From the University of Colorado at Boulder, where they are apparently attempting to explain away why Arctic sea ice isn’t living up to previous wild claims such as those made by Dr. Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who famously said that the Arctic is in a ‘Death Spiral’ in response to my writing on WUWT:
Serreze also famously said two years earlier that “The Arctic is screaming,” and a Arctic research associate, Jay Zwally of NASA, said in the same article that summer sea ice may be gone in five years, in an interview with the unquestioning and compliant Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press:
Now, years later, with summer sea ice still there, in a new paper, the terms are “erratic” and “bumpy”…riiiiiight.
As anyone can clearly see, there’s no ‘death spiral’ in Arctic Sea ice extent, it has simply reached a new equilibrium state:
So much for “breathtaking ignorance”.
Press release from the University of Colorado at Boulder
Erratic as normal: Arctic sea ice loss expected to be bumpy in the short term
Arctic sea ice extent plunged precipitously from 2001 to 2007, then barely budged between 2007 and 2013. Even in a warming world, researchers should expect such unusual periods of no change–and rapid change–at the world’s northern reaches, according to a new paper.
“Human-caused global warming is melting Arctic sea ice over the long term, but the Arctic is a variable place, said Jennifer Kay, a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-author of the new analysis out today in Nature Climate Change.
Natural ups and downs of temperature, wind and other factors mean that even as sea ice slowly melts, random weather can mask or enhance the long-term trend. For example, even in a warming world, there’s still a one-in-three chance that any seven-year period would see no sea ice loss, such as in 2007-2013, the new analysis shows. And the chaotic nature of weather can also occasionally produce sea ice loss as rapid as that seen in 2001-2007, even though the long-term trend is slower.
Neither time period should be used to forecast the long-term future of the region, Kay and her colleagues concluded. Some commentators tracking sea ice trends have used the recent “pause” in sea ice loss to claim that human-caused climate warming is not occurring; others previously used the rapid decline from 2001-2007 to speculate about ice-free Arctic summers by 2015. Neither claim is warranted, the authors report.
“To understand how climate change is affecting the Arctic, you cannot cherry pick short stretches of time,” Kay said. “Seven years is too short.”
The research team, led by Neil Swart of Environment Canada, analyzed both long-term records of Arctic sea ice observations and an extensive dataset of results from global climate models. From the model runs, they could calculate the chances that certain types of scenarios could play out in a slowly warming Arctic: For example, just how likely is it that sea ice would not decline during a seven-year stretch?
The team focused on September measurements of sea ice, which is when the extent reaches a yearly minimum. By early October, Arctic sea ice generally begins growing again, a seasonal response to colder temperatures and shorter days.
The researchers determined that a seven-year period is too short to accurately capture long-term sea ice trends in the region. Even given long-term melting, there’s a 34-percent chance of randomly getting an unusual period of no change or even growth in sea ice, and a 5-percent chance of a period of very rapid loss, similar to the decline in 2001-2007.
The team also increased the time period of analysis, to see if longer spans of time would be long enough. In about 5 percent of model simulations, there were even 20-year time periods with no loss of sea ice, despite strong human-caused warming.
“It is quite conceivable that the current period of near zero sea-ice trend could extend for a decade or more, solely due to weather-induced natural variability hiding the long-term human caused decline,” said Ed Hawkins, a co-author and researcher at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading.
“Human caused climate warming has driven a decline in Arctic September sea-ice extent over the past few decades,” the new paper reports, and “this decline will continue into the future.” But understanding how and why natural variability affects sea ice trends should help scientists better predict how sea ice will evolve in upcoming years and decades, with implications for natural ecosystems, shipping routes, energy development and more.
###
CIRES is a partnership of NOAA and CU-Boulder.
Co-authors of the Nature Climate Change paper, “Influence of internal variability on Arctic sea-ice trends,” include Neil Swart and John Fyfe (Environment Canada), Ed Hawkins (University of Reading National Centre for Atmospheric Science), Jennifer Kay (CIRES, University of Colorado Boulder Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences) and Alexandra Jahn (National Center for Atmospheric Research, now at University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research).
Reference:
Swart, Fyfe, Hawkins, Kay & Jahn, 2015, ‘Influence of internal variability on Arctic sea-ice trends’, Nature Climate Change, 5, 86, doi:10.1038/nclimate2483
Available at: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n2/full/nclimate2483.html
Update: the original article implied that NISDC’s Mark Serreze made the statement about sea ice being gone in 5 years, ending in 2012, when it was actually NASA’s Jay Zwally that made the claim in the National Geographic article. The language has been clarified in the paragraph to reflect this.
For those interested, 2012 came and went without the Arctic being “ice free”. In fact, it touched the “normal line” for that year in April for awhile:
The melt season ended below normal, with a new historic low, but was not “ice free” as his colleague Zwally claimed.
The historical low extent was due to a polar storm, as determined by NSIDC in a paper on the issue.
To my knowledge, Dr. Serreze has never publicly corrected the National Geographic article claim of 2012 being the ice-free year that wasn’t, suggesting he endorsed the idea at the time.
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What is missing is that nobody pays any attention to the real cause Arctic ice melt. As I proved (E&E 22(8):1029-1063 (2011). See alsp my book, pp. 37-46). The warmists want to credit carbon dioxide and its greenhouse effect for this but that is quite impossible. The Arctic is melting because at the turn of the twentieth century there was a rearrangement of North Atlantic current system that started to carry warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic Ocean. Prior to that there had been nothing there but two thousand years of slow, linear cooling. The strong initial warming was was interrupted by a thirty year cool spell in mid-century. Warming resumed in 1970 but it took until 2003 to reach the same temperature level it had in the twenties and thirties. In addition to the North Atlantic influence, Its Pacific side is also influenced by warm water entering through the Bering Straight. This was demonstrated by the record melt in 2007. What happened is that strong pole-ward winds pushed warm water from the Aleutian Sea across the Bering straight where it melted the ice in the Chuckchi Sea and then created a large meltwater patch to the north of it. At the same time, the Russian side of the Arctic was undisturbed. The amount of warm water entering the Atctic through the Bering Straight is controlled by the strength of the Aleutian Low which in turn responds to the phases of the PDO. A loose end today is the mid-twentieth century cooling. It is likely that it was caused by the temporary return of the original flow pattern of currents. But in nature, if something has happened before, it can happen again. Should another such cool period return it could wreak havoc with Arctic transportation and resource explorations. I wonder how likely it is that the apparent slowdown of warming today can turn into another such cold spell we had in the mid-twentieth century?
Serreze and his cohorts can probably expect an erratic and bumpy ride aboard their global warming gravy train, the “Spirit of Climageddon”, now that it has jumped the tracks.
Actually the entire paper is a joke. If 7 yrs of serious ice loss is important and 7years of no loss and some rebounding since 2012, is of no consequence, then 14 years, 28yrs, 50 years….is not data enough for all the hype and pain that we have endured from these troughers. Does this mean that we are going to be free from comment on distress in the arctic for the balance of their careers? This paper is definitely put out because they could no longer take the yearly stress of not losing the ice.
Climate ideologues have been coming down with a climate blues syndrome unquestionably because of the dreaded “pause”. It’s too bad they have ruined the perfectly serviceable word Deenyal because being in Deenyal is exactly the situation what psychiatrists have been trained to correct. But the “science has evene even screwed up the psychologists and psychiatrists because they are ideologically unable to try to solve this problem for their sufferers.
I think the kind of people who can’t function outside a crowd have some issues to start with before they even went into climate science. Indeed, gregarious types, I would posit, were attracted into this field because of its clubiness (I don’t include the minority who do work basically alone – they are forced to be outside by their integrity). These semi annual grand pilgrimages to exotic places to sing from the same song book is not so different from youth playing balalaikas and singing in the forest about exploits of ideological heros. I’m worried if the pause goes on another few years, some nuts will end up going up there and poisoning all the bears.
They just haven’t added up the gross factors.
That’s not the scientist’s roundhouse. His views are essentially tactical (with occasional forays into the operational level). It’s a job for us game designer/developers. We take a strategic view, with a constant eye to the major diverse elements. If it doesn’t add up to the known data, the “model” is wrong.
Next they’ll be trying to argue that global sea ice levels “might even increase to record levels for up to a decade in a long term declining trend”!
I could, and do it convincingly. I doubt they can.
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Alarmists are desparately trying to scare everyone by pointing to melting polar ice. You know what would be really scary? Ice sheets advancing as far south as the US Midwest again.
To hear these “experts” yak on, you’d never think they ever even heard of the AMO and PDO (or the issue of post-Y2k Chinese soot increase). And that’s part of the Remedial Ice .001 idiot curriculum. I could explain the pause in ice loss and make their own case better than they can — an I’m both a skeptic and a non-scientist.
The report is mostly hand-waving, with a germ of truth: the forces that determine NH sea ice extent are diverse, unpredictable. Sea ice extent is geographically constrained. Any short term variation is weather. It takes a long term to determine any underlying trend. They have no proof that any variation is human-caused.
[trimmed. Sereze’s Vietnam experiences, and the medical effects and treatment thereafter, are his own affair. .mod]
Sea ice is a trailing indicator of temperature. Temperatures have been flat for ~18 years. So, I expect sea ice decline to continue its “pause” as well.
Dr. Serreze, you take my breath away.
Too bad we don’t have Arctic sea ice data back just a little farther. How about 2000 BP years. Considering how warm it was at times back then we might find that the polar bears don’t really exist at all. They may have been wiped out several times by the total lose of sea ice and the ones we seem to have now are just Disney animatronics. Too bad the Disney ones eat just as many seal pups.
Andres, you take my breath away!
Especially for Jimbo and Anthony, a teaser for my forthcoming interview with NSIDC director Mark Serreze:
“Anthony Watts has been telling porky pies again”
I look forward to seeing any substantive replies to Jim Hunt’s clarifying post.
Anthony – I’ve now added an update to my post about your update to your post, which can be seen here:
[Snip. Instead of promoting your two day old blog post, with only 2 comments beside yours, please make your best arguments here. This would not be an issue, except that you labeled our host a liar. Do that on your own blog, not here. ~mod.]
I note, amongst other things, that you seem to be singularly lacking in gratitude for the sterling efforts of yours truly in bringing your no doubt inadvertent error to your attention. I also include the most amusing video contained in my previous comment here, which I further note has still not emerged from your moderation queue.
You will no doubt be pleased to learn that I shall now head off to inform David Rose about the numerous inaccuracies in his recent “Climate Hate” self-interview. Just be thankful that unlike David you reside far beyond IPSO’s jurisdiction!