Sea Ice News Volume 3 Number 14 – Arctic refreeze fastest ever

Caleb
Minimums are always more important, because of insolation. The Earth doesn’t warm with sea ice sitting the dark. The antarctic sea ice doesn’t have a Gulf Stream directed towards it. It doesn’t make sense to compare two very different polar regions. The antarctic sea ice minimum is some sea ice protected in gyres or it would be ice free in it’s summer.
Getting back to the point of this thread, if right now you took an ice breaker down to the antarctic sea ice, you’d be destroying it, but if you took one up to the arctic, you’d be creating sea ice. It doesn’t have to be that cold to make sea ice, but it takes time to remove the heat from a column of ocean. Sea ice is a very dynamic thing in it’s increases and decreases. It’s not a one dimensional temperature factor to make or destroy sea ice.
The arctic sea ice is in a death spiral, because it has lost it’s protection and it’s thick multi-year sea ice. I’ve been following sea ice for a long time and the exits for arctic sea ice to warmer waters has changed. High pressure over Greenland speeds up the Fram Strait and it’s becoming more common. The Nares Strait doesn’t have ice bridges preventing sea ice exiting the arctic like it once did and the Canadian Archipelagos have started to leak and melt multi-year sea ice. Unless sea ice is caught in the Beaufort Gyre, it’s doomed if it wanders into all that open ocean. The gyre feeds the transpolar current, which sends the sea ice towards the Fram and Nares Straits.
There isn’t a physical force keeping all that sea ice bunched together, it’s bunched together because that’s the only place left to survive. Some have hoped the summer melt would slow as the “circumference” became smaller, but the headlines will soon read that the North Pole is ice free. The last of the sea ice will hang around northern Greenland and the Canadian Archipelagos, but it won’t be like the old days when it could pile up and be protected. There are too many exits now to send it to warmer waters.

Mr. Lance, there you go again with attacks and acusations: “I know the facts about climate data and I’m not interested in your pseudo-science games. I didn’t even open the wrapper, because I’ve seen it all before. Skeptics don’t cherry pick data and denialists with an agenda do.”
Your reputation is preceeding you:
Gary Lance says:
October 19, 2012 at 12:53 pm
[snip. Referring to others as deniers violates site Policy. — mod.]
Since you know the facts and you have seen it all before, I am not sure why you waste your precious time here. We will be sure not to waste our time reading your comments since we are well beneath the level of your superior understanding.

P. Solar
What you presented as links wasn’t data or science.
I believe when I see pictures of several hundred glaciers that are melting that heat is involved and the same thing with sea ice. Let me know when the ice I can see stops melting, because I don’t have to believe it’s melting to know for a fact that it is! What is the climate around Patagonia going to be like when all that ice is gone? You might also want to consider the fact that the ice isn’t infinite and the heat will be around when it’s gone. Temperatures and CO2 don’t have to increase to melt all of those glaciers, ice sheets, sea ices, snow covers or permafrosts. Positive feedback will do it with time.
The truth is scientists have understated the warming, because feedbacks are hard to estimate and scientists don’t like to go out on a limb. There is nothing in the cards to make the arctic stay cooler in the future and the Northern Hemisphere where most of the people on Earth stay is going to experience extreme climate change.

We’ve known for at least 40 years what our position on Milankovitch Cycles was and the radiative forcing to produce cooling can be calculated. Both warming and cooling have feedbacks that amplify, but the one with the most force gets the feedbacks. To warm a cooling Earth, all you have to do is overcome the force of a cooling trend with a force of a warming trend and it switches those feedbacks to your side.

What is wrong with this statement?
“The current decadal average surface temperature (2001–2010) at the GISP2 site is −29.9°C. The record indicates that warmer temperatures were the norm in the earlier part of the past 4000 years, including century-long intervals nearly 1°C warmer than the present decade (2001–2010). Therefore, we conclude that the current decadal mean temperature in Greenland has not exceeded the envelope of natural variability over the past 4000 years”
Source: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL049444.shtml
Hint: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt

Crispin in Yogayakarta developing aerosol measuring protocols
What am I trying to say? I said ice and that means all ice. Permafrost doesn’t go all the way to the surface in the summer in many places, so removing it doesn’t increase IR loss from what it originally was. Permafrost can be a hundred feet thick in some locations.
http://weatherblog.kshb.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Snow-Cover.jpg
http://www.motherjones.com/files/images/arctic_snow_cover_anomalies_6-12.png
If you look at that snow cover chart for June, you will notice losing large amounts of snow cover is a recent trend. The second image shows you where it was lost and that’s important because the snow cover in forested areas has a different albedo change than areas of tundra, barren or wetlands.
Glaciers or alpine areas are limited when compared to snow cover near six million square kilometers in June.
Polar areas are important in the summer and once that arctic sea ice is gone, that heat will be around to warm the Arctic Ocean and the land surrounding it. Eventually, there won’t be sea ice present in June.
If that snow cover remains near the 2012 level next year, expect to see another 150 year Greenland meltdown.
Aerosols are hard to accurately estimate for their radiative effect, but most of our aerosols are gone in a week and are only there because they are constantly replaced. According to the EIA, we were down to 36% of our electricity being produced by coal in their last reported month and 38% for the last 12 months. We have the EPA wanting pollution standards enforced and natural gas is much cheaper to use as a fuel. It isn’t that hard to convert a boiler from coal to natural gas. The trend for aerosols in the US is in decline and that means more warming.
Antarctica and Greenland are both losing mass, but the albedo changes are nothing like losing 6 million square kilometers of snow cover. The antarctic sea ice minimum goes back to the same each year and that’s were the albedo effect is important.
CO2 is important in the long run and it’s hard to remove from the atmosphere, but the additional forcing caused by emissions is small compared to all the other forcing. We already have enough to mess up the world.

Gary Lance,
You don’t agree with R.B. Alley because his conclusions do not support your belief system. Typical of the alarmist crowd’s ‘catastrophic AGW’ religion.
This simple animation puts the current global temperature into perspective:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/noaa_gisp2_icecore_anim_hi-def3.gif

D Böehm says:
“You don’t agree with R.B. Alley because his conclusions do not support your belief system. Typical of the alarmist crowd’s ‘catastrophic AGW’ religion.”
Alley, R. B. doesn’t agree with you. His take is the temperature on Greenland varied a lot over time, much like the dates commonly claimed to be the MWP, LIA or any other period of interest.
If you had a good point using GISP2 data, why does everyone doctor the charts? There are about 20 different bogus charts for GISP2 and anyone who has discussed climate change knows it. If you know it, why do you use it?
I gave you a link to all Paleoclimatology Ice Cores Data Sets. Do I have to go to NOAA and get a comparison of yearly ice cores for the present, I was just looking at them yesterday? I told you why I didn’t accept the data and it’s because the present day O18 data from ice cores doesn’t match to a couple degrees, so why should one ice core be accepted as gospel? If you can’t get the present temperature to match using O18, why should the thousands of year old samples be accurate to a degree of temperature? You said the present temperature for the last decade was 29.9 C and that’s lower than the entire Medievel Warm Period. Do you know what was used to get present day data? I know they analyzed many modern ice cores, which could be accurately dated to the year, with visible rings and fallout. It’s not like the data after 1855 does exist and the data has to be better with more samples to average. Between 2000 and 2009, there was probably instrument measurements for that data.

I know when that sea ice volume runs out, there is no extent. I also know the albedo of slush is different than the old sea ice extent.
The latest data I’ve seen has Antarctica losing mass. WAIS will be having problems in the near future.

D Böehm
I’m not going to waste my time trying to convince someone that adding greenhouse gases to a planet heated by the sun and back radiation will cause warming. Pretend you are on Mars, Mercury or the Moon, I don’t care. Governments have better sense and they will figure out when they have gone too far.
I expect another watered down IPCC report and the world will have it’s share of misery if it spends 5 more years for a reasonable analysis. If they blow their feedback calculations like they blew that arctic sea ice free estimate, it will be Hothouse Earth. As it is, I don’t see anything natural for negative feedback, except the chance of a large volcanic eruption.
“And you have no scientific evidence showing that it does.”
You have the calculations on radiative forcing and greenhouse gases don’t have much error. Back radiation can be measured and it isn’t a theory, it’s a fact.
China’s health problems will cause them to reduce aerosols. Paying people to build scrubbers is easier than building cities without populations.
Things don’t naturally warm without a mechanism to make it warm. Nature is a word and concept that behaves according to the laws of Physics. You posted a chart that ended in 1855, which claimed it ended in 2000. There is obviously an effort to distort science, but with the majority of scientists on the payroll of industry, can you explain why they can’t discover this natural mechanism to warm a planet? Big oil has it’s share of Geologists and you have to take a course in Physical Geography to be a Geologist. Don’t you think it’s odd all those Geologists can’t discover a natural mechanism for our present climate change, like they have for past climate change?
The problem with your analysis is, scientists have looked at everything and greenhouse gases are the only thing they found. The equivalent of setting off 400,000 Hiroshima bombs each day sounds like a lot energy to me.

@Gary Young, Rob et al:
Serious question – why does the minimum extent matter so much?
The lower albedo of open water can’t have any warming effect because, by the time it’s reached, the sun ain’t shining up there and won’t be again until march next year. So there is NO sunlight to be reflected. Albedo means nothing when it’s dark.
From the point of view of thin v thick ice, thin ice is pretty much as reflective as thick so, as long as the cover extent (NOT volume) has returned by the time the Arctic sun rises again in March, there isn’t any positive feedback to worry about.
In fact, because the open water in those initial dark months is better at radiating heat (because it’s warmer and has better heat transport properties than ice does), a low minimum extent will have a net cooling effect provided it recovers by next March (when the sun rises again).
If you look at the annual graph, you’ll see that’s exactly what keeps happening. Regardless of the minimum, by the next spring equinox (when the polar sun rises), the cover is invariably back very close indeed to it’s long-term average.
If there’s a flaw in my logic there then please explain where it is? Remember, this is a SERIOUS question and I’m quite willing to be convinced that I’m wrong if you can put your case as (hopefully) clearly as i’ve put mine. Please note that appeals to authority, sarcastic comments and personal attacks are NOT “putting your case”.
I’m not a climate scientist, just a lowly computer science BSc who mends clocks and watches for a living, so I’d prefer a clear, step-by-step logical argument as I’ve offered you. There’s a long-standing tenet that I’ve always subscribed to: if you really understand what you’re saying, you should be able to distill it in this way for non-experts to grasp. Please demonstrate and share your understanding!

http://i46.tinypic.com/2m6ofg6.png
I would take that as a slight positive for the 2012 Arctic melt season. If the freezing area of 2013 even approaches that of 2012 there most likely will be much less open water per average day in the next season, probably along the lines of 2006, 2008 and 2010.