The WUWT Extent Projection: 4.55 million square kilometers.
Readers polled, 142 responded with 22.11% of responses in the range of 4.5 to 4.6 million square kilometers.
- 4.6 million sqkm 11.21% (72 votes)
- 4.5 million sqkm 10.9% (70 votes)
This was almost double the highest single category: 4.8 million sqkm 12.15% (78 votes)
Thus, the median of 4.55 million sqkm was chosen to represent WUWT readers.
UPDATE: DPlot author David Hyde sends this graph along, click to enlarge:
Here’s raw data breakdown of votes as of noon 7-5-12:
| Answer | Votes | Percent | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4.8 million sqkm | 78 | 12% | |
| 4.6 million sqkm | 72 | 11% | |
| 4.5 million sqkm | 70 | 11% | |
| 5.0 million sqkm | 58 | 9% | |
| 4.9 million sqkm | 49 | 8% | |
| 4.4 million sqkm | 39 | 6% | |
| 4.2 million sqkm | 39 | 6% | |
| 4.3 million sqkm | 36 | 6% | |
| 4.7 million sqkm | 33 | 5% | |
| Less than 4.0 million sqkm | 33 | 5% | |
| More than 5.5 million sqkm | 31 | 5% | |
| 4.1 million sqkm | 21 | 3% | |
| 5.1 million sqkm | 20 | 3% | |
| 4.0 million sqkm | 16 | 2% | |
| 5.2 million sqkm | 14 | 2% | |
| Less than 1 million sqkm (Zwally’s ice free 2012 forecast) | 14 | 2% | |
| 5.4 million sqkm | 9 | 1% | |
| 5.5 million sqkm | 6 | 1% | |
| 5.3 million sqkm | 6 | 1% |
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Seems arbitrary. Isn’t the median of all the votes 4.7?
You realize if you win, you are endorsing the IPCC methodology of scientific consensus means accuracy.
4.55 is not just abandoning “recovery,” it’s embracing the death spiral. Even a straight linear decline would leave us with half a million square kilometers(!) more ice than 4.55.
However, the actual median of those votes is 4.6.
Gneiss,
“Death spiral” exists only in the imagination of those who picked the abnormally large ice extent as the starting point. You know this as well as anybody else. Go scare some illiterate children.
I would have very much liked to have voted in this but something in my browser that removes all the spam and crap also seems to remove your polls.
I’d have gone for 4.2. I don’t understand the mechanics but it appears we are having high extent winters with low extent summers and i personally think none of it is significant unless the ice thickness data are included in reports.
Alexander, comments like yours make me wish there were a +/- or thumbs up/down button! (That was a compliment, if I weren’t clear)
The median value would be between 4.5 and 4.6, or between 4.6 and 4.7 since the cumulative counts for the middle value are 4.5 @ur momisugly 268 and 4.6 @ur momisugly 340 in one direction and 4.7 @ur momisugly 304 and 4.6 @ur momisugly 376 in the opposite direction. Total votes is 644 and the median is 322.5. By taking the center points of the two ranges, you could say that the median was 4.6. It’s messy because it’s not a normal distribution.
The weighted average of the votes, treating all values of “less than” and “greater than” as equal to the stipulated value (ie 14 votes for less than 1.0 million km2 is taken as 14 votes at 1.0 million km2) is 4.58 million km2, rounded to the nearest hundreth, or 4.6 million km2 rounded to the nearest tenth.
My 2 cents; I don’t see, given the current trend, how it can be anywhere close to that high, but time will tell.
Alexander Feht writes,
““Death spiral” exists only in the imagination of those who picked the abnormally large ice extent as the starting point.”
Who are “those who picked what abnormally large ice extent as a starting point” That’s a conspiracy I had not heard about.
“You know this as well as anybody else.”
Nope. Haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.
“Go scare some illiterate children.”
What children? I was laughing at WUWT, where not very long ago the faith ran like this:
“WUWT is predicting a recovery again this year, which we started mentioning as a prediction last fall.”
And the median is still 4.6
[Moderator’s Comment: Gneiss, anonymous commenters using anonymous proxy servers are in no position to laugh at anyone. Alexander Feht uses his real name here. You, on the other hand, are unwilling to stand behind your words. You’re rather like a kitty-cat that once moved in: all fluff and hiss but no substance. Never did know who she was. Your laughter means nothing because you have no substance. In the event you failed to do so, re-read the policy page here. Do not be outraged if further snark gets snipped. -REP]
From the U.K. Met Office of all places, there is a very interesting graph:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/charts/NHEM_extanom.png
Judged from the above, looking at July sea ice extents may be a misleading picture. In terms of summer minimum ice extent, 2011 had less ice than 2008, but, in ice averaged year-round, ice has been rising much since 2007. With the recent particularly large winter-summer oscillations seen, ice extent this July will likely be around as low as in 2008, maybe as low as in 2011 or even a little lower, but that will be misleading. The 60-year ocean cycle seems to have peaked already (a timing fitting with the history seen in http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif ); the current solar cycle has not yet; but, in several years, arctic ice in terms of annual averages could be back within part of the 1970s range seen in the first graph linked.
I sure hope we can get another shot at this at the end of July. I hope I’m wrong but I suspect 4.55 will look very optimistic by then.
Frederick Michael says:
July 5, 2012 at 6:47 pm (Edit)
I sure hope we can get another shot at this at the end of July. I hope I’m wrong but I suspect 4.55 will look very optimistic by then.
######################
Given the record setting month we saw in June I’m surprised as well.
Lets look back 30 days
19 groups submitted outlooks The median of the 19 groups was 4.4
the 3rd quartile was 4.7. WUWT was outside that at 4.9
Now, 30 days later with a record June under our belt and statistics that put 2012
on par with 2007 ( which ended at 4.3 ) folks did respond to facts. They dropped
from 4.9 down to 4.6 ( or 4.55 if you prefer ) That’s still above the median estimation
of 4.4.
Are people
1. Betting what they hope? but why hope that ice will be higher than experts predict?
2. Betting what they believe, and ignorant of the past 30 days of data?
Those who are betting what they hope are most interesting. does one hope that the ice number
comes in higher because
A) you like to see experts be wrong. if they are right will you change your opinion
of them? the last 30 days says no.
B) you really see that ice numbers support the AGW story.?
Why is everbody getting bent out of shape over summer sea ice extent? It does not matter what happens to the sea ice during summer.
After the sun falls below the horizon in the fall, freeze-up occurs quite rapidly. By Dec when the ice is about 3 ft thick, the ice road trucking season can start and the nat gas and oil drilling operations can get underway.
There has been no mention on “Ice Road Trucker”, “License to Drill”, or “Ice Pilots” of “global warming” having any effect on these Arctic operations.
The polar regions are like big blocks of ice in an old-fashioned ice box like we all had back in the old days before modern frig’s become readily available in the early 1950’s.
Due to the tilt of the earth’s axis of rotation, one polar ice block melts while the other polar region starts to freeze-up (i.e., recharge) and release heat absorbed during summer. Thus, the earth has natural cooling system. Ice bergs drift out of the polar regions and cool warm water coming out the tropical areas.
The claim by the climate scientists (aka white-coated wise guys) that the earth has a “tipping point” is nonsense. If these guys had be born about ca 1950 or earlier they would know about ice boxes and how they work. The block ice was located in the top of the box, i.e., the North Pole (or South Pole if you are down under).
There is no rapid decline in arctic sea ice extent that i can see, it is decreasing slowly.The graphs are telling a false story and I refuse to accept that story until I see a rapid decline .I think that we have no more than 8 weeks left of melting. While the continents are warming it does not seem to be reaching the Arctic area ,this could be an indication of how strong this El Nino is.
Harold.
The decline in Ice during the summer means:
more Terra watts absorbed by open water
more melting of the permafrost ( more GHGs released)
More c02 will warm the planet about 1.2C per doubling, all other things remaining equal.
Losing Ice, is not “all things remaining equal. which means you end up with more than 1.2C warming per doubling because of feedbacks. ie, lower albedo.
donald.
The word “rapid” is subjective and should be avoided. The ice is declining at a rate of about
8% per decade ( minimum extent)
yes, we have 8 weeks left. If the ice continues to melt at its current rate we will break the record
( while the sun sleeps no less). If the ice melts at the average rate of other years we will come
close to breaking the record.
temperatures in the arctic are record breaking.
But then we knew that would happen. its predicted.
Steven Mosher says:
July 5, 2012 at 10:07 pm
more Terra watts absorbed by open water
Has anyone investigated from satelite imaging what the albedo change really is? The Arctic ocean is cold, so it very often has a blanket of fog. Even though the Arctic has 24 hours of daily sunlight and is a relatively dry place, it still is a cloudy place. So is there really a significant albedo change?
Steven Mosher says on July 5, 2012 at 10:02 pm:
Harold.
The decline in Ice during the summer means:
more Terra watts absorbed by open water
more melting of the permafrost ( more GHGs released)
FYI, there is no emprical evidence that GHG’s cause any global warming or have any influence on climate change whatsoever. To date the so-called climate scientists have only produced computational speculation and conjecture. The climate models are fatally flawed because then conc of CO2 used by these is valid only highly-purified, bone-dry air.
Down load and read this essay: “Climate Change Reexamined” by Joel M. Kauffman, Journal of Scientific Explaration, Vol 23, No. pp 723-749 2007.
For starters, Thank you Steven Mosher, for being one of the few around here to talk some sense.
For people here who still think that Arctic sea ice will somehow miraculously ‘recover’ from it’s downward spiral, I would like to give one example here of positive feedback in the Arctic.
Let’s look at snow cover.
The NSIDC just release the snow cover anomaly for June snow cover anomaly :
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2012/07/Figure5a.png
June 2012 has set a record 6 million km^2 snow cover anomaly compared to the long term average. By a large margin.
What does that mean for sea ice cover ?
Well, I know it’s not very common here on WUWT, but let’s be a little scientific, and do a back-of-the-envelope calculation here for a second.
We know that the average 24/7 solar insolation on-the-ground in June around the Arctic perimeter is something like 280 W/m^2.
We also know that if snow melts, that the albedo drops from something like 0.8 to about 0.1. Over that 6 million km^2, that means that during June 2012, the Northern Hemisphere absorbed something like 1180 TW (that is tera-watt) EXTRA and ABOVE what it would absorb in June on ‘average’.
How much is 1180 TW ?
Well, total human energy consumption is 17 TW or so.
Also, there is 70 TW ocean heat going into the Barents Sea, which keeps it largely ice-free in WINTER.
1180 TW is enough heat to melt about 3.6 million ton of ice PER SECOND.
Over the entire month of June 2012, the 6 million km^2 snow anomaly accumulated enough heat to melt out some 9300 Gigaton of ice ABOVE what the average month of June would melt out. That is roughly 1/3rd of the entire winter volume of Arctic sea ice.
Now, not all that heat makes it to melting ice. For starters, not all of the snow anomaly borders Arctic sea ice (although most of it does) and a little bit of the heat warms the atmosphere and then starts increasing radiation to space (at some 10 W/m^2).
More significantly, only half makes it over the ice, since wind blows as much onto as off the ice. The other half goes to warming (less cooling) of lower latitudes. Did we notice anything of that in the US ?
With reasonable numbers filled in for these losses, we still end up with enough heat to melt out some 2-3 million km^2 of FYI (1.5 meter thick) as compared to the long-term average (since the 60s). Incidentally, that’s more or less what we have been observing.
Even with respect to 2011, 1 million km^2 snow is lost in June, which, following the same calculations, would eventually (September) lead to an ice loss of some 500 km^2 sea ice area below beyond 2011. And that was just the influence of June snow anomaly, with May ignored and July still to come, as well as the additional albedo effects that these ice-free areas will endure before the melting season is over.
This is what is called ‘arctic amplification’ and it is a positive feedback mechanism, since it surely did not take that much energy to melt that snow. And it surely was not caused by ‘wind’ or ‘ice breaker activity’ as some of the WUWT regulars have suggested.
Maybe it is time to become a real skeptic and a real climate realist instead of staring yourself blind on the temperature of melting ice in the DMI 80+ graph. That one will only change rapidly once open ocean significantly takes over sea ice in a summer in the not so far future.
ATTN: Steve M.
Further to previous comment
See Fig. 7. Note that in the range of 700-400 wavenumbers water vapor absorbs most of the OLR not CO2. At 298 K the maximum of the OLR is ca 500 wavenumbers, which is the center the OH2 absorbtions. This FT-IR has cut-off of 400 wavenumers. The a OH2 below 400 wavenumbers that absorb OLR.
The claim by the climate scientist that CO2 is the main driven of the alleged global warming is falsified by the empirical data in this spectrum.
Note the stong CO2 peak at ca 2300 wavenumbers. There is no OLR at this wavelenght.
How go outside and watch the clouds. Then ask yourself this question: What are the equations that described these amorphous structures in space and time? Clouds are the regulators of the earth’s climate.
Steve Mosher said:
If Mosher would bother checking what was actually predicted, Antarctica should be the hottest place on earth. Funny how some people can cherry pick predictions that support their own POV and claim everything that happens is what was expected, even when said predictions are 100% wrong. Then again, everything is consistent with AGW “theory”, right Steve?
This is from Steve Goddard’s now defunct website.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/hansen-1988-antarctic-meltdown/
The link in the thread to the paper is dead. Gee, what a shame, and purely coincidental I’m sure.
However, below is an article from Popular Science August, 1989 which I assume Steve Mosher meant by “we” (whoever that is) knew it would happen, but didn’t, yet still did, well not really. Note the bright orange broiling Antarctic region compared to the rest of globe by year 2020. Even by 2050 the Antarctic is much warmer than the Arctic.
http://is.gd/hJWbTC
Climate science is great isn’t it? Just make it up as “we” go along. I’d like to ask Steve Mosher in what year did “we” know the Arctic would be warming more than the Antarctic. Was it 1990? 1995? Maybe 2000? Or was it after it became obvious the prediction was wrong, so that no matter what the outcome, claim “we” knew it all along, then get amnesia for the failed predictions? Or is there some lost archive from the early 80’s Gavin Schmidt will just happen to come across that invalidates the newer and improved obsolete predictions made in 1988/89?
Rob Dekker record minus 100.8 at the south pole. Thats were the missing cold went.
Steven Mosher says:
July 5, 2012 at 10:07 pm
“The ice is declining at a rate of about 8% per decade ( minimum extent)”
It is unfortunate that images don’t appear in comments, making them too easy to skip over. The following two together indirectly highlight how, while the July minimum this year will likely be particularly low again, there is not that kind of linear-like trend being seen over multiple decades:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/charts/NHEM_extanom.png
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif
As seen in the second graph, arctic temperatures were as high in the late 1930s as in the 1990s, and, in that context, the first graph allows comparison of the annual means (beyond only July minima) of arctic ice extent in the past few years to those in the 1990s.
—————–
Global trends as opposed to arctic trends are somewhat off-topic, but, for overall albedo change:
Particularly with cloud cover change, Earth’s albedo predominately declined over the 1986-1997 period seen in http://www.pensee-unique.fr/images/pallesciencefig.jpg
Such affected how much of 170000 terawatts of incoming sunlight was absorbed, with warming during decline in albedo.
However, in contrast, 1998-now has had the opposite of predominately increased albedo as seen there and in http://www.pensee-unique.fr/images/palle2009.jpg
Such results in, unsurprisingly, the different trendlines seen in MSU global temperatures for the respective time periods:
Relative warming during the 1986-1997 albedo decrease, sunlight absorption increase:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1986/to:1997/plot/rss/from:1986/to:1997/trend
Relative cooling during the 1998-now albedo increase, sunlight absorption decrease:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/to:2013/plot/rss/from:1998/to:2013/trend
To add longer-term data, albeit with less directly global data available, Greenland temperatures 200-11000 years ago:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
according to data from
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
and (where these NOAA figures could be partially off but mainly only some skeptics thinking so):
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/epica_domec/edc-co2.txt
By (1180*10^12) / (4*π*6371008^2/2 * 86400*30 * 240) * 100(%) that means your terrifying 1180 excess TERAWATTS in all of June is but 0.00000074377% or a fraction of 0.0000000074377 of the insolation per your 240 Ws-2 if the entire N.H., and that is if the entire N.H. has the same irradiation as what is gathered around the Arctic perimeter per your remark. But really the average insolation over the entire hemisphere is nearly triple that, so your example makes no sense, or if it does to you, cut those factors by about another 1/3rd.
So the N.H. absorbed 7.4e-07% more radiation than before, do you really think that matters squat? The 11 year 0.1% solar cycle bobble is huge compared to that and it’s climate effect is basically called immeasurable.
See how ridiculous your statements sound? So melted snow cover has you a bit worried does it? If you can handle a calculator you might try it before posting such dribble.
Anthony
Oh No! I’m too late to vote. Ill let you know if I was right once the season finishes. I suspect I would have been spot on…
tonyb
No wayne.
Even if you spread out that 1180 TW over the entire Northern Hemisphere, you get (1180*10^12) / (4*pi*6371008^2/2) or about 4.6 W/m^2 increase in insolation.
That is just about 2 % increase over your 240 W/m^2 average instead of your 0.00000074377 %.