The Antarctic 'research' fiasco – 'would you, could you, in a boat'?

Glenn says: January 2, 2014 at 7:39 pm
The fact that Arctic Sea Ice has been on a downward trend, and that the Arctic Ocean is becoming more accessible during the summer months is not something that is a controversial opinion, even amongst the non-AGW community. Going to the charts, starting with the Canadian Archipelago one you posted http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/region.all.anom.region.12.jpg, you see that of the 9 lowest lows for summer ice coverage, 6 have happened in the last 8 years. Of course this is not an extensive area so the plot requires closer examination.
There is ample evidence that the largest contributor to the downward trend in Arctic Sea Ice is wind and Atmospheric Oscillations, i.e.:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/16/the-economist-provides-readers-with-erroneous-information-about-arctic-sea-ice/
Per this 2004 Science Daily article, ”Winds, Ice Motion Root Cause Of Decline In Sea Ice, Not Warmer Temperatures“:

“extreme changes in the Arctic Oscillation in the early 1990s — and not warmer temperatures of recent years — are largely responsible for declines in how much sea ice covers the Arctic Ocean, with near record lows having been observed during the last three years, University of Washington researchers say.”

Per this 2007 NASA article NASA Examines Arctic Sea Ice Changes Leading to Record Low in 2007;

“Son V. Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that “the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. “Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,” he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.”

Per this 2010 NASA article NASA Study Quantifies Role of Melt in Loss of Old Arctic Sea Ice

“Not all of the multiyear ice loss is accounted for, however. Ice loss through Fram Strait and from melt from 2005 to 2008 accounts for just 52 percent of total ice loss. The team suggests that melt in other Arctic regions and outflow through other passages besides Fram Strait could account for the difference.”
“They found that over the 17-year period, an area of 947,000 square kilometers (365,639 square miles), or about 32 percent of the decline in multiyear sea ice area, was lost in the Beaufort Sea due to melt.
A similar calculation using thickness estimates from NASA’s ICESat from 2004 to 2009 show a volume loss of 1,400 cubic kilometers (336 cubic miles), or about 20 percent of the total loss by volume.”

Per this 2013 NSIDC article A better year for the cryosphere

In recent summers, there has been considerable transport of older ice into the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, where it has been broken up and exposed to a warm ocean and high air temperatures. This has been a major factor in the loss of multiyear ice over the last decade. This year was notably different. Because this year’s wind pattern was different than 2012, the multiyear ice largely remained in a compact area along the Canadian Archipelago and did not circulate into the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. The cooler conditions this summer also helped preserve more of the first-year ice through the summer.
The first-year ice that survived the summer, now defined as second-year ice, will thicken through autumn and winter. However, it would take several more cool years in a row to build the ice cover back to the state it was in during the 1980s, which consisted of a larger proportion of thicker, multiyear ice that was more resistant to melt. While ice in the Arctic will thicken through this autumn and winter, winds may also transport some of the thicker ice out of the Arctic Ocean and into the North Atlantic.

The trend becomes easier to pick up when you look at the Arctic Basin plot http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.1.html where the last 8 summers have seen the 8 lowest amounts of summer ice coverage.
Yes, the Arctic Basin plot seems to reflect wind and Atmospheric Oscillation driven loss of Multi-Year Ice between 2006 and 2012;
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"] Cryosphere Today – University of Illinois – Polar Research Group – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
and the significant increase in 2013 “because this year’s wind pattern was different than 2012” and “cooler conditions this summer also helped preserve more of the first-year ice through the summer.”
Per this European Space Agency article Arctic Sea Ice Up From Record Low

“The volume of ice measured this autumn is about 50% higher compared to last year.
In October 2013, CryoSat measured about 9000 cubic km of sea ice – a notable increase compared to 6000 cubic km in October 2012.”
” About 90% of the increase is due to growth of multiyear ice – which survives through more than one summer without melting – with only 10% growth of first year ice. Thick, multiyear ice indicates healthy Arctic sea-ice cover.
This year’s multiyear ice is now on average about 20%, or around 30 cm, thicker than last year. ”
“‘One of the things we’d noticed in our data was that the volume of ice year-to-year was not varying anything like as much as the ice extent – at least in 2010, 2011 and 2012,’ said Rachel Tilling from the UK’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, who led the study.
‘We didn’t expect the greater ice extent left at the end of this summer’s melt to be reflected in the volume. But it has been, and the reason is related to the amount of multiyear ice in the Arctic.'”

Per this 2004 paper “Variations in the Age of Arctic Sea-ice and Summer Sea-ice Extent” by Ignatius G. Rigor and John M. Wallace:

“The winter AO-index explains as much as 64% of the variance in summer sea-ice extent in the Eurasian sector, but the winter and summer AO-indices combined explain less than 20% of the variance along the Alaskan coast, where the age of sea-ice explains over 50% of the year-to year variability. If this interpretation is correct, low summer sea-ice extents are likely to persist for at least a few years. However, it is conceivable that, given an extended interval of low-index AO conditions, ice thickness and summertime sea-ice extent could gradually return to the levels characteristic of the 1980′s.”

So this brings us to Antarctica. The general consensus is that the Southern Ocean is warming
I am not sure where you came up with this “general consensus”, but the Sea Surface data indicates the exact opposite:
[caption id="attachment_54067" align="alignnone" width="568"] Bob Tisdale – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
And Southern Polar Lower Troposphere Temperature Anomaly has a negative trend as well;
[caption id="attachment_54067" align="alignnone" width="568"] Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) – Microwave Sounding Units (MSU) – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
so why is sea ice generally on the rise in Antarctica? One tested theory is that stronger polar vortex winds are contributing http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00139.1 The idea being that the stronger winds drive the ice faster leading to more ridging and thicker ice which can better survive into the summer. At the same point this pushing of the ice ends up exposing more surrounding water to the same high cold winds, generating more ice volume. There is also the fact that precipitation has been on the increase, and is predicted to increase, especially in East Antarctica.
There is significant evidence that the Southern Polar Vortex has become stronger, colder, and more persistent, i.e.:

“These studies have shown that there are significant trends in the springtime Antarctic vortex and that the vortex has become stronger, colder, and more persistent (i.e., breaks up later) since 1979; see Figure 8. The colder vortex and delay in breakup are attributed to…”
http://www.columbia.edu/~lmp/paps/waugh+polvani-PlumbFestVolume-2010.pdf

“several studies (including Waugh and Randel 1999; Waugh et al. 1999; Karpetchko et al. 2005; Black and McDaniel 2007) have indicated a trend over the 1980s and 1990s toward a later vortex breakdown.” http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7598/is_20091115/ai_n42654411/

And it has been proposed that;

“The polar vortex that swirls around the South Pole is not just stronger than it was when satellite records began in the 1970s, it has more convergence, meaning it shoves the sea ice together to cause ridging. Stronger winds also drive ice faster, which leads to still more deformation and ridging. This creates thicker, longer-lasting ice, while exposing surrounding water and thin ice to the blistering cold winds that cause more ice growth.”
http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/09/17/stronger-winds-explain-puzzling-growth-of-sea-ice-in-antarctica/

however the author of this paper Jinlun Zhang has a history of contorting himself to try to hide the gaps in the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Narrative. For example, in this NASA article/press release it states that:

“Jinlun Zhang, an oceanographer at the University of Washington, has pieced together a complex computer model that helps explain why Antarctic sea ice is expanding even with signs that ocean and air temperatures are on the rise.”

and in this paper titled “What drove the dramatic retreat of Arctic sea ice during summer 2007?” by Zhang, J., R.W. Lindsay , M. Steele, and A. Schweiger, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L11505, doi:10.1029/2008GL034005, 2008, it states that “Arctic sea ice in 2007 was preconditioned to radical changes” and this contributed to “The dramatic decline” . This is not objective science, rather it’s alarmist rhetoric.
Zhang was already looking for an Arctic Sea Ice tipping points in 2005, i.e. the title of this paper paper was “The thinning of arctic sea ice, 1988–2003: have we passed a tipping point?” by Lindsay, R. W. and J. Zhang, J. Climate, 18, 4879–4894, 2005.
In 2006 Zhang co-wrote a paper with Mark “Death Spiral” Serreze and Keith “the lack of warming … is a travesty” Trenberth, titled “The large-scale energy budget of the Arctic” by Serreze, M. C., A. P. Barrett, A. G. Slater, M. Steele, J. Zhang, and K. E. Trenberth, , J. Geophys Res., 112, D11122, doi: 10.1029/2006JD008230, 2007.
Regardless, it is likely that the Southern Polar Vorticity is a significant driver of Southern Sea Ice. However, the same can said for Northern Polar Vorticity and Northern Sea Ice i.e.:

The abrupt retreat of Arctic sea-ice in recent several decades and associated atmospheric circulation changes are debating issue. In particular, what brings a lagged connection between sea-ice and atmospheric circulation remains unclear. In this study, we propose that Arctic sea-ice loss in autumn (October-December) has likely affected stratospheric polar vortex and temperature in winter (January-March). During recent two decades a large-scale wave pattern has emerged in mid-troposphere in autumn, which is characterized by anomalous high centered over Eastern Europe and elongated low along the wave-guide of polar jet. At the same time, stratospheric polar vortex in subsequent winter has weakened substantially. Statistical analysis shows that both of these trends are significantly correlated with the Arctic sea-ice melting in autumn. With a simple linear model experiment, it is shown that the enhanced diabatic heating due to the sea-ice melting can generate a similar large-scale wave as observed. Furthermore, this wave pattern highly projects onto the climatological wave-number 1 stationary wave, driving stronger planetary-scale wave propagation from the troposphere to the stratosphere through constructive wave interference. The resulting stratospheric change might contribute to the weakening of stratospheric polar vortex during last two decades. Although more quantitative investigations are needed, this result suggests that Arctic sea-ice change might play a broader role in global climate change than what is currently thought of. https://ams.confex.com/ams/93Annual/webprogram/Paper219592.html

Both the Northern and Southern Polar Vortices are visible on this Zonal Mean Temperatures at 50-hPa/mb map:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"] NOAA – National Weather Service – Climate Prediction Center – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
The general premise that any increases in ice in Antarctica casts serious doubt on climate change is overly simplistic.
“Increases in ice in Antarctica” don’t cast “serious doubt” on CAGW, the 9 – 17 year Pause in Earth’s Temperature does:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/15/a-big-picture-look-at-earths-temperature-santer-17-update/