Significant Arctic Sea Ice Story a Possibility This Year

well done Russians,
“With the current icebreaker fleet, regular through
passages are possible between July and October, and have been made in November. For more
than a decade, the western portion has been kept open year-round as far as the Yenisey River”

Heat transport to the N Atlantic was trending down for the last decade and heat content has been dropping since 2007. I wouldn’t bet money on any individual year since one major storm could change everything but I would bet money that if the heat transport doesn’t pick back up the Arctic will be gaining ice.

The really interesting thing about the first curve is the (unremarked) change in the variance of the sea ice curve in the range of the 21st century where it appears to have flattened out and maybe even be bottoming. The range of natural oscillation goes from roughly 1 million km-sq to 3 million km-sq! One can actually understand the concern that this was a “tipping point” — this is precisely the kind of thing that is observed in the vicinity of a critical point for a second order phase transition — critical slowing down, a divergence in the scale of fluctuations, and eventually a critical fluctuation that pushes the entire system from one bistable or multistable attractor to another.
However, the system is also clearly still stabilized by strong negative feedbacks towards a collectively stable “locally mean” behavior as the width of fluctuations isn’t changing much. Once it hits extremes, it rapidly regresses towards that mean. We still do not understand the motion of the mean — it seems unlikely to be CO_2 driven or driven by the global anomaly, as it has lousy correlation with the latter and a meaningless correlation with the former (generally monotonic functions can always be correlated, but if their pattern of variation and fluctuations don’t correspond it is difficult to even argue that there is a direct causal link between the two).
I personally am curious as to whether or not even these SHORT term predictions for things like ENSO, the AMO, and the arctic sea ice cycle are borne out. I do think that the decadal oscillations are a major factor in climate evolution, but since the decadal oscillations themselves are chaotic and at best quasi-periodic and of highly variable strength and duration, one can see their large effect on climate after the fact easily enough, but predicting that large effect beforehand requires being able to predict them and we can’t. It would be an absolute hoot if — after all of the bated-breath hype concerning a strong ENSO this year (without which the warmist argument collapses under its own weight within a couple more years as the solar cycle starts the long road downhill to a probable extended minimum and a possible very low following cycle, which seems likely to have at least SOME cooling effect) turns out to just be wrong, with the ENSO more or less fizzling out and/or being replaced by a strong La Nina. Perhaps it is “unlikely”, but I still think that our ability to predict large scale things until they are basically already happening is almost nonexistent. In this case, they are “already happening” (or starting to happen) but there are still many, many nonlinear factors that we cannot compute involved, so that we’re basically saying “most of the time when something starts out this way, the following happens” without having any really good understanding of why.
rgb