Image Credit: Cryosphere Today – University of Illinois – Polar Research Group
By WUWT Regular Just The Facts
Per the graph above, Antarctic Sea Ice Extent has remained above the 1981 – 2010 “normal” range for much of the last three months and the current positive Antarctic Sea Ice Extent anomaly appears quite large for a planet supposedly on the verge of Dangerous Warming.
Furthermore, in 2013 we had the third most expansive Southern Sea Ice Area measured to date;
and Southern Sea Ice Area has remained above average for most of the last two years;
At the other pole Arctic Sea Ice Extent has remained within the 1981 – 2010 “normal” range for the entirety of 2013;
and Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Area had it’s smallest decline since 2006;
thus Global Sea Ice Area has remained stubbornly average for the entirety of 2013:
According Michael Oppenheimer, Professor Geo-sciences and International Affairs at Princeton University and IPCC Contributor, the reason for The Pause/Hiatus in Earth’s atmospheric temperature, and apparently associated average Global Sea Ice is that;
“heat tends to hide in the oceans sometimes, but when heat hides in the ocean it later comes out and reappears in the atmosphere and then the warming resumes faster than before. We don’t know this for certain, we’ll find out over the next few years, but it is wrong to say that the IPCC didn’t look at it carefully, it certainly did.” PBS
Reassuring to know that IPCC has figured out Earth’s climate system for us, it’s all just like a big game of hide and go seek, clearly…
To see more information on Sea Ice please visit the WUWT Sea Ice Page and WUWT Northern Regional Sea Ice Page.
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Geoff Withnell says:
October 20, 2013 at 3:00 pm
I am a Quality Engineer, and as such I have spent a good part of my career looking at and interpreting process charts. Looking at the Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly chart, three things jump out at me. This is a process which was more or less steady up to about 1998, then started a fairly stable downward trend. Around 2007 the descent stopped, and since then the process has been level, but possibly has a little more variation. If this were a process I was investigating, I would pet money that something changed ~1999, and again ~2007.
In 2007, due to conditions exceptionally favorable to melt, there was a great deal of ice lost from the Arctic. Because of that there is more “first year ice” which is thinner and more easily lost in subsequent melt seasons. I think what you’re seeing after 2007 is a larger delta between minimum and maximum extent as most of the first year ice melts out each summer and then freezes back to about the normal maximum. The maximum extent is somewhat constrained by the surrounding land masses so you’ll typically see less variation in the annual maximum even if the minimum continues to trend downward.
MarkB;
The ocean temperature is higher than the air temperature for most of the year in the polar regions. In the Arctic in particular, the North Atlantic Current comes into the Barents Sea region. I have no idea if climate scientists consider this a significant driver to the decadal trend of ice loss and general warming in the Arctic, but “heat coming out of the ocean” and the flow of the North Atlantic Current is consistent with the pattern of minimum ice extent diminishing most rapidly on the eastern side and along the Siberian coast as well as Arctic warming.
Yes, this is well known. google “best of erbe” and you can see that the equatorial regions are net absorbers of energy and the actic regions are net radiators of energy. But those are surface issues. The claim being made is twofold.
1) the heat is being sequestered in the DEEP oceans
2) it might come back all at once
The deep oceans are VERY cold. For the heat to “come back” they would have to warm to a temp greater than the water above them. For the heat to come back “all at once” is such complete nonsense that I refer you to my original comment above. We have more to worry about from a gravity well reversal that spits everyone on earth into deep space.
“heat tends to hide in the oceans sometimes, but when heat hides in the ocean it later comes out and reappears in the atmosphere and then the warming resumes faster than before. We don’t know this for certain..”
Perhaps the dolphins have stolen the heat and are using it to heat their homes?
Looking at the first few years of Antarctic ice, I am guessing that Hansen was having severe panic attacks fearing the immediate loss of winter ice and catastrophic global flooding. He probably needed Valium at night just to sleep, poor fella.
@davidmhoffer
>>“heat tends to hide in the oceans sometimes, but when heat hides in the ocean it later comes out and reappears in the atmosphere and then the warming resumes faster than before.
>We should note that Oppenheimer fails to provide an explanation of the physical processes by which this could occur. To my knowledge, neither he, nor anyone else in the alarmascience community has done so, despite the frequency with which they claim that this is a possibility.
>No such mechanism exists. For “heat” to “come out of” the oceans and into the atmosphere requires that the oceans be warmer than the atmosphere. Since the heat capacity of the oceans is about 1200 times that of the atmosphere, doing so would require 1200 times as much energy to raise ocean temps as would be required to raise atmospheric temps by the same amount.
++++++
I am dying to see how a 4.001 degree ocean is going to warm the atmosphere a lot more than a 4.000 degree ocean. The concept is anti-physical. There is always a coterie of alarmists making unphysical predictions of calamity. While this is nothing new, it is such a starkly impossible prophecy it is a surprise to me that it gets any traction, even among the die-hards. Who would want to be associated with such nonsense?
Oh yeah, right. Forgot about ‘the message’ for a moment.
@ur momisugly Mark B and davidmhoffer
If the ‘warmer’ Arctic seas are indeed the point where the deep ocean heat is manifested at the surface, it will melt the Arctic ice earlier and remain open later, radiating vast additional amounts of energy into space during the summer months. Once cooled, it will close over the insulating cap of ice and go back to homeostasis, or thereabouts.
That plus Willis’ thunderstorm control mechanism is is probably the best part of global thermoregulation, would that people could perceive it. They both support the idea that there is no such thing as any positive feedback which could send surface temperatures into overdrive.
I am a AGW skeptic, but have heard of a AGW claim that the Antarctic ice increase is caused by unusual winds pushing cold air off the Antarctic continent. Sounds logical on its face. Any rebuttal?
J. Philip Peterson says:
October 20, 2013 at 3:34 pm
“Antarctic ice extent was flat-topped,…”
I had posted before as to why the antarctic sea ice data stopped in Sept until Oct 19th. This could be the reason. Maybe the NSIDC did get a secret memo from the powers that be…
Pretty sure it had to do with the federal government shutdown as updates from NSIDC for Arctic ice were also suspended during this period. Odd though, I could have sworn that second peak wasn’t there earlier.
Bill Illis says:
October 20, 2013 at 12:01 pm
I’ve decide to sell “Global Warming Insurance”.
Sounds silly, but maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Think about it. The mainstream press has colluded with the alarmists to convince the typical “low-information voter” that global warming is a certainty and that havoc will eventually ensue as a direct result of it.
How many suckers have they created? Suckers who would buy a reasonably-pitched policy “just to be sure”?
Could be a possible business opportunity. And implementing it would have the additional advantage of getting to watch the regulators try to shut it down by claiming….what?…that it’s all a hoax? I say go for it.
The heat returns to terrorize the Earth! My favorite B movie scream? The Blob! First they try to electrocute the thing but it turns out it only dies when frozen. That movie parallels the current mass hysteria over the heat accumulating somewhere into a giant blob waiting to return to Earth to kill us all. It appears that Mother Nature has taken up the task of freezing it to death.
Do you remember the warmist hype concerning the recent warming of Antarctic Peninsula? How many times have the warmists stated that the recent warming of Antarctic Peninsula, of the Arctic, and of the Greenland ice sheet is is unprecedented? How many times has the media and warmist scientists stated that the recent warming is the highest in ‘recorded’ history where ‘recorded’ is limited to direct measurement of temperature rather than the proxy record.
The proxy record (of the Antarctic Pensinsula and the proxy record on the Greenland Ice Sheet) shows that there are cycles of warming and cooling of the Antarctic Pensinsula and of the Greenland Ice Sheet with a periodicity of 1500 years and 400 years. The proxy record shows the past rate of warming and the magnitude of the past cyclic warming events was the same or greater than the warming that has just been observed. This is important finding as it shows there is cyclic warming and cooling of both hemispheres. The logical issue is that the mechanism that is causing past cyclic warming and cooling must be able to affect both hemispheres.
The past cycles of warming were not caused by AGW. The past cycles of warming were all followed by cooling cycles. It should be noted that there is cosmogenic isotope changes that correlate with the warming and with cooling cycles which indicates that solar magnetic cycle changes cause the warming and cooling. There has been a sudden slow down in the solar magnetic cycle. Based on what has again and again, the same regions that warmed will cool.
Davis, W.J. and P. Taylor Does the current global warming signal reflect a natural cycle?
We were delighted to see the paper published in Nature magazine online (August 22, 2012 issue) reporting past climate warming events in the Antarctic similar in amplitude and warming rate to the present global warming signal. The paper, entitled “Recent Antarctic Peninsula warming relative to Holocene climate and ice – shelf history” and authored by Robert Mulvaney and colleagues of the British Antarctic Survey ( Nature , 2012, doi:10.1038/nature11391),reports two recent natural warming cycles, one around 1500 AD and another around 400 AD, measured from isotope
(deuterium) concentrations in ice cores bored adjacent to recent breaks in the ice shelf in northeast Antarctica.
A couple of years ago we performed a similar but more extensive analysis of the historical temperature record from the ice core data obtained from the Vostok site in the Antarctic, not far from the ice core evaluated in the recent Mulvaney et al. Nature paper. We defined a NWE as a monotonic increase in temperature encompassing at least three consecutive Vostok temperature data points and terminated by at least one temperature data point less than the peak reached during the NWE. We found 342 natural warming events (NWEs) corresponding to this definition, distributed over the past 250,000 years at apparently irregular intervals (though we have not analyzed for subtle regularities, which may exist). The 342 NWEs we identified by this method are reminiscent of the two more recent NWEs reported in the Mulvaney et al. paper.
Comment:
Davis and Taylor could not get their paper published; however, another author had a similar paper published in Nature. Connected with the Davis and Taylor’s attempt to get their paper published is another sad tale of an editor who showed interest in their paper suddenly resigning. See this thread for details.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/davis-and-taylor-wuwt-submission.pdf
SteveP
“Perhaps the dolphins have stolen the heat and are using it to heat their homes?”
—————————————————————————————————————
Well I must say that’s not very eco-friendly of them is it?
Of all sentient lifeforms they should know better.
R Taylor “Amazing how sea ice is expanding around Antarctica, while Antarctica itself (according to Nature, etc., etc.) is warming. It must be harder to torture the satellite cameras into false confessions.”
To be fair, if the air temperature rises from -20C to -19C, it shouldn’t matter a lot to the ice. Other effects, like snow accumulationand sea currents, might outweigh temperature changes until temperature exceeds 0C.
Jones, “So long and thanks for all the fish” was the worst of the five volume trillogy. I think he put in the minimum effort required to get a check in the bank.
Anthony’s response to Seth is going to leave a mark on the poor guy
“……We don’t know this for certain”
They obviously do not “know” it at all. It’s entirely made up.
But they’re hoping for the worst. 🙂
There’s no longer anything polite that can be said to them
It’s all come down to their deserving no more than a middle finger.
Figuratively speaking of course.
Seth says:
October 20, 2013 at 5:46 pm
Both the fact that sea ice is normal & that CACA advocates have warned for decades of dangerous warming are well supported. How could you have missed these facts?
Sea ice normality is less destructive of your faith-based religion than is the fact of no increase in water vapor during the mild, normal warming trend of 1977-96 or since. As you may know, CACA depends completely upon assumed positive feedbacks from rising CO2 to support the scary first C for Catastrophic. A doubling of CO2 in the air on its own can’t produce dangerous warming, but only benefits to humanity. So CACA requires feedback effects which not only are not in evidence, but have been repeatedly shown false by actual science, based upon observations of reality.
So it’s not a single point in the CACA case that has been shown false, but it’s essential hypothesis. To use your absurd creationist analogy, it’s as if biologists had discovered that natural selection doesn’t occur. The lack of positive feedback is as destructive to the CACA scam as that would be to evolutionary theory (although it’s obscene to compare phony CACA with the real science of evolution).
William Astley says:
October 21, 2013 at 9:14 am
there are cycles of warming and cooling of the Antarctic Peninsula and of the Greenland Ice Sheet with a periodicity of 1500 years and 400 years.
No, there are no such cycles.
There has been a sudden slow down in the solar magnetic cycle.
Not ‘sudden’. Gently over the past three cycles and no worse than a hundred years ago, and a hundred years before that.
lsvalgaard says:
October 21, 2013 at 11:44 am
Three recent studies confirming Bond Cycles:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018212000260
Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology
Volumes 321–322, 1 March 2012, Pages 16–23
Climatic variations over the last 4000 cal yr BP in the western margin of the Tarim Basin, Xinjiang, reconstructed from pollen data
Keliang Zhaoa, b,
Xiaoqiang Lia, b, Corresponding author contact information, E-mail the corresponding author,
John Dodsonc,
Pia Atahanc,
Xinying Zhoua, b,
Fiona Bertuchc
a The Laboratory of Human Evolution, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100044, China
b State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an 710075, China
c Institute for Environmental Research, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Kirrawee, NSW 2232, Australia
Abstract
The nature of Holocene climate patterns and mechanisms in central Asia are open areas of inquiry. In this study, regional vegetation and climate dynamics over the last ca. 4000 years are reconstructed using a high resolution pollen record from the Kashgar oasis, on the western margin of the Tarim Basin, central Asia. Ephedra, Chenopodiaceae and Cannabaceae dominate the pollen assemblages, and Chenopodiaceae/Ephedra ratios and percentages of long-distance transported pollen taxa are used to infer regional variations in moisture and vegetation density. Three periods of increased humidity are identified, from ca. 4000–2620 cal yr BP, ca. 1750–1260 cal yr BP and ca. 550–390 cal yr BP and these periods coincide with the respective Holocene Bond Events 2, 1 and 0, which are reported in the North Atlantic. Any increase in strength, or southward migration, of the mid-latitude westerlies would result in more precipitation and meltwater on mountains surrounding the study site. Warm and dry conditions are detected between ca.1260 and 840 cal yr BP (AD 690–1110), and cool and wet conditions are detected between ca. 840 and 680 cal yr BP (AD 1110–1270), during the Medieval Warm Period (ca. AD 800–1200). The climate variations in the Kashgar region over the last 4000 years appear to have been dominated by changes to the westerly circulation system and glacier dynamics on surrounding mountains. However, the question of whether the Asian monsoon delivers precipitation to the western Tarim Basin, a region that is influenced by several climate systems, is still open to debate.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033589410000785
Abstract
The alluvial deposits near Gibala-Tell Tweini provide a unique record of environmental history and food availability estimates covering the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age. The refined pollen-derived climatic proxy suggests that drier climatic conditions occurred in the Mediterranean belt of Syria from the late 13th/early 12th centuries BC to the 9th century BC. This period corresponds with the time frame of the Late Bronze Age collapse and the subsequent Dark Age. The abrupt climate change at the end of the Late Bronze Age caused region-wide crop failures, leading towards socio-economic crises and unsustainability, forcing regional habitat-tracking. Archaeological data show that the first conflagration of Gibala occurred simultaneously with the destruction of the capital city Ugarit currently dated between 1194 and 1175 BC. Gibala redeveloped shortly after this destruction, with large-scale urbanization visible in two main architectural phases during the Early Iron Age I. The later Iron Age I city was destroyed during a second conflagration, which is radiocarbon-dated at circa 2950 cal yr BP. The data from Gibala-Tell Tweini provide evidence in support of the drought hypothesis as a triggering factor behind the Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/37/13941
Abstract
The Holocene vegetation history of the northern coastal Arabian Peninsula is of long-standing interest, as this Mediterranean/semiarid/arid region is known to be particularly sensitive to climatic changes. Detailed palynological data from an 800-cm alluvial sequence cored in the Jableh plain in northwest Syria have been used to reconstruct the vegetation dynamics in the coastal lowlands and the nearby Jabal an Nuşayriyah mountains for the period 2150 to 550 B.C. Corresponding with the 4.2 to 3.9 and 3.5 to 2.5 cal kyr BP abrupt climate changes (ACCs), two large-scale shifts to a more arid climate have been recorded. These two ACCs had different impacts on the vegetation assemblages in coastal Syria. The 3.5 to 2.5 cal kyr BP ACC is drier and lasted longer than the 4.2 to 3.9 cal kyr BP ACC, and is characterized by the development of a warm steppe pollen-derived biome (1100–800 B.C.) and a peak of hot desert pollen-derived biome at 900 B.C. The 4.2 to 3.9 cal kyr BP ACC is characterized by a xerophytic woods and shrubs pollen-derived biome ca. 2050 B.C. The impact of the 3.5 to 2.5 cal kyr BP ACC on human occupation and cultural development is important along the Syrian coast with the destruction of Ugarit and the collapse of the Ugarit kingdom at ca. 1190 to 1185 B.C.
milodonharlani says:
October 21, 2013 at 11:56 am
Three recent studies confirming Bond Cycles
The battle of the links. Everyone cherry picks what he likes the best. Here is my pick:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Obrochta2012.pdf
“Ice-rafting evidence for a “1500-year cycle” sparked considerable debate on millennial-scale climate change and the role of solar variability. Here, we reinterpret the last 70,000 years of the subpolar North Atlantic record, focusing on classic DSDP Site 609, in the context of newly available raw data, the latest radiocarbon calibration (Marine09) and ice core chronology (GICC05), and a wider range of statistical methodologies. A w1500-year oscillation is primarily limited to the short glacial Stage 4, the age of which is derived solely from an ice flow model (ss09sea), subject to uncertainty, and offset most from the original chronology. Results from the most well-dated, younger interval suggest that the original 1500+/-500 year cycle may actually be an admixture of the ~1000 and ~2000 cycles that are observed within the Holocene at multiple locations. In Holocene sections these variations are coherent with 14C and 10Be estimates of solar variability. Our new results suggest that the “1500-year cycle” may be a transient phenomenon whose origin could be due, for example, to ice sheet boundary conditions for
the interval in which it is observed. We therefore question whether it is necessary to invoke such exotic explanations as heterodyne frequencies or combination tones to explain a phenomenon of such fleeting occurrence that is potentially an artifact of arithmetic averaging.
And this one:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/palo20005-D-O-Explanation.pdf
“[1] We present a new hypothesis to explain the millennial-scale temperature variability
recorded in ice cores known as Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) cycles. We propose that an ice
shelf acted in concert with sea ice to set the slow and fast timescales of the DO cycle,
respectively. The abrupt warming at the onset of a cycle is caused by the rapid retreat of sea
ice after the collapse of an ice shelf. The gradual cooling during the subsequent interstadial
phase is determined by the timescale of ice-shelf regrowth. Once the ice shelf reaches a
critical size, sea ice expands, driving the climate rapidly back into stadial conditions. The
stadial phase ends when warm subsurface waters penetrate beneath the ice shelf and cause
it to collapse. This hypothesis explains the full shape of the DO cycle, the duration of the
different phases, and the transitions between them and is supported by proxy records in the
North Atlantic and Nordic Seas.”
lsvalgaard says:
October 21, 2013 at 12:29 pm
IMO it’s unscientific to make categorical assertions, such as that Bond Cycles don’t exist, based upon cherry picked studies, when at least equally valid papers find strong support from sites around the world for the existence of the phenomena.
As has been discussed here before, the first study is from a single site. The second study doesn’t show that Bond Cycles don’t exist, but explains ice shelf behavior based upon an oceanic oscillation which it leaves unexplained. That oscillation could well be driven by the same effects which produce Bond Cycles. Or not, but the paper does not support your contention that they don’t exist, only offers an explanation for ice shelf fluctuations that might or might not reflect Bond Cycles.
milodonharlani says:
October 21, 2013 at 12:47 pm
IMO it’s unscientific to make categorical assertions, such as that Bond Cycles don’t exist, based upon cherry picked studies,
And to make categorical assertions that they do exist:
William Astley says:
October 21, 2013 at 9:14 am
“there are cycles of warming and cooling of the Antarctic Pensinsula and of the Greenland Ice Sheet with a periodicity of 1500 years and 400 years. ”
My point is that there is a good natural explanation for the ‘cycles’. And they are not cycles at all, just episodes occurring every few thousand years. So CYCLEs don’t exist, just variations on a time scale of millennea.
lsvalgaard says:
October 21, 2013 at 12:54 pm
Thanks for that clarification. To me however, it looks purely semantic, ie a distinction without a difference, unless you’re convinced that the repeating fluctuations are chaotic & random, not driven by any underlying quasi-periodic natural process.
milodonharlani says:
October 21, 2013 at 1:01 pm
fluctuations are chaotic & random, not driven by any underlying quasi-periodic natural process.
There is no evidence they are driven by an underlying true cycle, so the null-hypothesis must be that they are not. If the period was well-defined one might take that as evidence for a real cycle, but is not. Of course, there are people [Rahmsdorf, 2003] who claim the period is very sharply defined at precisely 1470 years, but paradoxically they also claim that that shows the effect is not the Sun, but something else ‘extra-terrestrial’ [without saying what that might be].