Even journalists get tripped up into thinking this is photo from the North Pole. At the real North Pole, history shows this to be a relatively common occurrence.
It isn’t very hard to catch Al Gore and his Climate Reality project followers in ridiculous claims that don’t hold up. For example there was his statement on national television where he claimed the temperature of the interior of the Earth was “millions of degrees” and then there is his “Climate 101” video that failed so they had to fake the results in post production. None of his followers call him out on such things, so it isn’t a surprise to find that they think this photo proves the North Pole is melting, far worse than before.
Only one problem: that picture wasn’t taken at the North Pole, it was taken over 300 miles away.
You see while they were busy lecturing the faithful, they forgot the one teensy-eeensy little detail about the source of this photo. It is from camera on top of the sea ice, and sea ice isn’t static, it moves. In fact according to the University of Washington who manages and tracks these floating cameras and weather stations, while they started out near the North Pole, they aren’t anywhere close to it now. See the map:
My annotations added, original source: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/
The North Pole Environmental Observatory web page describes their weather stations and webcams as “an automated scientific observatory in the central Arctic ocean” and describes the “Barneo 2013 buoy farm — including webcams.”
This “North Pole melted” image (and variants) got a lot of media play last week, showing the “lake at the North Pole” such as this AtlanticWire story saying “The North Pole has Metled Again” and this Daily Mail story, titled “The North Pole turns into a lake: Webcam captures melting ice following a spell of warm weather“.
That was enough to spur the sans-factually emotive Huffington Post into action with a before and after comparator:
Of course, like the Gore Reality Bots, all of these “journalists” also missed the simple fact that the photo was taken hundreds of miles away where the buoy had drifted to. They could easily check this themselves with about 30 seconds of work, visiting the source for the photo here:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/
Some of the blame for this nonsense goes to the University of Washington’s Dr. James Morison, who manages the page titled: “North Pole Environmental Laboratory”. When that page was put together, the Arctic hadn’t become the poster child for global warming yet, so the the naming was probably innocuous. However, that naming leaves the “webcam at the North Pole” assumption wide open for those that are factually challenged or just too lazy to check.
Using the contact info linked above, I’m sending a letter to Dr. Morison, asking him to fix this issue, naming the page something else, so fools won’t make the same mistake again next year. The webcam/weather station buoys spend most of their lifetime away from the North Pole, so the name of the web page is misleading, as has been aptly demonstrated by the fools in journalism and activism that didn’t look beyond the title this past week.
And, as of today, the “North Pole melt crisis” seems to be over.
And, of course, photos actually taken at the North Pole by the US Navy show that such open water is a regular occurrence in the past:
(U.S. Navy Photo)
UPDATE: NYT’s Andrew Revkin pointed out the same issue is his essay:
A Closer Look at That ‘North Pole Lake’
Revkin has a unique perspective, in that he’s one of the few reporters on the planet that has actually visited the North Pole with a science team.
He notes:
A Web search for “North Pole lake” turns up a lot of hype. I posted a YouTube video trying to clarify what is and isn’t going on:
Ponds of meltwater form routinely on Arctic Ocean sea ice in the summer. The sea ice is floating on the Arctic Ocean and in constant motion. The autonomous camera that took these images was placed on the ice a few dozen miles from the North Pole in early spring, but has since drifted hundreds of miles.
UPDATE2:
I’ve heard back from Dr. Morison at UW. He’s aware of the problem saying:
The lesson I’ve taken from this is that we need to do a much better job of explaining these images. What looks normal to those of us familiar with this particular environment can look alarming if we don’t provide the context.
I expect that we’ll see some improvements to the web page to discourage such future misunderstandings. I thank Dr. Morison for the willingness to engage the issue with me and to consider improvements.
Also very important: Growth of South Pole (Antarctic) ice. Yes, the ice cover in Antarctica has been growing. It constitutes the largest single mass of ice on the planet.
Carrick
Read this. It clearly details the account of the Skate surfacing in what was a hole in the ice. It wasn’t melt water as has been implied here.
http://www.navalhistory.org/2011/08/11/uss-skate-ssn-578-becomes-the-first-submarine-to-surface-at-the-north-pole
Frankly I think you will always hide behind the fact satellites didn’t kick in till the 70’s. But there have been recent studies (Kinnard et el 2011) that show ice extent is way past anything in recent (last 1500 years or so) history…
“Arctic sea ice extent is now more than two million square kilometres less than it was in the late twentieth century, with important consequences for the climate, the ocean and traditional lifestyles in the Arctic1, 2. Although observations show a more or less continuous decline for the past four or five decades3, 4, there are few long-term records with which to assess natural sea ice variability. Until now, the question of whether or not current trends are potentially anomalous5 has therefore remained unanswerable. Here we use a network of high-resolution terrestrial proxies from the circum-Arctic region to reconstruct past extents of summer sea ice, and show that—although extensive uncertainties remain, especially before the sixteenth century—both the duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years. Enhanced advection of warm Atlantic water to the Arctic6 seems to be the main factor driving the decline of sea ice extent on multidecadal timescales, and may result from nonlinear feedbacks between sea ice and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. These results reinforce the assertion that sea ice is an active component of Arctic climate variability and that the recent decrease in summer Arctic sea ice is consistent with anthropogenically forced warming.”
I was rather surprised at the number of mainstream media outlets that carried this story without bothering to fact check it. Livescience, HuffPo, CBS News, The Atlantic Wire, etc. It’s also took me all of about 30 seconds to spot the error.
Accuweather reported it correctly and added some information in the comments from Dr Morison where he noted that buoy with cam #2 was placed in a low spot with deeper snow that contributed to the formation of the melt pond.
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-blogs/weathermatrix/did-the-media-just-prove-north-pole-is-not-melting/15739869
Of course many alarmists think that 350 miles is close enough and the message is more important than facts or accurate reporting.
And still the drivel keeps flowing. Propaganda masquerading as news.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23346370
Irony is lost on the journos who write this garbage. We hear about Alaskans allegedly “suffering because of a problem they did nothing to cause”, ie ‘fossil fuel induced climate change and yet in every picture we see fuel tanks, petrol powered snow mobiles, motor bikes, ice drills…
I doubt that there will be much of a follow up story in ten years time when the dea level has risen 1cm and the town is still thriving.
Lew Skannen
I think you will find the point of the article is the island is no longer protected for long periods by the ice so the sandy base is at the mercy of the sea and its waves.
Here is a copy of my letter to the editor of the DM.
To the Editor.
Sir,
I doubt that you are interested in learning about the inaccuracies incorporated in some of the stories the paper prints, but in the case of the egregious article about the North Pole Automated Observatory in the Arctic Ocean, I am prompted to contact you.
The author entirely missed the point that the weather station wasn’t at the North Pole, when the photograph was taken, it was positioned over 300 miles away.
NP_buoy_drift_map_annotated
That is an extremely crass mistake to make & I suggest her future contributions are vetted by a responsible adult, in order that such abysmal accounts are avoided.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/29/al-gores-reality-minions-think-the-north-pole-is-melting-except-thats-not-a-photo-of-the-north-pole/
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/
Yours truly.
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
For those persons who are basing their AGW/CO2dangers/carbon tax+ beliefs on “evidence” such as that the North pole melt is due to man-made causes, please read this.
It has “melted” in the recent past several times – 1959, 1962, 1987. All before the ‘dreaded’ global warming hoax took hold.
Not only that, but the photographic evidence of this year’s melt is incorrect.
Time to have a deeper think about your beliefs, perhaps?
Simon says: July 29, 2013 at 9:44 pm,
The submarine surfacing at the north pole in 1958 is not in any way a useful measure of the thickness of ice, nor is it a comparison of ice’s thickness then and now. When the seaman says: “Heavy ice, ten feet.” How could he possibly measure that by looking through a tiny glass prism from a depth of 180 feet? I imagine “ice, ten feet” simply means any ice that’s too thick to surface in, not that it’s literally ten feet thick.
Second you give a quote from a climate science paper, which is actually very telling. It says:
You say “..you will always hide behind the fact satellites didn’t kick in till the 70’s” but the quote from the paper you give actually confirms that we knew little about ice’s thickness or extent until the satellite era. Why do you pretend to know better?
The paper goes on to reinforce this view by saying that it’s the first time anyone has really had a stab at trying to determine the ice’s past thickness. But they still really don’t know, because:
Now for the cause of the alleged, possible ice loss:
Hmmm, so it’s actually warm water from the Atlantic that’s melting the ice. What happened to global warming? Oh yeah, here it comes:
The phrase “consistent with” in this context means “not contradicting”. It’s really a way for a scientist to say something without saying anything at all. It means it might be related to global warming, but then again it might not.
To the global warming zealot however, the phrase “consistent with” is interpreted as “proves”.
While it is true that the evidence for ice extent and thickness is much less comprehensive before satellite imagery it is self-serving and disingenuous to claim that therefore no credible conclusions can be drawn about the Arctic ice before the mid seventies.
For obvious commercial reasons the edge of the ice was closely monitored by shipping businesses along the Russian, Scandinavian and Canadian coast. The cold war polar flights and sub patrols also provide good data, after it was declassified.
The bottom line is that we can be as certain as we are about the heliocentric solar system that Arctic ice has not melted out to this extent in the summer since at least the Holocene optimum around 7000 years ago.
In the years from which the sub pictures are taken the edge of the ice was known and was far further in extent than it has been for the last few decades. The Arctic ice is melting out each summer to an extent unseen during the history of human civilisation because of the polar amplification factor which was a primary prediction from AGW theory. Trying to minimise the impact of this known change by casting spurious doubt on the pre-satellite data and posting dubious pictures of surfacing subs looks like the actions of people unable to accept reality and desperately looking for any excuse to reject the clear import of the rid disappearance of the polar ice.
By the way there is clear evidence that the Antarctic land ice is shrinking significantly as well. The winter ice extent may be larger as a result of a warmer circumpolar environment increasing fresh water input. But the summer extent and the land ice at the south pole are both shrinking like the north pole.
Excellent. Even alarmists cannot now be fooled, or can they?
Formation and lifecycle of melt ponds in Arctic sea is fully natural phenomenon and happens every symmer. The melt pond formation was first explained in detail by russian scientist Zubow at 1943:
http://archive.org/stream/arcticice00zubo#page/276/mode/2up
Also this paper covers the subject quite well:
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de/seaice/amsredata/modis/sea_ice_papers_database/ponds_in_situ_meas/Fetterer_Untersteiner_1998.pdf
izen says:
July 30, 2013 at 2:49 am
“By the way there is clear evidence that the Antarctic land ice is shrinking significantly as well. The winter ice extent may be larger as a result of a warmer circumpolar environment increasing fresh water input. But the summer extent and the land ice at the south pole are both shrinking like the north pole.”
So wrong it’s quite scary.
The only observation of any land ice shrinking over in Antarctica is based in the peninsula. Why would winter ice extent increase with freshening of water (not even observed here) when plenty of observed water freshening, is occurring in the Arctic and there sea ice is declining generally. There is no sign or evidence/observation that the Antarctica continent is melting like the Arctic, please stop telling lies. How can the land get warmer while the sea ice increases when Antarctica’s main energy source is from much warmer oceans hundreds of miles away. The continent is far from not warm enough for any melt even during mid-summer, the only exception is the peninsula that because of it’s location is in a different climate zone anyway.
@-Matt G
“There is no sign or evidence/observation that the Antarctica continent is melting like the Arctic, please stop telling lies. ”
There are several observations confirming that the Antarctic land ice is melting as any search would have confirmed. To claim that it is only on the peninsula or insignificant is … So wrong its scary.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Grace/news/grace20121129.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Grace/multimedia/chart20121129.html
“In a landmark study published Thursday in the journal Science, 47 researchers from 26 laboratories report the combined rate of melting for the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica has increased during the last 20 years. Together, these ice sheets are losing more than three times as much ice each year (equivalent to sea level rise of 0.04 inches or 0.95 millimeters) as they were in the 1990s (equivalent to 0.01 inches or 0.27 millimeters).”
Matt, you really should check your facts before accusing others of lying to avoid looking ignorant when the vast majority of the evidence shows that no lie has been told.
At least, not by me.
While it is clear that this year may not be a record melt out matching last year, the amount of ice left in the Arctic is already so depleted that even a small melt this year will still exceed most of the last decade and the minimum ice extent and volume is much less than seen since the Holocene optimum when perihelion was in the Arctic summer.
Can anyone explain what scientific point the pictures of submarines surfacing in the Arctic are meant to make?
That gaps, leads, in the ice can open up at any time any where especially after storms is well known, but it has little relevance to total ice volume or extent.
There are multiple measures of the past Arctic ice which all confirm that the present melt has not been matched in the last few millennia. Pictures of subs in the Arctic do nothing to refute or falsify those multiple measures, so what IS the point of posting these pictures ?
So, if everything was hunky dory in ‘no global warming land’, and it was business as usual in the Arctic, what would this picture look like?
/rhetorical question.
It’s frustrating to take nature’s flair for dramatica and have it amplified to the ignorant masses as a symbol of the story being promoted.
ATTENTION ANTHONY or MODERATORS,
One caught in the blackhole. Please rescue it?
Please delete this one.
Thanks!
[??? Don’t see anything stuck in the “spam” filter. Mod]
izen says:
July 30, 2013 at 2:49 am
“…that Arctic ice has not melted out to this extent in the summer since at least the Holocene optimum around 7000 years ago.”
So you admit that CO2 is not necessary for the Arctic to melt “to this extent”. And for the global temperatures to be higher than now. Since, CO2 was not necessary then it probably is not necessary now.
izen says:
July 30, 2013 at 5:48 am
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Grace/news/grace20121129.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Grace/multimedia/chart20121129.html
——————————————————————————————————
“There are several observations confirming that the Antarctic land ice is melting as any search would have confirmed. To claim that it is only on the peninsula or insignificant is … So wrong its scary.”
The first link shows no data in supporting melt in Antarctica, I didn’t disagree with Arctic melting.
The 2nd link is based on gravity and is a poor way of judging ice loss, this site explained why years ago. How can you distinguish the compacting of ice with lice loss for example? Ice loss is not the same as ice melt, there are numerous reasons for ice loss even if this proxy was correct.
“Matt, you really should check your facts before accusing others of lying to avoid looking ignorant when the vast majority of the evidence shows that no lie has been told.”
The links do not support any of the claims you mentioned regarding Antarctica melting. Ice loss can be defined by numerous mechanisms and melt is just one of them. The continent is too cold for ice to melt, this is where you are wrong. The majority of the continent is -10c and below during it’s warmest periods in summer. Ice loss can be caused by sublimation and ice shelves breaking off in their natural way. A decrease in precipitation over years leads to losses more than gains even when well below zero centigrade. There is nothing there to indicate the ice melted like in the Arctic.
The Arctic ice is mainly influence by ocean cycles like AMO over a 60 year period where both warming and cooling occur. Antarctica is not influenced by short cycles like these so it represents the changing climate better. The pictures of submarines just show that ice free areas in the Arctic are normal and what’s happening over recent decades is not unusual so far. Just wait until the AMO changes again and then see what happens in the Arctic. Even if the Arctic ice was to all melt in future it would still be there for about 11 months of the year. The winter ice would still be as huge as ever in area. It is the ice coverage that affects humidly and atmospheric behaviour, volume has no influence on this. We know little about ice volume and the data too short to make any worthwhile comparisons. We don’t have yet reliable Arctic data that covers both a warming and cooling period of the planet Earth..
RE: izen says:
July 30, 2013 at 5:48 am
To speak with any certainty about the thickness and extent of arctic ice in the times before we could look down at the Pole with satellites is stepping out on a limb. At best it is educated guessing, and there is quite a range in the educated guesses.
Stepping out on a limb, my own guess is that there is a cycle of thickening and thinning ice, related to the warmth or coolness of influxes of water through the Bering Strait from the Pacific, or as an extension of the Gulf Stream from the Atlantic.
As ideas such as the AMO and PDO are relatively new, and still being studied, our understanding of any sort of “sixty-year-cycle” is incomplete, however there does seem to be some basis for surmising that the satellite era has only witnessed the first half of such a cycle, and the thirty years we have witnessed has been the “melting half” of the cycle.
There do seem to be enough reports of past melting to suggest ice extent was decreased in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Also there are parts of northeast Greenland that were accurately mapped by sailing ships back around 1820, and that simply could not have been done unless those coasts were surprisingly ice-free for a while. These bits of historical fact suggest earlier times of melting, as well as times of refreezing.
Now let me step back in off this limb.
@-Matt G
“The first link shows no data in supporting melt in Antarctica, I didn’t disagree with Arctic melting.”
The first link, third paragraph, third sentence :-
“The new estimates, which are more than twice as accurate because of the inclusion of more satellite data, confirm both Antarctica and Greenland are losing ice. Combined, melting of these ice sheets contributed 0.44 inches (11.1 millimeters) to global sea levels since 1992.”
Now I suppose you could quibble and claim the land ice in Antarctica does not actually melt until it reaches the sea, but the fact is that BOTH poles are losing ice at unprecedented rates as confirmed by both gravity measurements and land based altimetry.
@- mkelly
“So you admit that CO2 is not necessary for the Arctic to melt “to this extent”. And for the global temperatures to be higher than now.”
Yes, during the Holocene when the Milankovitch cycle resulted in almost as much extra solar energy warming the N hemisphere summer as is now added by the rising CO2 the summers were just about as warm as now and the ice may well have melted almost as much.
Stuff warms and melts for a reason, energy has to be added from somewhere. We know where the extra energy came from to end the last ice age and cause the warm summers in the Northern hemisphere around 8000 years ago.
And we know the source of the extra energy that is warming both summers and winters and melting the ice at both poles in the present.
izen says:
July 30, 2013 at 9:00 am
Yes, during the Holocene when the Milankovitch cycle resulted in almost as much extra solar energy warming the N hemisphere summer as is now added by the rising CO2
Please tell how CO2 adds energy?
Just curious. What are those mountains visible in the distance in the melt picture?
Is it normal to see mountains from the North Pole in any particular direction?
izen;
No.
There are NO explicit satellite “measurements” of any ice melting trends or year-to-year for either Greenland nor the Antarctic. There are no “measurements of either original ice weight/thickness/area/contours NOR of the underlaying continental rock nor is there a “difference” from a baseline “measurement” of either the Greenland or Antarctic land masses/sunken sea beds.
What there is a single ice borehole to Greenland’s baseline rock near the middle of ONE area of ONE part of ONE cross-section of that massive island. And two (or three) boreholes of the mountaintops AROUND the massive Greenland ice cap. You are telling us how much the Appalachian Mountains have gone up in the past 30 years based on 2 years of elevation changes of Manhattan’s granite and Chicago’s landfilled area of 1879. Plus one measurement of the height of Mount Washington in New hampshire.
The GRACE satellite measurements are ONLY “differences” of minutely small gravitation attractions as the paired satellites fly OVER Greenland and Antarctica (and the rest of the ocean and land continental rocks and ocean floor masses. Then that data is interpreted (hopefully correctly) by ASSUMING that the movement (up, down, expansion, contraction and compression, magma etc) of the total land mass of the granite base UNDER the ice is exactly known AND the exact original and final ice elevation and mass are known.
THEN the gravity (mass) differences that are measured by the two satellites – assuming they are working as theoretically defined) are calculated AS IF all of the changes were due SOLELY to ice mass loss. If the land mass is changing, these assumed results are wrong, and ice mass may be either increasing or decreasing.
It is absolutely known that certain areas of the Greenland ice cap are increasing their depth significantly (by hundreds of feet of net ice increase) since the 1940’s and 1950’s. Rather than “change in mass measured => reduction in mass of ice”, the math works out equally well as “increase of ice mass => greater compression of rocks under ice” .
So, you are relying entirely on those “dozens of scientists” whose current life, current funding, and future work and entire reputation and publishing history is dependent on finding ice loss in Greenland. Is that …. “peer review” only 97% accurate?
izen says:
July 30, 2013 at 9:00 am
That is the difference between the two, Arctic ice melts due to mainly warmer ocean temperatures influencing the local climate, where temperatures go above zero centigrade. Antarctica estimated ice losses are due to movement of shelves that break up under stress in much deeper and warmer parts of the ocean where they melt. Combined melting of these ice sheets in paragraph 3 don’t say where the source of melt is. Due to area and ice pressure of the continent it can only support a certain threshold of ice. This over thousands of years continues to fall when ice breaks up and then take time to move to previous ice levels with further build up in snow. It obviously takes longer for snow to build up than a massive chunk to just break off.
You excoriate the NPEO for their photographs, and then show a bunch of submarines surfaced with captions implying inaccurate locations and times. Classic.
Here’s the actual SKATE 1958 N. Pole image: http://navsource.org/archives/08/575/0857824.jpg
And another one with SEADRAGON in 1962: http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0857805.jpg