Remember back in September 2012 Professor Peter Wadhams famously said that Arctic sea ice would disappear within four years? He also had another prediction in 2013, saying that due to the “methane emergency”, Arctic Sea ice would disappear within 2 years. Even Gavin Schmidt thought that was bollocks. Of course, he [Wadhams] was wrong. Now, his four year prediction from 2012 is being tested this year, and while sea ice has in fact melted faster than usual in May (partly due to El Niño boosted global temperatures), it is still a long way from disappearing right now [and] is within 2 standard deviations of normal for this time of year:
Don Keiller writes:
Professor Wadhams has past form with his Arctic sea ice extent predictions. Only last year he predicted that sea ice would vanish
He’s up to his old tricks again, so i called him out and bet him £1000 his prediction for this year was wrong;
—–Original Message—–
From: P. Wadhams
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2016 11:42 AM
To: Don & Selina
Subject: Re: Arctic ice free by September
Dear Mr Keiller, Thanks but I don’t gamble. Nor do I make many of the definitive predictions attributed to me by newspapers, who, as the Brexit campaigns demonstrate, have little interest in truth and much in sensation. The area trend is certainly on the way down, and before long the area will drop below 1 million sq km, but not definitely this year,
Yours sincerely,
Peter Wadhams
On Jul 21 2016, Don & Selina wrote:
> Dear Professor Wadhams, I read this article with interest and a degree of
> scepticism.
>
> http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/arctic-could-become-ice-free-for-first-time-in-more-than-100000-years-claims-leading-scientist-a7065781.html
>
> Are you prepared to put money on “an (ice) area of less than one million
> square kilometres for September of this year’?
>
> I am.
>
> I challenge you to a Public bet of £1000 that Arctic sea ice will remain
> above 1 million square kilometres at any point up to the end of
> September.
>
> Should be a sure thing for you, after all you are Professor of Ocean
> Physics and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge
> University.
>
>And who am I? Dr Don Keiller, MA, PhD, Cantab.
>
> I have also posted this email at “Tallbloke’s Talkshop”;
> https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/hottest-june-not-according-to-the-satellites-roger/#comments
>
>Best regards,
>
>Don Keiller
Personally, I think Professor Wadhams has issues with determining reality versus fantasy. After all, he thinks big oil assassins are out to get him.
Note: about 15 minutes after publication, this post was updated to clarify Wadhams vs Schmidt in the first paragraph, fixed a typo, and some missing punctuation was also added in the same paragraph.
“After all, he thinks big oil assassins are out to get him.”
More likely a sinister plot by prof. Wadhams to eliminate his opponents by making them laugh to death.
He thinks big oil assassins are out to get him? That sounds suspiciously like actor Randy Quaid’s claim that Star Whackers are out to get him. Is this a form of me-tooism?
Wadhams is the odd can short of a six-pack.
Three scientists investigating melting Arctic ice may have been assassinated, professor claims
Cambridge Professor Peter Wadhams suspects the deaths of the three scientists were more than just an ‘extraordinary’ coincidence
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11762680/Three-scientists-investigating-melting-Arctic-ice-may-have-been-assassinated-professor-claims.html
According to Wadhams, Big Oil Orcs assassinated one scientist by pushing him downstairs when he was drunk at a party, caused another to be snuffed by a truck when riding his bicycle to work in London traffic, and called down a lightning strike to kill another who was on a walking holiday in Scotland.
I kid you not.
Wadhams also predicted this June that we would set a new record low Arctic sea ice extent, below 3.4 square kilometers this September.
“It is very likely that this will be a record low year. I’m convinced it will be less than 3.4 million square kilometres.”
So he doesn’t “predict” or guarantee, he says “very likely” and “I’m convinced”.
On the “ice free” Arctic:
“I think there’s a reasonable chance it could get down to a million this year and if it doesn’t do it this year, it will do it next year.”
So “it will do it” in 2017. That’s a prediction.
“it is still a long way from disappearing at right now is within 2 standard deviations of normal for this time of year:”
Anthony, should “AT” be “AND” ?? Or do I need more coffee and less beer ?
[no, while that is a good correction, you need less one-liner snarky comments here, perhaps more beer would help. – Anthony]
..Sorry, it was not meant to be “snarky”…it was intended more as a personal cut down on myself ..
[no, I’m speaking in general about your comments, not this one. -Anthony]
…and forgive us our grammar as we forgive those who momentarily confuse us…
Could it be ‘AS’ 🙂
“After all, he thinks big oil assassins are out to get him.”
============
It’s usually just the ex-wife, but:
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”.
The severely ethically-challeneged Peter Gleick says “We’re on a runaway train, scientists are blowing the whistle, but politicians are still shovelling coal into the engine.”
The only “runaway train” is the Climatist movement, which has “scientists” and politicians blowing whistles, clanging bells, and tooting horns, all while shovelling loads of brown stuff and calling it science, and trying to scare the bejeebus out of people, just so they can keep riding that train.
He doesn’t gamble. H probably thinks his ideas for cooling the earth are more in line with “insurance” than “gambling”. Check out any local anti-gambling ordinance … there is a qualifier stating that it doesn’t apply to the regulated insurance market. Insurance/gamble … gamble/insurance; the professor isn’t the underwriter (bookie), he’s more like the runner (win or lose he gets paid to do his part).
I wonder why Professor Peter Wadhams is not sailing around the Northwest passage in the artic, taking advantage of the ice-free conditions he predicted.
I read where some of his fellow “ice-free” travelers are trying to sail through the Arctic’s Northwest Passage, but are currently stuck because there is too much ice.
I wonder if they were depending on Professor Wadhams’ predictions when they made their sailing plans?
I read that (about the “ice free travelers”) just this morning. Ironic, isn’t it?
Too bad irony is lost on these folks…
Irony? This is irony:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/gohv97b
From the Mawson Ship of Fools voyage.
Sorry. This tiny URL link takes you to the image (and others from that infamous voyage):
http://tinyurl.com/gohv97b
Hired Chris Turney as a consultant?
Maybe hired a Russian icebreaker?
They have now set sail again. However, when asked by Tony Heller if they were using an icebreaker to clear the way they refused to answer.
Link? Thanx
Here Wayne http://realclimatescience.com/2016/07/arctic-fraud-in-the-works/
So that’ll be a Yes then.
here’s the link
http://realclimatescience.com/2016/07/polar-ocean-scam-update/
I’ll book a trip through the NW passage when Lord Monckton does so.
“The area trend is certainly on the way down, and before long the area will drop below 1 million sq km, but not definitely this year”
I will give him credit for admitting the ice will not disappear this year. However, in the same sentence he makes a silly assertion that it is valid to extrapolate a linear trend. Pure nonsense.
Statistics is for dependent variables. X is the independent variable. Y is the dependent variable, and is dependent on X. The function is then Y = f(X), Y is a function of X. That is the basis of linear regression and correlation coefficient for that line or any other function. So, X is time and Y is ice extent or volume. PIOMASS and others have fit a function to this line. Okay, is ice a function of time? Does time make ice? No. Okay, so the trend has no meaning. This is why these predictions keep failing. They are correlating independent variables. This is also why all X values for these kinds of predictions are time, because if X was something that actually correlated to Y, then they would have discovered a causative agent to study. Also note, if X is CO2, which is supposed to drive climate, the correlations of dependent Y variables such as ice and temperature are very low, indicating random noise. So, we know why the Al Gore, et al. statistical predictions failed–time does not make ice, and CO2 is not strongly correlated to temperature for purposes of public policy. I would put a correlation coefficient minima at 0.7 for causative correlations sufficiently strong for purposes of public policy. In other words, they have no concept of how statistics works. It was not designed to operate on independent variables. It also proves why prediction of this type cannot work. They must fail, and we know why they will.
Indeed.
No need to explain further.
Try telling that to Steve-kinetics-can tell-you-nothing-Mosher.
He doesn’t get it.
http://www.hamradioschool.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Sine-Wave-1.jpg
Most climate patterns have a significant sinusoidal component.
Claiming a trend on a period less than a cycle long (and preferably many cycles long) is absurd.
Further, the current sea ice is pretty clean and the trend this year has been to follow the two deviant line. So if I had to guess in September the ice will be 2 standard deviants below the 1981-2000 average. The sea ice volume is comparable to 2010 which had a minimum 2 standard deviants below the average.
😀
Hello PA
“standard deviants” – I love it, and I will start using it.
IMHO the long-term temperature trends during the current ice age don’t look particularly sinusoidal. It looks to me like alternation between two states – a warming state and a cooling state. I suspect (said this before and I have to keep saying it because I do think it’s important) that the duration of the warming state is determined by how long it takes for the NH ice cap to melt, and the duration of the cooling state is determined by how long it takes to accumulate the NH ice cap with 120 metres’ worth of water from the oceans via evaporation and precipitation. Then something happens, probably caused by falling ocean level, to switch to the warming trend.
That’s just my opinion, based on looking at the long-term temperature plots from ice cores and thinking about the mechanics of accumulating those huge volumes of ice.. It doesn’t offer an easy explanation of “why”.
A sinewave is basically the projection of a rotating process onto a flat surface. Hence, sinewave climate variations result from orbital effects. It is also why electricity supplies are sinewave, being produced by rotating magnets.
The ice age cycle is not sinusoidal. That has a characteristic more like a sawtooth wave, which is typically produced by a relaxation oscillator. This suggests that ice ages do have some kind of trigger event that causes them. Although, that trigger event would have to be at the temperature minimum, whilst we are currently at a maximum.
Sawtooth eh? There is about 510 million km2 of earth’s surface. 150 million km2 is land. 15 million km2 is covered in permanent glaciers.
During the ice age the glacial extent was 50 million km2, and that is about 5-7% less net energy than 15 million km2 of permanent cover, and 10-14% less energy during the northern hemisphere summer (doesn’t make a lot of difference during the NH winter). Plus the Himalayas are rising 5 mm/Y and the glacial cover of these subtropical mountains is increasing.
http://www.cabrillo.edu/~rnolthenius/climate/milak%26temp.jpg
The “out of ice age” insolation is 460-470 W/m2, the back to the cooler insolation is 420-430 W/m2.
So there is about a 10+% difference in insolation between into, and out of, ice age conditions. When we look for a cause of 10+ hysteresis, viola (that is French for “oh there” or something and is pronounced “wooley”), there is our ice sheet.
And that is how you get a sawtooth. Once the insolation (peak NH) hits 420-430 the ice sheets build and stick around until the insolation hits 460-470.
Note he said “not definitely” not “definitely not”.
Ahh another ship of fools conquest , hopefully they won’t rescue this lot .
They are worse than that group of fools, just go to their site http://polarocean.co.uk/ 2 couples on a small SAIL BOAT!!
Disciples of climate change, but oblivious to climate reality…
Think of all the emissions from the rescues…I hope the various geniuses all buy/bought some offsets when they get/got back to civilization.
After the neo-Malthusians lost the Simon-Ehrlich bet, they no longer want to bet their own money on their fantastical predictions of catastrophe. But they still know people should impoverish themselves so academic eggheads can pretend they saved the world from imaginary catastrophe. Evil.
Nay, not impoverishment, just “planned austerity” for those who are guilty of “middleclassness”.
The “climate bets” or “refusals to bet” were school-yard childish in the past, and are still school-yard childish in the present.
Grade-school kids shouting “Betcha five dollars you’re wrong….”
Ah but Mr Wadhams has been wielding a crystal ball for years, extremely poorly yet still have too many naive ones paying a ticket for him to re-issue his ‘readings’. Charlatan’s and bullies must be called out or they won’t stop and won’t ensaring the feeble minded or weak of body.
I’m not so sure I agree.
Warmists are always happy to spend OPM (other people’s money, usually taxpayers) on their cockamamy schemes, it is quite interesting to see a small bet demonstrate they don’t believe their own bovine excrement.
Ah, but it’s fun to watch a fight… until the teacher gets there.
SMC ==> You, sir or madam, understand the only value of such bets — it is a spectator sport at best.
It’s a way of seeing if someone will put their money where their mouth is. Don’t be so priggish.
We are not talking here about a foolish bet based on the random outcome of flipping a fair coin. We are talking about a bet based on his specific expertise. He holds himself out as an expert on sea ice. He ought to have an edge when it comes to bets about changes in sea ice. He apparently has said there will be less than 1 million square kilometers of sea ice in the Arctic by September. Assuming terms can be defined (is “slush” ice?), it seems like a binary outcome. There will either be less than 1 million square kilometers of Arctic sea ice or there won’t. He should be willing to make the bet because he has an expert edge on the information. But he won’t. That calls the value of his expertise into question. Yet he wants the very expertise he is unwilling to back with his own money to be relied on to influence public policy that affects us all. That’s the whole point of the post and the comments. Sorry for being pedantic but it seems obvious to me.
re: Climate bets ==> James Annan started this silly business of Climate Bets in 2005 or so, making a big deal out of who would and wouldn’t bet about what, as if it were proof of his position in the Climate Wars. Of course, it is entirely meaningless.
It was meaningless when Annan did it, it is still meaningless today.
I may have misstated my position in my original comment — actually, these climate bets (and the ‘all-so-significant’ non-bets) are far more childish than 6th Grade children betting each other about nonsense on the school-yard — “My Pa could beat your Pa!” and “My dogs smarter than yours! Betcha five dollars!”
It is important to highlight the predictive failures of the warmists and IGPOCC. But pointing them out after the fact is ineffective, because the audience realizes that the supposed losing side might have an excuse to wiggle out of it. And indeed they do, as we have seen. For instance, Hansen claims he merely overestimated future emissions of methane, and thus his 1988 predictions haven’t been disproven. If he had made a bet back then, he would have no wiggle room. Ditto Wadhams, etc.
The winner of a bet gains a tremendous talking point. If the climate skeptics movement had focused on setting up a betting mechanism back in 2005 (thru Switzerland?) it would have done more for its cause than anything else, or maybe everything else, it has done since. It would be able to crow about predicting the Plateau, no Antarctic warming, no increase in US hurricanes or tornadoes, etc., etc., etc. It tries to boast now, but the other side has slippery counters, and our side has no “news peg” (like a photocopy of a canceled payoff check) to get the media to pay attention. All we have is a “claim”–and those are a dime a dozen. A payoff is a FACT–and facts are stubborn things.
The average man respects people who are willing to put their money where their mouth is, and respects those who have a winning record. Please, Heartland, or Koch, or someone, at least act now!!
“and while sea ice has in fact melted faster than usual in May (partly due to El Niño boosted global temperatures)”
There is a post El Nino warm surge to the AMO peaking around August, see 1998 and 2010:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/correlation/amon.us.data
he definitely does not dispute the quotations in the newspaper.
he deflects with irrelevancies about brexit.
he is a liar, that’s all.
wadham is a liar. he lies. he lies about lying. he’s a liar to the bone.
he’s a gambler, all right. he’s gambling he can get away with being a bald faced liar every day of his life and pay no consequences.
Somebody needs to ask him if he can actually name the law of chemistry for solving temperature of gas or atmospheric mixes.
Tell him ”gimme the formula, the equation – and tell me what all the factors stand for,
or you’re a fake atmospheric chemist.
End-0 of his hillbilly bullshoot Story-0.
you know….
It’s really a shame…if sea ice had started being measured for the first time….10 years ago
..except for a couple of storms….everything would be perfectly normal
Frozen green plants are being uncovered as various ice fields melt. That means we have been here before. When the ice melt reveals nothing, no plants or animals, just nothing but rock, I will panic. Or not. Probably I will panic, or at least my future kin will. Why? Because they will be closer to the downward slide to ice covered frozen northern latitudes.
I would rather see all the climate slush funds (no pun intended) go towards finding and preserving the various organic archaeological artifacts that are being exposed by retreating glaciers. It would be a much better use of the money. There actually is a time limit to being able to collect these items, as soon as the air hits, the decomposition clock starts ticking.
Little coverage of the situation, as it reveals reality: as you said, we have been here before! But the narrative that “weareallgoingtodie!!!!”must be preserved, so we let things of historical and academic value be destroyed by the elements. Blerg.
I just hope that any descendants who may emerge from my line get the hardy Scandinavian genes. They must be recessive in me. 😉
Do you have site (other than Quelccaya) and what C14 dating the plants, please? Interested here.
> Nor do I make many of the definitive predictions attributed to me by newspapers
Arcus thinks Prof. Wadhams does ineed make such predictions, 0.98million square km for 2015.
https://www.arcus.org/sipn/sea-ice-outlook/2015/june
ye, i could have told you that two years ago. jim hunt was the only person i could find willing to bet on arctic sea ice metrics ,and even then he chose ct area 🙂 , the bet runs to 2022. it was also for £1000.
My local meteorologist compared this current heatwave in Oklahoma to the “hottest year evah” of 1936, (around here, anyway) and he said Oklahoma had 65 days over 100 degrees during 1936 (36 *straight days* over 100), which compared to 38 days in 2012, and 7 days in 2013, and 7 days in 2014, and three days in 2015. Do you see a trend? Today, we hit our first 100+ temperature of the summer at 101 (107 heat index).
It’s laughable to claim the 21st century is hotter than the 1930’s. Too bad the original surface temperature database got hijacked by nefarious characters posing as climate scientists. If we had that, we could draw temperature charts that didn’t look nearly as scary as the hockey stick charts, and looking at them, people wouldn’t be fooled into thinking the world is about to come to an end from overheating, because it would be obvious from the chart that we were not overheating. Like the chart above, which is a better representation of reality than any current NASA or NOAA surface temperature chart.
Well, isn’t that the Blues! I posted this to the wrong thread. Was meaning to post it under Lord Monckton’s article.
“people wouldn’t be fooled into thinking the world is about to come to an end from overheating,”
That’s exactly why you don’t get unadulterated data.
It’s laughable to claim the 21st century is hotter than the 1930’s.”
Oh, If you say so….
“Changes in land area (as percent of total) in the contiguous 48 U.S. states experiencing extreme nightly low temperatures during summer. Extreme is defined as temperatures falling in the upper (red bars) or lower (blue bars) 10th percentile of the local period of record. Green lines represent decade-long averages. The area of land experiencing unusually cold temperatures has decreased over the past century, while the area of land experiencing unusually hot temperatures (red bars) reached record levels during the past decade. During the Dust Bowl period of the 1930s, far less land area experienced unusually hot temperatures.”
Source: NOAA NCDC Climate Extremes Index (2011) (Ref. 38).
http://www.c2es.org/docUploads/brief-extreme-weather-figure-2.png
These are adjusted temperatures. NOAA has taken so much freedom in adjustments, homogenization and infilling that I cannot trust this graph. You would get a different graph if you used actual temperatures. Look at actual temperatures for over 100 degrees, and you will see the opposite trend on the red line. Nevertheless, in my personal experience, we are getting fewer spells of extended cold weather even as we are getting fewer spells of extended hot weather.
Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. Reno, NV, where I live, is a poster child for UHI. Weather station was surrounded by wetland and agriculture in the 1930s. Wetlands drained, and airport was built but still surrounded by agriculture. Over decades the surrounding agriculture was replaced by airport expansion (concrete), a large casino hotel complex (acres of parking), housing developments, and commercial strip malls. And the adjacent highway US 395 widened from 2 to 6 lanes of concrete. The weather station is now at the hottest place in the metro area, but it hasn’t moved.
You’d think the numpties would learn-
http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/20/global-warming-expedition-stopped-in-its-tracks-by-arctic-sea-ice/
(hat tip to Tim Blair)
When you nominated the numpties I couldn’t figure out whether you were referring to the Ship of Fools, the bozo’s who were going to cross the Arctic Ocean by kayak or the Northwest Passage expeditions.
I think we can safely say shiploads of fools but my typing’s not always the best.
Professor? Does that mean that somebody pays him for his pathetically inaccurate predictions? If so, surely his employer needs no more such publicly nonsensical humiliation to dispense with his services?
I will be keeping a close eye on the big cruise ship set to traverse the NW-Passage in Aug…
Will be interesting to say the least. Depends on which way the Ice does blow/concentrate….
Why does Greenland still have ice cover all the way down to it’s southern tip? Other places globally at the same latitude don’t have any ice:
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_gif/DATA/cursnow_asiaeurope.gif
Most of Greenland is high land, so there will never be much warming in other areas than near the costline. Even models tells us that more CO2 in the air will not affect the temperatures very much.
A cold current carries ice down the east coast of Greenland. It actually has less ice this year. That means more ice is left up at the Pole.
On the other side of Fram Strait, towards Svalbard, a milder current heads north. If the ice in the south-bound current gets blown east by west winds into the milder north-bound current., it can melt fairly quickly. This is why the ice always seems to hug the coast of Greenland.
If a whole lot of the south-bound ice gets blown east, it can chill the north-bound current and cause it to sink beneath northern waters earlier, which means ice to the north is not melted by the north-bound current.
And that is only three variables in a small area called Fram Strait. Trying to model all the variables is a bit like trying to get a computer to tell you which kernel of your popcorn will pop first, when it is still in the bag…..in the store.
Peter Wadhams doesn’t need no stinkin’ models. He just tells you the entire bag of popcorn will explode before you put on the stove. Of course, he is wrong, year after year, but I have to give the guy credit. He gets paid a heck of a lot more than I do.
The people who get no credit are the fools who pay him.
Greenland has a very peculiar topography with a lowland plain in the middle surrounded by mountain chains on all sides. This means that the Greenland ice can only calve into the sea through a few narrow fjords which makes the icecap exceptionally stable. Both the Laurentid and the Eurasian ice-sheets calved out into the Sea (Hudson Bay and the Baltic respectively).
And that peculiar topography is because Greenland has relatively young rifted oceans on both sides. The only other continent this is true for is Africa, which is, fortunately, in the Tropics.
Professor Wadham is a typical warmist he’s always willing to spend the taxpayers money, for his junkets and climate party’s but he’s worse than Scrooge when it comes to his own money or walking the talk.
How very bizarre that he brings the EU referendum vote into the conversation and then questions the integrity of those who wanted to leave the EU. I assume that upset him too.
I thought that too but if you read it again slowly it says campaigns so that would refer to both sides and in that he is correct. However, I suspect that your assumption is probably correct as well.
This is really funny! ” The area trend is certainly on the way down, and before long the area will drop below 1 million sq km, but not definitely this year,”
Yours sincerely,
Peter Wadhams”
In his own forecast for 2015 the EXTENT was down to below 1 Mio km²:
So it doesen’t make me wonder that the AREA won’t drop below this threshold in 2016… it was in 2015! ( In the bizarre mind of Mr. W.) who should have lost every credibility.