From the “well, if hadn’t been that it would have been global warming for sure” department:
By Lauren Lipuma, AGU
A series of unprecedented storms over the Southern Ocean likely caused the most dramatic decline in Antarctic sea ice seen to date, a new study finds.
Antarctic sea ice – frozen ocean water that rings the southernmost continent – has grown over the past few decades but declined sharply in late 2016. By March of 2017 – the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer – Antarctic sea ice had reached its lowest area since records began in 1978.
In a new study, scientists puzzled by the sudden ice loss matched satellite images of Antarctica with weather data from the second half of 2016 to figure out what caused so much of the ice to melt. They found that a series of remarkable storms during September, October and November brought warm air and strong winds from the north that melted 75,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) of ice per day. That’s like losing a South Carolina-sized chunk of ice every 24 hours.
Antarctic sea ice is relatively thin – on average only 1 meter (3 feet) thick – making it extremely vulnerable to strong winds, said John Turner, a climate scientist with the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and lead author of the new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Sea ice area is an important indicator of climate change, and sea ice loss in the Arctic has been linked to increased greenhouse gas emissions. But because sea ice records go back only four decades – when the satellite era began – it’s difficult to attribute Antarctica’s sea ice loss last year to human-caused climate change, Turner said. Whaling records provide scientists with hints of Antarctica’s past sea ice extent, but it’s tough to compare that data to satellite records, he said.
“There’s no indication this is anything but just natural variability,” he said. “It highlights the fact that the climate of the Antarctic is incredibly variable.”
If greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, scientists expect there to be stronger storms in the mid-latitudes, but can’t say for sure that the deep storms of late 2016 were due to human activity, Turner said.
Up until this most recent decline, Antarctic sea ice area had increased slightly since satellite records began in the late 1970s. But that increase doesn’t mean climate change hasn’t affected Antarctica, said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who was not connected to the new study.
“This doesn’t mean that climate change isn’t happening, just that, at least through 2015 for Antarctic sea ice, the climate change signal could not be distinguished from natural variability,” he said.
More research is needed to determine exactly what caused Antarctic sea ice to grow over the past four decades amid a warming planet and if the low-ice conditions in 2016 and 2017 mark a turning point toward a decline in Antarctic sea ice because of climate change, Meier said.
“The increase definitely does not refute global warming and may even be a feature of it,” he said. “As temperatures continue to rise, the warming effect will win out and we expect Antarctic sea ice to eventually start decreasing.”
“It is tempting to think that the 2016 low ice conditions may mark this turn toward decreasing ice, but that temptation is not warranted,” Meier added. “It’s too soon to tell whether the low ice conditions are an ephemeral downturn or the start of something more long-term.”
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
But,
it would be unprecedented if the ‘unprecedented storms’ weren’t caused by unprecedented global warming thus causing an unprecedented loss of ice….
I do wish 97% of you chaps would sick with the program;
you very nearly had me thinking nature was in charge of climate
I thought global warming CAUSED record sea ice? So collapse of the ice would indicate ABSENCE of warming wouldn’t it?
the climate change signal could not be distinguished from natural variability
A tacit admission that they cannot detect the signal, and that if we have anything to fear, it is from natural variability itself. For 30 years they have been claiming that GHG warming would swamp natural variability and they are no closer now to detecting it than they were 30 years ago.
Over and over with the same thing. Yet the public stumbles along on the assumption that something bad lurks just over the horizon if we don’t “do something” when all they need so to reassure themselves is read the actual science. You don’t need a degree in physics to understand that this paper, like many others, syas plain and simple that natural variability is so much higher than the GHG warming signal that the signal doesn’t matter.
The exact same line that I picked : “the climate change signal could not be distinguished from natural variability”. The topic in this paper was Antarctic sea ice, but if you check the literature, the exact same line applies to every single facet of climate – there is not a single part of climate where any change could be distinguished from natural variability. One very obvious possible reason is that all climate change is natural variability. It seems pretty strange that so many scientists are so resolutely refusing to even consider this as a possibility.
“One very obvious possible reason is that all climate change is natural variability. It seems pretty strange that so many scientists are so resolutely refusing to even consider this as a possibility.”
They should assume natural variablity until proven otherwise. Assuming CO2 is causing the Earth’s climate to change is assuming way too much. There is certainly no proof for it.
That’s why studies like this on are so irritating because they assume facts not in evidence and then extrapolate from there. They are depending on dishonest climate scientists to give them the facts and they are not getting the facts from them, they are getting fake horror stories of gloom and doom instead.
People get angry when they find out they have been fooled, especially when it comes from scientists who are supposed to be beyond reproach, but unfortunately, they are not.
Surely this was a big test of their Global Warming Theory.
Something BIG happened.
So, where are the failed crops, the floods, the droughts, the hurricanes & tornadoes etc etc?
Where are they, apart from business as usual in that department?
There are refugees and dead bodies but they are entirely self inflicted as in Grenfell Tower.
That one just lurches from bad to worse, as in every Government scheme.
Manslaughter charges are to be brought (oh goody, the crony lawyers win win yet again), loads of other towers and properties are to be expensively refurbished because they are now not safe – and just after they were expensively furbished entirely because of this global warming fandango.
And the architects of this craziness, Mann, Hansen & Gore? Spitting out childish snark, 140 bytes at a time, on titter and the like. As though its just some sort of school playground game.
And these lot are just the same. Like children, they’ve found something (to them) interesting, like a pretty coloured snail under a rock by example.
Yes that’s very lovely but in the great scheme of the rest of the population of the planet, it makes diddly squat difference.
And for comic relief to those who know, From Global National TV in TORONTO, Canada. Hey, Toronto is the place we westerners love to make fun of.
Bolding is mine. Guess they never learned about displacement.
Watch the video. Oh noes!!! Melting of floating ice is going to cause sea level rise. The media is sooo informed.
http://globalnews.ca/video/3546882/unprecedented-ice-melt-in-antarctica
We should make tactical gear and helmets woven from CAGW…it’s bulletproof.
The winter peak in 2015 was similar to 2016 (at least in terms of losing ground to the norm). Was there a storm then too?
To see this go here, click on Antarctic and then add 2015 & 2016.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
Yes.
http://unofficialnetworks.com/2015/01/22/antarctic-storm-video-from-utsteinen-station-1-17-15/
Those two lower years followed record year after record year. Click on 2014, 2013 and 2012. Antarctic sea ice has grown since 1979, while Arctic has declined, showing that more CO2 in the air can’t be responsible for Arctic decline. The past two years on lower Antarctic ice resulted from the super El Nino and late winter storms. The lowest Arctic years have also been due to August and September cyclones.
And so once again we have a demonstration that weather driving wave and wind action has a greater short term effect on sea ice in every metric on sea ice than warming of air or water or changes in salinity. WHY do we not laugh at the premise that any measurement of sea ice is a viable proxy for warming? Why do we play their game and not just blow it out of the water?
Extraordinary as in it could not be inferred from a sub-Nyquist rate sample of the past.
So, the ice broke up, floated around a bit, and then refroze. Okey dokey, then.
Let me get this straight.
You put ice in your drink to cool it down…correct?
So, effectively all that ice which was clinging to the continent of Antarctica is now cooling the ocean?
So what we observed was in fact a major ‘cooling event’.
Just like the ‘exceptional warmth’ over Greenland last winter which in fact resulted in exceptional surface ice mass gain.
I guess you can spin these events any way you like.
Not really that big a deal. Most Antarctic sea ice melts every SH summer no matter what.
We had a big El Nino in 2015/16 and these highly paid guys didn’t even mention the possibility of of this causing the “storms”. It is also stupid to say storms and the warm air is doing something. Hell big storms will break the ice up and it will float away and melt in the ocean without alarming warming. We seem to forget that sailing around Cape Horn was sailor’s nightmare. The US Navy historically used to give a gold (left) ear ring to sailors as a mark of respect and accomplishment for this dangerous journey. They discontinued the practice in modern times but I met the last sailor to get one! He was a bartender in Switzerland (Leysin, Canton Vaud – Club Vagabond) in the early 1960s. Apparently the rule was still on the ‘books’ and he sued for his ring. He got one and they formally removed this rule from the olden days, apparently telling him to keep quiet! It was a pretty substantial piece of gold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Horn#.27Rounding_the_Horn.27
Scroll down to Trade route 2.2, 4th para “Traditionally, a sailor who had rounded the Horn was entitled to wear a gold loop earring — in the left ear, the one which had faced the Horn in a typical eastbound passage — and to dine with one foot on the table”
Even school kids used to know it was the stormiest place on earth.
I think a way to remove all the trash from the literature when the Big Reckoning comes is to use the search word “unprecedented”. This should get most of them. Any other words we should use to clean out the chaff?
“Robust”.
The phrase “is consistent with”. The most deceptive three words I know.
Include:
“has been linked”
“Model”
noaaprogrammer, please do not curse on this family Thread.
I’m still waiting on the NIMBUS satellite film to be digitized and released. I seem to remember they said that the sea ice went from what appears to be the MOST sea ice ever seen to the least in just one year. Are they hiding the NIMBUS data? Inquiring minds want to know. Release the tapes! Get Congress involved.
Better be careful! There may be an 18 minute gap, they are proven to be quite adept at such shenanigans.
Folks this is not fair, with the Mann paper and now this, Skeptical Science must be in Defcon 1 damage limitation mode.
Our local NZ warmist shill ‘scientists’ were very glad to see the drop, and note it was wind patterns. So they could claim the rise was also just wind patterns.. No realisation that it marked the change to the ‘Quiet Sun’ wikd jetstream regime affecting both poles and the termperate zones, Winds are blowing more north/south, causing greater extremes.
This shows in the southern and northern ice becoming piled up and thicker, which the shills do not mention. At the other end, English winemakers are now wondering if they made a mistake planting vines because their yield is wiped out. They are right, it is like in the LIA. This is the real climate shift, and we wish we are wrong, but not so far…..
The Bottom Line
https://youtu.be/7gH78lUc94Y
https://youtu.be/7gH78lUc94Y?t=8
“Sea ice area is an important indicator of climate change, and sea ice loss in the Arctic has been linked to increased greenhouse gas emissions.”
Linked in any real sense of cause-effect or just claimed and hoped-for? Is this from the ‘we make up stuff to be later proven correct’ department?
With that much ice cover gone, the loss of energy to space will be massive before it freezes over this winter. Ice insulates the ocean around the coast. There will be a large drop on total ocean heat content because of this event.
The strong El Niño has the same effect. It dumps heat much faster than normal. A few summers like this will only make the net effect stronger.
“But that increase doesn’t mean climate change hasn’t affected Antarctica, said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA” Nor does it mean it has affected the Antarctica. I was going to ask how much the sea levels have risen as a result of all the surface melting but then I saw the average thickness is on a meter thick. No affect on sea lever with that little volume melted.
Certainly that which is floating won’t add any increase in sea level rise.
With the rapid increase of open water, the the Southern Ocean how has increased surface area to release heat sorted in Antarctic oceans, which should have a net cooling effect.
I expect that Antarctic sea ice will rapidly recover, especially when both the PDO and AMO are in their 30-yrear cool cycles from 2019, and the weakest solar cycle since 1790 starts in 2021.
We’ll see soon enough.
Geoff certainly has it right, “more research is needed.” I have been reading research papers and reports and articles for 50 years and they all end with “more research is needed”. In other words I will be asking for a few million more in research dollars soon. I don’t mean to demean this very interesting report and the excellent comments I have read with interest. I simply had to laugh when I saw that line and loved it when Geoff posted the videos.
Hi Geoff,
You are not the Geoff in Geoff Sherrington – that is me from Melbourne AUST who has blogged on WUWT from about 2007.
Often, I sign off with a ‘Geoff’, but now there are 2 of us we need to identify better to avoid confusion. What if we both add an initial, so I am GeoffS and you are GeoffA or B or C or whatever applies?
Cheers
GeoffS
“This doesn’t mean that climate change isn’t happening, just that, at least through 2015 for Antarctic sea ice, the climate change signal could not be distinguished from natural variability,” he said.
So no reason to assume anything but natural variability.
“The increase definitely does not refute global warming and may even be a feature of it,”
Global warming brings more ice. Sounds convincing.
“As temperatures continue to rise, the warming effect will win out and we expect Antarctic sea ice to eventually start decreasing.”
Sure. When?
“It is tempting to think that the 2016 low ice conditions may mark this turn toward decreasing ice, but that temptation is not warranted,” Meier added. “It’s too soon to tell whether the low ice conditions are an ephemeral downturn or the start of something more long-term.”
Ah! Not before the current researchers have retired, and perhaps not in our lifetimes.
“More research is needed”
Naturally. Keep the grant money coming.
Very strong positive AAO anomalies occurred through 2016 following the El Nino, and also through 2010 and 1998 following major El Nino episodes.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/aao/monthly.aao.index.b79.current.ascii.table
The months of March, June, and September 2016 had the strongest positive AAO anomalies, which were the months when the greatest relative loss of sea ice occurred.
(select Antarctic):
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
“The increase definitely does not refute global warming and may even be a feature of it,” he said. “As temperatures continue to rise, the warming effect will win out and we expect Antarctic sea ice to eventually start decreasing.”
That statement only shows that they definitely don’t understand the trends. Antarctic sea ice extent increased since 1995 due to a net decline in climate forcing, the same reason for the warming of the AMO and Arctic since 1995.
Well here we are again arguing and discussing sea ice as if it is a valuable proxy of global temperatures. I just don’t get it! Time and again the major factor that effects all the metrics of sea ice at either pole are storms, wave and wind action just as the paper above is showing. This should make it clear that in the shorter term sea ice is a very poor metric for global temperature and yet people, many very well informed, argue about extent, area, volume and multi year ice day after day after day as if such day to day, week to week, month to month measurements are a holy grail of what the earths temps are doing.