A grand experiment is being conducted in the Arctic this year that may not only falsify a prediction made in 2007, but may also further distance a connection between Arctic air temperature and sea ice decline.
You may have noticed the countdown widget at the top of the right sidebar. I’ve been waiting for this event all summer, and now that we are just over a month away from the Autumnal Equinox at September 22, at 20:44 UTC., (4:44PM EDT) signifying the end of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, this seemed like a good time to start the countdown. If there is still significant ice (1 million square kilometers or more as defined by Zwally, see below) in place then, we can consider that this claim by Maslowski in 2007 to be falsified:
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm
What is most interesting though, is that Arctic temperatures seem to be in early decline, ahead of schedule by about 30 days compared to last year’s record melt:
Figure 1A: Overlay of temperature plots for 2012 and 2013 from the Danish Meteorological Institute.
Note that in Figure 1A, for 2013 the temperature has fallen below that which is needed to freeze seawater (approximately -1.8°C according to Peter Wadhams) at 271°K (-2.15°C). It is also approximmately 30 days ahead of the date that the temperature fell to the same value last year, and so far, the current situation with early colder temperature seems to be unique in the DMI temperature record back to 1958. However, it is worth noting that DMI has a caveat not to take the actual temperatures too literally.
…since the model is gridded in a regular 0.5 degree grid, the mean temperature values are strongly biased towards the temperature in the most northern part of the Arctic! Therefore, do NOT use this measure as an actual physical mean temperature of the arctic. The ‘plus 80 North mean temperature’graphs can be used for comparing one year to an other.
As if on cue for that caveat, shortly after I prepared figure 1A, DMI updated their plot to show a bit of a rebound:
Figure 1B DMI plot for today.
But there are other indications, for example this plot from NOAA ESRL, showing air temperatures well below freezing in the region:
Figure 2: Surface air temperatures in C Source: NOAA ESRL – Click the pic to view at sourceAnd, extent this year is ahead of extent for this time last year and within the standard deviation range (grey shading):
Figure 3: Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) – Centre for Ocean and Ice – Click the pic to view at sourceAfter a new record low in Arctic sea ice extent in 2012, the phrase “Nature abhors a vaccum” comes to mind as indicators suggest this melt season may end earlier than usual. The earliest that a turn in Arctic melt season was recorded in the satellite record was on September 2nd, 1987. With 14 days to go, will we see an earlier turn?
If we do, it might suggest (as many believe) that sea ice melt is directly tied to air temperature and the effects of increased CO2 on air temperature via the polar amplification we are often told about where the Arctic is the fastest warming place in the world.
Figure 4: The map above shows global temperature anomalies for 2000 to 2009. It does not depict absolute temperature, but rather how much warmer or colder a region is compared to the norm for that region from 1951 to 1980. Global temperatures from 2000–2009 were on average about 0.6°C higher than they were from 1951–1980. The Arctic, however, was about 2°C warmer. Based on GISS surface temperature analysis data including ship and buoy data from the Hadley Centre.
Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_amplification
If the melt continues, and turns around the normal time, which is usually +/- 5 days of the Autumnal Equinox on September 22nd, then we can assume other forcings are dominant this year, such as ocean currents and cycles like the AMO, winds, and ocean temperature below the sea ice. There’s also the unanswered question of the effects of black carbon soot.
If in spite of the early drop in temperatures, the Arctic sea ice extent ice drops below 1 million square kilometers, as NASA’s Jay Zwally famously predicted (with an assist from AP’s Seth Borenstein): “…the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012″ then most certainly all bets are off.
But if we see an early turn, it will falsify Maslowski’s and Zwally’s forecasts. Also, if the melt marches on despite the colder temperatures, it will force a reconsideration of what is really driving Arctic melt patterns.
Interestingly, the final ARCUS sea ice forecast has been published on August 16th,and the ranges of predictions are quite broad, spanning 2.2 million square kilometers from the most optimistic NOAA’s Msadek et al. at 5.8 msq/km to the perennially gloomy “Neven” whose Artic Sea Ice blog poll predicts 3.6 msq/km.
See http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2013/august
They write:
The Sea Ice Outlook organizers decided, with input from contributors and readers, to skip an August report this year in favor of a more thorough post-season report.
However, we provided this webpage to post and share individual contributors¹ August outlooks; the individual outlooks are below.
Since ARCUS didn’t plot them, I’ve plotted all the participant forecasts below.
Figure 5: plot of September Arctic Sea Ice Extent Mean forecasts submitted to ARCUS in August 2013.
Interestingly, I discovered that Robert Grumbine has participated in two forecasts (Wu and Wang) as a co-author, each with a different prediction, so that seems rather odd to me.
WUWT’s value is based on a weighted calculation of the top five vote getters in our poll here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/11/sea-ice-news-volume-4-3-2013-sea-ice-forecast-contest/
The most popular value picked by WUWT readers was 5.0 msq/km 8.9% (94 votes), though it wasn’t a runaway vote, hence I opted for a weighted average of the top 5 vote getters.
Most importantly, none of the ARCUS forecasts participants suggested an ice-free Arctic, which is bad news for Maslowski’s prediction.
No matter what happens, we live in interesting times.
As always the WUWT Sea Ice reference page has interesting plots of data at a glance: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
UPDATE: Commenter “jimbo” adds in comments –
Here is a compilation of ice-free Arctic Ocean / North Pole predictions / projections from scientists for the past, present and future.
Xinhua News Agency – 1 March 2008
“If Norway’s average temperature this year equals that in 2007, the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away, which is highly possible judging from current conditions,” Orheim said.
[Dr. Olav Orheim – Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat]
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Canada.com – 16 November 2007
“According to these models, there will be no sea ice left in the summer in the Arctic Ocean somewhere between 2010 and 2015.
“And it’s probably going to happen even faster than that,” said Fortier,””
[Professor Louis Fortier – Université Laval, Director ArcticNet]
__________________
National Geographic – 12 December 2007
“NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.” ”
[Dr. Jay Zwally – NASA]
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BBC – 12 December 2007
“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,”…….”So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”
[Professor Wieslaw Maslowski]
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Independent – 27 June 2008
Exclusive: Scientists warn that there may be no ice at North Pole this summer
“…..It is quite likely that the North Pole will be exposed this summer – it’s not happened before,” Professor Wadhams said.”
[Professor Peter Wadhams – Cambridge University]
__________________
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Vol. 40: 625-654 – May 2012
The Future of Arctic Sea Ice
“…..one can project that at this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty associated with such an estimate, it does provide a lower bound of the time range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover…..”
[Professor Wieslaw Maslowski]
__________________
Yale Environment360 – 30 August 2012
“If this rate of melting [in 2012] is sustained in 2013, we are staring down the barrel and looking at a summer Arctic which is potentially free of sea ice within this decade,”
[Dr. Mark Drinkwater]
__________________
Guardian – 17 September 2012
“This collapse, I predicted would occur in 2015-16 at which time the summer Arctic (August to September) would become ice-free. The final collapse towards that state is now happening and will probably be complete by those dates“.
[Professor Peter Wadhams – Cambridge University]
__________________
Sierra Club – March 23, 2013
“For the record—I do not think that any sea ice will survive this summer. An event unprecedented in human history is today, this very moment, transpiring in the Arctic Ocean….”
[Paul Beckwith – PhD student paleoclimatology and climatology – part-time professor]
__________________
Financial Times Magazine – 2 August 2013
“It could even be this year or next year but not later than 2015 there won’t be any ice in the Arctic in the summer,”
[Professor Peter Wadhams – Cambridge University]
__________________
Ian W says:
August 18, 2013 at 6:03 pm
“…(Not a single word has been said in the UK House of Commons about the death rates from cold – because the MPs do not care…”
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I have made this point many times. It also applies to the BBC. It tells you volumes about the society that we live in. Something we should be ashamed about.
If there is a multiple car crash on a motorway, or a train crash, or similar involving just 3 or more deaths, it frequently makes the news. Enquiries are set up in the case of rail deaths etc. where the number of deaths involved are quite modest.
Just think how much money is spent on improving road safety which at most will save less than a 100 lives, probably no more than a handful a year.
Recently, there have been many reports about failings in the National Health Service and the effect of these failings on death rates in hospitals. This has run to hundred or a few hundred in a couple of hospitals and in the worse offending one perhaps up to about 1000. Quite rightly there has at long last been some publicity regarding this scandal, but for a long time it was covered up, there not being the political will to address, or MSM’s desire to attack what it considers to be a sacred institution that can do not wrong since it is run and staffed by angels.
AND YET, nothing is said or done about thousands of people (some estimates run to tens of thousands) dying prematurely needlessly as a consequence of the UK’s energy policy. Not a wisper. There is no political will to address this issue since it is the result of failings in their energy policy, and coupled with the paltry value of the state pension (which is by far the lowest in developed Europe). It is also not helped by poor old and damp housing stock, much of which should have been knocked down 50 years ago.
The MSM do not wish to raise this point since to do so, would seriously dent their sacred cow, namely AGW. If people were truly informed that one significant effect of the UK response to AGW was that each year tens of thousands of people are dying prematurely in the cold because of fuel poverty and this was only to get worose since energy prices will double within short period of time because of subsidies, high cost of energy from renewables etc., then there would be huge public backlash. This would almost certainly turn the majority of public opinion against AGW/Climate Change, and certainly against UK policy response; which is a futile guesture not resulting in either a significant reduction in CO2 emissions that UK factually emits, nor in reducing global temperatures, and only results in inefficient and unreliable expensive energy production which few can afford and which will lead inevitable to energy rationing (either forcefully via smart meters, energy brown outs etc, or voluntarily since people will be unable to afford to buy as much energy as they would wish to do so, and will therefore self ration how much they use).
Now I do not like making predictions about the future, but if the recent trend of cold winters continues (since 2000, CET suggests that these past 13 years, winter temps have fallen by almost 1.5degC and the Met Office and Government give the impression of being in denial of this fact, and are locked into a global pause in temperature rise, as opposed to considering local trends dirrectly experienced by the UK), I would suggest that sometime before 2020, and quite possibly within the next 5 years, it will become apparent how UK energy policy has failed, how exposed the UK is to unreliable and/or expensive energy and the human toll this is taking. I expect to see this edifice crumble quite quickly as more and more stories emerge in MSM regarding the winter mortality dats and increasing numbers of old and vulnerable people dying prematurely in fuel poverty.
Of course, that is only a prediction, or should i say projection based on short term trends of a non linear chaotic climate system, and like any prediction about the future, it should be taken with a large pinch of salt; the weather will do what the weather will do, and time will tell.
Increased albedo plays a role. If earlier in the summer you get reduced surface melt then more snow remains on the ice, and snow has a significantly higher albedo than sea ice. Plus, as I explained earlier, one year sea ice has much less embedded black carbon than older multi-year ice and therefore has a higher albedo when exposed.
http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/processes/albedo.html
Rather than an Arctic sea ice ‘death spiral’. Older dirty ice has been replaced by new clean ice and this through increased albedo causes cooling, driving increased ice extent and over multiple years increased ice volume.
Dennis Ray Wingo says:
August 18, 2013 at 11:25 pm
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I have before seen people claim that there is sat evidence of less ice cover taken in the 60s and early 70s, but I have never seen those photographs. If you have a link to some of the images taken in the 60s and 70s, that would be very useful.
Of course we know from the US nuclear submarine trips in the late 50s, that ice was thinner and probably less extensive back in the late 50s tahn it is today. There are some photographs of these subs surfacing in the far north in August.
As far as an ice free Arctic is concerned, is it not almost certainly the case that there would have been many ice free summers during the MWP. Some dispute to what extent the MWP was global, but we know as fact (from Viking settlements and farming in the area and trees which are presently engulfed under glaciers but were growing in Viking times) that Greenland was many degrees warmer than it is today. This suggest that the Arctic area would almost certainly have been warmer and therefore likely ice free in summer.
Personally, I cannot see what there is to fear about the Arctic being ice free in summer. This does not result in global sea level rise, and being ice free acts as a negative feed back allowing more heat from the ocean to escape to space. The ice acts like a lid on a sauspan and hinders heat loss from the Arctic ocaen. So if the Earth is over heating (something I do not personally subscribe to), this is a negative feedback which will help restore matters and will act against a runaway scenario.
One always hears about Albedo, but this effect is minimal. The incident of sunlight in the Arctic, even in summer is low, and low incident sunlight is largely reflected by water such that there is relatively little difference in Albedo between ice and open water given the low incidence at which sun light is impacting in this region. Obviously, when out of the summer season, the ice returns and during the late Autum to early Spring there is either no sunlight, or daylight hours are short, and to the extent that there is sunlight the angle of incident is extremely low.
I would not be surprised if upon a proper analysis and evaluation, the positive feedback of reduced or even no ice in summer (ie., the Albedo change) is less than the negative feedback of greater heat loss from the ocean itself (due to the cap being taken off enabling the ocean to dissipate heat to space).
“Paul Beckwith is a Ph.D. student with the laboratory for paleoclimatology and climatology, department of geography, University of Ottawa.”
Is that how they describe “Quacks” in this Era of Political Correctness?
The Pompous Git says: August 18, 2013 at 11:15 pm
Greg M said @ur momisugly August 18, 2013 at 10:28 pm Shouldn’t there be some requirement for demonstrating that a model actually has predictive value before it becomes the source of alarmist claims in the media?
If the model has predictive value, then it’s not alarmist and it would be foolish to ignore such….”
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Surely the point that Greg was making is that to date, no model has been shown to have predictive value.
That is why each and every model gives different results to the others, and why no model to date has managed to predict reality, whether this be temperature, or rainfall, or extreme weather events, or Arctic ice extent etc. etc..
richard verney says:
August 19, 2013 at 1:43 am . . . . .
As further illustration of your point: consider how many children die each year in vehicular accidents, or from malnutrition, or from neglect – compared to mass shootings in the Schoolhouse. . . . . . .
One always hears about Albedo, but this effect is minimal. The incident of sunlight in the Arctic, even in summer is low, and low incident sunlight is largely reflected by water such that there is relatively little difference in Albedo between ice and open water given the low incidence at which sun light is impacting in this region.
The key difference is the albedo difference between snow covered ice, ice with low levels of black carbon, and ice with high levels of black carbon.
The albedo difference between ocean and sea ice is important around summer solstice when the sea ice is far enough south that the sun’s angle of incidence is well above the angle of incidence where sea ice albedo is approximately the same as ocean surface.
But hey, this is climate science, and if you average enough stuff together, you will get a result more or less like you want.
Otherwise, at NH solstice, north of the Arctic Circle receives more solar radiation than anywhere on Earth including the tropics. Thus albedo differences are more important in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth. Excepting the Antarctic around SH summer solstice.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/EnergyBalance/page3.php
richard verney said @ur momisugly August 19, 2013 at 2:17 am
And my point is that a model with predictive value will not be alarmist. That the models so far have fallen short is not a good reason to suppose that all future models will fall short. Heck, even a paramecium is capable of learning!
Meanwhile down in the Antarctic,
Can someone explain this to me? What happened to the sea ice data from NSIDC (which is more or less the ‘official’ statistic, isn’t it?) during the 4-year period 2009-13?
http://i1172.photobucket.com/albums/r565/Keyell/SHseaicearea_zps2d2302d2.png
http://i1172.photobucket.com/albums/r565/Keyell/SHseaicearea2_zps2218b17a.png
Seems to me the mean sea ice area of the southern hemisphere has grown a lot more since 2006/07 than NSIDC is willing to give it credit for …
There’s an old expression the technical elves of Wall Street borrowed from science that everything returns to it’s mean. When it returns is the difference between millionaires and the rest of us. A shame climate folks have yet to stumble onto this.
The Pompous Git says:
August 18, 2013 at 9:18 pm
Theo Goodwin said @ur momisugly August 18, 2013 at 6:49 pm
“The beauty of having one’s theory falsified is that you have made contact with reality and have learned something new …
…..They hold their theories and models so tightly to their chests that they cannot take a peek and remind themselves of what is there. All they can do is bluff.”
“That was rather well put…”
I second the motion.
RE: richard verney says:
August 19, 2013 at 2:06 am:
Good points, especially about the Vikings in Greenland, who I’ve been looking at since I was just a boy. It is a pet peeve of mine that so much good research by good men has been snooted simply to promote the false idea it was not warm when it in fact was much warmer, a thousand years ago.
A lot has to be ignored to promote the illusion that the ice was always thick and only recently became thin. Such illusionists take advantage of the fact we only recently have satellite views. However even using the satellite views from back in the early 1980’s it can be seen that it is quite common to have a large area of the Arctic Sea over towards the Bering Strait melt in the summer.
It is common for the Alarmists who have been deluded by the illusionists to have the misconception that the ice was 40 feet thick all over the Arctic Sea back then. It is helpful to have a summer map, (or both summer and winter maps,) from a year like 1981 handy. The deluded are often astonished to see how much open water (and “baby ice”) there was back then.
Our knowledge of the arctic is still in its infancy. Even as we speak there are people bobbing about up there, freezing in the summer, gathering data about a wide variety of subjects we know next to nothing about. Even with those buoys there are places in the central arctic that are hard to get to, and are largely buoy-free.
http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/DAILYMAPS/dailymap.jpg
It is politics that poisons the subject of arctic sea-ice, and leads to the nonsense promoted by illusionists. Ironically, it is politics that is funding a lot of the scientists up there. When the illusion pops like a bubble, I suppose a lot of the funding will vanish, but at least we will have a heaps of new and interesting data by then.
It is hard not to be cynical about the current situation, however in the end Truth will prevail, because it is true.
Its important to remember this extremely important recent post by Jim Steele . He explains clearly that there is a legacy of warm subsurface water in the Arctic leftover from warm phases of both the AMO and the PDO intruding warm water into the north polar region. Air temperatures appear to be trending downwards in the last few years and are strikingly cold this year according to DMI.
(BTW – does anyone have a link to averaged DMI arctic temperatures over whole seasons or years, over the last decade or two??)
To quote from Jim steele:
Arctic vs Antarctic sea ice
1) Sea ice melts deep inside the Arctic Circle during the coldest of winters because warm water from the Atlantic and the Pacific intrude and melt the ice from below. During the past two decades scientists have observed an increase in the volume of warm water penetrating deep inside the Arctic Circle, which then preconditioned the polar ice cap for a greater loss of summer ice.3,8 Changes in the North Atlantic/Arctic Oscillation affect how much heated water is driven into the Arctic, which then causes the widespread melt seen in the Barents Sea and adjoining Kara Sea. Similarly the warm phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation drives more warm water through the Bering Strait into the Chukchi Sea.2,5,8
It is also striking that oscillation between winter maximum and summer minimum Arctic ice has shot up in magnitude since 2007. This is understandable as a conflict between air and water – legacy warm subsurface water and cooling Arctic air. Eventually the lower summer ice extent will vent off the legacy heat and the ice will recover fully.
Regarding Arctic sea ice before 1979 (aka start of satellite record),
NSIDC did a cute little article back in 2011, Arctic sea ice before satellites.
By combining their records with those of UK Hadley Centre, they made an anomaly extent graph that goes from Jan 1953 to Sep 2010. Caption: Sea ice charts of the Arctic Ocean show that ice extent has declined since at least the 1950s. Credit: NSIDC and the UK Hadley Center
http://nsidc.org/icelights/files/2010/11/mean_anomaly_1953-2010.png
Being a mere layman, I see the smoothed line is peaking around 1968-9 so I would say the decline was from the late 1960’s, about when the Pacific Decadal Oscillation went positive, not the 1950’s.
Interestingly, the Y-axis is in bizarre units of ‘Standard Deviations from 1968-1996 Mean’. Without the underlying data, we do not know how alarmed we should be. Since about 1979 there was a drop of about 2 Std Dev’s. Is that a change of 2/10 10⁶km², or 20?
To ballpark it, we’ll check out the NSIDC extent records:
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/
Choose directory “north”, then “daily”, “data”, and finally look at “NH_seaice_extent_climatology_1981-2010.csv”.
There we see for the 1981-2010 climatology, the standard deviations, for all 366 days of the year, hang out around 0.5 10⁶km².
If the 1968-1996 standard deviations are similar, then, to me, it don’t look all that bad.
There is something else that looks very important in that graph. By my eyes, it is showing there was as much a drop from 1969 to 1979, as there was from 1979 to 2009.
So over a mere ten years, the extent dropped as much as it did over thirty years.
I would like to know why, after all the warnings about the dangerous rate of Arctic sea ice loss during the satellite age, they have not made special notice of The Ice Being Lost THREE TIMES As Fast in the decade before. How do they explain the slow down in ice loss?
It wasn’t just Greenland. Now, have you seen any of the following over the last 16 years? The Arctic might have been is some terrible shape.
Even if hell freezes over N Stokes will not admit.. he gets paid to push this crap typical second rate Australian Scientist who hopefully will be removed with the new government
The Pompous Git says:
“And my point is that a model with predictive value will not be alarmist.”
I know some engineers in the water area who have been playing with the climate models for about 7 years to see what “might” happen to rainfall patterns.. Apparently about half the models predict an increase in rainfall, and half predict a decrease.
The mean of all the models is apparently very close to actuality. 🙂
Not a single AGW doom prediction that I am aware of has come true.
Those of who have been skeptical (the so-called flat earthers) have been proven right every time we have challenged the AGW hype industry.
Think on this: Not one AGW prediction of doom has come true. Not one AGW demanded policy has succeeded. Not one AGW climate treaty has done anything of any significance at all.
Report to the disintegration chambers, man is destroying the planet……..LOL Too much ice caused by too little CO2. Blame it on Barack Husain Obama, known terrorist of coal producers all over the world.
Donald K. Chilo says: @ur momisugly August 18, 2013 at 9:35 pm
I suggest you look at North Hemisphere Summer Energy the Leading Indicator which has been DECLINING in the sesond half of the Holocene as we approach a possible glacial inception.
Or read these peer-reviewed papers:
A more recent paper looking at glaciers in Norway.
The authors of BOTH papers simply state that most glaciers likely didn’t exist 6,000 years ago, but the highest period of the glacial activity has been in the past 600 years. This is hardly surprising with ~9% less solar energy.
If you are in love with computer models here is a computer model
Are you SURE you want to get rid of all that ‘extra’ CO2?
Here is a more recent paper from last fall.
And another paper from last year
In other words warming events to not preclude a descent into another Ice Age. If you want to be ALARMIST you have your facts backwards.
“Not one AGW climate treaty has done anything of any significance at all.”
True – if one is prepared to ignore the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been wasted in the process, the jobs that have disappeared, the increase in fuel poverty etc. etc.
barry says August 18, 2013 at 7:31 pm
Good question.
The answer is found via the precautionary principle. If the catastrophe is predicted before the lifetime of new infrastructure expires then we have to adopt the precautionary polices now.
Therefore the impending catastrophe has a date. We are abandoning coal fired power plants (in the UK) now for emissions reasons.
In the UK the replacement wind-turbines have a lifespan of about twenty years.
Therefore, the predicted climate catastrophe is by 2033 at the latest. Remember, the rest of the world is still emitting CO2 regardless and the UK emissions are negligible so that is the predicted timeline.
Do you believe that?
Personally, I think we may be making a slight mistake.
Dennis Ray Wingo says: @ur momisugly August 18, 2013 at 11:25 pm
….If you REALLY want to understand this subject, track down the history of the ice cover BEFORE 1979. The satellite record goes all the way back to 1961, via recently unclassified images. You might be surprised at what you find. And yes I have helped to compile some of this data….
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So how about an article for WUWT?
The Alarmists’ stance on Arctic sea ice has always been as amusing as it was fatally flawed. It has been a key symbol, along with the polar bear, and equally a symptom of (supposedly) what is happening with climate as well as harbinger of dire things to come. We were to witness an “Arctic Death Spiral”, with positive feedbacks like decreased albedo and melting permafrost. This was to be tragic in and of itself, causing loss of habitat for Polar Bears for instance, as well as creating an additional positive feedback for the NH. Skeptics knew all along that all of this was based on Warmist fantasy and wishful thinking. Arctic sea ice has always waxed and waned, just as glaciers have.
As with global temperatures having stalled these past 16 or 17 years, arctic sea ice is following suit, stabilizing, and even rebounding somewhat. It is with great satisfaction that we now watch their final hope, their symbol of climate doom collapsing. Long may they endure the much-deserved jeering.
donald k chilo.i will give you the same bet i have to others,including john mason of skeptical science. i will bet my house against your house that the arctic sea ice summer extent does not drop below 1 million square kilometres.its about time some people started putting some major conviction behind this so called cAGW consensus.i will offer the same bet to anyone,mann,trenberth,the whole lot of them.
they are absolutely full of sh**.continual lies and half truths based on absolutely no hard facts.gail combs declares she is angry.personally i am incandescent with rage,having been lied to for so long,taking the word of the people that are supposed to know better.accepting these people are basing their warnings on sound science for years,only to find out they are a bunch of charlatans.
no big deal in itself,but when it becomes fraud,and is used to extort money from hard hit taxpayers all over the world,and is wasting money on a grand scale lining the pockets of the already wealthy it is no longer a joke.
i really think i would end up in jail if i ever met any of these idiots in person.
by the way anthony,i wouldnt be so nice towards “neven” in your comment,looking at the disparaging remarks on his blog towards this site,and the fact he does not allow links to this or other sites that do not promote the cAGW meme.