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.
Oh, yes, and additionally, you are absolutely correct the NPEO buoy image isn’t at 90 north. However, here’s something showing the area close to there:
http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r04c04.2013211.terra
Scale across the bottom is about 400KM. North Pole is in the lower left hand corner.
So, Anthony, have any mid-20th century images of the same area at about the same date, showing the pack broken up with so much open water? I thought not.
@Jeff Allen – got any mid 20th century photos showing solid ice on the same date on the same time of the area?
Thought not.
A few years ago I sent those pictures of the submarines that had surfaced at the North Pole during the last century in an email to an environmentalist friend who is a rabid believer in the AGW scam. The email was captioned “OPEN WATER AT THE NORTH POLE!” My friend refused to reply to the email and wouldn’t respond to anything I sent for a couple of months. His lack of response told me that the email had made it’s point.
In the current information age, it is impossible for even well-educated people to keep up with the tremendous volume of information that is available to them, and it is easy to hoodwink anyone. That is why it pays to be skeptical about all things.
Sorry, not to sidetrack unduly here, but to Jim S, all the way up top: regardless of what Disney may or may not have done, they did NOT “create” the lemming suicide “myth.”
As far back as 1941, James Thurber published his short story, “Interview With A Lemming,” which of course references that behavior. It may be true, it may be false, but it NOT Disney’s invention.
We should look for evidence that the Warmies are out there correcting this epic fail. Surely the AGW “scientists” and prophets like Hansen, Mann, Gavin, Gore, Jones, Ehrlich, McKibben, Trenberth, Pachauri, Serreze, Stroeve, Nye, Heidi Cullen, ( etc … ) are on the job trying to set the record straight? What about their vocal online contingent like Romm, Connolley, Tamino, Cook, Lewandowsky, Dana Nutcase, Gleick, Mooney, Bart Verheggen, Eli Rabbett, Joel Shore, Michael Tobis, Phil., R. Gates, telford, sceptical, Sun Spot, JJThoms, Louise, Rattus, LazyTeenager, jai mitchell, izen ( ad nauseum … ) ? Surely they will be running over to those sites correcting this incredibly embarrassing lie in the same manner they drop by here to nitpick some minor little thing that irks them so.
How about our “neutral” fence-sitting friends like Mosher, Fuller, Nick Stokes? What is the point of thousands of man-hours analyzing databases full of climate minutia when an enormous error like this comes along to swamp all that work and plants a radically incorrect notion into the public consciousness? Are they out there trying to squash this huge propaganda-fest? Somehow I doubt it.
The truth of the matter is that these are the crazy tales that shape public opinion, not the alleged fraction of a fraction of a degree temp delta or watts per square meter that they want to waste our time and money on. For the majority of those people listed above they actually benefit from these lies because the sheeple are led in the “proper direction” – AGW catastrophe. I say that any of those alleged scientists and commenters who are not out there ridiculing this and other mistakes are complicit in this lie and most likely welcome it because it serves their purpose. Surely there is a link somewhere, maybe at Judith Curry’s of Mosher and Stokes setting the record straight? We can’t leave it all up to Revkin alone to fix this egregious error which wouldn’t even have legs if it wasn’t for the daily AGW alarmism these people support or give quiet approval to.
Let’s recap. In addition to this North Pole melting nonsense we have two other recent examples of uber-crazy, and like clockwork they always seem to pop up at this time of year when the sun is shining a little more directly at the Northern Hemisphere. This one completes a Trifecta …
Global Warming To Boil The Ocean
NASA predicts 8 degrees of warming in the US by 2100
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/
That’s just in the last three days! I suggested Steve Goddard dig into the newspaper archives to see if there are any historical examples of this magnitude of crazy, but I highly doubt there will be anything even close, well not since witches were last drowned or burned at the stake. We are in a new era now. The Ehrlich-Hansen-Mann-Gore era of crazy.
Simon, I’m not “hiding” behind anything—lack of credible evidence is just that.
And there are other plausible models that explains the excess ice loss.
I was aware of Kinnard 2011 and am incredibly underwhelmed by it.
I appreciate the navy history link. Thank you.
izen:
I am afriad you’re mistaken about this. The evidence for ice loss is controvertible, starting with this: Mass Gains of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Exceed Losses.
As was correctly discussed above, the main evidence of increased interior ice loss comes from GRACE. Almost the entire ice loss “signal” is actually from a model, not data. (The seeming ice loss is due almost entirely to an adjustment for isostasy, on a continent that is heavily under instrumented and so is poorly understood, with no data that show any particular sign of ice mass loss in and of itself.)
There is a bit of discussion here, and some good back and forth on the two views + references.
The key point is the GCMs predict long term ice gain on the continent. There is no plausible model to explain the excess continent ice mass loss and the more recent corrections to GRACE’s modeling suggest rather smaller isostatic corrections than were present previously.
The Times of London, the original paper of record gets into the act… (paywalled in part)
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/weather/article3829757.ece
Weather Eye: melting Arctic ice
Paul Simons
Published at 12:01AM, July 31 2013
In future, we might now expect there to be nearly ice-free summers across much of the Arctic Ocean
The North Pole is melting. A big lake is all that can be seen on a webcam at the North Pole. The surface ice has melted into small pools that have joined up to form a large lake of meltwater. A time-lapse animation of this summer’s vanishing ice can be seen at 1.usa.gov/14JLdxT Unusually high temperatures over the Arctic Ocean — currently 1-3C above normal — have caused the ice to melt. Once warm air causes the surface ice to melt it sets off a vicious cycle as the open water traps more heat from the Sun and causes further melting.
In future, we might now expect there to be nearly ice-free summers across much of the Arctic Ocean.
http://news.yahoo.com/north-pole-lake-vanishes-204642659.html
Oops it refroze but it is still AGW
A simple adjustment would be a note: “Distance as the Arctic tern flies to the Pole: 300 miles. Due north.” In bold.
l;p
Ya, ya, Except that the dark water is at a sharp angle to the sun, and is radiating far more heat to space than it’s taking in. Negative feedback, doncha know?