The headline is a quote by Dr. Judith Curry from a David Rose article in the Sunday Mail: Stunning satellite images show summer ice cap is thicker and covers 1.7million square kilometres MORE than 2 years ago…despite Al Gore’s prediction it would be ICE-FREE by now.
![1409435267461_Image_galleryImage_polar1_JPG[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/1409435267461_image_galleryimage_polar1_jpg1.jpg?quality=83)
The speech by former US Vice-President Al Gore was apocalyptic. ‘The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,’ he said. ‘It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.’
Those comments came in 2007 as Mr Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning on climate change.
But seven years after his warning, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, far from vanishing, the Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in succession – with a surge, depending on how you measure it, of between 43 and 63 per cent since 2012.
To put it another way, an area the size of Alaska, America’s biggest state, was open water two years ago, but is again now covered by ice.
The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres.
This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.
Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometres.
The satellite images published here are taken from a further authoritative source, the University of Illinois’s Cryosphere project.
They show that as well as becoming more extensive, the ice has grown more concentrated, with the purple areas – denoting regions where the ice pack is most dense – increasing markedly.
Crucially, the ice is also thicker, and therefore more resilient to future melting. Professor Andrew Shepherd, of Leeds University, an expert in climate satellite monitoring, said yesterday: ‘It is clear from the measurements we have collected that the Arctic sea ice has experienced a significant recovery in thickness over the past year.
Indeed, and the way things are going, it looks like WUWT (and Wang) will be closer to the final September Average for Sea Ice than any of the other forecast players in the ARCUS Sea Ice prediction Network:
Click to magnify the image
Figure 1: Distribution of individual Pan-Arctic Outlook values (August Report) for September 2014 sea ice extent. Labels on the bar graph are rounded to the tenths for readability. Refer to the Individual Outlooks at the bottom of this report for the full details of individual submissions.
NSIDC shows sea ice within the +/- 2 standard deviations range, far above the year 2012:
![N_stddev_timeseries[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/n_stddev_timeseries1.png?quality=75)
The WUWT Sea Ice Page has complete details and all sorts of plots and images.
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Wonder why Russia is building a new fleet of monster ice-breakers?
Nukes too so good for CO2 stats.
http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=11&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CFAQFjAK&url=http%3A%2F%2Frt.com%2Fnews%2Fworld-biggest-icebreaker-russia-275%2F&ei=adwCVLSICcbnuQTyuYLYAQ&usg=AFQjCNF9jlQ7i0QkbgbfMSQN1lEoDcPQig&bvm=bv.74115972,d.dGc
The Skeptics revenge. IPPC panel locked in a room with Vanilla Ice’s hit song “Ice Ice Baby” on a loop and loud!
Wrong direction? I’d say a warming planet is the right direction. Most mammals and plants benefit far more from from warmth than cold. I never feared a warming planet but I definitely fear a cooling planet.
You and others use 1979 high in extent as a starting point rather than the first satellite data in 1974 which was low as today.
We could all be a little more circumspect if we had reliable data for the last 1000 years. Perhaps some meaningful conclusions could be made then.
What a bunch of whiners
I see by the first half of the thread that some of the usual suspects are whining that a comparison is being made to a low point in ice extent. OMG! It was the low point that was used to shout over and over that we were doomed. Doomed. Doomed as Doomed could be!
From the low point till now we see a recovery in spite of the fact that CO2 has been skyrocketing. This is news and the poster of the article did a fine job explaining it; even if the resident alarmists don’t like their religion to be challenged.
My friends, mankind does indeed effect climate to some degree. Building cities and cutting down trees will effect things to a tiny, tiny degree. But then climate is also effected to some tiny degree by other life forms. It is raw, stupid arrogance to claim that mankind is effecting the climate to any great degree. Natural causes are driving the climate. Only religious zealots, the deluded, and the propagandized fail to understand that.
No. No it isn’t. It really isn’t.
It may be affected, in fact, it certainly is, but it’s wise to learn the difference between effected and affected. Tragically, too many people do not.
Effected means executed, produced, or brought about. I meant that various life forms do, in fact, bring about climate change to a tiny degree. They effect the climate. Climate is also affected by other life forms to boot, also to some tiny degree.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Heh, this one has always bothered me. The meanings are close enough in many situations. So I sit and ponder, pull petals off of flowers, is it ‘e’ or is it ‘a’. Eventually I put one or the other down, and worry that the flowers have betrayed me.
The nouns are not so difficult.
================
You can effect a change–that’s true. But you (almost certainly) can’t effect (bring about) a climate.
Here’s Fowler (Modern English Usage) with a couple of examples that bring out the difference:
Mankind does not bring about climate to some degree–or anyway, if it does, that’s not what you meant to say. You meant to say that it changes climate to some degree. So you should have used “affect,” which is the word that implies “changes”:
NSIDC’s September average is tracking toward 5.40M km2 in 2014, versus 5.25M in 2013 and 3.63M in 2012. NSIDC does some post-processing to these numbers which can change them by +/- 0.1M km2.
Jaxa’s daily sea ice extent number declined by only 2,000 km2 on August 30, 2014 signalling that the melt season is coming to a low-melt end.
September 12 is the usual minimum Arctic sea ice extent/area day which is also the peak of the hurricane season and the peak of sea surface temperatures in most of the northern oceans. 83 days after the summer solstice.
The last hurricane to hit here (Florida) was Wilma in October 2005, and as we near 9 years without a hurricane it is the longest streak in recorded history. The alarmists are always going on about how their magic molecule CO2 is going to make hurricanes plentiful and super strong.
So how many predictions do they have to get wrong before they hang their heads in shame?
In the military service, we noted that when you got one “atta boy” it was worth ten “aw shits” so I suspect this is similar:
One right prediction (or even close) balances out ten wrong ones.
Con artists have no shame.
Excepting any massive storms I’d say it will be 9th +/- 1 , this year. Wiggles are out of phase with last year and lag a little from 2009/2010.
Nothing to worry about:
And:
The ice pack is far more solid in 2014 than last year’s “recovery” ice.
2014.
http://s1.postimg.org/iuto5ou73/Arctic_Ice_Aug30_2014.jpg
versus 2013.
http://s12.postimg.org/y603m69a5/Arctic_Ice_Aug30_2013.jpg
Thanks for those pictures. They explain something I have a hard time explaining with 1000 words: The Ice-pack is more packed, this year.
Temperature trends from Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Russis all show massive warming up to around 1940, massive cooling in the 1960’s and 70’s, and recent warming back to 1940 levels.
And the trends all closely follow the AMO.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/08/31/arctic-ice-and-the-amo/
We fail to learn the lessons of history at our peril.
Let’s hear it for Mother Nature – still the biggest, baddest, Big-Oil-funded, head-in-the-sand D****er on the planet!
Mom Nature Rocks!
haha now that was funny!
But one day all the doomists may die out, it’s no joke, it’s gonna be a crisis! We must do something to help conserve them! Got a good conserve recipe?
What is the trend since 2007? Oh my, flat to slightly upward.
If you can cherry pick the high extent when the AMO was at its minimum then you should have no problem with anyone using a low extent at the AMO peak.
Gulf Stream is inhibited by warmer North Atlantic.
http://www.opc.ncep.noaa.gov/Loops/GRTOFS/currents/GRtofs_Curr_Atl_03_Day_flash.shtml
http://www.opc.ncep.noaa.gov/Loops/GRTOFS/sst/GRtofs_sst_Atl_03_Day_flash.shtml
“Gulf Stream is inhibited by warmer North Atlantic.”
Not to worry. It’s always been a little bit shy.
Compare the coverage of ice from the side of Scandinavia.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=08&fd=29&fy=2013&sm=08&sd=29&sy=2014
You ignore at least three things: 1. The low 1974 ice extent shown to you above. 2. The failed projections of “ice free” Arctic. 3. The last 17 years of no warming.
You and others also seem not to understand that the global temperature has yet to exceed the highs of the Holocene Optimum thousands of years ago. Until we pass those highs all this is just natural.
In my opinion the key (corporately controlled) free market indicator of global cooling and the subsequent increases in arctic sea ice, was the purchase of the (Canadian) Tim Horton’s (Tim’s) coffee franchise by the (U.S.A.) Burger King. Knowing/predicting the consequent migration of 30+ million Canadians to the U.S.A.s southern latitudes, and Canadians particular copious consumption of coffee with an ever increasing market share palate preference for Tim’s (no offence to Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks intended), Burger King strategists have invested 9 billion dollars in this climate change mitigation endeavour. I suppose the risky marginal aspect of this corporate merger will be the stock market indicators of Burger Kings AGW denial.
Jimbo, I was about to post that although Al Gore is something of a comical figure in the minds of some, he did not make his prediction on his own. He would have relied on information from “top men”. Thanks for posting the log of similar predictions from other worthies in the field.
On another note, thanks for reminding us that the criterion for an ice-free Arctic is ice of less than a million sq km in extent. That makes sense to me. I could get that much ice in my bathtub. But if I were a climate scientist I would consider revising “ice free” to maybe five million.
“Al Gore … did not make his prediction on his own. He would have relied on information from “top men”.”
Uh, would these be the same “top men” that told him the Earth’s interior was millions of degrees hot?
Al Gore relied on Professor Wieslaw Maslowski of the US Naval Postgraduate School for his statement.
Al Gore is still an idiot.
Also covered here:
http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2014/243/b/1/_the_arctic_is_screaming__it_will_never_recover___by_kajm-d7xdnq0.png
After all the knee jerk reactions, increasing polar ice is not a good thing. Yeah it’s nice to show the charlatans are wrong but colder is not what the world needs. What the world needs now is, continued warmth. By the way, Florida is full, stay out.
Yeah, but humanity needs the dose of reality too, so we all get and can not fail to that we all got lied to for decades, so we can clean the green slurry out of every nook and cranny they have polluted … and degraded … and endangered … and stolen from … and perverted … and …
Tom in Florida, the freezing recent winters in the UK damaged their case in the eyes of many. Whether rightly or wrongly. Oh wait, they did tell us to expect warmer, snowless winters and earlier springs.
I agree with Peter. We have seen two years of ice extent “recovery” before and these were followed by new measured lows. Let’s wait for at least a third year of recovery.
Okay, so now what? Now that climate change/global warming is being corrected, or maybe self-corrected, where do all these environmentalists with Climate change of the brain go? If you know, then lets us know here
http://www.frontlineofdefense.com/trending
South Georgia?
It should shame Polar climate panicky scientists that simple minded armchair observers can calmly and clearly tag melt patterns with known polar oceanic/atmospheric circulation patterns, thus CO2 need not apply for part of the scare job. It should also shame polar pollution scientists that simple minded armchair observers of ice core data can clearly see that soot has been both greater and lesser in times past compared to now, thus China’s soot need not apply for part of the scare job. Our polar regions have large, very powerful weather pattern variation processes that require a tremendous amount of naturally driven re-directed energy to force a switch to a different variation or oscillation. The tiny addition of industrial soot, and/or the tiny addition of anthropogenic CO2, and/or the tiny addition of anthropogenic chlorofluorocarbons, just don’t have the cojones to move such powerful systems into a different pattern, even when combined.
Weather pattern variations do not trip over something so trivially small. They blow right through that stuff, paying it no mind whatsoever. The only things humankind have control over in terms of temperature are windbreaks, shade, and reflected heat from the things we build, and even then these things affect tiny heat island areas on the globe close to temperature sensors, compared to the strength of natural variations. Think of us as an ant hill colony. The structures that ants build affect the temperature of their colony. Step away from that colony and ants are at the mercy of weather just like we are.
Ph.D.’d scientists involved in perpetuating this watermelon fad may be book smart, yet remain amazingly stupid, becoming more so the longer they stay at the climate gravy train feed trough. In a very real sense, they look just like pigs lined up jostling for position with their snouts deep in slop, growing more stupid by the minute as they engorge on the emptying contents of our wallets.
Pamela, either that or incompetent.
Pamela Gray,
You said it better than I could have.
The basic argument has always been about “carbon” [by which they mean CO2, a tiny trace gas].
The scare has always been that rising CO2 will lead to runaway global warming and climate catastrophe. But that has not happened. In fact, global warming has stopped. In any other field of science, such a falsification of a basic prediction would mean the end of the conjecture. Climate ‘science’ is the exception.
Your last paragraph says it all. This is about money, not science.
[BTW, I found this photo of several alarmist scientists on the job.]
The following article was written May 31, 1947, in the There are many examples of similar ones from earlier periods in the 20’s and 30’s. All have very similar Alarmist tones to today’s climate bedwetting period. Note the call then for an “international agency to study the conditions on a global basis”. So, not only do we have cyclical icemelt periods in the arctic causing the usual climate fearmongering, but, wonder of wonders, there has never been an “arctic death spiral”. The ice always recovers. But, I suppose for the True Believers and those still suckling from the teat of government “science”, this time is different. Sure it is.
In my opinion, what it means to be “within two standard deviations” is not emphasized enough.
This is exactly what NSIDC says about standard deviation and how that relates to sea ice extent:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq/#standard_deviation
“Measurements that fall far outside of the two standard deviation range or consistently fall outside that range suggest that something unusual is occurring that can’t be explained by normal processes.” [my bold]
[In other words, if it is INSIDE two standard deviations, it is not unusual]
However, they then make this misleading statement:
“In recent years, ice extent has declined and in the summer especially, it has regularly fallen outside of two standard deviations. This suggests that the recent decline in sea ice extent represents a significant change in conditions from 1981 to 2010 time period.”
Not true. In fact, the September minimum has fallen outside two standard deviations exactly three times during the entire record: 2007, 2011, 2012.
Those dates may be “recent” but they hardly represent the “routine” state of the ice over the last 20 years or so.
Check it out yourself.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
Dr. Susan Crockford, PolarBearScience
Nice blog Dr. Crockford.
I would not be surprised to see that your blog about the great white bear is blacklisted by CAGW believers.
Your post here seems to suggest applying common sense to the data we have. I suspect that won’t go over well with the CAGW believers either.
FWIW – I’d say that makes you 2 for 2.
Dr. Crockford, the other problem is the period over which they computed the standard deviation. Starting in 1979 or 1981, as the two charts posted in comments above do, does not even use the full satellite record going back to 1974 that was published in AR1, FAR. So the 2 sigma band is too tight.
Since NSIDC doesn’t know the “normal processes” enough to predict anything about sea ice, I’d say their statement is fairly meaningless.
Thank yiou!
Good identification of the long-term trend of arctic sea ice compared to the “two standard deviations from normal” definition that NSIDC declares is correct.
I will never understand how mostly intelligent people can fall for 1 million sq km …..is ice free
…that’s the size of Egypt
Latitutude, I am only taking their definition without argument, just like I take the 30 year period of data as climate. I agree it’s not ice-free but we need an accepted definition otherwise we would all be going round in circles. Is the Arctic ice free yet? Yes it is, not it’s not, yes it is, no it’s not…….. 😉