I don’t have much time for a detailed post, a number of people want to discuss sea ice, so here is your chance. We also need to update the ARCUS forecast for August, due Monday August 6th. Poll follows:
barry says:
August 5, 2012 at 6:28 pm
Nope. ‘Variability’ usually refers to weather-like phenomenon, such as the year to year variations in winds, pressure, temps, ocean/atmosphere systems (multi-year) that fluctuate and influence sea ice melt and growth. You introduced the term upthread, seemingly referring to long-term effects. It is the long-term decline, not the interannual variability, that is attributed to AGW.
No one denies that many factors influence sea ice cover and composition year to year. The ‘warmist’ researchers examine these influences extensively, and talk about them publicly. This allows skeptics to cite them when they speak exclusively about weather influence and then argue that therefore they do not believe AGW has an influence. I’m sure there is a name for that logical fallacy…
That would be “phenomena”. As for the ‘warmist’ researchers, they don’t seem to talk about cover and composition in the same breath. Links would be handy, ta, as would be links to peer-reviewed papers regarding observational data that support your – shall we say – argument. Ones without reference to models, for example, as they seem to be merely thought experiments. Love to see those. Empirical data does tend to trump statistics.
In fact, if you’d be so kind as to provide any kind of evidence that what you say is based on fact as opposed to simply the right words, I would be fascinated. Otherwise, spouting the kind of rubbish (interannual means nothing, ducky, and the “long-term” decline is not shown, either in short- or long-term [‘long-term’ in the geologic sense of the phrase]) of which you appear to be so fond does no-one any good at all…
alex
August 5, 2012 9:34 pm
Well. It melts down. May be not this year, but in a few years from now it is going to be ice free.
Not really surprizing!
Try to explain why it is not CO2. You are going to have hard time!
Gail Combs
August 5, 2012 9:56 pm
It is interesting that the vote is bimodal with 77 votes at 4.5 and 71 at 4.2 and the rest scattered.
Gail Combs
August 5, 2012 10:41 pm
Mike H says:
August 4, 2012 at 3:29 pm
Few people on this site seem alarmed about the disintegration of Arctic sea ice, and the implications for future northern hemisphere climate….
_______________________
MSM alarmist hype is for selling newspapers because Blood sells.
So why are we not alarmed by all the hype?
How about this peer reviewed paper. Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic
Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado, USA et al Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ca 11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3° C above 20th century averages, enough to completely melt many small glaciers throughout the Arctic, although the Greenland Ice Sheet was only slightly smaller than at present. http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-2/public-review-draft/sap1-2-prd-all.pdf
Or this one Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception
Ulrich C. Müller & Jörg Pross, Institute of Geosciences, University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….”
or this Graph
Or this article at WUWT by a Geologist.
The End Holocene, or How to Make Out Like a ‘Madoff’ Climate Change Insurer
…We live today possibly near the end of the most recent interglacial, the Holocene, or the 11,715 years since we melted our way out of the last glacial, the Wisconsin Ice Age, the interglacial in which all of human civilization has occurred. Five of the last six interglacials have each lasted about half a precession cycle. The precession cycle itself varies between 19,000 and 23,000 years and we are close to the 23kyr point now, making 11,715 years about half……..which is why this discussion has relevance…
Smokey says: “See, scientific skeptics have nothing to prove. ”
And you are absolutely right. You are free to say “The climate has changed before, and I have no evidence that this current change is anything but natural variability”. But that is NOT the same thing as “The climate has changed before, and I am sure this current change is natural variability”.
Do you see the difference? As long as you are content to say “I don’t know one way or the other” then you indeed have nothing to prove. But you are making a different assertion … that you do know something, which makes you no longer simply a skeptic. Any time you make an assertion that you DO know something, then you need evidence. Just like proponents of AGW need to provide evidence to support their assertions.
Spence_UK
August 6, 2012 12:20 am
The driftwood proxies show that sea ice is still well within its range of natural variability, and natural variability extends further than barry would like to admit; see here for more details of Funder’s analysis:
For the last 10,000 years, summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has been far from constant. For several thousand years, there was much less sea ice in the Arctic Ocean – probably less than half of current amounts.
(This was reported at WUWT at the time)
Rob Dekker
August 6, 2012 12:58 am
Gneiss said :
First, the Arctic air temperature rise has been much faster than the global rate, something like .5 C/decade since the mid-70s. Second, much of the sea ice is melting from below, because of warmer water. This warming is unprecedented over the past 2,000 years, and linked to Arctic amplification of global warming.
to which Smokey answered :
Horseapples. The planet has been considerably warmer over the past 2,000 years, and warmer still over the Holocene – well before CO2 began to rise.
You reference GISP ice core, which tells something about Greenland’s summit temps up till 1900.
Do you honestly believe that temps at Greenland’s summit up till a century ago somehow ‘disprove’ Gneiss’ statement, let alone proves your own statement that “The planet has been considerably warmer over the past 2,000 years” ?
Rob Dekker
August 6, 2012 1:06 am
Spence_UK said :
For the last 10,000 years, summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has been far from constant. For several thousand years, there was much less sea ice in the Arctic Ocean – probably less than half of current amounts.
(This was reported at WUWT at the time)
Could you please provide a reference (WUWT or otherwise) to the claim that “for several thousand years, there was less sea ice in the Arctic Ocean – probably less than half of current amounts” ?
Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261-293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started.
If early greenhouse gas emissions (thousands of years ago) prevented the inception of a new glacial, then what would current greenhouse gas emissions result in ? Eocene / Miocene climate ?
While we are at it, does anyone here on WUWT have any scientific explanation for why glacial periods started at all (during the early Pleistocene) ? Why did the Pliocene/Miocene climate (with much higher temps and much higher sea levels) not persist ?
First day of sea ice extent increase this season at the NSIDC. Only 60 km2 but a positive number nonetheless.
That would be a nice break from the 100,000 km^2/day losses we have been seeing over the past couple of weeks.
Still, this short-term stall in ‘extent’ reduction can very easily be caused by the initial divergence of sea ice caused by the cyclone that’s moving over the Arctic as we speak. http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/08/cyclone-warning.html#tp
Why don’t we just follow these NSIDC numbers you referred to for the next week or so ?
Do you want to place any bets that your “positive number” assertion will sustain ?
Ecco the Dolphin
August 6, 2012 2:35 am
How much of the current arctic melting is promoted by atmospheric particulate matter (light ash from fires, soot from industrialization, volcanic ash from Kamkatcha and the Aleutian arc) ? Coincidentally, I would expect all of this to occur mainly in the Northern hemisphere while it would be almost nonexistent in the Southern hemisphere near the Antarctic. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why despite increasing global temperatures (regardless of the causes), antarctic sea ice does not appear to be affected negatively?
kadaka (KD Knoebel)
August 6, 2012 2:53 am
From tjfolkerts on August 5, 2012 at 11:46 pm:
Do you see the difference? As long as you are content to say “I don’t know one way or the other” then you indeed have nothing to prove. But you are making a different assertion … that you do know something, which makes you no longer simply a skeptic. Any time you make an assertion that you DO know something, then you need evidence.
Umm… No. “Within the range of natural variability” is the null hypothesis, which is assumed true until proven otherwise. Like toilets are installed in bathrooms or your cat in your house is alive. If you need to find a toilet in an unfamiliar house, you assume it will be in a bathroom and go looking for a bathroom. You don’t say “I don’t know where a toilet is” and check if one is in the kitchen or the den. While you may be inclined to quip “I don’t know if my cat is alive or dead” you still assume it is alive.
So you say “I know the toilet is in the bathroom” or “I know my cat is alive” until you find evidence to the contrary. That’s how a null hypothesis works, it’s what you know to be true until it’s proven to be not true.
Temperature in Arctic per season: http://oi56.tinypic.com/vfv70g.jpg
As “warm” as in 40ties. Is the miniscule rise, half of that from the beginning of the century, really that unprecedented?
The “really big picture” is global sea ice area, ignoring the large ice chunks on Greenland and Antarctica?
Perhaps you have a problem working directly with datasets. While that “daily global sea ice anomaly” is supposedly scary looking, it really isn’t. To better examine the figures, I went looking for them. Since I couldn’t find the South Hemispheric data on the Cryosphere Today site where that graph comes from, I scraped together the monthly NSIDC info from here: ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/
Goes from 11/1978 to 7/2012.
After assembling both North and South Hemispherical data into a spreadsheet, then adding them together for Global numbers (blanking out the nulls of course), a linear regression reveals a downward slope for Global sea ice area of -0.816*10^6 km^2 per century. At that rate the area will go to zero late in the year in 4198. Doesn’t seem that scary now, does it?
Of course linear fits are fraught with hazards, as seen when looking at the extent figures. With those the downward slope is -3.816*10^6 km^2 per century, and will hit zero about midway through 2619. Since it’s difficult to have sea ice area without any sea ice extent, unless the “area” is exclusively calculated from slush under the 15% concentration threshold for extent, it’s most likely that neither zero-point year is correct.
In any case, by current linear trends there’s at least about 600 years of sea ice left globally. By the sea ice area, subject of your “really big picture” chart, it’ll be around a lot longer that that. That’s a long time off, and there will undoubtedly be changes like natural climate variability and reductions in human GHG emissions from ordinary economics forces in the meanwhile. Those trends won’t last that long.
So what is there to worry about?
Gail Combs
August 6, 2012 4:52 am
tjfolkerts says:
August 5, 2012 at 11:46 pm
Smokey says: “See, scientific skeptics have nothing to prove. ”
____________________________
Smokey is talking about the Null Hypothesis in science. From the stand point of the scientific method, skeptics have nothing to prove PERIOD end of discussion. You can not wriggle out of the statement of the null hypothesis with any type of reasoning or rhetoric. It is up to climate scientists to prove the null hypothesis is incorrect and they have not done so.
Gail Combs
August 6, 2012 5:35 am
rogerknights says:
August 4, 2012 at 8:36 pm
What’s happening with the military satellite photos pre-1979? I thought some agency was studying them with an eye to extending our knowledge of arctic ice extent back in time.
_______________________________
It did not advance “The Cause” and since they are actual photos they can not fudge the data like they do the temperature record so they buried the results DEEP under the ice.
It is clear that Rob Dekker does not understand the concept of the Null Hypothesis. No wonder he is foundering on the rocks of science. He forgets that scientific skeptics – the only honest kind of scientists – have nothing to prove. And the alarmist crowd cannot prove their way out of a wet paper bag.
Natural variability fully explains the current Arctic ice extent. It has all happened before during the Holocene, and to a greater extent – and prior to the current rise in CO2. It is natural fluctuation, nothing more.
If it were not for pseudo-science, the alarmist contingent wouldn’t have anything with ‘science’ in it at all.
Gail Combs
August 6, 2012 5:53 am
noiv says:
August 4, 2012 at 9:36 pm
Fred asks:
Why does Sea Ice News always just cover the Arctic and not also the Antarctic?
Yeah, that’s funny. Especially because in Summer there is even less sea ice in Antarctic.
_______________________________
OH? It is summer in the Antarctic? (Do I really need the /sarc?)
Spence_UK
August 6, 2012 5:57 am
Rob Dekker,
There is a link in my previous post to a University of Copenhagen press release which is associated with a paper published in Science. The link may not be terribly obvious – just one word is hyperlinked, the word “here”. Paper is at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/747.full
Entropic man
August 6, 2012 6:05 am
Smokey and I have been agreeing (it does happen occasionally!) that the normal glacial/ interglacial cycle is driven by orbital eccentricity cycles which drive temperature changes which drive CO2 changes, with amplification of both changes by positive feedback. This is the natural trend on which any natural short term variation would be superimposed.
The problem with the 20th and 21st century changes is that most of those with an informed opinion regard our current situation as an example of unnatural variation.
This comment from our discussion on another thread seems apposite here too.
Smokey says:
August 5, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Entropic,
Not just on timescales of Ice Ages. On time scales of a few decades, too.
CO2 is a function of temperature. Is there any doubt?
——————–
There is a doubt, or we would not be arguing this point.
At this time we should be seeing temperature and then CO2 driven down by the Milankovich eccentricity changes presaging the next glacial period.
Instead we find ourselves in a new situation. The first intelligent organism on the planet is burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide in large enough quantities to raise the level way beyond normal interglacial levels.
This has reset our climate to a pattern usually seen early in an interglacial as rising insolation triggers increased CO2. We have restarted the positive feedback loop that stabilised some 6000 years ago, with no clear precedent from paleoclimates to guide our analysis of the result.
.
Gail Combs
August 6, 2012 6:09 am
wayne Job says:
August 5, 2012 at 12:01 am
….. I see first some decades of rampant solar cycles and a warming phase that followed a cooling phase. This warming pumped some heat into the oceans, the southern ocean deals with this heat easily as Antarctica is an island and has a circular current that mixes and dilutes the warm water in short order.
…..Thus we have a slow thermostat. The melting of ice and the coming northern winter should deal with any warmth that is left in this anomaly.
That the sun has gone on holidays and the world has switched to a cooling phase, I do not like the chances of any time soon having an ice free Arctic.
===========================
The real clincher is the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007 (AR4) intentionally keep out of the report the fact the energy from the sun was INCREASING.
IPCC “Consensus” on Solar Influence was Only One Solar Physicist who Agreed with Her Own Paper
…Objection to this was raised by the Norwegian government as shown in the AR4 second draft comments below (and essentially dismissed by the IPCC): “I would encourage the IPCC to [re-]consider having only one solar physicist on the lead author team of such an important chapter. In particular since the conclusion of this section about solar forcing hangs on one single paper in which J. Lean is a coauthor. I find that this paper, which certainly can be correct, is given too much weight”…
Judith Lean, along with Claus Frohlich, are responsible for the scandalous rewriting of graphs of solar activity. Satellites showed that the TSI (measured in watts) between 1986 and 96 increased by about one third. Judith Lean and Claus Frohlich (authors of the single study noted above) “manipulated” the data. People who were in charge of the satellites and created the original graphs (the world’s best astrophysicists: Doug Hoyt, Richard C. Willson), protested in vain against such manipulation. Willson: “Fröhlich has made changes that are wrong … He did not have sufficient knowledge of (satellite) Nimbus7 … pmode composites are useful for those who argue that global warming may be primarily due to anthropogenic causes.” [cautionary note English->Czech->English translation of Willson]
…Since the appropriate questions were not asked, the IPCC knows little about the sun. While the rest of the IPCC AR4 is rich in graphics, there is not a single graph of cosmic radiation, solar cycle lengths, or geomagnetism – which is very strange because they are important indicators of solar activity…
On the same subject Luboš Motl comment is even more revealing. It seems the IPCCs pet “Solar Physicist” isn’t even a Solar Physicist!
Judithgate: IPCC relied on one solar physicist
(Her CV lists some lower-grade institutions and reveals she didn’t get an academic job at some point. And her education is in environmental and atmospheric sciences only – no solar physics etc.)
Gneiss
August 6, 2012 6:14 am
u.k. writes,
“I prefer non-fiction.”
OK, that’s one way to science-proof your beliefs. Demand to be shown the data, then refuse to look when it’s offered. But you can prove me wrong: show that your reaction was based on knowledge and not a knee-jerk.
You indicated you knew nothing about the data, so I suggested a good place to start learning. The link you waved away, http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9.html
is Chapter 9, Understanding and Attributing Climate Change, from the WG I report. That’s a bit dated now. We’ve learned a lot about sea ice and other things since 2007, and I could cite newer stuff, but Chapter 9 is still a good place to start. That chapter alone cites results from more than 500 studies. So tell me, what’s the fiction in Chapter 9?
Entropic,
Cutting and pasting your comment from another thread does not make it legit. I showed that on all time scales, from years to hundreds of thousands of years, rises in CO2 follow rises in temperature. Therefore, changes in CO2 are a function of temperature. The only ones who ‘doubt’ that fact have already made up their minds, and are immune to reason and scientific evidence.
Also, I have not written one word about Milankovich eccentricity. So how do you presume that we agree? Is that yet another baseless assumption, like so much else that eminates from the alarmist crowd?
barry says:
August 5, 2012 at 6:28 pm
Nope. ‘Variability’ usually refers to weather-like phenomenon, such as the year to year variations in winds, pressure, temps, ocean/atmosphere systems (multi-year) that fluctuate and influence sea ice melt and growth. You introduced the term upthread, seemingly referring to long-term effects. It is the long-term decline, not the interannual variability, that is attributed to AGW.
No one denies that many factors influence sea ice cover and composition year to year. The ‘warmist’ researchers examine these influences extensively, and talk about them publicly. This allows skeptics to cite them when they speak exclusively about weather influence and then argue that therefore they do not believe AGW has an influence. I’m sure there is a name for that logical fallacy…
That would be “phenomena”. As for the ‘warmist’ researchers, they don’t seem to talk about cover and composition in the same breath. Links would be handy, ta, as would be links to peer-reviewed papers regarding observational data that support your – shall we say – argument. Ones without reference to models, for example, as they seem to be merely thought experiments. Love to see those. Empirical data does tend to trump statistics.
In fact, if you’d be so kind as to provide any kind of evidence that what you say is based on fact as opposed to simply the right words, I would be fascinated. Otherwise, spouting the kind of rubbish (interannual means nothing, ducky, and the “long-term” decline is not shown, either in short- or long-term [‘long-term’ in the geologic sense of the phrase]) of which you appear to be so fond does no-one any good at all…
Well. It melts down. May be not this year, but in a few years from now it is going to be ice free.
Not really surprizing!
Try to explain why it is not CO2. You are going to have hard time!
It is interesting that the vote is bimodal with 77 votes at 4.5 and 71 at 4.2 and the rest scattered.
Mike H says:
August 4, 2012 at 3:29 pm
Few people on this site seem alarmed about the disintegration of Arctic sea ice, and the implications for future northern hemisphere climate….
_______________________
MSM alarmist hype is for selling newspapers because Blood sells.
So why are we not alarmed by all the hype?
How about this peer reviewed paper.
Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic
Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado, USA et al
Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ca 11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3° C above 20th century averages, enough to completely melt many small glaciers throughout the Arctic, although the Greenland Ice Sheet was only slightly smaller than at present.
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-2/public-review-draft/sap1-2-prd-all.pdf
Or this one
Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception
Ulrich C. Müller & Jörg Pross, Institute of Geosciences, University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….”
or this Graph
Or this article at WUWT by a Geologist.
It is a long article with a lot of information.
Other info:
600 million year graph of global temperatures – various proxies showing we are at near glacial temps.
Quick cooling to glaciation
Then there is the shorter climate cycles.
The Physical Evidence of Earth’s Unstoppable 1,500-Year Climate Cycle
Possible solar origin of the 1,470-year glacial climate cycle demonstrated in a coupled model
And again we maybe headed into a bond event (COLD) shortly.
From the historical perspective:
1/2 bond events
Of Time and Temperatures
Given a bit of warming or heading into a major cooling cycle possibly leading to “The big one” I will take melting in the Arctic thank you very much. Growing up during the Ice Age scare with a terminal moraine in the backyard (plus copperheads) makes you very aware glaciation is real.
Smokey says: “See, scientific skeptics have nothing to prove. ”
And you are absolutely right. You are free to say “The climate has changed before, and I have no evidence that this current change is anything but natural variability”. But that is NOT the same thing as “The climate has changed before, and I am sure this current change is natural variability”.
Do you see the difference? As long as you are content to say “I don’t know one way or the other” then you indeed have nothing to prove. But you are making a different assertion … that you do know something, which makes you no longer simply a skeptic. Any time you make an assertion that you DO know something, then you need evidence. Just like proponents of AGW need to provide evidence to support their assertions.
The driftwood proxies show that sea ice is still well within its range of natural variability, and natural variability extends further than barry would like to admit; see here for more details of Funder’s analysis:
(This was reported at WUWT at the time)
Gneiss said :
to which Smokey answered :
You reference GISP ice core, which tells something about Greenland’s summit temps up till 1900.
Do you honestly believe that temps at Greenland’s summit up till a century ago somehow ‘disprove’ Gneiss’ statement, let alone proves your own statement that “The planet has been considerably warmer over the past 2,000 years” ?
Spence_UK said :
Could you please provide a reference (WUWT or otherwise) to the claim that “for several thousand years, there was less sea ice in the Arctic Ocean – probably less than half of current amounts” ?
Comparing last weeks Arctic photo to yesterdays the pool of water has shrunk a bit. Refreezing has begun at the webcam.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/NPEO2012/WEBCAM2/ARCHIVE/npeo_cam2_20120806004130.jpg
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/NPEO2012/WEBCAM2/ARCHIVE/npeo_cam2_20120729003243.jpg
Gail Combs quotes Müller et al when he writes :
If early greenhouse gas emissions (thousands of years ago) prevented the inception of a new glacial, then what would current greenhouse gas emissions result in ? Eocene / Miocene climate ?
While we are at it, does anyone here on WUWT have any scientific explanation for why glacial periods started at all (during the early Pleistocene) ? Why did the Pliocene/Miocene climate (with much higher temps and much higher sea levels) not persist ?
Some interesting work on sea levels here: http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/nocs/news.php?action=display_news&idx=654
Bill Illis said :
That would be a nice break from the 100,000 km^2/day losses we have been seeing over the past couple of weeks.
Still, this short-term stall in ‘extent’ reduction can very easily be caused by the initial divergence of sea ice caused by the cyclone that’s moving over the Arctic as we speak.
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/08/cyclone-warning.html#tp
Why don’t we just follow these NSIDC numbers you referred to for the next week or so ?
Do you want to place any bets that your “positive number” assertion will sustain ?
How much of the current arctic melting is promoted by atmospheric particulate matter (light ash from fires, soot from industrialization, volcanic ash from Kamkatcha and the Aleutian arc) ? Coincidentally, I would expect all of this to occur mainly in the Northern hemisphere while it would be almost nonexistent in the Southern hemisphere near the Antarctic. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why despite increasing global temperatures (regardless of the causes), antarctic sea ice does not appear to be affected negatively?
From tjfolkerts on August 5, 2012 at 11:46 pm:
Umm… No. “Within the range of natural variability” is the null hypothesis, which is assumed true until proven otherwise. Like toilets are installed in bathrooms or your cat in your house is alive. If you need to find a toilet in an unfamiliar house, you assume it will be in a bathroom and go looking for a bathroom. You don’t say “I don’t know where a toilet is” and check if one is in the kitchen or the den. While you may be inclined to quip “I don’t know if my cat is alive or dead” you still assume it is alive.
So you say “I know the toilet is in the bathroom” or “I know my cat is alive” until you find evidence to the contrary. That’s how a null hypothesis works, it’s what you know to be true until it’s proven to be not true.
Temperature in Arctic per season:
http://oi56.tinypic.com/vfv70g.jpg
As “warm” as in 40ties. Is the miniscule rise, half of that from the beginning of the century, really that unprecedented?
Eli Rabett said on August 4, 2012 at 5:58 pm:
The “really big picture” is global sea ice area, ignoring the large ice chunks on Greenland and Antarctica?
Perhaps you have a problem working directly with datasets. While that “daily global sea ice anomaly” is supposedly scary looking, it really isn’t. To better examine the figures, I went looking for them. Since I couldn’t find the South Hemispheric data on the Cryosphere Today site where that graph comes from, I scraped together the monthly NSIDC info from here:
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/
Goes from 11/1978 to 7/2012.
After assembling both North and South Hemispherical data into a spreadsheet, then adding them together for Global numbers (blanking out the nulls of course), a linear regression reveals a downward slope for Global sea ice area of -0.816*10^6 km^2 per century. At that rate the area will go to zero late in the year in 4198. Doesn’t seem that scary now, does it?
Of course linear fits are fraught with hazards, as seen when looking at the extent figures. With those the downward slope is -3.816*10^6 km^2 per century, and will hit zero about midway through 2619. Since it’s difficult to have sea ice area without any sea ice extent, unless the “area” is exclusively calculated from slush under the 15% concentration threshold for extent, it’s most likely that neither zero-point year is correct.
In any case, by current linear trends there’s at least about 600 years of sea ice left globally. By the sea ice area, subject of your “really big picture” chart, it’ll be around a lot longer that that. That’s a long time off, and there will undoubtedly be changes like natural climate variability and reductions in human GHG emissions from ordinary economics forces in the meanwhile. Those trends won’t last that long.
So what is there to worry about?
tjfolkerts says:
August 5, 2012 at 11:46 pm
Smokey says: “See, scientific skeptics have nothing to prove. ”
____________________________
Smokey is talking about the Null Hypothesis in science. From the stand point of the scientific method, skeptics have nothing to prove PERIOD end of discussion. You can not wriggle out of the statement of the null hypothesis with any type of reasoning or rhetoric. It is up to climate scientists to prove the null hypothesis is incorrect and they have not done so.
rogerknights says:
August 4, 2012 at 8:36 pm
What’s happening with the military satellite photos pre-1979? I thought some agency was studying them with an eye to extending our knowledge of arctic ice extent back in time.
_______________________________
It did not advance “The Cause” and since they are actual photos they can not fudge the data like they do the temperature record so they buried the results DEEP under the ice.
It is clear that Rob Dekker does not understand the concept of the Null Hypothesis. No wonder he is foundering on the rocks of science. He forgets that scientific skeptics – the only honest kind of scientists – have nothing to prove. And the alarmist crowd cannot prove their way out of a wet paper bag.
Natural variability fully explains the current Arctic ice extent. It has all happened before during the Holocene, and to a greater extent – and prior to the current rise in CO2. It is natural fluctuation, nothing more.
If it were not for pseudo-science, the alarmist contingent wouldn’t have anything with ‘science’ in it at all.
noiv says:
August 4, 2012 at 9:36 pm
Fred asks:
Why does Sea Ice News always just cover the Arctic and not also the Antarctic?
Yeah, that’s funny. Especially because in Summer there is even less sea ice in Antarctic.
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OH? It is summer in the Antarctic? (Do I really need the /sarc?)
Rob Dekker,
There is a link in my previous post to a University of Copenhagen press release which is associated with a paper published in Science. The link may not be terribly obvious – just one word is hyperlinked, the word “here”. Paper is at
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/747.full
Smokey and I have been agreeing (it does happen occasionally!) that the normal glacial/ interglacial cycle is driven by orbital eccentricity cycles which drive temperature changes which drive CO2 changes, with amplification of both changes by positive feedback. This is the natural trend on which any natural short term variation would be superimposed.
The problem with the 20th and 21st century changes is that most of those with an informed opinion regard our current situation as an example of unnatural variation.
This comment from our discussion on another thread seems apposite here too.
Smokey says:
August 5, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Entropic,
Not just on timescales of Ice Ages. On time scales of a few decades, too.
CO2 is a function of temperature. Is there any doubt?
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There is a doubt, or we would not be arguing this point.
At this time we should be seeing temperature and then CO2 driven down by the Milankovich eccentricity changes presaging the next glacial period.
Instead we find ourselves in a new situation. The first intelligent organism on the planet is burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide in large enough quantities to raise the level way beyond normal interglacial levels.
This has reset our climate to a pattern usually seen early in an interglacial as rising insolation triggers increased CO2. We have restarted the positive feedback loop that stabilised some 6000 years ago, with no clear precedent from paleoclimates to guide our analysis of the result.
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wayne Job says:
August 5, 2012 at 12:01 am
….. I see first some decades of rampant solar cycles and a warming phase that followed a cooling phase. This warming pumped some heat into the oceans, the southern ocean deals with this heat easily as Antarctica is an island and has a circular current that mixes and dilutes the warm water in short order.
…..Thus we have a slow thermostat. The melting of ice and the coming northern winter should deal with any warmth that is left in this anomaly.
That the sun has gone on holidays and the world has switched to a cooling phase, I do not like the chances of any time soon having an ice free Arctic.
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The real clincher is the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007 (AR4) intentionally keep out of the report the fact the energy from the sun was INCREASING.
On the same subject Luboš Motl comment is even more revealing. It seems the IPCCs pet “Solar Physicist” isn’t even a Solar Physicist!
u.k. writes,
“I prefer non-fiction.”
OK, that’s one way to science-proof your beliefs. Demand to be shown the data, then refuse to look when it’s offered. But you can prove me wrong: show that your reaction was based on knowledge and not a knee-jerk.
You indicated you knew nothing about the data, so I suggested a good place to start learning. The link you waved away,
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9.html
is Chapter 9, Understanding and Attributing Climate Change, from the WG I report. That’s a bit dated now. We’ve learned a lot about sea ice and other things since 2007, and I could cite newer stuff, but Chapter 9 is still a good place to start. That chapter alone cites results from more than 500 studies. So tell me, what’s the fiction in Chapter 9?
Entropic,
Cutting and pasting your comment from another thread does not make it legit. I showed that on all time scales, from years to hundreds of thousands of years, rises in CO2 follow rises in temperature. Therefore, changes in CO2 are a function of temperature. The only ones who ‘doubt’ that fact have already made up their minds, and are immune to reason and scientific evidence.
Also, I have not written one word about Milankovich eccentricity. So how do you presume that we agree? Is that yet another baseless assumption, like so much else that eminates from the alarmist crowd?