Guest essay by Rolf E. Westgard
![global.daily.ice.area.withtrend[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/global-daily-ice-area-withtrend1.jpg?quality=83)
In his 2007 Noble Prize acceptance speech, former Vice President Al Gore warned that the “Arctic ice could be gone in as little as seven years.” Last week, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reported:
“The North and South Poles are not melting.” In that report, oceanographer Ted Maksym noted that polar ice “is much more stable than climate scientists once predicted and could even be much thicker than previously thought.”
That Woods Hole study was confirmed by today’s NOAA Arctic radar map which shows the Arctic Ice Cap at more than 4,000,000 square miles, larger than on any December 28 in the past five years. Reaching the North Pole requires either a dog sled or a nuclear sub; Al Gore’s cruise ship will stay in the tropics. At the South Pole, Antarctic ice coverage is at the highest extent since radar measurement began 35 years ago.
NOAA’s Arctic Report Card; Update for 2014 provides similar data for the Earth’s other big ice sheet, Greenland. Data from the GRACE satellite and other sources has shown an annual average Greenland ice loss of more than 300 billion tons until 2013. That loss has now dropped sharply by 98% to 6 billion annual tons since mid 2013. A loss of 300 billion tons adds about one millimeter to sea level rise.
All this frigid data parallels the 17 year pause in global land and sea surface temperatures as reported by NASA, NOAA, the UK Climate Research Unit, and the University of Alabama Huntsville Remote Sensing Systems program. That pause is occurring despite our annual release of more than 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide(CO2) from burning fossil fuels, especially coal. Half of that CO2 release stays in the atmosphere. But CO2 remains a trace gas, as the atmosphere weighs several quadrillion tons, and a quadrillion is a million times a billion.
There are good reasons to limit coal burning, even if its CO2 emissions may be primarily plant food. Burning coal releases toxic products like mercury, sulfur, arsenic, soot, and unburned coal ash. But unfulfilled dire warnings coming from UN agencies about the effect of CO2 emissions are contributing to public skepticism about global warming. Global warming ranked 19th in a recent Pew Poll list of 20 issues which concerned the public.
In the most recent UN IPCC report, lead author Dr. Mark Howden said,
“There’s increasing evidence that climate change is also impacting on agriculture, particularly on some of the cereal crops such as wheat and maize. The negative impacts are greater and quicker than we previously thought.”
Farmers continue to ignore the IPCC. The US Department of Agriculture notes that world agricultural production set all-time records for all three major cereal crops in 2014, with rice output up 1.1 percent, wheat up 11.2 percent, and corn up a whopping 14.0 percent over 2013.
So hang on to that winter coat, our future as a tropical paradise may take awhile.
Have they ever made anyone return their Nobel Prize? Al Gore would be a good first. I’d say they should make the IPCC return theirs too but I’d rather just see that organization dismantled.
Al Gore should consider himself fortunate that he doesn’t have Pinocchio’s problem. Otherwise the former VP’s nose would probably stretch half-way to the Moon by now–many further.
OOps… meant maybe further.
“Reaching the North Pole requires either a dog sled or a nuclear sub;”
You forgot the Top Gear vehicle 🙂
[Top Gear drove to the “pole” but it was the north magnetic pole. Now a bit further towards Russia however. Guess they need to drive again? .mod]
Didn’t they try a dirigible at one point in time? They should have taken Al, it would have stayed up for- ever with all the hot air!
Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
How dare Nature continue to deny The Goracle?
“Burning coal releases toxic products like mercury, sulfur, arsenic, soot, and unburned coal ash.”
Not entirely correct. As a western Canadian farmer I can tell you that sulfur is an “essential” nutrient that we in fact spend a lot of money on every year to replenish. Without it you won’t grow much canola or produce much protein in wheat. Out here we could use more of it, along with more CO2.
Seems Sulfur is not in short supply in western Canada — at least the pure form.
http://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/styles/overlay/public/07-11-14/canada1.jpg
Blueberries need it too. Well, mine do.
@John, were and what is that?
asybot,
Sulfur.
Use Google Earth and the coordinates below
57.042130, -111.654552
In its elemental form, sulfur is yellow:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/44/Sulfur-sample.jpg/1024px-Sulfur-sample.jpg
http://www.businessinsider.com/there-are-mountains-of-sulfur-growing-in-the-oil-sands-just-waiting-for-demand-to-increase-2012-4
And also garlic.
Don’t forget garlic.
Reaching the North Pole requires either a dog sled or a nuclear sub …
Or a Toyota Hilux and the financial and tactical support of the BBC.
Top Gear: Polar Special
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear:_Polar_Special
What, there’s a dome over the whole thing, excluding aircraft?
@Brandon
This is but one example of failed predictions. Please, please, please, address the issue and explain in coherent detail why these (and all others) predictions have failed. You say you have the science. Please show it.
they failed because they are wrong. had they been right, they would not have failed. this then provides a method by which we can establish the difference between what is right and what is wrong. this method is called the scientific method.
there is nothing more required to understand science. if your theory can reliably predict something that is hard to predict, science says you are onto something. if it fails to predict reliably science says you are wrong, no matter how many excuses you might dream up.
this typically is hard for politicians to understand, as they routinely promise anything you ask for, and have a never ending supply of excuse why someone else is the reason you never got what you were promised.
Indeed,
A number of years ago, I remember reading about volcanoes seen erupting on the floor of the Arctic Ocean. Has there been any more sightings of these volcanoes, or others? They probably wouldn’t change the amount of Arctic ice, but at the time it was thought there would be more of them.
Arsenic, the word, appears 3 times (now 4) above.
It is useful to know that most rice, especially those types promoted as healthy, contain this element. So, …
Ban rice and keep CO2.
And taking off from another theme ( – Gore did not – ) Sarah Palin did not say “I can see Russia from my house.”
… proving, once again, that 97% of what we think we know is wrong.
It’s worse than that Jim. ‘Sheena Easton’, ‘Ellie Goulding’, ‘Billy Connolly’, ‘John Denver’, and ‘Top Gear’ also appear – on the same thread within a WUWT topic. Who would have thunk it?
Actually, just had a thought. If some on here are playing Celebrity Bingo, then I have probably just given someone a complete line. Are the mods aware of what Celebrity Bingo is? We atheists used to play Christ Bingo on the Christian forums. Highly amusing, when you have nothing else to do.
I read the article in Nature by Williams, Maksym et al and it does not say : ““The North and South Poles are not melting.”
That is a statement by Dr Benny Peiser of GWPF ( a social scientist) which appears in the Express story and is not a conclusion of the Woods Hole research Team.
Also the quote that polar ice “is much more stable than climate scientists once predicted” is not from the researcher but from reporter Levi Winchester who wrote the Express article.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution press release is here: http://www.whoi.edu/news-release/SeabedAntarctic
The Nature Geoscience paper can be reached via a link at the bottom of the news page here: : http://www.nature.com/news/robot-reveals-surprisingly-thick-antarctic-sea-ice-1.16397
What the paper did say is that using the robot submarine they were able to measure parts of the Antarctic sea ice cover they had not been able to measure before and those sections were thicker than the areas they had previously been able to measure with drilling and shipboard measurements, Thus it seems there may have been a sampling bias in previous Antarctic sea ice measurements. Further under-ice surveys will be needed to get a more accurate measure of the Antarctic pack than was previously possible,
Exactly.
I’m sceptical of ‘catastrophic’ AGW and I’m more than happy to shout from the rooftops anything that debunks ‘alarmist’ theories but, in all honesty, there isn’t a great deal for sceptics too excited about and certainly nothing in the Ted Maksym study.
The current rate of warming does suggest climate sensitivity is at the lower end of IPCC estimates – which is good – but even that relies on a small and non-increasing TOA imbalance.
If solar cycle 25 is substantially lower than solar cycle 24, we all will be learning more about ice and how the oceans can cool from the Arctic ocean downward and the Antarctic upward..
Is there a draft in here..seems a bit chilly..
The limb is getting brittle Dr. S….
Just looking at IJIS, 2015 is in third place behind only 2007 and 2011. May have a new low this year.
“Half of that CO2 release stays in the atmosphere.”
How is this possible? How could Mother Nature choose to sequester half, only half, always half, of our additions to Her natural production of CO2? There is no way, no how, totally impossible. Something else must be happening.
Anyone, please, fault my logic. No one has yet…
“How is this possible? How could Mother Nature choose to sequester half, only half, always half, of our additions to Her natural production of CO2? ”
==========================
I have made the same argument. Mother Nature should sequester a percentage of total CO2 in the atmosphere, not a percentage of only human CO2.
So for example, from 1950 to 2015, CO2 went from 300 to 400 ppm. The rate of sequestering should only have gone up 4/3. However, in 1950, when CO2 was 300 ppm, human CO2 production was about 1.5 billion tonnes/yr. Today it is 10 billion tonnes/yr. A ratio of 20/3, or which mother nature sequesters 10/3.
So, while CO2 partial pressure has increased by 4/3, sequestering has increased by 10/3. In other words, sequestering is increasing 2.5 times faster than CO2 is increasing.
Something doesn’t add up, because this doesn’t fit the water draining in and out of the bathtub model. The drain is growing faster than the water flowing in.
” There are good reasons to limit coal burning, even if its CO2 emissions may be primarily plant food. Burning coal releases toxic products like mercury, sulfur [US spelling, NOT mine], arsenic, soot, and unburned coal ash ….”
This is a gross generalisation , not all coal fired generation plants are equal, and even though some of these gasses and solids may escape even the most modern technologies there are vast improvements and real world research and engineering i under way.
We should be carefully about the Greenland ice sheet. The ice loss is negligible in 2014, but if you check the graph yousee that the downward trend has not yet stopped; we need some few years more to see if it has slowed down or stopped.
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/images-essays/fig3.3-tedesco_sml.jpg
Anyway, it’s not dramatic. If the satellite data show the reality, the yearly ice loss adds 1 mm Ocean rise per year. Up to 2100 this would be 8.5 cm or treeandsomething inch. But what about the antarctic ice sheet?. It’s around the South pole and it’s way colder there. Snow is collected, and the only loss is that from the ice sheets drifting down into the ocean.
The full noaa page is here:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/greenland_ice_sheet.html
Thanks for the link, Johannes. It starts out by saying …
Whoa, 2.85 cubic kilometers of ice … I always get nervous when a document hasn’t been proofread. Doesn’t make the rest wrong, just means I have to look real hard at every number.
Assuming that they mean 2.85 MILLION km3 of ice, that’s about 2.65E+15 tonnes of ice … and the loss that they show so dramatically above is about 3E11 tonnes lost per year.
Which means that one hundredth of one percent of the ice has been lost per year, or about a tenth of a percent over the period of the record shown above.
And no matter how dramatic they try to make it, with their plunging chart and all, I just can’t get excited over the loss of a tenth of a percent per decade … in my book, that’s stability, not instability.
w.
Oh, yeah, one further detail … the modern estimate of the Greenland ice sheet volume is 2.93 million km^3, not 2.85 million.
This means that IF the ice loss continues for 250 years, by then we’ll be down to their estimated 2.85 million cubic km of ice … 250 years to get to where they say we are today.
Can’t make this stuff up, folks.
w.
As I mentioned a few days ago , the abrupt drop in Arctic ice seems (from your ref charts ) to have occurred around 25th Dec, whilst a corresponding sharp increase in the Antarctic ice occurred at almost exactly the same time ( within a day or 2).
If this not a coincidence , given that the 2 areas are at opposite ends of the globe , and opposite seasons, and given also that , according to the references obtained from an earlier thread about penguin populations the Antarctic sea ice is wind dependent , could there be an instrumental reason for the 2 sudden changes in sea ice.
I am assuming , ignorant of the technical details , that the same satellite is monitoring both poles. Has there been an orbital correction or some recalibration , etc that has affected both sets of data , but in opposite ways ?
Hang on a minute, Willis. You are letting this article off the hook. It clearly tries to make the point that reduces mass loss this year is significant and that the downward trend has changed, e.g.
There’s no evidence that the downward trend has changed and the smaller loss, unless sustained, is nothing more than natural variation.
It can’t be ‘natural variation’ because CO_2…
W,
There is the “How to Lie With ….” folder with subfolders:
Statistics, Graphs, and so on.
A couple of years ago Dr. Roy showed a CO2 chart drawn with different but equally valid spreads on the x and y axes. The line went from rising at about a 45 degree angle to flat.
The ice loss chart shown above is of the 45 degree death march category. One “sees” something dropping so sharply that it is clearly going to go splat very soon now.
It takes only a few moments to redraw this chart with a y-axis an inch high and an x-axes as wide as a monitor (say 20 inches). That alone still shows the line approaching the x-axes, but convert the vertical axis to actual amount rather than the + versus – (as now drawn) and, lo and behold, the newly drawn line will disappear, being pressed tightly against the upper border.
From “go splat” to “that ain’t going to happen” in three easy steps.
Yikes, at the rate it’s melting it will be all gone in only ~12,000 years!
UN IPCC report, lead author Dr. Mark Howden said,
““There’s increasing evidence that climate change is also impacting on agriculture, particularly on some of the cereal crops such as wheat and maize. The negative impacts are greater and quicker than we previously thought.”
Howden should be made to explain how he reached these conclusions.
Yesterday WUWT highlighted a PhD study that concluded that the mitigation costs of climate change should be made much higher “than previously thought” . One feature of the analysis included the effect of climate change on agricultural yields , but once one started to follow up the references and citations it became clear that the true situation is very complicated and the variables of temperature , CO2 enrichment, water stress and the anticipated new strains from eg Monsanto ( supported by US Govt) make any simple generalised claim such as that by Howden quite ridiculous.
Plebs we may be in the eyes of the Howdens of the world , but we are only ignorant if we wish to be . Google is a mighty weapon.
‘Al Gore, wrong again’ worlds shortest and most accurate news story ?
Still would be a more accurate word than again.
Those are good reasons to manage coal burning, not limit it. Limiting is a subset of managing.
Where is coal burning unmanaged, aside from a uncontrolled fire at a coal mine?
Ever since the Arab Oil Embargo the US government has promoted coal for energy production. Over a period of 40 years companies, state and local governments and individuals have invested billions based on directives from the government. The EPA now proposes to punish these investors by limiting energy production from coal.
It is not the general public that will pay the cost. It is specific areas of the country that have invested in coal produced energy and coal production that will pay the price of EPA regulations. They very people that invested based on 40 years of government policy are now going to penalized for implementing government policy.
The very policy that the government put in place, those people that helped carry out the policy will now be penalized. The message here is clear. Help carry out government policy and you will be penalized in the future when the government changes.
May I favor all with this little poem?
Global Warming?
G..one are your days, trepidation now swarming!
L..urking with obscurity comes a new age of warning.
O..h you must listen and your questions must fold.
B..ehold I’m Al Gore; it’s your future I’ve foretold.
A..rmed with my models, indubitable facts have been forming.
L..eer not elsewhere; it’s your fault the climate’s warming.
W..eep all in disgrace, keep burning your coal.
A..las, I exclaim, you’re surrendering earths soul!
R..epent from this sin, withdraw the temptation.
M..ark it forbidden to a developing nation.
I..’ve reaped its rewards, in plain sight for all to see.
N..egating the others makes no difference to me.
G..ather your senses, remain but slightly sober.
? ..All I am asking, that you simply start over.
The phantom editor strikes again: Please change “Noble” to “Nobel” in the first line. Apologies, etc., for the minor nature of this comment.
Ian M
Have I been banned or what ?, none of my stupid comments have shown up on any thread for the last hour ??
Mods ????
Just let me know.
I’m no scientist but wouldn’t warmer oceans create more evaporation. The trouble with the ice ages that the Gulf Stream was diverted or stopped. From fresh water coming from the Arctic at first. Plus our orbit! It soon froze up again and so did most of the Northern Hemisphere. Year of Living dangerously is still running on SBS once a week, and quite honestly just the few minutes I watched it I was completely unconvinced, not from just their data appraisal but they way it was presented. Scientists don’t talk that way! They were trying to sell an outdated hypothesis.
Where is the ice melting in Antarctica?
http://www.uni-koeln.de/math-nat-fak/geomet/meteo/winfos/synNNWWantarctis.gif
There is no where there warm enough for ice to melt even now in mid-summer. These comments about ice melting in Antarctica are cringe-worthy and far from any truth when you actually visit the place. Please remember even with air temperatures of 1,2 or 3 c, the ground often is below freezing with no ice melt. The ice is not melting more around Antarctica recently in the nearby ocean or it would have shortened in size, not increased. Even the temperatures around the most exposed Peninsula is still not warm enough at the moment.
Matt G, take a look at some actual data. When it comes to Antarctic ice and sea levels, sea ice is not the most important thing to measure. In Antarctica, the largest and most important ice mass is the land ice of the West Antarctic and East Antarctic ice sheets.
Between 1992 and 2011, the Antarctic Ice Sheets overall lost 1350 giga-tonnes (Gt) or 1,350,000,000,000 tonnes into the oceans, at an average rate of 70 Gt per year (Gt/yr). Because a reduction in mass of 360 Gt/year represents an annual global-average sea level rise of 1 mm, these estimates equate to an increase in global-average sea levels by 0.19 mm/yr.
Here is the reference
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1183
Nonsense. you are dead wrong. In mid-September, when both the Arctic and Antarctic are exposed to the same levels of solar radiation daily, today’s rapidly expanding Antarctic sea ice receives FIVE TIMES the solar energy that the Arctic sea ice receives.
yes, for four months of the year, the Arctic receives more energy in late April, May, June, and July. But by August 22, that “excess” 1.5 million sq km’s of Antarctic sea ice is already reflecting more energy back into than the Arctic is absorbing.
You claim the Antarctic land ice is melting, but where? That small 3% of the Antarctic that is the western peninsula? Or the rest of the continent ice-covered areas that are cooling slightly the past 50 years? What area are actually melting, and what is your evidence they are melting?
The Antarctic sea ice area is exposed to solar radiation between 67 deg south latitude and 57 south latitude all year as it ossilates between minimum and maxium extents. The Arctic sea ice? It is up between 70 north and the pole: At its minimum in September, the MOST the Arctic sea is exposed to the sun is 10 degrees for a few fleeting minutes at noon? By late October, the whole of the entire Arctic sea ice is exposed to only darkness 24 hours per day. And, that newly exposed open Arctic ocean LOSES more heat by evaporation, convection, conduction, and LW radiation when the sea ice cover is gone.
Less Arctic sea ice? More cooling.
More Antarctic sea ice? More cooling.
The link above I gave was for towards a period at end of WInter, but just an example where during Summer is less cold. Temperatures still are around the -30’s c near the pole and around very briefly 2/3 c in the warmest Peninsula region.