Sea Ice News Volume 3 #15 – Arctic sea ice doubles in October

I don’t know much about this, but it seems obvious from graph 2 that the Arctic ice is disappearing. Even without the 2007 spike, it is going nowhere but down. However, looking at the blue line average around 1979 it looks as though the ice was either stable, or more likely that it reached a peak in the early 80s. The blue straight line looks odd at both ends of the chart and misleading to imply that the ice was thicker before 1979, perhaps it wasn’t.
I am also curious about the little distortion in graph 1 that appears on the lines representing years 2007, 11 and 12. It cannot be a co-incidence. Yet this little feature seems to get earlier in the year – 2 weeks earlier this year than 2011. What is it? What does it mean?

“A behemoth’s final days”
“Helen Czerski charts a most intrepid and storied voyage of an Arctic iceberg”
“The battle has taken its toll. The iceberg only gets seven hours and 40 minutes of daylight now, and soon the darkness will swallow it up completely. Since the supply of energy from the sun is so weak, the siege is over for this year. A winter respite is beginning.
Sea ice is advancing towards the berg from the north. This is the other type of ice at the poles, formed when the sea surface itself freezes. It’s fascinating stuff, because the salt is mostly squeezed out as it freezes, so sea ice is almost fresh. It starts as fragile platelets, and thickens as the water temperature drops. In an average year (out of the past 30 years), the sea ice would already have reached our iceberg. But this year, there was less summer sea ice in the Arctic than any other year on record, so it is taking longer for the great freeze to reach 69N. The sea ice is still crawling south, and when it touches the cliffs I saw, it will connect our iceberg to all the other ice in the Arctic. The iceberg will be frozen in place. Darkness and silence will rule. The bears will be able to walk out on to the sea ice and hunt again.
In the middle of one of my typical frantic workdays, I enjoy imagining where ”our” iceberg is now.”
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/a-behemoths-final-days-20121104-28rp9.html

omnologos says:
November 6, 2012 at 3:29 am
Why can’t there be more ice than 100% (unless 100% is defined as the entire surface of the Earth)?

Interesting article from a few years back. Ask yourself how did the rickety old ship get there. I am distantly related to Captain Banks who discovered the island so the article caught my attention.
http://news.discovery.com/history/abandoned-ship-arctic.html

Excellent article:
MAURICE NEWMAN: LOSING THEIR RELIGION AS EVIDENCE COOLS OFF
Date: 05/11/12Maurice Newman, The Australian
Regrettably for the global warming religion, its predictions have started to appear shaky, and the converts, many of whom have lost their jobs and much of their wealth, are losing faith. Worse, heretic scientists have been giving the lie to many of the prophecies described in the IPCC bible. They could not be silenced.
Once upon a time when Christendom was at its peak, missionaries would be dispatched to the four corners of the globe in search of converts. They believed their mission would expand the influence of Rome and save heathens from eternal damnation.
It was a compelling message. Convert and enjoy everlasting life in the hereafter. The advantage the missionaries had was that the religion they taught had no hypotheses that could be tested. Death – “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns” – meant that the afterlife could be neither proved nor disproved. Faith was the only thing needed.
Climate science is a bit like that – push the rewards and the catastrophes far enough into the future, and have faith that the prophecies will come true. However, unlike heaven, which we may reach at any time, climate prophecies need to be distant enough to make them hard to challenge yet sufficiently close to generate urgent action.
So when in 1969 Paul Ehrlich claimed because of global cooling it was an even-money bet whether England would survive until the year 2000, he could not immediately be proven wrong. After all, this was a cooling period.
Unfortunately for him, England is still inhabited and his predictions are still remembered. Ehrlich is now a warmist. Like a good stock analyst, when the company doesn’t perform as you thought, better to change the recommendation from a sell to a buy, than admit you were wrong.
When Mother Nature decided in 1980 to change gears from cooler to warmer, a new global warming religion was born, replete with its own church (the UN), a papacy, (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and a global warming priesthood masquerading as climate scientists. Selfish humans in rich, polluting countries were blamed for the warming and had to pay for past trespasses by providing material compensation to poor nations as penance. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions became the new holy grail. With a warm wind at their backs, these fundamentalists collected hundreds of billions of dollars from naive governments that adopted their faith on behalf of billions of people. No crusader was ever so effective.
…….
http://www.thegwpf.org/maurice-newman-losing-religion-evidence-cools/

Barg Humer: Yes, it looks like the arctic ice is decreasing, and disappearing like when we used to have to defrost our refridgerators.
However, with each and all of these climate topics, what we have to pay attenion to is what is happening now, plus what has been happening over a much longer term.
The arctic sea ice shows data for 30 yers. Why 30? Why not 20 or 40, or 400?
Because 30 yrs ago is when satellite msmt began. That is it. There is no magic reason for starting in 1979 other than that is when the curent method began.
So the next question is this: for this planet, historically, is this recent 30-year decrease within the normal range of the ebb and flow of nature, or is it unusual / anomolous?
Here is where we need to use common sense. What would you need to answer that question?
You would need data going farther back.
But there is no satellite data going farther back.
So, you look for second-best.
Surely, somewhere in the world, someone has some kind of record.
In fact, if there was some kind of record going back far enough, we could see if this current decrease is only seen in the current days of increasing man-made co2 in the atmoshpere, or if this variaotion is in the normal range.
Some Novembers have more rain than others. Soemtimes this is just in the range of normal variability, and some times it is a change to a new normal.
If you go to “http://www.climate4you.com,” there are tabs / index items on the left side. You can click on “sea ice.” There, it has this “satellite era” data – 1979-present. It also presents a couple data sources – one going back to 1900 – it has the title “Four Arctic Seas” – and the other goes back to 1860, and is titiled “April Ice Extents.”
Are these data sets as good as the satellite data of the recent 30 years? No. However, they do show that it is no longer such a clear issue: these contradict the CO2-warming-arctic ice loss hypothesis.
They have long-term trends suggestive of ice loss, but the trend goes way back before the current period of fosil fuel combustion.
So, instead of going into a panic, we have to scratch our heads, and figure out ever-more creative ways to gather data and otherwise understand what is going on with our planet.
We may be in an apocalypse, and it may be time to hand over the planet to Al Gore and a bunch of international poll watchers, but I would like to be more certain, after seeing these two historical arctic ice data points.
Surely, if we can be confident about the planet back in the dinosaur days, and on Jupiter, then somehow we can glean some info on the arctic ice from before 1980 – espeically since humans have occupied the arctic and have been sailing up there for hundreds of years.
Bottom line: the global warming hypothesis would suggest that these apocalyptic trends be unprecedented – glacier loss, arctic ice loss, etc., and so these trends must arise somewhere in the modern era of fossil fuel consumption/CO2 accumulation; if the trends stretch farther back in time, it does not disprove global warming, manmade, but it is a data point to the contrary and must be reconciled with other data sources in order to be cinfident that we need to hand the keys over to Pinky and the Brain. Also, the other necessity is that these striaght-line trends cannot be simply a phase of an oscillation regularly seen before the current atmospheric CO2 phase – if arctic sea ice, or glaciers, or whatever, wax and wane going back in time, and the curent waxing and waning is in that range of normal, then it does not disprove manmade global warming via SUV, but it contradicts it, and make sthe hypothesis more shaky, less trust-wrothy, and makes me less excited to hand over the keys to Al Gore.
Therefore, whenver faced with some panic-inducing hockey stick, seek out data that goes farther back in time. Look for two things: is the current trend new, or does it fit in the normal oscillaition? And look for: does the long-term trend rpre-date the SUV, or not?

jonny old boy says: @ur momisugly November 6, 2012 at 4:13 am
Arctic sea ice is a headline grabber for sure, but for me the only real “indicator” worth of note is the gradient of the graph lines during July. If this gradient ever changed significantly then would could indeed start head scratching, but, during the most intense “true melt” time, the rate of melt is pretty constant…..
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That deserves repeating because it is the significant metric.
Milankovitch – Roe graph of Jun 65N solar insolation and RATE OF CHANGE of Ice Volume

In defense of Milankovitch by Gerard Roe
Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington
ABSTRACT
The Milankovitch hypothesis is widely held to be one of the cornerstones of climate science. Surprisingly, the hypothesis remains not clearly defined despite an extensive body of research on the link between global ice volume and insolation changes arising from variations in the Earth’s orbit. In this paper, a specific hypothesis is formulated. Basic physical arguments are used to show that, rather than focusing on the absolute global ice volume, it is much more informative to consider the time rate of change of global ice volume. This simple and dynamically-logical change in perspective is used to show that the available records support a direct, zero-lag, antiphased relationship between the rate of change of global ice volume and summertime insolation in the northern high latitudes….

Full Paper (5 pgs) @ur momisugly http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/roe/GeraldWeb/Publications_files/Roe_Milankovitch_GRL06.pdf
Climate scientists keep measuring the wrong parameter it is the CHANGE in the rate of change that shows something different is happening. For example the earth is warming as it comes out of the Little Ice Age. The question is not whether the earth is warming back up but has there been a CHANGE in the rate of warming. The answer is NO!
Only if there has been a change in the rate of change (as shown in Mikey’s Hockey Stick) is there any indication that something different is happening.

garymount says:
November 6, 2012 at 4:38 am
Sea ice normal is not your normal normal, as it’s only 30 years. Other normals in weather are 3 times greater coverage of time, or even a lot more. I expect to see much more ice over the coming years, and no one can say that I am wrong. Time will tell. The science does not exist yet that can predict what the sea ice coverage will be in the future, near term or far.
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I am not so sure about that. Long term I think we can safely say that the chances are better that NYC will be under a mile of Ice again and not under liquid sea water. Hansen just neglected to mention what form (solid) all that “sea level” rise was going to take.
See: WUWT The End Holocene, or How to Make Out Like a ‘Madoff’ Climate Change Insurer for the discussion.
We are in an interglacial and near the end of that interglacial even the warmists acknowledge that.

Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception
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….

The Authors do say there will be no returning Ice Age but that is based on the assumption of “continuously increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and no change in the sun.”

October, magical October. Ah the scientific significance of October. It is a very special month for science is October. So much better than April. No science should happen in April. Especially Artic climate science. Noooo, you don’t want to be doing climate science in the Arctic in April – better spend your time selling dodgy insurance policies to grannies (it’s all these AGW guys are fit for).
Imagine you went to the WUWT sea ice page and did that same graph for April. Would you get the same nice trend do you think? No. You wouldn’t. Which is a little odd. You see, April is right at the end of the Arctic winter when it is completely DARK in the Arctic and there is therefore no heat from the sun – all the heat that is present is trapped by atmospheric gases like CO2. So if global warming was happening right now you’d have expect the winter Arctic to be experiencing unusual melting – but it isn’t. The summer is showing some signs of melting – but in the Summer the Arctic is in permanent daylight. So Summer temperatures are determined by the Sun – more melting in the Summer indicates more warmth coming from the Sun rather than extra greenhouse effect.
What a bunch of shysters Team AGW are. They make me want to lose my lunch.

Maybe “current trend” is a better way to view global ice rather than the term “normal.” The climate is historically trending and changing.

How do the Inuit keep warm during the winter? They build igloos out of compacted snow. The ice cap of the igloo prevents heat from escaping into space. You’d think experts on the Arctic would know this and extrapolate to conclude that an open Arctic ocean results in global colding, not warming.