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.”
“If greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, scientists expect there to be stronger storms in the mid-latitudes,”
Not scientists with any sort of clue. The misconception is that reducing the pole ward temperature gradient allows the mid latitude jet to slacken and loop. The opposite is closer to the truth. (As usual)
Always scream out: Name the scientists!
Figure 1.5 from Klyastorin (2007). ACI is a Russian index that measures “zonality” vs “meridionality”. The zonal and meridional components are mirror opposites and the zonal component is shown here. It can be seen that the tendency for zonal flow increases with increasing Arctic temperature, and decreases (meaning the jet stream gets more loopy) with decreasing Arctic temperature.
Looks good to me, gymnosperm.
“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.”
So in other worlds they don’t have any idea what the mechanism actually is.
Were I to propose such shite as an engineer, I’d be laughed out of the room.
Again, always scream out: Give us the proof of your statement “As temperatures continue to rise” in specific terms!
“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 of ice per day. That’s like losing a South Carolina-sized chunk of ice every 24 hours.”
That’s chickenshit you Chicken Little. The sea ice grows back 17,000,000 sq. km. every winter. 1 meter thick sea ice is chickenshit compared to 2,160 meters thick Antarctic ice sheet. How can you melt that when the ave. temperature is some -50 C. From the last 420,000 years, this interglacial may warm 2 or 3 C. Still 47 C colder than melting point. And the latent heat needed to melt the ice sheet is over 3 times more than to warm it by 50 C. We’re still in an ice age folks! We have been for the past 2.58 million years. So keep dreaming global warming but the 2 km thick ice sheet is here to stay!
http://www.meteoclub.gr/images/stories/zeus/Temperature_Interglacials.jpg
We’ve been in an ice age for 34 million years, when the East Antarctic Ice Sheet formed, under CO2 levels two to five times higher than now. But ice sheets didn’t form in the Northern Hemisphere until 2.6 Ma, after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama.
I think it is worth noting that when you read the comments section of WUWT, you will see post after post of people demanding proof of CAGW assertions, and you would think that if the CAGW promoters actually had a scientific case to make, that they would jump on these demands with both feet and blow away their skeptic opposition with the facts.
But what do we get? Almost dead silence. No offers of evidence. Some alarmists check in to voice their opinions, but again, no evidence of any consequence.
It’s obvious they don’t have a case to make. That’s why they are absent from WUWT. Or at least silent. They probably do spend some of their time on WUWT. They would be crazy not to, since this is where the serious challenge to their faith is located. Here, and in the White House, I guess I should add.
+10…some of them may be secretly trying to educate themselves.
If someone has evidence supporting AGW (or CAGW, if you prefer) should they present it at WUWT or, I don’t know, some scientific peer reviewed journal?
“Peer review” is the FIRST refuge of the scoundrel.
Were any climate journal reviews made of McIntyre’s destruction of Mann’s Hockey Stick? Mann is still a darling of government and academia! Along with all the other Climategate heroes.
Go stuff your noble climate scientist meme, DWR54. What is your name, anyway?
Dave Fair
Perhaps that tells us something about the value of that critique. By the way, since when has it become a requirement to provide one’s proper name at this site? Presumably you have made or will be making the same request of ferdberple, Latitude, goldminor…. et al?
“Peer review” is the FIRST refuge of the scoundrel.”
What a laughable comment. The medical field relies on peer reviewed articles in journals, same for engineering, same for oceanography, etc. What is your proposed alternative? Put it up on a blog site, and then folks can make comments? And if 1000 people make comments – without giving any indication of their qualifications or knowledge – then the author must sift through all of those, deciding which have merit and which do not.
You miss the point, Chris. This is about climate commentators and their hiding behind “peer review” to avoid citing facts supporting CO2-driven CAGW. Climategate, anyone? Additionally, have you read anything about the scandals surrounding journal article replication in the various scientific and pseudo-scientific fields?
And what is wrong with a serious researcher reviewing 1,000 comments? When helping write Federal Environmental Impact Statements, I reviewed and responded to many more cogent and not-so-cogent comments.
And yet “climate scientists” use peer review as their good old boys network to spew lies and sh*t. And you think that is just peachy.
Chris,
Peer review has failed miserably in every field, but especially medicine.
http://www.allianceforpatientsafety.org/redding-failure.pdf
That’s even without its total corruption into pal review in the case of climate “research”.
Various fixes have been proposed, but blog review is surely one of them. If you’re worried about qualifications, review sites can impose them. But usually only experts are going to want to read scientific papers, and reviewers who aren’t might still make valid comments. I doubt that any scientific paper would attract thousands of reviewers.
Chris,
In your opinion, was any valid science published before 1967, when the journal Nature initiated a peer review process?
http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2014/06/04/even_einstein_hated_peer_review_108687.html
“If someone has evidence supporting AGW (or CAGW, if you prefer) should they present it at WUWT or, I don’t know, some scientific peer reviewed journal?”
How about both? If they do it that way, we know their work will get a thorough examination in at least one of those places.
@ur momisugly DWR54…I mentioned my name several times some years back. It would not mean anything to anyone here as I am just an interested amateur. One who was willing to spend the last 9 years of my life looking into this discussion. I am hooked.
RE: “But what do we get? Almost dead silence.”
Silence and a seemingly endless parade of appeals to authority; “97%”, “Hottest evah”, “Mann says…” etc. Unrefuted evidence, not so much.
There is no viable substitute for fossil fuels
===========
A gallon of gasoline is 33 kWh of energy. A standard 100w solar panel needs 55 days of sunlight to produce the same amount of power.
There you go again, dropping facts about like poodle bombs on the white carpet in the foyer of the Grand Cathedral of Human Caused Globall Warmining. So naughty of you!
There is no viable substitute for fossil fuels
===========
A gallon of gasoline is 33 kWh of energy. A standard 100w solar panel needs 55 days of sunlight to produce the same amount of power.
A standard roof can support more than 50 100watt panels.
And still can’t equal a gallon of gasoline.
At what real cost per kWh, Michael.
And I have wonderfully subsidized panels on my roof!
A Nissian Leaf will go 107 miles on a 30 Kwh charge.
And how much coal does it take to get that 30Kwh charge?
At what real life-cycle cost per mile, Michael?
Manufacture of the battery of a Tesla produces the amount of CO2 equivalent to 9 years of driving a car.
Here’s the link:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/20/tesla-car-battery-production-releases-as-much-co2-as-8-years-of-gasoline-driving/
And how many of those batteries have been produced to date? A little math the Human Caused Globall Warmining church REALLY does not want the average person to do.
““The increase definitely does no refute global warming and may even be a feature of it,” he said.”
You just can’t win with warmists.
The persistent strong cold SST anomaly all around Antarctica has been there continuously for at least a decade – why is this hardly ever discussed?
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif
The idiot paper discussing recent changes in Antarctic sea ice of course completely ignored/hids the SUPER BIG observational paradox:
It is a proxy fact, that the Southern ocean about Antarctic has cyclically warmed and cooled, 342 times in the last 240,000 years.
The periodicity of the past Southern hemisphere temperature changes is the same periodicity (a cycle of 1470 years with a beat frequency of plus/minus 400 years), as the periodicity of the past Northern hemisphere cyclic temperature changes in the proxy record.
The logical paradox, is there are no earth drivers/internal mechanisms that can warm and cool both hemispheres of the earth cyclically.
There is an interesting additional observational paradox fact concerning the periodicity of cyclic climate changers.
Mixed in with the Medieval warming and Little Ice Age, medium magnitude cyclic climate changes, are the super large in magnitude, super abrupt cooling events, the Younger Dryas type abrupt cooling events, in the proxy record that have a periodicity of roughly every 10,000 years and that occur at the time of the 1370 year event, indicate what causes the small, medium, and super large climate forcing events is the same and is modulate in strength by another factor (hint the other factor is orbital configuration).
William: The above referenced paper was accepted for publication and then the assisting editor that recommended accepting the paper for publication was fired, fired for recommending a scientific valid, but non party line paper.
Science is a puzzle to be solved not an argument to be won.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/davis-and-taylor-wuwt-submission.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003GL017115.shtml
Yes – there’s always the sun..
Arctic sea ice extent has bunched up, as the years do in early summer, but 2017 is still holding its own. By small amounts, it remains higher now than at this point in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2016, but lower than 2013, 2014 and 2015. Its September minimum will still depend upon how stormy August is or isn’t.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
As an engineer, I have tended to rely on testing to specific criterion, and analysis of results, while politicians and special interests take a conclusion first and find support later. The warmer air and currents of 2016 was due to all the hot air being channeled by politicians in the Northern Hemisphere. Oh, sorry, that was conclusion. Now i have to find corroborative data…
In my post in moderation I failed to include the sentence that the anomaly measured by climate research is the steady, 30 year half cycle oscillation around zero the planet goes through, from about .5 cooler than the International Standard Temperature, to about .5 degrees warmer. That takes out a lot of the absolutes in the first sentence.
The entire Sea Ice Reference page currently comes back as “not found”… someone running the site might want to look into that.
[works fine for me https://wattsupwiththat.com/?page_id=22084 -mod]
Nope still comes back as “not found” but it was working several days ago and so there is some new problem that only seems to happen to some of us. Good old computer bugs 🙁
Same here “…Oops! That page can’t be found.
It looks like nothing was found at this location. Maybe try one of the links below or a search?…”
The paper is written with too many “if”s, “likely” and unsupported superlatives as “unprecedented”.
In particular the “likely” pertains to the presumption of southern ocean hemispheric wide storms that are not represented in the DMSP records for 2016 and not much by way of commercial ocean traffic reports (they were staying far from the “ice-edge” anyway to avoid bergs).
That being, the “unprecedented” storms did not exist nor have!
From the retrieval record the “drop” in the area-extent started on 30 August from the previous day (the record high for 2016) and continued through 3 September, then increase from 4 September through 8 September, then continued to “drop” through 14 September, then proceeded to increase through 1 October, and finally returned to “dropping” on 6 October with small day-by-day variations.
Gabro tell us all about how man has created synthetic organisms that reproduce themselves,
and then act shocked when we remind you that – man created those. LoL.
When I say that ”since we’re not, that fact doesn’t exist either” Gabro what I mean is that – the chemistry of everything is examined by interested chemists, because once you are a chemist, nothing’s secret to you if you have a wide chemistry background. Biological chemistry, natural chemistry, water-related vs hydrocarbon related – solid state incompressible chemistry, the chemistry of compressible matter – once someone unlocks general chemistry it’s not possible to keep big secrets.
If men had discovered the evidence that plugs all the holes in evolution, everyone on earth would know about them simply because it’s such an interesting subject.
Like taxation. The reason everyone is interested in climate is because people made claims about chemistry that said everyone must be taxed. People were going to take what they owned and give it to their own kids because their work, saving the planet, was too important.
The origins of life and evolution are similar simply because so many people are interested from both a philosophical but also a legal point of view where laws might need to be made protecting certain things.
So I’m saying I’m an atheist – I don’t believe in that creationist garbage about an angry sky daddy. It’s too preposterous to consider realistic: if this was some sort of cosmic simulator, nobody would be playing because everyone was afraid of daddy.
On the other hand I’m a confident student of not just chemistry but biological chemistry and also the studies regarding the origins of life.
And if all your claims of everything being settled, were real – I’d know, because real chemists, would be telling people outside their specialty, ”hey look at this: this is solved!”
That’s what I meant by ”we’d all know.” I didn’t say anything about everyone acknowledging whatever issues in question were settled or even right.
But if there were satisfying answers to evolution, pure scientists, who study things simply to see how many answers are uncovered before they died, would be talking about it all the time. And we’re not.
Because word gets around,
when the secrets of the origins of life become plumbed by real sciences.
There’s no secret lab, or elite group of guys and gals in white coats, knowing too much for the little people.
I don’t know what holes you imagine exist in evolution, which is a scientific fact. There are surely issues in evolutionary theory, just as there are, and much more seriously, in gravitational theory. But that evolution has been going on here for around four billion years isn’t in doubt.
So I assume you’re referring to holes in origin of life research, which is not the same as biological evolution once life developed via chemical evolution. I’ve never claimed, as you seem incorrectly to think, that all the problems are solved. Quite the opposite. Please read my lists of the main outstanding issues. That’s why there is still research. But every year more of them are solved.
Szotak might be optimistic, but he has forecast self-replicating protocells within five years. He knows a lot more about it than, I obviously, but when I look at the problems once thought insurmountable which have been solved, I get more optimistic, too.
If not in five years, then possibly in ten and probably within 20 years there will be man-made, artificial life in the lab. As noted, three years ago, Scripps scientists inserted a whole new genetic alphabet into a strain of E. coli, creating a partially synthetic organism.
I think the chemistry of the origin of life is an interesting subject that I like to discuss as a scientist. I hope what I’m saying isn’t taken as trying to be trolling or confrontational I really mean what I say, and since I’m one of the people who has to go around and discuss evolution with people I don’t like it when people who claim to be representing me – scientists – try to make it seem like there’s an elite group of special people who know secrets nobody else, can bear to know. The real truth’s there, it’s just only 5 guys are smart enough to know it.
That’s simply never – not ever true. It’s the claim about climate alarm, that ”We know, but since we’re scientists we’re just not very good at getting the word out.”
That’s just not possible, it’s not true, evolutionary sciences are too universally enthralling for anything very secret to last very long.
Where did you all get the crazy idea that I said that all the issues had been resolved and were being kept secret?
Please read what I actually said. I listed the major still unresolved issues, and the approaches being taken to address them.
Since at least two readers here must have missed my prior comments regarding remaining problems in origin of life research, I’ll state two main issues yet again, limiting myself to RNA World research, rather than including “Metabolism First” work.
1) While short RNA sequences form spontaneously, forming longer ones today requires protein enzymes. Getting RNA chains long enough to serve as repositories of genetic information and to act as enzymes themselves (ribozymes) without protein enzymes is thus an issue. Two important approaches are a) using physical catalysts to synthesize polymers of nucleotides, such as clay or ice, and b) investigating amino acid sequences shorter than proteins (peptide oligomers rather than polypeptide polymers) or other simple chemical compounds, such as PAHs and RNA itself.
2) Getting long chains of RNA to separate without enzymes is another issue. One approach is using higher temperatures, supposing that prebiotic RNA chains formed under cooler conditions, then migrated to warmer areas of their watery environment. Another, yet a further discovery of the Szostak lab, is that substituting a different nucleobase for one of RNA’s makes a more rickety chain, more easily separated at lower temperature. The same nucleobase is still used in nucleic acids today, in a specialized application.
The RNA precursor molecule could then have been replaced via natural selection by the more stable modern RNA once enzymes developed.
There are other issues, but as I said, great progress is being made, thanks in part to more funding becoming available in this century.
Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak recently:
“A lot of failure goes into success.”
He should know.
WAPO just doubled down and put up Antarctic is doomed article as damage limitation against the AGU BAS paper