By P Gosselin
16 years of no decline
Arctic summer minimum sea ice extent refuses to drop further, surprising and frustrating the alarmist media.
Image: National Snow and Ice data Center (NSIDC), Boulder, Colorado.
Hat-tip: Klimanachrichten
German research vessel Polarstern of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) is currently underway again in the Arctic. where a decrease in sea ice had been expected there, or, probably more accurately said, hoped for.
But this year the minimum Arctic sea ice extent has turned out differently, as Germany’s widely viewed (climate-alarmist) Tagesschau news had to report:
In view of the extreme summer, the question arose in advance: Will the Arctic also see a new negative record in melting ice this year? This time, the Arctic has been spared. AWI director and expedition leader Antje Boetius tells Tagesschau that an unusual weather phenomenon prevented a record melt of Arctic sea ice this summer. According to Boetius, a sequence of low-pressure systems has led to an entirely different ice movement. The so-called transpolar drift, which describes the drifting of ice along certain routes, took a different course this year, she said. Ice from the Siberian region has been held together and compressed instead of drifting out and melting. For the AWI director, this shows that weather phenomena determine the development of sea ice, and that forecasting is more difficult than ever. The Arctic, with its sea ice and life, has been lucky once again, says the biologist. But things could go the other way. “If we are unlucky, if weather phenomena play unfavorably, we can also be affected by large ice-free parts much sooner than expected,” Boetius adds.”
We notice that when the opposite happens, e.g. heat, storms or more melt happens, then it’s all because of climate warming. But when it goes the other way, then it’s weather!
“The so-called transpolar drift, which describes the drifting of ice along certain routes, took a different course this year, she said. Ice from the Siberian region has been held together and compressed instead of drifting out and melting.”
Has anyone thought of what causes Arctic sea ice to drift? In winter, when the entire Arctic with the possible exception of the Scandinavian coast is encased on ice, the ice probably doesn’t drift much, because it has nowhere to go without hitting land.
In spring and summer, when there is melting along the coasts of Russia and Alaska, but the Canadian archipelago and the north coast of Greenland still have ice, sea ice is free to drift, but is more likely steered by water currents, which can exert greater forces on the ice than wind. Ocean currents in the Arctic are likely affected and steered by the North Atlantic Oscillation, where there is more water exchange between the Atlantic and Arctic than between the Pacific and Arctic through the narrow Bering Strait.
But a fluctuation in the North Atlantic Oscillation can also affect the weather in the North Atlantic, and by extension in the region between Greenland and Scandinavia, which has more open water than anywhere else in the Arctic. Is there some relationship between a warm summer in Europe and a current pushing ice southward into the coast of Siberia?
And the “satellite record” conveniently begins at the end of a 3 decade cooling trend, which makes the starting point effectively a “cherry pick” to begin with.
Of course there will be less ice as the climate warms up, but that says nothing about the cause, nor nothing about how much ice is “normal” outside the temperature trough where they start the “record.”
Again, we need to recount all of the years when we were supposedly going to see the Arctic free of sea ice, which hasn’t even come close to happening.
Their predictions are wrong because they’re wrong about ALL OF IT. The driving forces, the effects of those driving forces, they haven’t got a clue. They’re stuck on their CO2 fetishism and won’t let go no matter how many times they are shown to be wrong.
“an unusual weather phenomenon prevented a record melt of Arctic sea ice this summer”
It’s a weather phenomenon known as bloody cold !!!