Guest essay by Eric Worrall
In the wake of his failed 2016 “ice free” prediction, Dr. Peter Wadhams has spoken up, claiming most scientists are frightened to speak up about the climate crisis – though he admits his confidence in predicting exact dates has taken a dive.
Dahr Jamail | Arctic Expert on Sea Ice: We Could “Reach Zero” Within Two Years
Arctic sea ice is in big trouble.
This is bad news for multiple reasons, the primary one being that Arctic sea ice helps keep the polar regions cool along with working to moderate the entire global climate.
“Sea ice has a bright surface; 80 percent of the sunlight that strikes it is reflected back into space,” explains the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s website. “As sea ice melts in the summer, it exposes the dark ocean surface. Instead of reflecting 80 percent of the sunlight, the ocean absorbs 90 percent of the sunlight. The oceans heat up, and Arctic temperatures rise further.”
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Truthout: Numerous people have predicted the vanishing of the Arctic sea ice in summer, including a US Navy study that predicted it by this summer, but they’ve all been too early in their predictions. Why do you feel confident about predicting that summer Arctic sea ice will disappear in either 2017 or 2018 at the latest?
Dr. Peter Wadhams: I don’t feel confident — it’s simply that this is the trend shown by the sea ice volume in recent years, and since that volume is now quite small, it ought to reach zero within one to two more years. But, of course, something could happen to change that.
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We have reported quite extensively on the threat of increasing amounts of methane being released as permafrost melts. Why should people be concerned about methane releases in the Arctic, and the fact that these are increasing?
We have modeled what would happen if the rate of emission increased radically to be equivalent to a 50-gigaton pulse (predicted by the Russian scientists who work on offshore methane). It would give a 0.6C boost to global warming immediately — which is a very large figure.
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You have been outspoken and frank about how rapidly the situation is changing in the Arctic. Why do you suppose more scientists aren’t being as outspoken in their alarm and concern over what is happening there and what it means to the planet?
Career considerations: If they speak out, they fear that it will upset their promotion prospects, so they keep their heads down.
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Any final thoughts you’d like to leave with our readers?
As a final point, sea ice retreat from the Greenland Sea has prevented the formation of chimneys — deep cylinders through which surface water sinks to great depths. This slows the thermohaline circulation [the movement of seawater in a pattern of flow dependent on variations in temperature, which give rise to changes in salt content and hence in density], which will result in cooling — or slower warming — of the Northwestern Atlantic coastline (e.g. Britain) and faster warming of the tropical Atlantic (e.g. more intense hurricanes).
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If I’ve understood correctly, we can now expect sea ice to melt away in 2 years (maybe), an imminent 0.6c spike from methane, and a potentially severe drop in Northern temperatures thanks to interruption of the Thermohaline circulation, the “Day after Tomorrow” scenario.
Settled science, anyone?
Whacky Pete? More like whacky baccy Pete.
What really puzzles me is how somebody who calls himself an expert can refer to the earth’s atmosphere in such a simplistic way.
One should expect the scientists of all people, to understand the sheer complexity of the planet and the impossibility of mankind (at least at this stage) to replicate these complex and mostly ill understood processes.
Sad days for science.
So – the refreeze seems to have slowed right down this year…
https://seaice.uni-bremen.de/amsr2/index.html
Yep. I was going to point that out. I may be temporary, though. In some graphs it is out of the 2 standard deviations zone.
Weather. It’s what caused the low this year, it’s what caused the fast recovery and it’s what is causing the slow down now. Meteorologists must bang their heads on a desk when they see people trying to manipulate weather events into something more than they are.
“Through 2016, the linear rate of decline for September is 87,200 square kilometers (33,700 square miles) per year, or 13.3 percent per decade”
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2016/10/monthly_ice_09_NH.png
The trend lines on extent and volume still show an essentially ice free summer arctic ocean between 2025 and 2035.
and the ice state after this year in terms of thickness/age is not at all good.
Wadhams is essentially right… the trends show we are heading for ice free. Given a melt season like 2012 again, the record is inevitably going to be broken (we hit second lowest this year in a year of poor melt conditions).
If its 2017, or 2020, when we get to ice free then its still a big problem, even if Wadhams was 1 to 5 years out…
how is it a problem? to whom and for what reason?
Surely if the ice melted to be joint with 2007, you can’t really say they were poor melt conditions, can you? You would surely need to say the conditions favored melting. Of course, if what you mean is that if something that didn’t happen had happened instead, then things might have melted more, I could say if 2007 and 2012 didn’t happen and something else happened, bla bla bla.
I’m curious as to how being ice free (excusing the weird definition) for a few days in September causes any “problem”.
Maybe it will happen one day, who knows, but continuing to predict when and being wrong each time would surely cause any rational person to rethink their hypothesis. In fairness, IPCC don’t claim any of these death spiral scenarios and we shouldn’t resort to picking a few outliners to be a representation of the view.
+1
“continuing to predict when and being wrong each time would surely cause any rational person to rethink their hypothesis”
You’re think the clowns who believe this stuff are rational, John?
Assumes fact not in evidence.
But you can.
Insolation in June and formation of melt ponds drives summer melt in most years.
In a year with poor insolation and fewer melt ponds like 2016, melt result should have been indifferent -and here we are with a second lowest (or 2007 tie under NSIDC measure)
The latest NSIDC report confirms that:
“Although the onset of surface melt was early over much of the Arctic Ocean, as the melt season progressed, a pattern of stormy weather set up….. Such conditions have been previously shown to limit summer ice loss”
I wonder what posters would think if this were a graph showing the performance of the US economy under Obama. Would they still be saying it was not an issue?
You haven’t explained how a few days of ice free (either the real term or IPCC term) would be an issue.
By golly it does resemble Obama’s economic growth, good catch Gareth. But, like arctic ice, you don’t expect the economy to go to zero I’m sure.
Griff, your own chart shows that since [2007], it has nearly stopped going down anymore.
Like most alarmists, Griff selects the time frame that shows what he wants to see.
It looks like he showed the entire satellite period. What should he have shown?
Predicting a date for the demise of sea ice is just daft. It undermines confidence in climate science. On the other hand saying that there is no problem and sea ice cover is in an expanding trend is just as bad and undermines the argument of sceptics just as efficiently.
It is a trend for the past 9 years (increase of the minimums, because 2007 was so low), so the only thing you can then say is that 9 years isn’t a relevant time period. You would be quote right to say it. Just like it is also right to day that the first half of the 2000s, which started the death spiral talk, were also a short period of time.
Ultimately, the only thing that can prove an increase or decrease one way of the other is time. Until then, there aren’t any proposals to do anything about it, not that would have any impact anyway.
Climate “science” undermines itself perfectly well 24/7. It needs no help from Whacko Wadhams.
Fortunately, the demise of the glaciers in Scotland turned out well for the kilt wearing inhabitants of said country.
Who is to say the demise of summer ice won’t turn out equally well for someone. Only the Eeyores* in the environmental movement will continue to be depressed about it.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeyore
Why should pointing out the truth make skeptics look bad?
…and in other news (reported in the Guardian – where else?)
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/british-mountains-could-be-downgraded-to-hills-because-of-the-rising-sea-level-says-ordnance-survey/ar-BBxd4E3?li=AA59G2&ocid=spartanntp
April the 1st come early
Ice is an emergent property of the Arctic. It is not the cooler of the Arctic. Peter is a fool.
I’d say yes, you are right.
and the conditions which cause it to reach certain levels are the climate of the arctic…
and the Guardian strikes again…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/08/the-guardians-100-months-to-save-the-planet-was-always-just-a-fa/
I’m concerned we are in for a Karlization of sea ice and ENSO data. The ‘problems’ and seemingly outright neglect of longstanding data sets this past year has been a prelude to adjustments to land and sea surface temperature, sea level and other sets in the past.
Remember Hansen simply pushed the US 1930s and 1940s temp records down below 1998’s in 2007! We even had emails pop up between H and an underling on the progress of the fudge. They saw 1998, as the last opportunity to get a new world record temp and this was scotched by the dreaded ‘Pause’ .
Y’all remember the Pause? They were emboldened to ‘Just Do It’. It fell to Karl since he was retiring anyway.
Anyone heard anything about the plight of mountain glaciers lately? They were hyped by the UN up until 2007 too. They’ll be retooling measurement methods in use for over 100 yrs as well. BMO in Oz is probably sharpening their pencils. The Climateers have taken a big hit in Oz this past year. Oh, and have you noticed that your local weathermen have magnified the ‘feels like’ temperatures? “It’s 24C today but it will feel like 35!”. They are also already pondering changing the 150yr old definition of hurricane landfall to include near misses. And ya know that old which a call Simpson scale for storm wind speeds needs an overhaul.
Arctic sea ice is a bogus metric.
Arctic sea ice may be a valid metric, but we have NOT yet measured even a single half-cycle.
When we know more, we “might” be able make some other conclusions. Until then, we are only considering the impact of a single half-El Nino cycle, or half an AMO or PDO.
I agree with Gamecock. It responds over time to a rise in air temperatures and fluctuates with ocean oscillations in addition to wild swings due to winds. In other words, it doesn’t really tell us more than what we already know, and can in fact mislead us, which of course the Alarmists want. They also love the fact that they can use one of their favorite type of arguments, the Appeal to Emotion, since ice is something tangible they can point to as “disappearing”, and intimate that we should be all shocked and alarmed about it.
So basically this guy with the PhD (I’m just guessing he is just a research quack not a medical one) hanging on the wall and a whiteboard with impressive looking formulas scrawled on it…knows just as much about the future of arctic sea ice and melting trends as this armchair climatologist with an MBA that has nothing to do with the field hanging on the wall.
Glad these guys are worth all the grant money!
He’s been studying it for decades – including many years of field research.
As have the NSIDC – founded in 1957…
and they and other institutions who have been studying the arctic for decades – from before the 1979 satellite data started – conclude the trend is down.
Griff,
He is well educated,but now badly infected by the CAGW paradigm,which is why he makes outlandish no sea ice predictions in the last 10 years.
He is a propagandist now.
He was funded by dirty oil money for 16 years (1976-1992). He must be lying.
/sarc
Griff,
Peter is the poster boy of the motivated reasoning / failed prophet syndrome.
tommy – his data has not changed, nor has his methods in gathering it…
World sea ice is very low at the moment. Given that antarctic sea ice was at record levels in recent years, it is now currently showing no signs of getting back to those level.
..Yea, and there are no more glaciers covering North America !!! Oh the horror !!!
??? What?
Antarctic sea ice (maximums, minimums, and averages) was steadily growing ever-larger from 1992 through 2014 – when it set record HIGH maximum sea ice extents. 2015 – up through the beginning (at the beginning of the record-high El Nino ?) of September 2015. Since September 2015 it has oscillated above and below the long-term average.
You cannot make any claim of any sort of “new trend” from one year at average levels after 22 years of increasing levels.
“You cannot make any claim of any sort of “new trend” from one year at average levels after 22 years of increasing levels.”
Wanna bet?
So, one year of average Antarctic sea ice (during a record-setting El Nino year) after 22 years of ever-increasing antarctic sea ice extents. What is the trend?
I was being sarcastic.
Another way to conceptualize Arctic Amplification is to think of the Global climate as the dog and the Arctic as the tail. It is clear that the Arctic is highly variable, like a wagging tail. But wagging tails don’t actually control that much of the dog. Peter is obsessed with the tail, and obviously gets it wrong.
The arctic is variable in that different weather in different melting seasons produces variable results, but the trend is down…
and the fact is that the arctic ice is an indicator of wider trends – i.e. it is a clear indicator of warming
He he,Griff,
Many warmists like you, have been predicting NO Summer sea ice in the region,for years now, always wrong it is a boring trend. You need to try something else to bother people with.
It has been shown the decline has rapidly changed to near zero since 2007.It has been shown that important changes in the weather has showed up, with a reducing melting time frame and less unfavorable winds as well. It has been shown statistically the decline has nearly flattened out. It has been shown to YOU repeatedly in another blog,that the AMO is cooling down,which favors the increasing survival of Summer ice in the region.
You have also been shown in another blog, of a number of published science papers,showing that for a few thousand years in the early Holocene,there were little to no summer ice. You have also been shown that sea ice changes are connected to the AMO changes.
Yet you refuse or ignore all this because you like Wadhams, are infected by the dumb CAGW conjecture.
No, a wagging tail is not controlling the dog.
The Arctic, blowing heat out of Earth into space even faster when ice pack is down, is not a predictor of more warming.
It takes deliberately ignoring climate history of the arctic to confabulate a crisis out of the current sea ice levels.
People have been predicting that if the trend continues there’ll be no ice.
The trend is quite clear.
And if people misrepresent the statements on the lines of ‘if the trend continues as it did this year we’d see no ice in..’ then that’s skeptics twisting what they said.
It is dishonest to take only the two points of 2007 and 2016 extent and claim there’s no downward trend or it has stabilised.
griffyboy, you make my day each time with laughter
just a question: is then the cooling and expanding antarctic an indicator of wider trends such as global cooling?
“sea ice retreat from the Greenland Sea has prevented the formation of chimneys ”
He just pulls this stuff out of thin air or where the sun never shines, doesn’t he? It surely smells. There is no report of downwelling water not happening in the North Atlantic. Studies of the Gulf Stream, looking at sediment cores from between Florida and Cuba, indicate that the Stream speeds up in warm conditions and slows down with cold, which is the opposite of what he is saying. This fits perfectly with the fact that cold water has higher viscosity than warm and would thus be slower to flow. Duh!
What many “climate scientists,” who like to think that they understand the Arctic, do not realize or refuse to recognize is that solar input to the Arctic is pathetic even at the peak of Summer. Summer sunlight, with the sun at such a low angle, must take a long path through the atmosphere at a low angle which, from atmospheric absorption, makes sunlight ~17% of direct sunlight from overhead. Also, the energy delivered per unit area is spread out due to the low angle, such that it is ~17% of normal overhead energy delivery. Taken together, at the peak of Summer, solar intensity is about 3%. Call it 5% and it is still not a lot of energy. This small amount of energy absorbed by open water would be quickly canceled out by ongoing evaporative cooling. In addition, there is indeed quite a bit of reflection of water at this low angle, so it is not all absorbed. Furthermore—it’s so much fun as junk science can be refuted in so many ways— this 5% insolation is only aat the peak of Summer. During most of Summer, the Sun’s angle is even lower and it is dark for six months. Solar energy input is a non-starter as far as warming the ocean goes.
Arctic Summer melt is caused mostly by injection of warm water into the Arctic basin, such that the warmer, lower density water would hug the underside of the floating ice and melt the ice from below. Warm air from the south, replacing dense bodies of cold air that flow south toward the equator, also causes melting but not as efficiently as does the warm water.
The low Arctic ice of 2007 was a perfect storm involving at least two major factors. The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) pumped a large bolus of warm water into the Arctic basin, dominant winds of that summer blew a lot of ice out of the Arctic basin where it melted elsewhere, and there appears to have been some ocean floor vulcanism that might have generated more warm water. None of these effects have anything to do with the junk science regarding that the Arctic is on a melting trend, other than the long-term warming we have experienced since the end of the Little Ice Age. Also, assuming an ever-continuing warming trend is ingenuous as history clearly shows that warm periods and cold periods do not last forever and it is likely that the cyclic warming and cooling that we have seen for thousands of years are most likely to continue.
Pushing the meme that we are on a warming path no matter what thus becomes a political push designed to persuade normal people to allow the government to make changes to their lives that they normally would not tolerate and reject completely.
If global warming of the air were the cause for alleged Arctic sea ice decline from its century high in 1979, then Antarctic sea ice should also have contracted. But instead, it has grown dramatically.
CACA hypothesis falsified. QED.
“alleged”? Are you serious?
Er – it did expand for a bit, for reasons connected with changing winds/currents (driven by warming).
But it peaked early this year and is now dropping more quickly than usual… in fact to a record low
http://www.citymetric.com/horizons/record-high-record-low-what-happening-antarctica-s-sea-ice-2488
“Antarctica has also just broken a new climate record, with record low winter sea ice. After a peak of 18.5m square kilometres in late August, sea ice began retreating about a month ahead of schedule, and has been setting daily low records through most of September.”
“and there appears to have been some ocean floor vulcanism that might have generated more warm water”
No there was not. There is no ocean floor vulcanism influencing arctic sea ice melt.
Insolation is a vital component of summer ice melt.
so the gakkel ridge one of the least understood ridges wher explosive volcanism happened on depths before not believed to have made this possible doesn’t exist? hmmmm griff you seem to be very selective
This is the text of an email I sent Professor Wadhams today. I await his reply.
Dear “Professor” Wadhams.
Here you go again, reiterating your failed predictions.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37686-arctic-expert-on-sea-ice-we-could-reach-zero-within-two-years
There are only two possible explanations for your behaviour.
1) You are a shameless charlatan, more concerned with your own personal publicity, rather than the actual science.
2) You have my sympathy as you are clearly delusional and require medical and/or psychiatric treatment.
By the way my last bet, which you did not respond to, still stands.
I bet you £2000 that Arctic sea-ice extent will not fall below 1 Wadham* at its lowest next year (2017).
(* 1 million square kilometers)
Regards,
Dr D Keiller.
I miss jimbo and all his posts:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/12/moving-the-goalposts-has-professor-wadhams-explained-his-now-changed-ice-free-arctic-prediction/#comment-1813252
I do, too! And I have been wondering for weeks, What happened to Jimbo?
About a year ago (?), something happened to make him stop posting on WUWT. He was SUCH fine, highly informative, and frequent commenter — then, after a few posts on WUWT, here and there, ___________________________________ . Silence.
Whatever the cause (and if Jimbo was hurt, I sure wish the one(s) who hurt him would make it right), WE MISS YOU, JIMBO — please come back!