Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to NASA, the increased rate of thickening of sea ice in the Arctic is due to Global Warming.
Wintertime Arctic Sea Ice Growth Slows Long-term Decline: NASA
Dec. 7, 2018
New NASA research has found that increases in the rate at which Arctic sea ice grows in the winter may have partially slowed down the decline of the Arctic sea ice cover.
As temperatures in the Arctic have warmed at double the pace of the rest of the planet, the expanse of frozen seawater that blankets the Arctic Ocean and neighboring seas has shrunk and thinned over the past three decades. The end-of-summer Arctic sea ice extent has almost halved since the early 1980s. A recent NASA study found that since 1958, the Arctic sea ice cover has lost on average around two-thirds of its thickness and now 70 percent of the sea ice cap is made of seasonal ice, or ice that forms and melts within a single year.
But at the same time that sea ice is vanishing quicker than it has ever been observed in the satellite record, it is also thickening at a faster rate during winter. This increase in growth rate might last for decades, a new study accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters found.
This does not mean that the ice cover is recovering, though. Just delaying its demise.
“This increase in the amount of sea ice growing in winter doesn’t overcome the large increase in melting we’ve observed in recent decades,” said Alek Petty, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study. “Overall, thickness is decreasing. Arctic sea ice is still very much in decline across all seasons and is projected to continue its decline over the coming decades. ”
…
It seems counterintuitive: how does a weakening ice cover manage to grow at a faster rate during the winter than it did when the Arctic was colder and the ice was thicker and stronger?
“Our findings highlight some resilience of the Arctic sea ice cover,” Petty said. “If we didn’t have this negative feedback, the ice would be declining even faster than it currently is. Unfortunately, the positive feedback loop of summer ice melt and increased solar absorption associated with summer ice melting still appears to be dominant and continue to drive overall sea ice declines.”
…
The abstract of the study;
Warm Arctic, Increased Winter Sea Ice Growth?
Alek A. Petty Marika M. Holland David A. Bailey Nathan T. Kurtz
First published: 04 October 2018We explore current variability and future projections of winter Arctic sea ice thickness and growth using data from climate models and satellite observations. Winter ice thickness in the Community Earth System Model’s Large Ensemble compares well against thickness estimates from the Pan‐Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System and CryoSat‐2, despite some significant regional differences—for example, a high thickness bias in Community Earth System Model’s Large Ensemble in the western Arctic. Differences across the available CryoSat‐2 thickness products hinder more robust validation efforts. We assess the importance of the negative conductive feedback of sea ice growth (thinner ice grows faster) by regressing October atmosphere/ice/ocean conditions against winter ice growth. Our regressions demonstrate the importance of a strong negative conductive feedback process in our current climate, which increases winter growth for thinner initial ice, but indicate that later in the 21st century this negative feedback is overwhelmed by variations in the fall atmosphere/ocean state.
Read more: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018GL079223
I guess we should count ourselves lucky the world isn’t currently in a cooling phase, otherwise we might lose the Arctic icepack altogether.
Why is the arctic sea ice diminishing “unfortunate”? With it gone or diminished, it opens up the entire Arctic to fishing, oil exploration, and possible mining. I swear these people would have been running in circles screaming and crying if they had witnessed the diminished glaciers about 10,000 years ago – and that was not unfortunate at all.
How come every change is bad?
Because it’s propaganda with agenda behind it.
Climate change global warming
causes more snowfall and more ice.
Climate change global cooling
causes less snowfall and less ice.
This is basic climate science.
They teach this in elementary school now.***
Climate change also causes hurricanes,
wildfires, floods, hordes of locusts,
and exploding silicone bre-ast implants.
So when the leftists tell you to jump,
in response to “climate change”,
just ask “How high?”,
unless you don’t care
about saving the world
for the children.
I don’t have any children,
so I favor a lot more CO2 in the air to
accelerate C3 plant growth, to help the people
on our planet who don’t get enough food to eat.
I’ve lived in the same home for 31 years,
and not far from here for 10 years before that.
In my opinion, the climate here is still too cold,
and I’m really angry that Michigan has been
bypassed by all the $#@&% global warming
I’ve been waiting for since 1977.
*** Just ask one of those young whippersnappers
in elementary school (preferably pubic school)
if you can’t figure out this comment !
mmm “Climate change global warming
causes more snowfall and more ice.
So where is all the ice and snow from the purported current warming phase then?
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
It was warm(er) in Michigan in ’81 and ’82.
Which was preceded by the mean seasons of 77 and 78. As a student in Northern Illinois we had a more than a month of below zero temperatures. I don’t remember seeing the ground underneath that snow until April. By march the snow was covered black with crud kicked up from the highways and byways. Black snow and windchills to freeze your long johns to you private parts. Feels a lot like we are heading back into another cycle.
“Because it’s propaganda with agenda behind it.”
Yep. And in this case the ‘Climate Scientist’ propaganda is designed to provide cover for the fact that the cycle of arctic sea ice coverage appears to have reached its minimum and is starting to swing the other way again. This if course is likely tied to similar cycles of that giant nuclear fusion reactor in the sky that ‘Climate Scientists’ tell us has little to do with the Earth’s climate.
Starting to swing Louis …. ?
2018’s low higher than 2007’s, with an upward trend, albeit small.
Tell you what is starting though, the global warming causes global cooling meme. How can they take the general population for such fools ….. oh, hold on a sec.
(You are just ranting, not addressing the specific topic at hand, will disrupt the thread, can’t approve this) MOD
(edited and posted. Mod2)
One could call it propagenda
For all intensive reasons, that might have at one point happened really rather quicky, before the younger dryas…of course that would be have been a good thing.
A sub species of hysterical human would have gone the way of the mega-mammals. In one big wave…
An ice free planet would be a very good thing…more space for trees, more oil and sea food like you say…maybe put a large resort at the north pole, twice the sun bathing in summer time, deep sea fishing, polar bear hunts. Get yourself a nice polar bear rug for in front of your fireplace.
I hear they are as thick as fleas on rez dog up their….cheers Texas
Maybe the Arctic camels that inhabited Ellesmere Island 3.5 million years ago could be convinced to come back.
https://www.history.com/news/giant-ancient-camel-roamed-the-arctic
Dromedaries, I see.
Don’t forget the beavers and other fossils.
Analysis of the beetle fauna from the peaty matrix indicates that the site was 10°C warmer than present in summer and 15°C warmer in winter, and isotopic studies of fossil larch support this view
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ellesmere-island-pliocene-fossils
additional references found at end of this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strathcona_Fiord
Kinda nice to take the sealskin parka off after 100,000 years!
Greetings, Mr. Burns. Glad to see you on this site.
Because these people are never happy
The quote is: “…Unfortunately, the positive feedback loop of summer ice melt and increased solar absorption associated with summer ice melting still appears to be dominant and continue to drive overall sea ice declines.” What is unfortunate is not sea ice diminishing, but the summer melting continues to dominate and drive sea ice decline. I’m not defending the article, just trying to be clear about the quote.
hmm, Summer ice melt. Looking at DMI temp data the last few years summers have been colder than 1958.
Robert of Texas says:
these people would have been running in circles screaming and crying if they had witnessed the diminished glaciers about 10,000 years ago
They wouldn’t just have been doing that, they’d be sacrificing virgins and/or burning witches/wizards.
Lower sea ice cover reduces albedo, this leads to more absorption of solar energy by seawater, and increases the planet’s temperature. It should be evident that we really ought to worry if temperature rises so much it leads to exaggerated sea level rise.
If anybody has access to the full paper I would like to know if the authors used RCP8.5 to make their forward predictions.
Is it April 1st already ? They can’t be serious….
Sounds a lot like eco fearology Principles # 2&3
https://tambonthongchai.com/2010/05/16/171/
Global warming will eventually be blamed for causing the next ice age.
They should be thanking CO2 for saving us from devastation.
“Based on previous cycles the Earth is probably due to go into an ice age about now. In fact, conditions were starting to line up for a new ice age at least 6,000 years ago.”
“If you look at what was happening prior to the industrial revolution, summers were actually getting colder in the northern hemisphere. They’ve been getting colder for at least the last 6,000 years, so we were definitely on that trend,”
“Besides the fact it would be an awful lot colder, huge regions where hundreds of millions of people live would become completely uninhabitable. They’d be covered in thick ice sheets and subject to an inhospitable climate.”
“Assuming it was similar to the last one, then north America would be covered in ice, the whole of northern Europe, the whole of northern Asia would be covered in ice,”
What are you quoting?
. . complete insanity.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-06-15/what-is-an-ice-age-explainer/7185002
I thought those ice age beliefs were widely accepted.
From the link:
“An ice age is a time where a significant amount of the Earth’s water is locked up on land in continental glaciers.”
Like now, when there is about 65 meters of sea-level locked up in continental glaciers. And so it has been for at least 14 million years.
from the link
“The Earth has been alternating between long ice ages and shorter interglacial periods for around 2.6 million years.
For the last million years or so these have been happening roughly every 100,000 years – around 90,000 years of ice age followed by a roughly 10,000 year interglacial warm period.”
“Compared to conditions on Earth 20,000 to 30,000 years ago we are clearly not in an ice age now
But in terms of the long history of the Earth we are actually still in an overarching ice age period – known as the Quaternary glaciation – which has been going for the last 2.6 million years. At the moment, the Earth is just in a slightly warmer period, an interglacial.”
They are Jeff. But there’s a lot of hammering here these days, and very few nails are ever cleanly hit. Wrong end of the hammer, wrong wall, non recognition of nails, mistaking of nails for nuts, and nuts for nails, standing on the ceiling instead of the floor, but mainly being unsighted by coming at everything from very wide on the right, crashing in through the out door with too many hammers and not enough hands, plus inexplicable mis-hits, and of course friendly fire. But there’s still the odd carpenter here who knows which end of the hammer is what and knows how to drive a nail home and produce a tidy finish. Their constructions are often a joy to view.
“Steven J. Phipps
I am an ice sheet modeller, climate system modeller and palaeoclimatologist, based within the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. My research is funded by the Antarctic Gateway Partnership.
I studied physics at the University of Oxford, before completing a PhD in climate system modelling at the University of Tasmania in 2006. ”
https://www.stevenphipps.com/
Now there is surely a great “human interest” story buried somewhere in the above personal testimony.
Will they play more or less hockey in Canada?
Jeff,
If you go by the tilt cycle, we’re not due for reglaciation for about another 3000 years. If the eccentricity cycle rules, then not for another 30,000 years or longer.
Interglacials vary greatly in length. The last one, the Eemian, was warmer than the present Holocene and lasted about 5000 years longer than it has so far. Before that were two shorter ones and another long one. Averaging them to determine how long they should last doesn’t work.
See Fallen Angels by Pournelle (and Niven?)
I read that! The Greens wreck the world economy to save it from CAGW, and then when the Earth starts into it’s next regularly scheduled Ice Age they blame Astronauts for ‘stealing’ too much of the Atmosphere and wrecking the Greenhouse Effect.
The saddest part was, I could easily picture all that happening.
~¿~
“using data from climate models… ”
I stopped reading after that.
GIGO
Climate models do not produce data, nor do any other type of models. They might produce insight, or they might produce garbage, but they don’t produce data.
You seem to have a lame-brained definition of “data.”
Michael,
If you think that the output from a computer simulation, a simulation run on a set of dynamical non-linear equations out to many decades, is “data” then you know nothing about actual science.
Concur.
Even in ‘well understood’ science we start with computer models then we build tangible scaled models for various experiments to test out the validity of the computer models. Then we build full scale items and flight test them to further validate the computer code.
…and this is done for each and every vehicle.
The big difference we have decades of validation for our computer models, yet we still do not fully trust them. They simply let us winnow through a much larger ‘trade space’ and hone designs before we begin to cut metal.
When ‘climate models’ can even repeat their own predictions or with any probability to reality I’ll start to pay attention.
Michael,
Data are observations of nature, not the output of GIGO models based on faulty assumptions divorced from objective reality.
Excellent point, they ignore actual data and claimed failed models are data, not exactly science in any book.
As Summer extent has increased significantly since 2012 they fail to acknowledge it and resort to models, calling results data.
Interesting, reduced ice is bad climate change, also increased ice is climate change too.
Does NOT sound like sound science to me.
Remember all their summer ice free Arctic predictions have failed miserably.
Do you know the first thing about the model used? I seem to recall Spencer using a model.
Roy Spencer’s AMSU input/temperature profile model output is verified/validated with radiosonde data.
Climate modellers purposefully avoid validation to measurement. The call their “intercomparisons” with outer models as their validation. Richard Feynman coined a name for that, it is called Cargo Cult Science.
Did you keep reading once you realized he was using a model?
Using models is OK, using computer output as it were empirical data it is not.
Oxymoron.
Climate models do not produce data, and never have.
This is PRICELESS!
Even better than “the GBR is recovering, er, because it has adapted” or “there is more NH snow, er, because of global warming”.
Who needs comedians?
In my reseach (social sciences), I could never get away with contraditary statements like this–no matter how I spun it!
Nice list!
In my reseach (social sciences), I could never get away with contraditary statements like this–no matter how I spun it!
And it is said *somewhere* that non-STEM studies are worthless . . .
I’ve said it because I didn’t know what I wanted to do so I went into political “science” at Penn State. I excelled at verbal and written communication in all my tests, promoting me to go the path of lawyer then politician. Within 2 years of graduating I had talked to enough lawyers and witnessed enough politician corruption that I now regret those choices.
Social sciences are a complete waste of time, especially at Penn State. I once had an arrogant game theory professor angrily call me out in front of the whole class for daring to suggest his voting system exercise was useless because the only outcome was designed to set us up to fail. His methodology was over simplistic and the whole point was basically to tell us we’re dumb and not able to make useful predictions with value or oversimplified data sets. He actually screamed at me in class “what the hell are you doing in college?!”
I said “I thought I was here to challenge myself and become smarter, but instead you’d rather I just obey your authority and become stupid.” You could hear a pin drop in that class
!!! How I would have liked to be in that class! Especially to see and hear the professor’s, and also the other students’, reactions after the pin dropped. Although this is off-topic, would you mind telling us what happened after such an insulting remark?
.-
I got very anxious, I was only 21 or something, and he ignored my statement after a gruff scoff, but glared at me pretty good. I went to the dean about it because I was furious, and of course, no apology, no reprimand. I knew at that moment I should have chose engineering. Pardon for the off topic but someone mentioned social “sciences”, and it reminded me of what a waste of money, my degree.
Pardon for the off topic but someone mentioned social “sciences”, and it reminded me of what a waste of money, my degree.
I mentioned it from hearing those of whom are wedded to STEM degrees laud them over other non-STEM disciplines (whatever they may be), while at the same time decrying (and rightly so) the “waste of money” those STEM degrees prove to be to those doing a climate “science” that presupposes CAGW as a first premise.
It’s funny when one’s pretentious perspicacity causes one to contradict oneself.
Oh! I hate to say this. But, Political Science has its value. I had one of those debates with a friend of mine while in college. We would meet at the snack bar between the ramshackle School of Social Science and the new defense contractor funded five story brick veneered School of Engineering. It was embarrassing to sit there with my paper back books by Marx, Markuse, Locke etc. sitting on the table next to his thick books on Analytical Geometry, Physics, and Electrical Engineering. LOL
Once, he laughed and asked what the F&#@ur momisugly I was going to do with a degree in Political Science. I admitted, I had no clue. But, I also responded that it would be a guy like me who pulled the plug on guy like him. He blustered in non-comprehension. And, I did not feel like explaining the ebb and flow of defense spending, budgets, politics and policy cycles.
Sadly, he went through at least two to three layoff cycles in the defense industry. I in turn had a pretty steady rising career for thirty years in municipal government doing redevelopment and economic development and ultimately city management. Until it was a cabal of folks like me in Sacramento higher up the food chain who pulled the plug on me and redevelopment in California to give money to the teacher’s and fire fighters unions. LOL!
The moral of the story? I don’t think we treat our STEM professionals that well. But, that is life.
Shelly – Just because something appears to be contradictory doesn’t mean that it is. This is the explanation: “If the sea ice layer floating over the ocean thins, the upper ocean is less insulated from the very cold Arctic winter atmosphere. That lowers ocean temperatures and builds more ice from below.”
Source: final paragraph, Oldbrew’s article on the same study, Tallbloke’s blog, with link to Jonathan Griffin’s piece on it. I haven’t linked it because I’m not sure it would pass the mod. Hopefully it would, but anyway, it’s easy to find. Just go to Tallbloke’s blog and you’ll see it there.
It’s as if these jerks never heard of the AMO. Actually, they may never have heard of things that happen outside of their models come to think on it. Amazing.
As fast as they come up with excuses to explain whatever has happened i.e. fast ice growth in November, ice formation almost stops in December! It’s like God is baiting the fools.
And today we had 2 reports (1) E.Antarctica is now melting 28M sea level rise coming, and, (2) Warming causing more snow to pile up in Antarctica causing slowing of sea level rise.
Which is it. Get the story straight. This is settled science don’t ya know. Or maybe it is just one ginormous crock of ****.
Finally, they’ve found the missing heat. it was not hiding in the oceans, but in the ice.
Yeah, that “hot ice” is really sneaky!
Not that I agree with any of the tripe being peddled in the papers, but the ‘latent heat of fusion’ (80 cal/g ice) will suck up a lot of heat before any ice even melts.
By definition enthalpy/latent heat of fusion can only suck up heat _as_ the ice melts. You may have meant “suck up heat before the temperature goes up.”
Are there any climate variances NOT associated with AGW? These people are going to need shovels with longer handles.
Waders too.
And so the clowns of climate change continue to be the heroes of headlines and tweets, both fleeting events.
To paraphrase L C
“For, you see, so many out of the ordinary things had happened lately, that ‘climate scientists’ have begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”
And the earlier 20th century was very warm in the Arctic and Greenland was warmer as well, see Vinther et al study. Oh and Greenland was cooler after that earlier warm period up to the 1990s. Some warming since, because of the warm phase AMO.
And in the MUCH warmer Climate optimum boreal forests grew up to the Arctic coastline and sea levels were up to 2 metres higher just 4,000 Yrs BP. See MacDonald et al study.
This was cleared up by the NY Times in 1969. Arctic sea ice will either thin or thicken, and will disappear- or not. :
Expert Says Arctic Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea; Catastrophic Shifts in Climate Feared if Change Occurs Other Specialists See No Thinning of Polar Ice Cap
“Col. Bernt Balchen, polar explorer and flier, is circulating a paper among polar specialists proposing that the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two.
Although he bases his thesis on predictions in recent years by several experts in polar weather and ice behavior, interviews with a number of other specialists have shown a widespread belief that the progressive shrinkage of the Arctic pack ice over the last century has reversed itself, at least temporarily….”
https://www.nytimes.com/1969/02/20/archives/expert-says-arctic-ocean-will-soon-be-an-open-sea-catastrophic.html
It’s a long article, and too much to re-type. It should be quite clear at this point, however, that scientists have long been predicting that Arctic ice will shrink- unless it grows, and that the global cooling trend will continue- unless it warms, and that no matter what happens, the Arctic, along with humanity, is certainly screwed.
Best summary yet.
Article image available https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/nyt_arctic_77442757.pdf
Just another example of circular argument, the usual from these warmest types. Whatever the phenomena, warming is behind it. Nothing disproves their theories; contrary facts make them hide their heads in the sand.
I’ve noticed that the bald spot on my head is starting to fill in (well maybe). AGW? Could be; may be.
It’s high school physics. You can do this at home.
“It’s high school physics. You can do this at home.”
Really? Well young troll, give us a demonstration.
Put up or shut up.
It was sarcasm. Just like Al Gore says carbon dioxide will heat the planet can be proved with high school physics – yet it has not been done.
“News” like this is to be expected from NRDC, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, or any number of private, leftwing groups but to have NASA tying itself in knots with taxpayer funds is bullsh*t.
Negative feedback? Why, that sounds like an an argument for an emergent phenomenon. Such anti-scientific blather. Of course we know that all feedbacks are positive, right IPCC? We are balanced on a knife’s edge, just waiting to plunge over the tipping point into the abyss.
yeah /sarc
ah no.
in ar5 the alarmest predictions for rapid sea ice loss were rejected because of thin ice negative feedbacks.
“…in ar5 the alarmest predictions for rapid sea ice loss were rejected because of thin ice negative feedbacks…”
Didn’t see any quote on that.
More recently https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2018EF000820 with my caps for emphasis:
“…Over the past few decades, roughly one half the surface area, and three fourths of the volume of ice in the Arctic, has now been lost, and what remains and is regrown each winter is now primarily young, and often first year, ice. SUCH A THIN LAYER OF ICE TRANSMITS RATHER THAN REFLECTS SOLAR RADIATION…”
Did you hear the one about the homeopath who forgot to take his medication? He died of an overdose.
Are they ever going to figure out that most of the ice is under water….the Atlantic flows directly into the Arctic…and the AMO has plateaued slowing the Atlantic current?
Since the early 80’s….right after the ice age scare…right at the bottom of the AMO that had no where to go but up
Talk about cherry picking….when you start at the bottom
How do people let them constantly get away with this?
Latitude
Hahahahahahaha!
Just more linear regression line chasing. No attempt to really understand the physics of what is happening. Sad clutching at straws, methinks.
… A recent NASA study found that since 1958, the Arctic sea ice cover has lost on average around two-thirds of its thickness and now 70 percent of the sea ice cap is made of seasonal ice, or ice that forms and melts within a single year …
… This increase in growth rate might last for decades …
================================================
They are simply extrapolating a trend from what looks like the North Atlantic Ocean temperature cycle:
..that is exactly what they are doing
Wasn’t NASA once supposed to fly and launch things around ?
National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Then somehow became the only airline exclusively devoted to justifying state climate policies at all costs, cheating inclusive.
With the apotheosis of us humans, being exterminated by alien civilizations if we fail to pay climate taxes.
Saying (https://www.foxnews.com/science/aliens-could-attack-earth-to-end-global-warming-nasa-scientist-frets):
“We might be a threat to the galaxy just as we are a threat to our home planet,” it warns.”
Makes me wonder, how do these guys manage to pass their medicals let alone operate aircraft, their inadequacy to reality being so blatantly evident even to non-trained eyes…
That change of mission and the reasons behind are more worrisome than the political content it purveys.
With it’s actual meager contribution to flight, NASA can be as well disbanded with minor regrets.
They did get a new Sat running Ice sat 2.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6484709/NASA-releases-unprecedented-new-maps-Antarctica-satellite-data.html
Mac
A massive contribution to the safety and comfort of the half a million or so PAX and their crews currently airborne over US.
Guess many would display smiles of relief when the dispatcher texts that “NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2)” just provided politically valuable data.
Such an aeronautical breakthrough from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration sure calls for a party. How did we manage to live and work so far without ? Beats me.
*palmface*
Probably preaching to the choir, but catastrophic anthrpogenic carbon warmists are such optimists. I think that the reverse is a far starker scenario:
– a cooling world with less energy and carbon for plant life
– less life giving moisture in the air for rain
– humans unable to unable to significantly influence the climate