IceAgeNow writes: As of today, 27 May 2014, Lake Superior ice cover stands at 4.3% – the greatest level of ice seen on this date, not only on Lake Superior, but on all of the Great Lakes since modern satellite records in 1980-81. Get a load of this picture that shows the Lake Superior beaches on Memorial Day.
Bill Steffen, meteorologist at WOOD-TV writes:
The high temperature at the Marquette Airport (well inland) was 85° on Sunday…but… This is what it looked like at the beach! (pic. from the Marquette NWS facebook page and Doug Vanb). Easiest day a lifeguard ever had. Check out this picture Sunday from the beach at Grand Marais. Note, not only the expanse of ice, but also, no leaves on the trees yet. Here’s Union Bay – Silver City MI on Friday. Here’s the ice at Black River Harbor. Another pic. of the ice at Marquette.
Current ice cover measured by satellite:
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/res/glcfs/sicecon-00.gif
For more info, see the WUWT Great Lakes Ice page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/great-lakes-ice-page/
UPDATE: The headline was truncated and gave an inaccurate viewpoint that ice had never been seen on Lake Superior at this late date. It has been updated to reflect that it is about extent, not just the mere appearance of it.
Thanks to Twitter follower Abbie Tireman for the note and this photo:
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People around the Great Lakes are probably aware of the large shoreline ice banks that form over the winter. These banks are formed when waves splash up and freeze, building ice with each spray, but these banks are filled with sand and debris and usually melt very quickly once the sun starts beating on them. One unique feature Lake Superior had this year between Marquette and Munising was an extremely large “ice bank” a couple miles offshore. I’m not sure if anyone explored this bank. I can imagine the large open water waves and extreme cold could have made this bank a source of huge, CLEAR icebergs that will not melt as quickly as the usual icebergs normally seen.
Global warming is real, Obama said so and it is therefore Amerikas official policy and for you to say that there is still ice on Lake Superior makes you a raciest.
It may have been 4.3% on the 27th, but the NOAA link for the 28th says 3.4%.
It may not mean anything, but in 1971 on the 1st of June on Crystal Lake north of Harrison, Maine there was still ice on the lake there. I saw it myself (my one year there) and thought that the climate in Maine sure was different than in the Midwest where I came from.
As a general picture of the trend in the climate, this kind of thing suggests that we are in a similar climate phase as back in the early 1970s. (It is NOT anecdotal, because it is in the weather records there.) After that we entered into a warmer phase for a while, and now we are in a cooler phase. However much some people want to think that climate is totally random from year to year, and that any trends are some kind of human screw ups, that thinking is WRONG, because the fact that we are BACK in the cooler phase (and we certainly are in the US and northern Europe) means that whatever was causing the warmer phase has failed to make a permanent impact. If it DID make a difference, then we could not be back in the cooler phase.
Of course, all of this reflects on the PDO, which is a HUGE influence, and which wasn’t even known about for 9 years after Hansen screamed “The Sky Is Falling” before Congress. Since he couldn’t have known about the PDO and its warm and cool regimes (phases), obviously Hansen did not have the whole story, yet he claimed to be able to predict the future, saying that the climate was inexorably warming. That the climate DID warm up in the 1990s, thus, made his lucky guess look like he knew what he was talking about.
But he didn’t.
So his prediction was a lucky guess.
His precocity was an ILLUSION. The climate was not inexorably warming.
@Glenn Skankey at 6:31 pm:
“It may have been 4.3% on the 27th, but the NOAA link for the 28th says 3.4%.”
Well, 85° temps just might do that. Between air temps heating by conductivity and radiant heat energy directly entering the open water between the ice floes, a lot of heat energy was going into the lake water.
Luke Warmist says:
May 27, 2014 at 4:55 pm
“Well, today in Phoenix it’s 106F, which means it’s climate. Those of you with ice, that’s simply weather.”
That depended on where you were “in Phoenix”. I read only 102 today. Of course that isn’t
an “official” reading, though.
“Arizona’s urban areas could see summer temperatures rise between 2 and 7 degrees during the next few decades because of the heat island effect, according to a recent study by the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences”
http://www.statepress.com/2012/11/25/researchers-urban-heat-island-effect-more-severe-than-global-warming/
Bushy says:
May 27, 2014 at 6:17 pm
My experience also Bushy, combination of stalled weather, trapped urban heat at temperature measuring sites, plus warmth drift from the tropical North and of course, the “abnormal” heat generated in the media by the usual suspects praying for a hook to hang warming on,
Hence the Australian B.O.M. concentration on so called record periods, that are confined of course to convenient periods in time where the auto homogenization of recent and past temperature data, can be twisted (tortured??) to suit the meme. Shush just don’t mention satellite data, just adjust to hide the divergence.
Its an agony to see their desperation to hold the line.
I have “nick” named this as “Nickstokian anguish media syndrome” in anticipation of a Lewandowski inspired psychological media Cookup when winter finally sets in and the Carbon fuelled energy taxes bite and the fire needs media stoking!
Scott@ur momisugly 5:35: Beer ice?
Same as it ever was
Gitche Gumee is such a party-pooper.
Oh you silly people he’s not a lifeguard he’s an iceguard, after all you’ve got to protect all that ice from the nasty global warming…
We lived in Superior WI from 1971 to 1975, where we experienced some cold winters. The year we arrived, the ice did not leave Duluth-Superior harbor until June 10, which at the time I understood was the latest on record. Our moving day was in early June, and I remember driving across the south range of hills a few miles from the lake and seeing no blue–just white. It was a warm day in Superior, about 82 degrees with a slight south breeze, and as we drove into town, we saw people outside working in short sleeves or even shirtless. We got to the DMV and saw shirtless workmen across the street on a construction project; they were getting quite sweaty in the hot sun. We were maybe an hour in the DMV getting Wisconsin licenses. When we came out, it was still sunny, but there was a strong wind off the lake, and the air temperature had dropped to about 40 degrees! The cursing from the workmen was most vehement. A wind change at that time of year can lower the air temp by 30 or 40 degrees in a minute.
Our son was born in 1973 in Superior. In the winter we took him out on the lake, which had frozen over a few feet thick. The ice was not smooth and flat; it was hilly, with sharp projections, as though wave action had broken up the floes and thrown the resulting chunks of ice onshore. As I walked on the floe, my 9-months-old son on my shoulder, I could feel the ice floe riding gently up and down with the wave motion underneath. I did not go far out on the floe, in spite of its obvious solidity as far as I could see; it just seemed risky. Nonetheless, an amazing experience.
Some day, I’ll write about the Spring Break blizzard . . .
The comment thread here reads like a comment thread at http://reason.com/.
The land adjacent to the Great Lakes can’t really warm up until after the ice is all gone. Even then the Lakes are a big modulator of temperature, as the temperature of the Lakes (speaking of Michigan and Superior from my experience) never get much above 60 degrees F. The beach is a fun place but you can’t spend much time in the water–a quick dip when you get hot, but don’t stay in the water unless you want hypothermia. Boaters can die of hypothermia in the middle of winter in a boating accident if they are not rescued fairly quickly. Every summer weather forecast is punctuated with the phrase “cooler near the lake” which us typically a 5-10 degree cooling depending on the direction of the wind. And during winter this flips to “warmer near the lake” until it completely freezes over. We lived about a mile from Lake Michigan and most homes in our neighborhood did not have air conditioning until the hotter summers of the 1980’s and 1990’s because it wasn’t worth it for the two or three weeks that it got really hot. Looking forward to another gorgeous summer here again. The Great Lakes were THE summer vacation destination in the US before air conditioning because of the beautiful tempering effect of the Lakes during the summer.
I’m on my way to the UP on Sunday and looking forward to all the usual activities on Lake Superior. I grew up there and one lasting impression is that Winter is never over. Still winter in the high country of Colorado. Ski Colorado on Memorial Day at A-Basin.
http://www.arapahoebasin.com/ABasin/snow-conditions/mountain-snapshots.aspx
What An Inconvenient Truth!
brr..
40’s here (central maine) today. but no ice at least 🙂
Too much moisture from warmed waters (from CO2-retained heat) caused too much snow to fall on “normal” ice and so retarded normal melting of the underlying ice.
It is all explainable if you allow the complexity of explanation infinite growth.
If it was January and Superior was ice-free, would it be headline news in major papers and news shows? You betcha it would!
The ice coverage in the visible part of the lake looks rather more than 4.3% I guess its bunched against the sides of the lake?
Gnarly, dude!
No problem for GAGWer’s to explain.
The heat missing from Lake Superior snuck into the ocean and is hiding there.
When all this ice melts, Chicago will flood…
PaulH says:
May 27, 2014 at 1:11 pm
I wouldn’t worry about this, because I’m sure it’s all just rotten ice.
/snark
—————
That anything like “sour grapes” (AGW™ Brand, of course)?
/snicker
The CAGWer’s won’t know anything about it. They’ve headed Down Under to enjoy, oops I mean complain about, the “unprecedented” winter time heat wave in Queensland. Long may it last but it is due to global cooling not global warming. Less solar energy in the atmosphere means less movement of air masses, which means the temperatures will remain constant for days and even weeks. It has happened quite a few times in the last couple of years, both summer and winter.