Recently, we’ve seen an event that has added fuel to the ongoing debate surrounding climate change and its real-world effects. The case in question involves Russia’s latest icebreaker, the Yevpatii Kolovrat, having to take a longer route to reach its Pacific fleet due to impassable heavy ice in Arctic waters.
This event raises important questions for those who are concerned about “alarmist” perspectives on climate change. Despite repeated warnings about melting ice caps and rising sea levels, here we have an icebreaker, designed to carve a path through icy waters, being diverted by unusually heavy ice. The ice was so thick, in fact, that even the Yevpatii Kolovrat, designed to deal with such environments, couldn’t pass through.
This incident underlines the inherent unpredictability in climate change predictions, particularly in relation to multi-year ice. While climate change models may predict the reduction of sea ice overall, they seem to struggle when it comes to accounting for these multi-year ice formations. This ice is built up over years or, averaging three to four metres thick, and is often dislodged and relocated as temperatures rise.
Recent observations in the Arctic region have shown an increase in this type of ice, which has disrupted the usual maritime routes since October 2022. If we are experiencing a global warming crisis as intense as many suggest, shouldn’t we be seeing a decrease in such significant ice formations?
It’s also worth noting that while Canada’s federal auditor general reported a drop of about 40 per cent in average summer sea-ice coverage in the Canadian Arctic over the last 50 years due to climate change, the enduring multi-year sea ice seems to have increased. This has disrupted shipping lanes and caught governments and organizations off guard.
The Canadian government, in particular, has come under scrutiny for its lack of preparedness in dealing with the issues posed by rising multi-year ice. As a country with an extensive Arctic coastline, this lack of preparation raises serious questions about how well we understand and can predict the impacts of climate change.
So, while many continue to discuss and predict an ever-warming world with melting ice caps and rising seas, events like the detour of the Yevpatii Kolovrat paint a more complex picture of climate realities. Climate change is not as straightforward as some might have us believe, and predicting its exact course is proving to be a challenge even for those with the most advanced tools at their disposal.
As climate skeptics, we believe that it’s essential to approach climate change with a rational perspective, acknowledging the complexity of our planet’s climate system and the considerable uncertainties that still exist in our understanding. Alarmism does little to advance meaningful conversation and thoughtful action on this critical issue.
Alarmists go deaf, dumb and blind whenever reality gets out of sync with their narrative. I swear arctic ice could cover all of Canada, which under Trudeau might be an improvement, and the chirping Global Warmists would still be spinning doomsday temperature narratives.
In reality it is even worse than that. They will say the increase in ice is actually caused by “climate change” and was predicted all along. It is a religion not a science.
“Climate change” was the new term adopted by the crack-pot environmental community when the data refused to conform to any warming pattern in the first decade of the 21st century. No one has pointed to the fact that the term is utterly meaningless: “heads I win, tails you lose” is what it means.
Godclimate change works in mysterious waysand that is because as the former head of the UNIPCC has stated – the real goal of the green movement is more about the destruction of capitalism than the environment
Seems that ice is as slippery to keep track of as it is to handle.
You’d think that all the Arctic “experts” sponging off the climate capers grants would know this already.
Slow learners, hey?
You know darn well that when the data doesn’t agree with the model, some deceptive skeptic is slipping in misinformation.
I propose that we have no idea how much the Arctic has warmed over the past 30 to 40 years. The thermometers there are likely located near military bases which, along with the sitting issues, give off waste heat. Both of these artificial sources are likely creating a false warming trend, convincing us that it’s changing radically. Here’s the evidence behind my hypothesis. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/22/arctic-isolated-versus-urban-stations-show-differing-trends/
The Arctic sea ice decline could also be caused by other factors; underwater volcanoes is a factor I’ve heard off. All in all, you’re right. We need to be cautious in attributing what is causing what. There is too much uncertainty to know what is really happening to the Earth. Without good thermometers, I don’t know how there can be any serious discussions about global warming and the state of the Earth.
I propose that we discard all thermometers, and just deal with what the weather serves up each day.
Just like our ancestors did, as they progressed to what standards of living we have today.
How much would that simplify our existence, whilst having absolutely no effects on our wellbeing?
Thermometers deserve no blame whatsoever.
What deserves the blame are activists that seek to average what cannot be averaged to provide any value whatsoever.
The same activists that then use their specious averages in preparation of anomalies that bear even less relationship to average temperatures or to weather and especially not climate.
Keep the thermometers.
Stop averaging unique temperatures from unique locations with tens of thousands of similar thermometers.
The activists? Have a good belly laugh right in their faces!
Be sure to mock these activists when they whine online about their precious averages and anomalies.
Activists have almost zero humor and take such actions as very personal, especially as activists consider people with contrary science/opinions as beneath them.
The scientific nullity of so-called Climate “Science” is perfectly illustrated by its averaging of spatially-separated temperatures, which is utter nonsense.
Climate Science. Noun. Belief system with Net Zero scientific content.
“The Arctic sea ice decline could also be caused by other factors; underwater volcanoes is a factor I’ve heard off.”
It looks to me like arctic sea ice is determined by temperatures, and it is natural that arctic sea ice would be in decline since the 1980’s because that is when the latest warming cycle for the Earth began. It has warmed up until the last few years, but now the temperatures have cooled by about 0.5C (see UAH satellite chart) which may account for the increase in arctic sea ice.
Arctic sea ice was at similar levels back in the hot 1930’s, too.
The Earth’s climate operates as a cycle: It warms for a few decades and then it cools for a few decades and then the cycle repeats. This has been the case since the end of the Little Ice Age.
Here’s a U.S. temperature chart (Hansen 1999) showing the ups and downs of the climate over the Early Twentieth Century:
Note that the years 1998 and 2016 are statistically tied for the warmest year in the satellite era (1979 to present). Also note that the swing from the warmest year to the coolest year is about 2.0C
We have had our “up” cycle in the satellite era, and going by history, there will be a “down” cycle following it. The Climate Change Alarmist claim CO2 will cause this cycle to change so that instead of cooling off, the temperatures will just get hotter and hotter.
Time will tell, but it sure does seem chilly out for this time of year, and now we find that arctic sea ice is causing problems.
The air temperatures are influenced by the temperature of the waters, and by the amount of water vapor warmer oceans add to the air. Even when the sun gets too low to melt sea-ice from the top, at the Pole, melting from beneath continues roughly 30 days. Lastly, oceanic warming is occurring deep down, far from both sunlight and the temperature of the air. I believe we are studying the wrong thing. Dr. William Gray was correct, all those years ago, when he stated we needed to study thermohaline circulation, and Al Gore was a petulant fool to deny him funding.
Walter, there are relevant temperature surface records showing Arctic warming history. Arctic temperature trends from the early nineteenth century to the present W. A. van Wijngaarden, Theoretical & Applied Climatology (2015) here
My synopsis is
https://rclutz.com/2016/05/06/arctic-warming-unalarming/
Also, the satellite ice extent record shows the Arctic ice decline stopped in 2007, and it may have been triggered by underwater volcanic activity.
https://rclutz.com/2023/01/03/arctic-ice-in-perspective-2022/
Not long ago they were saying that the decline in multi year ice was an important indicator for man made global warming.
There is an anecdote here. No data.
Do you have data Nick? One that doesn’t cherry pick at 1979 and instead starts at 1910 or 1920?
“There is an anecdote here. No data.”
That sounds just like your comments from earlier in the week.
If you learned how to use the copy/paste function you could probably save yourself quite a bit of time from your internet commenter duties!
My thought exactly.
When something that isn’t supposed to happen, happens, that’s data.
All weather attribution stories are anecdotes.
Are you telling us that the claimed Arctic warming rate of 2-3X the global average is not supported by actual data?
You do know that there is more Arctic sea ice now that there has been for nearly all the last 10,000 years, don’t you NIck.
Sorry, but it is hard to know just how far your deliberate ignorance stretches.!
You never back anything up. Just assertion.
The fact that the ice breaker had to deviate from its planned route is a FACT. The only question that remains is whether the planned route was:
You have provided no facts to support or discredit either assertion, therefore, any conclusion made can be considered the correct one.
How does it feel to try and skeptical of an assertion when it is up to you to prove it incorrect?
Any thick ice on that route would be most likely due to ridges built up by the weather since there is very little multi-year ice in that region.
&hash=982fcec4d5073aaf65124252a5ca8aa3f6e775a5
Multi-year ice has substantially decreased in the Arctic over the last 20 years.
For some reason the link appears not to work, the data can be found at EASE-Grid sea Ice age at NSIDC
Phil,
I find it helpful to watch the 365 day video of sea-ice thickness produced by the Navel Research Lab. The thickness is an “average” and has some problems, but the video gives one a fairly good idea of how thick the ice is, and how it is moving about. You can watch how the sea-ice failed to melt away on the Siberian side, last summer. The remnant is only a elongated strand, likely a pressure ridge or several pressure ridges, but it was big enough to avoid being “averaged” away by the models used, and served as a sort of seed-crystal for the formation of this years “baby ice”, and also likely was a place where baby ice got crunched and piled up on windy winter days. It doesn’t surprise me icebreakers would rather sail around it than through it.
Jim Gorman,
See my reply to Phil for more information about the blockage.
I’ve been making sea-ice a hobby for around twenty years now, and was surprised there was not a greater regrowth of sea-ice along the Siberian coast the past three years. I expected it, because it seems to happen when the PDO is cold, especially when there is a La Nina. Very little “recovery” seemed to occur.
But last summer, finally, there was indeed one skinny strand of sea-ice that survived. As sea-ice reformed it seemed to grow, perhaps piling up “baby ice” along its “shores”. Then it drifted towards land and took a position that looks like it would have made the captains of icebreakers swear.
If you want to read some interesting history of how thick the ice can get, and how it can trap ships, in the East Siberian Sea, read the tragic tale of the USS Jeannette in 1878.
I think the reason the sea-ice thins in that area, and can vanish altogether, has far more to do with the temperature of the water than with a trace gas in the atmosphere. We should have heeded Dr. William Gray, and studied Thermohaline Circulation, 40 years ago.
Can you post a link to the data backing up your claim?
There IS a datum here, and a very concrete one: Despite all the predictions of its imminent demise, the Arctic ice is STILL PRESENT!
I have data that no Chinese Arc 7 LNG carrier has attempted the Northern Sea Route this year. They’ve all been going via Suez. Unfortunately the Russians no longer give a daily update on the positions and progress of ships in the Arctic, but it is clear that the Arc 7s that attempted the route have been hugely delayed by the ice.
Data from DMI show that Arctic temperatures have been below the climate historical a erabe while sea ice has stayed higher than in recent years. All of whichyou could have researched yourself.
The entire IPCC AR6 is composed of anecdote and opinion with precious little data. What, exactly, is your point?
Two more general observations specifically relevant to this new post about thick multiyear ice consequences:
These juxtapositions might be relevant to the relative perceived need for new icebreakers.
You are much less cynical than I am!
It appears to me that each nation’s primary model runs almost exactly where the government that FUNDED the model wants it to run. Leftist governments want to “fundamentally transform”, so their models run very hot.
Russia derives approximately 60-75% of their export revenues from the sale of oil and gas. They want global warming to be an “issue” that causes Western governments to curtail their own oil and gas exploration, but still run their economies primarily on fossil fuels.
The Russian model with modest global warming exactly matches their optimum economic strategy.
(Am I too paranoid, or not paranoid enough?)
Well, you could average the two. An average that allows you to track anomalies over time?
/S
I tend to be sympathetic with Tony Heller’s reports that using older records on ice coverage, not just the post 1978 satellite coverage, gives a different impression of arctic ice. It is consistent with being cyclical over a multiple decade range.
Not using real, if imperfect, records is pure cherry picking.
See my essay ‘Northwest Passage’ in ebook Blowing Smoke. Visually proved your thesis. With references.
Rud, I haven’t yet read your book. Is Amazon the best place to get a download?
Kindle or iBooks. Both have it.
In the IPCC AR6 report, even under the fastest-warming scenarios (SSP5-8.5), Arctic sea ice extent in September is not expected to regularly dip below 1 million km2 before the 2050s. At current scenario levels (SSP2-4.5) ‘ice-free’ September conditions in the Arctic aren’t expected until the mid-2070s.
A few seasons of increased ice in the early 2020s hardly invalidates these projections.
I thought the Arctic was supposed to be ice-free by 2013.
We all died in a puff of blue smoke in the 80’s so were unable to see it.
This is what comes of not reading the IPCC reports.
I have read the reports and, while the IPCC makes a big song-and-dance about the extent of Arctic sea ice, there is little on the buildup of multiyear ice which is what this article is all about. When you stop comparing apples to oranges, would you like to comment on the thick buildup of multiyear ice?
Your graph shows the longest period of stable ice conditions since the ’80s – even the ssp1 curves are too aggressive in dropping compared to reality. Any newer data/graph available?
Arctic sea ice area since 2016 is well within the model range.
Speculative “scenarios” mean nothing when fed into unvalidated, proven-to-be-wrong UN IPCC CliSciFi models. With models having a 3℃ spread in average temperatures, what is the freezing point of water? Do any of them model the actual Earth?
Model “projections” are nothing more than activist zealot’s motivated speculation. Show me where my conclusion is wrong.
Yet observations remain well within the modelled projections; both sea ice and surface temperature.
Yawn….
Rusty just loves his puerile little computer games.
There is more Arctic sea ice now than for nearly all the last 10,000 years.
The spread of the modeled temperatures is wide enough to drive a Mack Truck through. Modeled ECSs range from 1.8℃ to 5.4+℃. And if one graphs UN IPCC CliSciFi models’ absolute temperatures instead of anomalies you would see that modeled temperatures have no relationship to Earth’s measured temperatures.
UN IPCC CliSciFi models are not sufficient to fundamentally alter our society, economy and energy systems. And the frequency, intensity and duration of extreme weather events have not changed statistically in over 120 years.
“A few seasons of increased ice in the early 2020s hardly invalidates these projections.”
Climate (model) predictions for Arctic sea ice extent—or any other “climate” metric, for that matter—that extend out 30 to 50 years from now are impossible to validate or invalidate. Thus, your last sentence is meaningless.
You’re basically saying that just because the models haven’t been proved wrong yet doesn’t mean they’re right. That’s true; but then so is the corollary: just because the models haven’t been proved right yet doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Yet look at the number of comments on these threads that already, and by your own standard erroneously, claim that the models are wrong.
“Yet look at the number of comments on these threads that already, and by your own standard erroneously, claim that the models are wrong.”
As Rud said above, the Russian model seems to be following reality fairly closely, and all the other models are way off, so not all models are claimed to be wrong, at least one, the most benign one, might be close to being right.
You erroneously lump all of the models together, TFN. With an ECS spread of 1.8℃ to 5.4+℃ and an average global temperature spread of 3℃ they are not modeling the same things (physics) nor the climate of the Earth as it actually exists. Additionally, the high scenarios of radiative forcing in the future (RCP8.5 & etc.) are proven to be wildly improbable.
BTW, the models have been proved wrong, especially in respect to Holocene temperatures. Read more science and less propaganda, TFN.
That is the most unscientific and illogical thing I’ve ever heard. If you make an assertion you have to support it with real data. Nobody else has to disprove it nor wait for such assertion(s) to maybe become true sometime in the future. Assertions are wrong, or useless, if not supported by data, and when alternative data is provided the assertion must be altered to accommodate this new information, not ignored like so many seem to do in order to make themselves feel better about themselves.
IPCC = IRRELEVANT computer games driven garbage.
Just the sort of thing Rusty would go with.
There is more Arctic sea ice now that there has been for most of the last 10,000 years.
True. Using the word “invalidate” is a bit too emphatic.
How about zooming in and seeing if the actual data is “consistent with” the model projections instead ?
Loading your JPEG file into a separate tab and zooming in I “extracted” the 2000-2020(ish) data with my screenshot program, then “stretched” it to line up the 2, 4 and 6 million square kilometre lines with a graph I updated last October.
The result is attached below.
Notes
1) The actual “minimum / September” extent was around 6.5 (million square kilometres) in 2001.
The IPCC’s “Historical data, median estimate line” topped out around 5.5 (in 2001 or 2002 ?) instead.
2) All of the model “projections” were that the 2007/8/9-to-2015 “levelling off” in Arctic sea-ice minimum extents would immediately start dropping again.
Instead, the “pause” continued all the way to 2022 (so far).
– – – – –
Yes, 16 years (2007-2022) is much too short to establish a genuine “climate” trend, but we’re well out of the “just weather” timescale (< 12 months) and a long way into the “natural variability / decadal trends” timescale (12 to 359 months) here.
The model “projections” for the last 7 or 8 years — of immediate resumption of the “Arctic death spiral” — are not “consistent with” the actual empirical data.
NB : To officially “invalidate” the models would require the minimum extent to rise above the “error range” of the models, i.e. to just over 6 million square kilometres.
That’s not going to happen anytime soon.
So basically the IPCC is now back pedalling on one of its previously star forecasts.
Which will be next?
It’s the opposite. They are being forced to forward pedal. The AR6 prediction is the most aggressive I’ve seen from them so far. This is likely in response to their previous woeful underestimations of sea ice decline. For example, in 2001 they predicted that annual Arctic sea ice would not decline below 10.5e6 km2 until 2040 at the earliest. It first happened in 2007 and then happened 7 other times in 2011, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
There is a similar problem happening in the Antarctic now. In AR5 they predicted that sea ice in that region could actually increase until 2030 or even 2050 before starting a decline. Yet sea ice down there has been repeatedly breaking record lows the last few years.
And as of today global sea ice area is at a record low at least over the period of record.
Notice the thick ice is due to relocation caused by “rising temps”. These people stop at nothing to promote their agenda.
Also the ice contains some multi-year ice which I hadn’t seen in a while so close to the coast of Siberia. I assume it has to do with the triple La Nina and cold PDO, as in the past increases in East Siberian Sea sea-ice have been associated with such swings in the Pacific cycles.
“Canada’s federal auditor general reported a drop of about 40 per cent in average summer sea-ice coverage in the Canadian Arctic over the last 50 years due to climate change”.
There they go again the climate is always changing, what they mean is climate change due entirely and exclusively to human activity.
While there is likely some human factor at work it is impossible to determine how much.
Data indicates there is a natural sixty year cyclical factor at work viz. the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
As is often noted here inferring some ongoing permanent trend from the past fifty years of Arctic sea ice data is jumping conclusion bias ‘a form of cognitive distortion’ (Wiki).
In 1819 William Parry was able to take the northern route through the Northwest Passage through Lancaster Sound and Barrow Strait and all the way west to Winter Harbor on Melville Island. I wouldn’t like to try that this year, especially with a big mass of 9-12 foot thick ice sucked into McClure Strait and now bearing down on Melville Island from the west.
Parry sailed 204 years ago, and waters were more open that year than they usually are now. All one has to do is study a bit of history to see how the sea-ice varies year to year. It makes a mockery of statements such as the Federal Auditor General of Canada’s.
No, No, no – we are supposed to ignore this obvious cooling because there has been a warming trend over the last 7-8 years in parts of Antarctica.
Just as we are supposed to believe Australia is experiencing man-made ‘global warming’ – when our ‘frost season’ has lengthened by up to 40 days a year since the 1960’s.
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/05/thats-a-big-climate-surprise-frost-season-growing-longer-across-australia-and-for-years/
And yet this indicates no Australian warming for over a decade.
Here is the whole story
Why does the BoM cancel all recorded regional temps prior to 1910, Nick?
(Hint – there were painstakingly-recorded mid 40s temps across the whole continent for many years in the period 1890 – 1910. A continent-wide heatwave in about 1896 iirc killed > 400 people. Trove is a great way to enlighten yourself Nick. No spin in those days.)
“Why does the BoM cancel all recorded regional temps prior to 1910, Nick?”
It doesn’t. They are readily available at CDO.
So why do the graphs they feed to the media start at 1910 rather than say what they had for 1880?
(30 years supposedly being a climatic trend)
“Here is the whole story”
ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
. . . assuming one doesn’t want the “whole story” to include:
1) changes in instrumentation accuracy (the ABM bar graph implies temperature resolution precision of 0.1C or better, just laughable when considered over the 110 year interval of plotted data),
2) possible UHI or other human-induced errors affecting temperature readings at some of the reporting stations,
3) possible biased temperature reporting due to improper location-randomization/sampling over the geographical area of “Australia” . . . have the number of reporting stations increased since 1910 and what criteria was used for locating each additional station since then? What about stations that were decommissioned over the 110 years?
4) What does the “mean” mean? Is it a simple arithmetic average of all stations or is it “normalized” in some fashion for area, altitude, proximity to coastline/body of water, annual rainfall, annual snowfall, windward/leeward side of mountains, etc., etc., etc.? Basically, are some reporting stations “weighted” more heavily than others, and if so based on what criteria?
5) Have the mathematics/algorithms for establishing a single yearly annual mean temperature (anomaly) for Australia been exactly the same over 110 years? (This is, of course, a rhetorical question.)
6) Any satellite-measure temperature data included? (It would be post-1960.)
I could go on and on, but need I?
You might sell your “whole story” to some, but not to me (or others, I think).
It is almost certainly the mid-range value [(Tmax+Tmin)/2] for the early years, and possibly conflated with an actual arithmetic mean for recent years. Comparing Crab Apples with Red Delicious Apples.
Perhaps . . . but how many temperature reporting stations are used to develop Tmax and how many similarly used to report Tmin for any given year?
It’s hard to believe that just two reporting stations would create the mean for all of Australia in the “early years”, say 1910-1960.
The devil is in the details (which certainly are variable with time) as the temperature monitoring technology, number and sitings of monitoring stations, and mathematical averaging method used to develop a continent-wide “mean temperature” have evolved over the past 110 years.
This is the whole story, Nick:
Redge
Can you plot human body temperature variations on the same scale and we’ll see if we can spot the points at which we are variously healthy, too hot, too cold, dead, etc? I think a chart on this scale would be about as useful for that purpose as it is for plotting global surface temperature change.
Irrelevant
Uninformative.
Inconvenient to you, you mean.
Anyone can stretch the scale till the plot looks like a red rectangle. But it is the same plot, year after year. No information.
No, it’s the same information, just presented in a more honest way.
Ever read the book, “How to Lie with Statistics”?
Nick,
The very fact that the percentage change is minimal IS INFORMATIVE.
Ask someone to go outside from a stabilized interior temperature and tell you what the temperature is from just using their sense of feel. Do you think they would guess within +/- 3 degrees? The absolute temperature is what people experience, not anomalies. Absolute temperature is the only real quality that is important unless you think the heat is going to spiral out of control forever.
And anyone can shrink that Y axis to create a hockey stick if they so desire.
Like the IPCC et al stretches the Y-scale to make a scary impression ? Your credibility is currently at the bottom of the garbage bin.
Because it shows the triviality of periods of post-Little Ice Age warming, Nick? Do people really want to go back to the temperatures of the coldest period of the Holocene?
Stokes lives blindly by his political doctrine, “whatever it takes.”
So your graph shows scary anomalies, currently barely 0.5C, and that’s somehow more informative than NASA’s graph showing the actual global temperature as mucked about with by NASA?
Hmmm. Surmised concoctions of discontinuous technologies and adjusted temperatures to meet your activism.
A story that shuffles up the foreword, introduction, chapters, summation, follow-up.
You know that is not a REAL set of “climate” data, don’t you Nick !
It is a heavily mal-manipulated fabrication from urban and airport sites that are totally unfit for any “climate” purpose.
No, that is a graph of the annual ACORN-SAT anomalies.
The “whole” story should probably use the daily (area-weighted, Average = [Min + Max] / 2) anomalies, but that would be excessive … and impossible in practice, I don’t known how the “area weights” changed as the ACORN-SAT network grew from 60 sites in 1910 to 112 in 1975 (the V2.3 Tmin and Tmax data for station 5007, Learmonth airport, starts on “1975-03-01”) …
Let’s start from the BoM website you used.
Direct URL : http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=timeseries
Now, let’s scroll down and choose “Period = All months” instead of the default “annual” resolution.
Clicking on the “Download … | Print” link gives us a local copy of the resulting graph with monthly resolution (attached below).
NB : The two “spikes down” at the end of the graph to just below the -1°C (anomaly) level are for November 2022 and May 2023.
I’m in western Europe, by my reckoning it’s about 10 or 11 PM on the 1st of June in Oz.
The BoM employees updated their website before heading home to open a tinny and throw another koala (/ wallaby ?) onto the barbie …
And this indicates no Australian warming in many decades. It was just as warm in Australia in the Early Twentieth Century as it is today.
resize=640%2C542
Frankly, anything – like a statistic – that comes out of a Canadian federal agency’s mouth… is not worth a pinch of coonshit.
The article’s main point is a good one. It, however, misuses the term “climate change.”
“Climate change” has come to mean (in the common useage of American and British English) only the non-data-evidenced phenomenon, human CO2-caused change in climate. So far, there is no data proving that “climate change” is real.
Climate changes. This is the ONLY way a bona fide skeptic should talk about this issue (given the fact of the propaganda term “climate change”).
(Unless the writer INTENDED to use George Orwell’s “careless and imprecise language [which] is a conscious attempt to confuse and deceive.” 🤨)
I have a dislike for careless use of language.
“Renewables” is now a classic. “Renewable Energy” is now synonymous with intermittent wind and solar energy. The energy source may be sustainable but none of the current energy extractors are sustainable. They require more energy to make than they can deliver over a lifetime of operation. How is something that is unsustainable “renewable”?
I also dislike the use of “Organic”. Organic beef, Organic carrots? I presume this is in comparison to Inorganic carrots and beef? Bastardisation of my language. I have yet to see an inorganic cow.
If you want to see inorganic cows, might I suggest a visit to the Milton Keynes concrete cows?
OR “sustainable?!”
The picture above shows a 20,000 tonne nuclear powered icebreaker working through thick ice. The 4,000 tonne vessel that went via the Suez Canal from Atlantic to Pacific can only break 1.5m thick ice.
I guess they shouldn’t have listened to the IPCC ice projections, and instead built for very thick ice.
Imagine if it not been mid-May when it travelled! I guess this new icebreaker is good for summer ice only considering all the global warming going on.
Skis or a catamaran hull with iron cladding, like sled runners?
Maybe they need one with really big saw blades that pop out of the front to cut through the ice like the Mach 5.
::waits to see who gets that reference::
The UN climate models have been consistently WRONG in their projections. Including snow and snow cover.
https://youtu.be/bnCNz0LvKzs
Yes, but it’s hot ice.
Ice arches and storms greatly influence the amount of multi-year ice.
Making scenarios, projections, and/or predictions of such things
even a year in advance is easy to do and surely wrong.
OK, here is some actual data on multi-year ice. Mid-March data.
Down, down, down.
Exactly what I predicted you would do.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/05/31/arctic-ice-a-cold-reality-check-for-climate-alarmism/#comment-3728321
I post the data that is available. There were no satellites in 1910.
But it says that over 40 years, multi-year ice has just gone down and down.
It is real data; no-one else is offering any at all, including the article.
Your statement is easily falsified . . . the article cites the following in its fifth paragraph:
“It’s also worth noting that while Canada’s federal auditor general reported a drop of about 40 per cent in average summer sea-ice coverage in the Canadian Arctic over the last 50 years due to climate change . . .”
I don’t think a drop of 40% in average summer sea ice coverage is data the author wanted to present. Anyway, it isn’t data about multi-year ice.
Your phrase applied to real data: “any at all”.
QED
Really?
How did those early satellites measure ice age/thickness?
Another specious confection.
Forty years is not even one cycle of the AMO! Of course for someone from the Michael Mann school of climatology that does not matter since he claims the AMO is not a factor anymore.
Satellite did exist before 1979…
… and they show a lot less sea ice in the early 1970s.
The peak in 1979 was an EXTREME HIGH extent, similar to the extreme high extent of the LIA.
The world’s first weather satellite, TIROS 1, was launched in 1960.
The first weather satellites to provide imaging over the north and south poles of Earth were the Nimbus series (1964-1978).
According to https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nimbus-nasa-remembers-first-earth-observations , among the “firsts” credited to the Nimbus satellites were:
— First to provide extensive global observations of spectral signatures of ice that indicate the age of the sea ice and first to provide snow depth and snow accumulation rates over the Arctic and Antarctica,
— First microwave devices to distinguish rain over ocean and between snow and ice in polar areas, and
— First satellite to reveal an ice-free opening in the Antarctica ice pack. This patch of open water, called a polynya, appeared during the winters of 1974-76 in the Weddell Sea and has not been observed since.
Try taking the experience from ~ 1920 Nick.
It was around 1922 that the Arctic fishing fleets were reporting vast ice-free areas.
But they got better . . .
In 1942 an RCMP schooner finished a trip through the North West Passage
Unstated in the film is that it spent about a year and 1/2 stuck in pack ice.
https://youtu.be/r-vn0-xjMDI
”Down down down” Except that your actual data shows 0-3 year old ice basically without trend for 15 years and ice older than 3 years without trend for a decade.
But yeah, other than that, down down down!
WOW , there really is a LOT OF SEA ICE up there isn’t there.
FAR MORE than for nearly all the last 10,000 years !
Icelandic sea ice data shows very clearly that 1979 was a period of EXTREME HIGH sea ice, up there nearly with the LIA .
Biodata clearly shows that current levels are FAR HIGHER than they have been for most of the last 10,000 years.
Biodata also shows that the Arctic has been FAR WARMER than now for most of the last 10,000 years.
Pretty steady from 2009 to present. This possibly indicates that they have just been using GPS to return to the same locations since 2009, and before that went to locations where satellite pics said there was lots of ice…..I’m speculating of course….
Charles,
Many thanks for pointing out this anomalous ice, which ought to be addressed by the “experts” in climate change because it is so embarrassing and so counter to their expectations. The trendy meme is polar amplification which unfortunately starts to fall apart as events unfold. It also shows, again, the poor quality of science generally associated with climate researchers.
The ice changes can be classed into two types, being long-term (say a trend over 30 years or more) and short term, in particular annual/seasonal.
In this case, we have several years/seasons of growth of this particular thick ice. It should be classed (at least initially) as weather related, not climate related. We need to explain the anomaly in terms of short term changes. Carbon dioxide in the air is not showing any short term changes in concentration apart from a steady rise with annual wriggles for the last 40 years. Even puny man did not affect its measured values over the Covid-19 emission reduction year of 2020. Direct effects of CO2 on this thick ice anomaly are therefore looking like they can be disregarded.
What else changes over the short term of a few years? temperatures, be they air or ocean water or ice temperatures, are so degraded by fiddling people that you can cherry pick any outcome you wish. Overall, measurements like UAH satellite temperatures seem to indicate that short-term T changes in the Arctic might not be the cause of this observed ice. Yes, we are bombarded with papers about Arctic amplification, but they cannot go on forever because all excusrsions like this eventuall reverse. (That is why we can live on Earth). Besides, that guesswork amplification is not working in Antarctica – it should if CO2 was the controller.
Does albedo cause the strange ice? That would be my choice, but I am a generalist, not a specialist. Soot from fires and industry might be part of the mechanism, as might orbital changes that affect daily insolation.
Fair suck of the sausage, people can’t blame CO2 for everything that alarms them. Geoff S
The fact that Canada is an Arctic nation doesn’t mean that it would be prepared with an adequate number of modern icebreakers. It’s also a nation that faces Russia just over the horizon, but its military is underequipped and undermanned and hardly in a position to assert any sovereignty over its share of the polar regions.
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_claims_in_the_Arctic ):
“Under international law, the North Pole and the region of the Arctic Ocean surrounding it are not owned by any country. The five surrounding Arctic countries are limited to a territorial sea of 12 nautical miles (22 km; 14 mi) and an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of 200 nautical miles (370 km; 230 mi) adjacent to their coasts measured from declared baselines filed with the UN.”
Faces Russia over an immense global arc of horizon.
Literally, go west, find Russia; go north, find Russia.
Mainland Canada to Mainland Russia is about the same distance as New York to Venezuela….over Tundra, icefields, and frozen and open waters that are both militarily indefensible and humanly unconquerable without significant logistics support.
Canada is not stupid enough to waste money on fake sovereignty which they could defend at roughly 1 soldier or sailor per 1000 sq.km., with no invader possibly succeeding from that direction anyway…..a few jets flying over, a few supply ships to northern radar outposts, some robotic weather stations to tell you why anyone living there wants to retire to Florida, and you’ve pretty well plumbed the depths of political control over the whole Northern Territories.
me? i just want to know why the danes claim above 80N has been below average for two months while NOAA claims sea ice in the arctic remains 1 SD below average, steadily.
So demand answers from Gaia, the controller in chief of all things weather and climate.
Perhaps the reason is that the “Arctic” (actually area within the Arctic Circle) is currently defined to include latitudes greater than 66°30′ N, whereas the Danes’ claim relates to the smaller area of latitudes above 80N?
if only there was some mechanism for heat to transfer.
As Monckton has pointed out repeatedly, globally. there has been no statistically significant warming for almost 9 years. If that extends to the Arctic, then we shouldn’t be surprised by an increase in multi-year ice.
Yes but as the graph of multi-year ice shows there has been no such increase only a slight decline over the past few years plus a lot of noise.
So, you are saying that something other than thick ice is preventing the Soviet ice breaker from making headway? What might that be? If you suggest pressure ridges, how can we be sure that pressure ridges haven’t been misidentified as multi-year ice in the past?
Personally I am not a fan of using sea ice as a climate change proxy on such short time scales as the alarmists do. But I will play along. This is from Tony Heller:
Yep, that nails the cherry-picking of starting anything to do with climate in 1979.
It was a very cold year at the end of a drop in temperature from the much warmer 1940s.
Arctic sea ice was totally chockers, with no sea life possible at all.
The RECOVERY from that extreme 1979 high very slightly towards the much lower Holocene average has meant that a lot of sea life has been able to return to the Arctic.
Love it!
Tony does good work. His history refutes the alarmists scary claims of unprecendented warming.
It was just as warm in the recent past as it is today, and arctic sea ice extent was just as low in the past as it is today.
Nothing to see here.
Tone Heller doesn’t know how to read a phase diagram and thinks CO2 freezes in the antarctic, the guy doesn’t have a clue!
Personally I think the Arctic Sea Ice is doing pretty darn well considering the “scientific consensus” was that by 2013 the Arctic would be ice free during the summer.
Taken from Tony Hellers blog:
I wonder what ole Hansen has to say about the arctic now.
Senator Inhofe used to give the climate alarmists hell. A lone voice in the Wilderness. Where is the next Senator Inhofe? I don’t see any. I see a lot of Republicans who buy into this human-caused climate change nonsense.
There, fixed it for you 🙂
The latest excuse is that the 1987 Montreal Protocol has postponed an ice-free Arctic by 15 years. However, the press release doesn’t provide any numbers on the amount of “Ozone Depleting Substances,” their half-life, or their Global Warming Potential. We have to accept their claim without supporting evidence.
https://scitechdaily.com/the-arctics-unseen-savior-the-montreal-protocol-has-delayed-an-ice-free-arctic-by-15-years/
Both Arctic Passages closed all year last year for the first time since 2009. My £100 bet that Summer Equinox ice will be more than 4Mkm2 is again open. Btw there’s a Danish site w Arctic temps since 1958 tap on any year and track against the mean which shows unfreeze mid June plus two degs C or so, refreeze mid Aug. 2023? Yeah running tiny bit cooler than the mean.
Err, Summer equinox?
Not true several ships sailed the NW Passage last summer.
Can you supply links? I love reading the adventures of such crazy sailors. Covid seemed to cut back on such adventuring, and it would be reassuring to read the logs of a few who have come out of hiding.
Two National geographic cruisers, the Endurance (both ways) and Resolution made it through. Also the cruise ship the Roald Amundsen and numerous smaller vessels (SV Draco, a 12m cutter, was one of them).
Following last season’s impressive performance, the Greenland ice sheet is at it again in 2022-23.
Throughout the month of May, a time when the Surface Mass Balance (SMB) readings would normally be trending down as we near the summer melt season, Greenland has instead formed an uptrend, culminating in Wednesday’s SMB gains of approx. 4 Gigatons — a new record for the time of year in Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) books dating back to 1981.
(From: https://electroverse.info/greenland-smb-gains-bone-chilling-chills-india-record-cold-may-for-australia/)
I’m sure there is an idiot in a canoe somewhere in there.
There was one that got his ass frozen trying it in a Kayak.
We had fun with that guy. Damn we’re old.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/03/adventures-in-arctic-kayaking/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/09/polar-defense-project-deletes-the-tough-questions/
Old enough to remember the global cooling/coming ice age scare and thus to see through the current bull!
Story tip. The Daily Express are reporting that sea temperatures have risen from 12C to 16C noting a huge rise in jellyfish numbers washing ashore around the Bay of Biscay.
Thousands of jellyfish wash up on French beaches after huge increase in sea temperature | World | News | Express.co.uk
The Bay of Biscay an area of the Atlantic, bordered by the west coast of France from Brest southeast to St Nazaire (at the mouth of the Loire River), then south to Biarritz, then westward along the north coast of Spain.
I lived in France from 1984 through 1995, and Meteo France routinely reports sea water temperatures along the coasts throughout the summer season (so that beachgoers know what to expect). Back then, sea water temperatures in the summer ranged from about 17 C in the north near Brest, to about 20 – 22 C in the south at Bordeaux and Biarritz.
A sea water temperature of 16 C in late May (they didn’t specify where) is nothing unusual, even in the north.
The beaches along the west coast of France generally have large differences in sea level between low and high tide, and there are usually many waves due to the prevailing westerlies (Biarritz in the south is famous for surfing). Occasionally, due to an anticyclone over western France, the seas become very calm for several days, and jellyfish tend to approach the shallow waters near the coast. When the anticyclone moves away and the westerlies resume, the jellyfish get washed up on the beaches.
This was a frequent occurrence back in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and was always due to a long period of calm weather followed by a storm. This has nothing to do with warming of sea temperatures!
Excellent comment, giving us a better perspective on the issue.
You mean THE Daily Express, the UK’s middle-market, tabloid newspaper?
You mean THAT source for scientifically-accurate, breaking news???
In several previous Arctic ice posts, I have mentioned that the climate change narrative management machine has already created an enduring alternative reality about Arctic Ice. even as early as 2011 My casual polling (2011-2021) of mostly well educated co-workers indicated that almost all of them thought ice had already vanished from the Arctic. Many did not believe the Satellite images of arctic ice extent I sent them…and wondered why I even bothered. They just didn’t care, which makes me an ice geek.
This is an example of impressionistic easy beliefism, which makes us all very vulnerable to believing propaganda and building false presuppositions at least speculatively. This creates the ground for climate change bandwagoning (self righteous actions to save the planet) even when what is believed is rooted in mere impressions, exaggerations false presuppositions and bald face lies.
The variation in arctic sea ice extent since1985 isn’t terribly robust within a very short time frame. No one has a full understanding of all the variables that contribute to the ice extent variation nor how the variation dynamic works in the log run.
Yet the people driving the climate change narrative management machine, bank on the masses believing sound bites, and repeated images. Frankly, it works at creating false presuppositions because most people don’t care enough to actually go look for themselves.
Finally, most people cannot recall when, how or why they falsely presupposed ice had vanished from the arctic…. this is because the narrative has become so endemic in media it has become the very air we breath and difficult to refute rationally.
Hunan-caused Climate Change Propaganda works. A Blizzard of Human-caused Climate Change Propaganda works even “better”.
We are in a blizzard right now.
Propaganda will be our downfall (if there is one).
If it’s colder or warmer, that’s climate change. If it’s wetter or drier, that’s climate change. If it’s windier or calm, that’s climate change. If the sun shines or it’s cloudy, that’s climate change. The debate is over. The science is settled. 197% of (government funded) scientists agree. Now, go home, turn off all the power, eat some organically sourced insects, and never travel anywhere ever again. Ain’t the WEF/NWO life grand? Oh, and BTW, if you disagree with any of this, you’re a racist.
Here are my latest arctic observations
https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2023/06/01/arctic-sea-ice-a-cold-may/
I can’t explain why it is so cold up there the past month. My view for years is that CO2 can only have a minor effect, sunlight has a greater effect, and the warmer oceans have the greatest effect. It is very annoying that some Alarmists belittle the ideas that the sun and deep sea warming can have any effect at all, cancel and shadow-ban people who attempt to research such things, and demand all funding go into their seemingly endless and inane endevours to prove their mistake isn’t mistaken.
Thanks Caleb for linking to your interesting discussion. I also noted the slower decline of sea ice this May.
https://rclutz.com/2023/06/01/slowly-melting-arctic-ice-may-2023/
Good to hear from you, Ron. Thanks for the graph.
There is an entire generation of schoolchildren that were force-fed “An Inconvenient Truth” that believe Arctic Ice will disappear. They are now voters.
Minds can be changed. Mine was. Disillusionment is not fun, but does wonders.