First, let’s get one thing clear, Joe Romm of the Center for American progress is paid to write stuff with headlines like this:
Arctic death spiral: Icebreakers reach North Pole as sea ice disintegrates
Oh noes! The headline gives the impression that this is a newsworthy event, it isn’t, all he had to do was to check the history of icebreakers in the Arctic:
Wikipedia says:
NS Arktika (Russian: «Арктика») is a retired nuclear-powered icebreaker of the Soviet (now Russian) Arktika class. In service from 1975 to 2008, she was the first surface ship to reach the North Pole, on August 17, 1977.[1]
And then there’s this:
First Ship to “End the the Earth”
The first surface vessel to reach the North Pole was the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker Arktika (the name is from a Nenets word meaning “End of the Earth”).
Sailing from Murmansk, it plowed its way through the ice, and reached the North Pole on August 17, 1977.
The Arktika was the second nuclear-powered icebreaker built by the Soviet Union (now Russia). Built in Leningrad, it was launched in 1975 and was designed to operate in the sea routes of the Northeast Passage. The North Pole expedition was described as a “scientific-practical experimental voyage” to test the new icebreaker in conditions that were more extremethan it would ordinarily encounter.
The trip to the Pole was not repeated for another decade, but since the 1980s, the voyage has become popular with tourists who can now travel in great comfort to the “top of the world”.
Source: http://www.athropolis.com/arctic-facts/fact-arktika.htm
Gosh, popular with tourists.
I suppose that explains the cheeky photo Romm provided of the event:
The biggest howler in Joe Romm’s article was this:
Icebreakers have been visiting the pole for years, but as Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, told Mashable, this year even a sailboat “could actually sail nearly all the way to the North Pole, since sea ice cover is largely absent to about 86 degrees north.”
So, show me a picture of a sailboat at the north pole that sailed there, and you might actually have something to say. As the story stands, an icebreaker? They’ve been there, done that, back in 1977. And I’ll bet they didn’t make a cheeky photo op with “Santa Claus”.
While Romm and others wail about “death spirals” since 2008 when the term was first coined by Mark Serreze, here we are 9 years later, and Arctic Sea Ice extent has been just slightly below two standard deviations for most of the melt season, and isn’t close to the 2012 event caused by a large storm which broke up and dispersed ice. This year, two storms also had an effect, but failed to create a new record low in sea ice extent.Romm doesn’t seem interested in revisiting his article where he said there would likely be a new record low this year.
And it looks like the melt season may be about to turn the corner, perhaps a bit earlier than usual. So much for the doomster predictions of an ice-free summer.
It seems, the more they all wail about it, the less nature actually pays attention.
Joe Romm seems to hate nuclear power even more than he loves global warming. He could never admit a nuclear-powered icebreaker ever travelled to the north pole.
Joe Romm has zero credibility along with his friend Seth Borenstein. They’re PR machines for the warmistas.
Does anyone else feel queasy when they see charts like the Arctic Sea Ice one presented?
First of all, what does the 2 standard deviation region even mean? I assume (and we know that’s a bad starting point) that it represents the distribution of ice extents recorded (estimated) on a given date of the year, so each distribution is based on 29 data points (1981 – 2010), not a big sample.
Second, there is a massive autocorrelation problem here: I am guessing that nearly all of the ice extent measurement on day n depends upon the ice extent measurement from day n – 1 (not independent and identically distributed). The time series ought to be differenced, I would think.
Third, what does the distribution of this data look like? I am sure we are meant to assume a normal distribution, but my guess is that it is not, so 2 standard deviations does not mean a 95% confidence interval. My guess would be a skewed distribution – the energy involved to get an outlier on the high side is far greater than that for an outlier on the low side, so I would expect to see outliers on the low side to be more extreme than those on the high side.
I just don’t know what to think of this kind of data.
There are all sorts of variables involved. The remaining sea-ice this year is spread out over a far bigger area than the sea-ice of 2012. The difference is huge, but if you only count pixels of white, the “extent” is roughly the same.
It is like saying the coastline of the small state of Maine is roughly the same as the coastline of the huge state of California. (Maine has countless nooks and crannies, harbors and inlets, while California is a straight line (excuse me, San Francisco.) ) To say Maine is like California is like comparing apples with oranges, as is comparing 2012 with 2016.
One thing I have learned, even as a layman, is that sameness is not an option, in meteorology. Not even the snowflakes match up. You look for “similarity”, and go from there.
One thing to watch for this year is a big difference from 2012, in how the sea-ice “grows out from the edges.” Because the ice is spread out much more, there are more edges for the ice to “grow out from.”
I am left confused about one of the points you made..”since sea ice cover is largely absent to about 86 degrees north.” Is this not true or is this near normal ? Skimming the Internet left me thinking the former based on satellite photos but nothing definitive.
In 1957:
The 230-foot icebreaking cutter Storis and the 180-foot buoy tenders Spar and Bramble sailed through the Bering Sea to attempt a crossing of the Northwest 5 Passage. In sixty-four days the ships crossed the Arctic, making them the first American ships to make the passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, north
of the North American continent. Spar also became the first ship to circumnavigate the continent in one year
. This effort was assisted by the U.S. Navy and Canada.