardian as a leftist rag. I don’t know if you Americans know this either, but the Guardian is often referred to as the ‘Grauniad’ – since they once made so many spelling mistakes in thier (see what I did there?) articles.
That particular term has perhaps a different meaning here in America than in England. Many of these Limousine Liberals such as Cocker are called ‘twits’ here. And does anyone actually expect consistency and truth from the MFM (the second M is media, fill in the blanks)? The J schools long ago quit teaching reporting, and began teaching agenda driven politics. IMO, the influence of Cronkite, and Woodward and Burnstein’s unwravelling of the Watergate scandal (remember politicians, it’s the cover up that gets you, not the scandal itself) that turned that corner for them. Though of course, Walter Duranty and his help in covering for the Soviets in the 30s would indicate it goes much farther back. Also, I’ve seen the Grauniad referred to as ‘Al Gaurdian’ many times, since they act as a functional English branch of Al Jazeera.
Seems pretty clear: the 75% number is obviously supported by the PIOMAS numbers. The journalist should have stated that clearly.
Yes, PIOMAS is a model, so are the satellite temperature datasets*. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
There are definitely some issues like the possibility of many years of a very thin layer of sea ice with a near zero volume but still high albedo, the sloppy mingling of different measures in the article, …
The fact that some scientists may have their reservations with regard to the PIOMAS model. I say, let the scientists behind PIOMAS explain how their model works, along with its strengths and weaknesses, before we throw their data out.
But to say the 75% is taken out of thin air is not fair.
Also, any skeptic who thinks the volume numbers are bogus is free to make an alternative estimate (and publish it). Who knows? The real reduction might be 55%… or 85%…
*I heard Stephen Schneider assert that, somewhere on YouTube. I don’t know if it’s true.
REPLY: Uh, sorry, but no. See the comment from Scott two up from this one – Anthony