Image Credit: National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC)
By WUWT Regular “Just The Facts”
Per the image above, Arctic Sea Ice Extent made a late season run, but it appears to have reached its maximum for the year. “NSIDC calculates daily extent using a five-day average of the data.” The “method takes the average of the previous five days, so that readers will see fewer “wiggles” in the tail end of the data series. The value of the trailing mean lags the actual data values, so sea ice values will appear lower when ice extent is increasing, but will appear larger when ice is decreasing.” NSIDC
JAXA’s Sea Ice Extent, which “is updated at around 3:00(UTC) every day” JAXA, shows a significant downward turn;
DMI’s Mean Temperature above 80°N has been running well above average;
and there is a another cold air outbreak headed into North America;
thus it is unlikely that we will see significant additional Arctic Sea Ice growth this season. Part of the reason for the relatively low Arctic Sea Ice Maximum this year is that several cold air outbreaks have occurred this winter, allowing cold air to escape the Arctic, e.g.;
resulting in second highest Great Lakes Sea Ice Coverage on record reaching 92.2% on March 6th, i.e.:
In the Southern Hemisphere, Sea Ice Area reached it’s 2nd highest Minimum on record on February 23rd, 2014, and somewhere in there lost its January rabbit ears;
resulting in a large area of Sea Ice now floating in the Southern Ocean:
Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Area has now been above average for over 2 years and 4 months;
with the last negative anomaly recorded was on November 23rd, 2011, data here and graph below:
Global Sea Ice Area has remained stubbornly average over the last year and a quarter;
and Global Sea Ice Area Anomaly is currently just .083 Million sq km above the 1981 – 2010 average:
For additional information please visit the WUWT Sea Ice Page, Northern Regional Sea Ice Page and Great Lakes Ice Page.
Caleb says:
March 26, 2014 at 6:34 am
RE: JBJ says:
March 25, 2014 at 9:01 pm
Caleb says:
March 25, 2014 at 6:24 pm
“In 1817 so much ice flushed out that bergs were beaching in Ireland, and the chilled Atlantic may have contributed to the “Year Without a Summer.””
The “Year Without a Summer” was 1816 so whatever happened in 1817 could hardly be a cause!
The Royal Navy sent a mission in 1818 to Spitzbergen to investigate reports that the ice between Greenland and Spitzbergen had gone. They found that the ice was normal and in fact got iced in on the west coast in June, that bay is currently ice free and has been all winter. It’s been possible to travel north of Spitzbergen without encountering sea ice this winter, even now at the maximum extent.
http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/single.cgi?image=crefl1_143.A2014084144500-2014084145000.2km.jpg
Jeff says:
March 25, 2014 at 6:49 am
…
Look at the ice in the middle of the arctic and look at the ice near the Canadian coast and surrounding islands. That ice there is extremely thick. The Arctic Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation are both in cold phases now, meaning that the warm gulf water is having difficulty penetrating and it is not warming that water. Ocean temperatures in that area is two degrees below normal. The north Atlantic is also below normal. When taken with the unusual thickness of MOST of the arctic ice, that suggests to me that the ice WON’T melt as easily (except for the area around Iceland and Scandinavia which has been warmer than normal all winter).
I predict this will be a bad year for the alarmists as it appears that rapid ice recovery is now well on its way.
You make an important point, data from Levitus on a strong correlation between AMO phase and Barents sea 100-150m depth temperatures make me suspect that the strength of the gulf stream warming flow to the Arctic could be the most important component of the AMO itself. So the AMO downslope can indeed to expected to bring Arctic ice recovery.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/08/new-paper-barents-sea-temperature-correlated-to-the-amo-as-much-as-4%c2%b0c/
Hi Caleb … the currents would have been wrong for east Greenland ice to reach Ireland … here’s an article I found http://www.houghton.idv.hk/?p=190
All the enthusiastic talk about shipping through the Arctic will remain mostly just that — talk — for the foreseeable future, says Transport Minister Lisa Raitt
She bluntly offered a list of concerns — including from insurance companies who, she said, are the ones really calling the shots about what ships would be allowed to pass through the area.
There are too many problems for now, including shallow passes and a lack of navigational markers, Raitt said. Any time savings offered by the shorter route would be negated if a ship got stuck, she added.
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/economy/Northwest+Passage+shipping+hopes+cooled+transport/9659329/story.html#ixzz2x5RPeeaM
Re: Michael Jennings says:
March 26, 2014 at 7:07 am
[snip . . this is dull. Put some content into your contributions or you are just trolling . . mod]
At the risk of repeating myself, here’s the latest dull content out of NSIDC:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/03/Figure3-350×261.png
Do you see the blue line heading for the bottom right?
Snow White,
Global ice cover is right at it’s 30-year average [the red graph line]. That is because Antarctic ice cover has been steadily rising for many years.
The basic debate is about global warming. If the planet was warming, then both poles would see declining ice. But as we see, that is simply not happening. That is because global warming has stopped. And not just recently: the planet stopped warming more than seventeen years ago.
But by all means, continue with your ‘great white con’. Maybe you can fool a few realclimate folks.
SIGINT EX says:
LOL. Yet another year, another example of the “Catastrophic Warmers” Catastrophic Failure.
But ‘climateace’ objects to that fact being noted.
Here’s how it is, ‘ace’:
Planet Earth is decisively falsifying your global warming scare. It just isn’t happening. If the tables were turned and temperatures were rising fast, as was incessantly predicted by you and your ilk, then you would have bragging rights. The planet would be agreeing with you, and you know what? Scientific skeptics would accept what the planet was saying.
That is the difference between skeprics and climate alarmists. Skeptics accept what reality tells them. But the alarmist crowd, being religious True Believers, will never accept reality. Instead, you cherry-pick the Arctic, and pretend the Antarctic doesn’t count — even though it has 10X the volume of ice that the Arctic has.
I notice that you have once again moved the goal posts, this time to your grandchildren. How convenient, eh? Can’t falsify that, can we?
Manmade global warming is your religion, and you cannot accept reality. You are as far from being scientific as a sixteenth century witch doctor in Africa. Your juju is supplied by anti-science blogs like SkS.
Really, you would get some respect if you accepted what Planet Earth is clearly telling us: that global warming, like global cooling, is entirely natural. There is nothing unprecedented happening, and the only unusual thing we see is the exceptionally benign global climate over the past century and a half. Note that not one of your endless predictions of global catastrophe have come true. Not one. And all of your computer climate models have been flat wrong: not one of them predicted the 17+ year halt of global warming. They were all wrong.
But like Chicken Little, you believe an acorn represents the sky. You simply cannot let go of your religion. Sad, really. Stand-up people admit it when they are proven wrong. Not you, though.
Willis did us all a favour a few strings ago by pointing out that much of the discussion about AGW is about Meming, or cultural transmission of fixed ideas, rather than about scientific discussion.
In the latter, those discussing issues have open minds and are willing to change their minds when presented with new evidence or with compelling new interpretations of the evidence.
Unfortunately, Willis only really looked at the Memers on one side, which was a bit unbalanced because it is fairly easy to pick dozens of Skeptic Memer posts in virtually any string in WUWT, including, ironically, in the string in which Willis was making his point.
Memers who depart from the science look silly from a scientific perspective.
It is good to see that such as Just the Facts – see above – agree with me completely that a single day cherry pick and single event frenzies are barely worth discussing from a scientific statistical point of view. Of course Just the Facts just looks at one side of the Memers, when, really, there are two lots of Memers who cluster around both sides of the concept of ‘Catastrophe Now!’
I note that in recent WUWT blogs we have posts on a single Arctic winter maximum day, on the weight of a single species of animal, on the science used on another single species of animal, on a single storm and so on and so forth.
While it may be useful to discuss the nitty gritty of a single species the key thing about AGW is that it will generate trends and it will generate patterns of consequences. Any single event, or discussion about any single day, or a discussion about any single species should, IMHO, be set in the context of these trends.
AGW is like many a good meal… the cooking is done slowly.
Dear dbstealey,
According to the title this thread is about the Arctic. Here’s another dull blue Arctic sea ice extent trend line courtesy of the NSIDC:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2000/02/Fig3_Jan2014_trend.png
What do you suppose the one for March will reveal? Feel free to draw your own blue trend line on this dull graph of (estimated!) Arctic sea ice volume:
http://GreatWhiteCon.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/piomas-20140228.png
See what I meant in my (snipped) comment about all the long term trends heading towards the bottom right? Can you show me one that isn’t?
climateace says: March 26, 2014 at 3:04 pm
It is good to see that such as Just the Facts – see above – agree with me completely that a single day cherry pick and single event frenzies are barely worth discussing from a scientific statistical point of view. Of course Just the Facts just looks at one side of the Memers, when, really, there are two lots of Memers who cluster around both sides of the concept of ‘Catastrophe Now!’
Can you provide examples of the ‘Catastrophe Now!’ Skeptical Memers you refer to, i.e. links to article similar to what I cited?
I note that in recent WUWT blogs we have posts on a single Arctic winter maximum day, on the weight of a single species of animal, on the science used on another single species of animal, on a single storm and so on and so forth.
“single Arctic winter maximum day”? The Arctic and Antarctic tend to have one maximum and one minimum per year, thus it seems reasonable to report on them, especially given the phoney ‘Catastrophe Now!’ death spiral meme.
AGW is like many a good meal… the cooking is done slowly.
No, the theory as put forth is that, “Global warming is the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century primarily due to the greenhouse gases released as people burn fossil fuels.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page2.php
However, “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, ‘the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.'”
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions
If Earth is not warming as a result of the rapid increase to CO2, it indicates that Earth is not particularly sensitive to changes in CO2. As such, the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming narrative is falsified and there is no reason for us to be concerned about our CO2 emissions.
At the risk of repeating myself, so what?
The Antarctic sea ice that is reflecting energy back into space is many hundreds of kilometers closer to the equator than is the Arctic sea ice on every day of the year.
That Antarctic sea ice is at its highest extents at the same times that the Arctic sea ice is at its minimum extents, and last October for example, just the “excess” Antarctic sea ice at latitude 60 south was larger than the ENTIRE area of Hudson Bay at latitude 60 north.
At that same exact day-of-year, that “excess” Antarctic sea ice is irradiated by FIVE TIMES more solar radiation than the Arctic sea ice (on the same day of year) at its minimum extents.
Within 10 years, if the ever-increasing Antarctic sea ice continues its steady expansion as it has since May 2010, it will block the sea routes around Cape Horn and the Magellan Straits.
At today’s levels, at sea ice minimum between late August and early October, the Arctic Ocean LOSES more energy when the sea ice is removed than it gains from the received solar radiation. More sea ice loss in the Arctic, the more heat loss.
william on March 25, 2014 at 10:25 am
Having watched sea ice extent data every day this winter here at Watts Up it looked like sea ice extent was going to recover to at least within the std dev of the 1979-2000 monthly average. That recovery stalled. Probably as others pointed out it was a result of the “polar vortex” we experienced a few times here in Chicago. I will stand by my prediction that sea ice extent at the summer low will be similar to the last few years. It will remain substantially below the k1979-2000 monthly average. As a result, warmists will have their typical field day pointing to the lack of ice as proof of our impending golbal warming doom.
Temperature of air is only part of the story of Arctic ice and maybe a small part. The largest part is water temperature specifically warm water transport poleward from lower latitudes. Thus some recent summers have had very low summer ice minima despite quite low average summer air temperature.
However as Jeff has posted above, there are signs that poleward heat transport in the gulf stream has been decreasing in the last year or two as part of the recently commenced fall of the AMO. Thus there could well be another strong Arctic September minimum regardless of what air temperature does.
The low Arctic ice summer minima in recent years combined with low summer air temperatures there have caused a shed-load of heat to escape from the climate system as a whole (to space). This is part of the negative feedback associated with oscillating Arctic ice extent.
RACookPE1978 on March 26, 2014 at 5:28 pm
Your point about Antarctic sea ice, latitude and albedo is important. It is understandable how Antarctic and Arctic ice may reciprocate due to heat piracy and the bipolar seesaw. However for ice to start increasing at both poles – that would be scary.
Snow White says:
See what I meant in my (snipped) comment about all the long term trends heading towards the bottom right? Can you show me one that isn’t?
Here is one that isn’t.
And here.
Here is another one.
This will help you get your head out of your… clouds.
You seem to believe NSIDC. Did you know they adjust inconvenient graphs?
Here is another chart debunking your ice alarmism. Also, the Arctic is responding to our cooling planet.
Finally, most of the Antarctic has been in a long-term cooling trend that has yet to change direction. Since the Antarctic contains 10x more ice than the Arctic, doesn’t it seem just foolish cherry-picking to be doing all your hand-waving over the Arctic?
Wake up, Snow White. Your manmade global warming scare is being debunked by the only Authority that matters: Planet Earth.
JTF
Thank you for your polite and considered reply.
You ask me to provide links to articles. I was referring to dozens of posts on WUWT. I recall one in particular. A Skeptic Memer discussing extinction rates in a recent string asked rhetorically why there had not been thousands of extinctions already. I could have provided a scientific response but there was obviously no point because the comment was made by someone indulging in cultural transmission of a fixed idea and not in science.
I recognise that some Skeptics are genuinely interested in the science just as thousands of climate scientists are also genuinely interested in the science. I welcome this.
My general point: stands there are Memers active on both sides of the discussion.
“‘I note that in recent WUWT blogs we have posts on a single Arctic winter maximum day, on the weight of a single species of animal, on the science used on another single species of animal, on a single storm and so on and so forth.
“single Arctic winter maximum day”? The Arctic and Antarctic tend to have one maximum and one minimum per year, thus it seems reasonable to report on them, especially given the phoney ‘Catastrophe Now!’ death spiral meme.”
I don’t have a difficulty with reporting a single day, local weather event, regional weather event or even national weather event, or a single species outcome. In fact I usually find the discussions very interesting. It is the weight given to them that is the point.
Global, Arcitc or Antarctic Ice extent on a single day of the year has no statistical significance. Yet it has become Memer bait for both sides of the discussion. Weather in a single country has almost no particular significane on a global basis. Yet is has become Memer bait. The future of polar bears is an insignificant element of wholescale range and phenology changes. Yet the status of polar bears has become Memer bait.
I agree with your comment on ‘Catastrophe Now!’ I think it righly belongs to the AGW Memer Club and not to scientists.
I note your general comments on AGW and see that we will have to agree to differ on the science of AGW.
This leaves the most interesting point of scientific contention between us: assuming, (solely for the sake of argument) that AGW is occurring and will continue to occur, how rapid is ‘rapid’? This is precisely the point I have been trying to make. Most of the pro- and anti- catastrophist Memers seem to have a bee in their bonnets about any catastrophes needing to be around the corner.
IMHO this focus of the ‘AGW debate’ is mainly in the form of Memers on both sides hurling barbs, cherry-picked facts, personal insults and the like. It generates heat but no scientific light.
One particular difficiulty may be that we culturally-attuned to events rather than to patterns and trends.
Thus there is a tendency to define catastrophe as something that happens in a limited place, is dramatic, and occurs within a relatively short time scale.
This tends to cause us to focus, for example, on a single extinction of a single species as if this is some sort of substitute for what is happening on a global scale to biodiversity. While interesting, it is not particularly significant. With respect to biodiversity, the trends and patterns that we need to focus on are range increases and phenology changes amongst thousands of species including weeds, feral pests, insect vectors of tropical diseases and numberless pathogens.
A few decades, IMHO, is neither here nor there. A single storm or a single warm winter in a limited place or a single cold winter in a limited place, a single species that may or may not be increasing in population or range or weight are, similarly, the stuff of Memers on both sides.
The answer to the important, rather than the insignificant, AGW questions lies not in odds and sods. It lies in trends, patterns, a global scale, and timelines of many decades and many centuries.
According to the Daily AMSR2 sea ice maps, University of Bremen, Germany:
Note that the maximum extent of Arctic sea ice was reached in 1979 and for the Antarctic in 2013.
See http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr2/extent_n_running_mean_amsr2_regular.png
and http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr2/extent_s_running_mean_amsr2_regular.png
climateace says:
IMHO this focus of the ‘AGW debate’ is mainly in the form of Memers on both sides hurling barbs, cherry-picked facts, personal insults and the like. It generates heat but no scientific light.
The ‘debate’ was about one thing, and one thing only: whether human CO2 emissions are causing climate catastrophe in the form of runaway global warming. That debate has been decisively won by scientific skeptics.
Next, ‘ace’ says:
…there is a tendency to define catastrophe as something that happens in a limited place, is dramatic, and occurs within a relatively short time scale.
Well, that is pretty much the definition of a catastrophe. But now you are trying to move the goal posts once again, by saying that a “few decades, IMHO, is neither here nor there…. AGW… lies in trends, patterns, a global scale, and timelines of many decades and many centuries.”
Ri-i-i-i-ght. So now that your climate catastrophe is nowhere to be seen, we must all change our outlook to “many centuries”??
Wake up, ‘ace’. You lost the debate. You were flat wrong. Pushing your argument out to many centuries in the future shows how wrong you were.
There is no scientific evidence proving that human emissions have any effect on global temperature. Thus, spending one more dollar to ‘mitigate’ the non-existent effects of [harmless, beneficial] CO2 is a dollar completely wasted.
The most frustrating thing about this whole ‘debate’ is that the climate alarmist crowd knows that they have no scientific evidence to support their argument, but like religious believers everywhere, they dig in their emotion-based heels, and refuse to acknowledge scientific veracity. Your kind would be easy pickings for a 16th Century witch doctor.
climateace says: March 26, 2014 at 7:35 pm
I note your general comments on AGW and see that we will have to agree to differ on the science of AGW.
But isn’t it a valuable goal to try determine if the science behind AGW is accurate? I have been looking for observational evidence of Co2 based AGW for many years, reviewing data from all available sources and I cannot find any convincing evidence to support the existence of CO2 driven AGW. I understand the underlying science and CO2 is clearly a greenhouse gas, however it appears as though Earth’s sensitivity to CO2 is less than projected by various models, possibly due to the logarithmic effect of CO2;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-co2-as-a-greenhouse-gas-becomes-ever-more-marginal-with-greater-concentration/
that negative feedbacks are mitigating any CO2 based warming;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/30/lindzen-on-negative-climate-feedback/
or otherwise.
This leaves the most interesting point of scientific contention between us: assuming, (solely for the sake of argument) that AGW is occurring and will continue to occur, how rapid is ‘rapid’? This is precisely the point I have been trying to make. Most of the pro- and anti- catastrophist Memers seem to have a bee in their bonnets about any catastrophes needing to be around the corner.
But rapidity is at the root of the scientific debate. Hypotheses are not proven by models, but by observations, and the observations currently show no significant change in the rate of warming after 1950, when the IPCC claims to be “95% certain that humans are the “dominant cause” of global warming”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24292615
There is not only no observational evidence that “catastrophes needing to be around the corner”, but there is no observational evidence that CO2 based AGW will cause catastrophes at any point in the future.
IMHO this focus of the ‘AGW debate’ is mainly in the form of Memers on both sides hurling barbs, cherry-picked facts, personal insults and the like. It generates heat but no scientific light.
Totally agree there, this has turned into a PR debate versus a scientific debate for many.
Thus there is a tendency to define catastrophe as something that happens in a limited place, is dramatic, and occurs within a relatively short time scale.
But even defining “catastrophe” in the broadest terms possible, it still implies “a sudden and widespread disaster” or “Geology . a sudden, violent disturbance, especially of a part of the surface of the earth; cataclysm”;
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/catastrophe
and there is no observational evidence that CO2 based AGW will lead to such a “catastrophe”.
A few decades, IMHO, is neither here nor there. A single storm or a single warm winter in a limited place or a single cold winter in a limited place, a single species that may or may not be increasing in population or range or weight are, similarly, the stuff of Memers on both sides.
Yes, a few decades are negligible in the life of a 4.5 billion year old planet.
The answer to the important, rather than the insignificant, AGW questions lies not in odds and sods. It lies in trends, patterns, a global scale, and timelines of many decades and many centuries.
Agree, in this article;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/25/when-did-global-warming-begin/
I looked back over the last 450,000 years and didn’t find any evidence of CO2 based AGW. Please read this article and let me know if you think I missed something.
JTF
To sum up, we agree that the Memer focus on a single day event, a single weather event, a single species, a local weather event, a regional weather event or a national weather event belies what should be the scientific focus, which is patterns, trends, a global scale and decades and even centuries.
I think we are also broadly on the same page with Memer’s attitudes to ‘catastrophes’ in the sense that the general concept of a catastrophy is that it is constrained in time, place and focus, whereas the AGW (should the latter happen) catastrophe will be global, and will take decades, centuries and millenia to exhibit. There may well be incidents of storms, hurricanes, cyclones, snow fall, snow cover, sea ice extent, ice mass balance in Greenland and Antarctica and the world’s tens of thousands of glaciers, storm surges, wildfires, rainfall, wind, cloudiness, and ocean chemistry that, taken as individual events, may well be statistically insignificant.
The catastrophe will not be the parts but the sum of the parts. That will take some time to eventuate.
It is interesting how different countries are approaching some of these issues, BTW. In response to concerns about AGW, the Netherlands began years ago to spread and raise their river levees, and to raise and thicken dykes. Houses in the Netherlands do not flood. In fact it is highly likely that no Dutch government would survive a large scale flooding event. OTOH, there are thousands of homes in low-lying parts of England, just across the ditch from the Netherlands, for which it is now impossible to get private sector flood insurance at all. The home owners are trying to get taxpayers to provide government insurance but I am not sure how that will go.
They would no doubt be pleased that we have exempted them from being the AGW catastrophe: probably too soon to be AGW-related, too small an event, a single weather occurrence (although being repeated rather often), too localised and limited in duration.
Those British homeowners who live in low lying areas which are increasingly subject to increased tidal reach and/or to changes in coastal geomorphology which are flooding some houses while dropping other houses over eroding cliff tops, might eventually come to the conclusion that rising sea-levels are not a good thing, of course.
They might then have a personal interest in separating the Memers from the scientists.
All we have to do is wait,
Hate to be a pessimist, but I think we will see another record low this summer. There was a lot of warmth in the Arctic this winter because the frigid air came down to the U.S.
ace says:
The catastrophe will not be the parts but the sum of the parts. That will take some time to eventuate.
I give up on ‘climateace’. His belief is religious, and total. He is clearly convinced that we are in the midst of a ‘catastrophe’, and he cherry-picks random natural variability to feed his Belief:
…homeowners who live in low lying areas which are increasingly subject to increased tidal reach and/or to changes in coastal geomorphology which are flooding some houses while dropping other houses over eroding cliff tops, might eventually come to the conclusion that rising sea-levels are not a good thing…
And so on. Skeptics cannot debate with emotion or religion. Debate must be rational. Ace would be fine, if he understood and accepted the climate Null Hypothesis, which has never been falsified. That hypothesis states that nothing currently being observed is unprecedented, or unusual. It has all happened before [when CO2 was low], and to a much greater degree.
Therefore, how can the current, very benign global climate and temperature be a ‘catastrophe’? Only a religious True Believer in cAGW would make that preposterous claim.
==================================
Richard says:
“Hate to be a pessimist…”
Nothing to be pessimistic about. Arctic ice cover is normal and natural. Earlier in the Holocene the Arctic was very likely ice-free. The ice comes and goes, and human activity has nothing to do with it. Just like human activity has nothing to do with Antarctic ice cover.
Also, here is more data for the wacky Snow White crowd.
There is nothing unusual happening in the Arctic. The only unusual occurrence is in Snow White’s noggin.
climateace says: March 26, 2014 at 11:09 pm
whereas the AGW (should the latter happen) catastrophe will be global, and will take decades, centuries and millenia to exhibit.
But this runs counter to the basic tenets of CO2 based AGW. If Earth is highly sensitive to CO2 the warming should be happening right now, as “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750.” If Earth is not highly sensitive to CO2, then we will not expect AGW take decades, centuries and millenia to exhibit, rather we can safely catagorize CO2 as a minor climatic variable at current and foreseeable concentrations. As such we should focus our energy on understanding what really drives changes in Earth’s temperature, as this will allow us to best predict and adapt to future changes.
It is interesting how different countries are approaching some of these issues, BTW. In response to concerns about AGW, the Netherlands began years ago to spread and raise their river levees, and to raise and thicken dykes. Houses in the Netherlands do not flood. In fact it is highly likely that no Dutch government would survive a large scale flooding event. OTOH, there are thousands of homes in low-lying parts of England, just across the ditch from the Netherlands, for which it is now impossible to get private sector flood insurance at all. The home owners are trying to get taxpayers to provide government insurance but I am not sure how that will go.
Yes, preparation for naturally occurring severe weather events is a good idea, we should be expending more resources preparing for inevitable natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, volcanoes, etc.
All we have to do is wait
I figure a few more years at max. If Earth does not begin warming rapidly, then CO2 can be dismissed as a minor climatic variable at current and foreseeable concentrations and we can all move on.
dbstealey – So your oracle in such matters is Steven Goddard’s ludicrously misnamed “Real Science”, rather than the NSIDC or NORSEX? Surely you jest?
Paraphrasing his lurid headlines, “Arctic Sea Ice Extent WAS NOT Nearing Peak For The Past Decade” on March 16th, and there was no evidence for an “Arctic Ice Recovery” on March 7th.
I repeat, if you can present any evidence to the contrary please do so. Show me the data, not largely irrelevant cherry picked images.