Someone pointed me to the amusing tweet by the deranged blogger who goes by the name “Steven Goddard”, fresh from the Heartland Climate Denial conference and feeling his oats apparently, @ Meteorologist Heidi Cullen.
Got me thinking there needs to be an Arctic ice Update. Fortunately Greg Laden has already given us one.
Yup, it’s melting.
As it does every summer, the Arctic Sea ice is melting off. Over the last several years, the amount of sea ice that melts by the time it hits minimum in September has generally been increasing. So, how’s it doing now?
The graph above shows the 1981-2010 average plus or minus two standard deviations. Before going into more detail than that, you should look at the following graphic.
The top chart shows the march of Arctic Sea ice melt for first ten years of the baseline data set only, and the bottom chart shows the last ten years of the same data set. This tells us that the two Standard Deviations for the period 1981-2010 hides an important fact. Since Arctic Sea ice is melting more and more every year, a proper baseline might be the first several years of this period, not the entire period.
Now refer to the graphic at the top of the post. This is the current year’s ice extent. Notice that it is tracking right along the lower edge of the 2 Standard Deviation zone. In other words, the present year is exhibiting what we have been seeing all along: An Arctic with much less ice.
Now look at the years that post date the baseline period, 2011 through the present, including the wildy extreme year of 2012 when a record melt was set.
Here we see that collectively, the last three full years and the present partially documented year exist at the lower end of, or lower than, the 2 Standard Deviation zone. This suggests that the current trend is an extension of the previous couple of decades. More melting on average over time. One would hope this would level off, and maybe it will. But we certainly can not make that claim at this point.
Great post, Peter. Just a small quibble – your second plot should be captioned “Last 10 years of data”.
No, it shows 10 years of data up to 2010. It doesn’t include 2011-2014.
Hmmm, you’re right. Well, it’s not the second ten years either, which would be 1989 – 1998. SO I”m not sure what the label sould be.
To be sure, there are others who are perhaps more concerned with veracity than Mr Goddard who also don’t expect 2014 to be very melty, at least not without some more weather (weather in the Arctic, forsooth!). That’s what I get from perusing Neven’s blog anyway.
I suppose even a stopped clock gets to be right twice a day*.
But being concerned with veracity, I doubt they’d suppose 1 data point (hypothetical data at that) collected in the wild where data can often go up and down constitutes some kind of ‘well actually…’ retort to an established trend over time.
(*Though Goddard, who exhibits a long term trend of being increasingly wrong, still has a way to go before he’s twice a day useful.)
Extent holds water, but it’s crystal clear that ice volume is the hard cold truth of the matter, and there is no skating around that fact.
Although Arctic extent is most important for when the sun shines and the planets albedo in the summer months on the northern hemisphere, you are absolutely right that the volume of the ice tells us more about the seriousness of the problem.
I am fairly certain there will be summer months with practically no ice in the Arctic within 2020. All it really takes is the reduction we are seeing and another summer with 2012 weather conditions. I am sure we will have that within the next 6 years.
So, in the 4.5 billion years of earth history you are comparing two 10 year periods. over the last 20 years. As if the history of the earth shows us that anything other than complete stasis is unnatural and time to panic. Yet at the same time, as we have seen ice increasing since the lows in 2007 and 2012, you try to tell us that a couple years are too little time to draw conclusions. 2 of 4.5 billion is ridiculous. 10 of 4.5 billion is settled science.
If you’re going to base your fear mongering on .00000001% of the data can you at least show the same charts for the Antarctic? And then tell us how that data is deceptive.
Been there, done that. You have not been paying attention.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPnj9eR7t0g
The “Antarctic is increasing” canard has been well squashed here. Suggest you actually read the blog, and check out the videos, so as not to embarrass yourself in this way.
Also see most recent research
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/8187/20140722/antarctic-sea-ice-expansion-may-have-been-overestimated.htm
“Scientists have long puzzled over what exactly is causing Southern Hemisphere sea ice cover to increase in a warming world. Now, a study published in the journal The Cryosphere suggests that much of the measured expansion may be due to an error that researchers failed to notice until now.”
Since you showed me yours…………well, you know…
No.
When I crush your talking point, you do not get to change the subject.
Stay on point and either deal with my reply, or leave.
Here is the link to ‘mine’, it didn’t show in previous post.
nor will it. You can stay on point and acknowledge that your error, or troll elsewhere.
Doesn’t matter! The universe is 16 billion years old and if you can’t show how climate change in each of its thousands of billions of planets isn’t natural then I’m not going to believe it! How can you possibly base your conclusions on .00000001%*(16/4.5)*(as Carl Sagan would say ‘billions upon billions’)= hopelessly small percentage? Ergo, its a Hoax!
Explain the billions! And oh, by the way, its cold in Deadhorse, Oklahoma today! Gee, I guess those climate models are broken!?!
The video you linked is a bit outdated. Just after it was made, global sea ice rebounded and has been near long term average for 1,5 years now:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
Incidentally for those 1,5 years now it’s been pretty close to what it was in 1984 – thirty years ago.
The thing with debunking is that you have to update your claims to correspond with what is happening in the real world. You can’t keep claiming that the sea ice gain in the southern hemisphere isn’t currently balancing out the losses on the northern hemisphere just because it wasn’t in 2012.
And about that overestimation – if you ignore all those ifs, mays, mights, perhaps’s and we-don’t-know-what’s-going-on’s on the study and reduce the southern ice cover by 200 000 square kilometers to counteract it, nothing much changes. All it does is it drops the graphs about the height of one pixel downward since 1991.
So I really wouldn’t use the word “much” in this context.
the ifs and maybes are there because the changes in Antarctic ice, if any, are so slight that they are easily lost in the measuring.
Meanwhile, the northern ice, by volume, is three quarters gone, spread it around how you like.
Well they are not so slight if they are enough to more than balance out the decrease on the north.
For most of this year the global sea ice area has been close to one million square km’s *over* the 1978-2008 mean. For the last 18 months global sea ice area has been – on average – over the 1978-2008 mean.
But the fact is that we don’t know what will happen to the arctic ice this summer. We’ll just have to see. But I’ll admit being really surprised if we’d get a new record minimum. We have too much multiyear ice now.
when a physicist sees a ball bouncing downhill, he knows that the upward bounce will not continue, because he understands the gravitational forces that drive the movement. Thus no ball bounces and then rolls back up the hill, or continues up into space.
When a climate denier sees the same ball, he assumes that on each bounce, there is the chance the ball will continue to rocket upward. Or at least, that “nobody knows” what will happen.
The earth is losing over a trillion tons of ice per year:
– 159 Gt Antarctic land ice, McMillan el al, GRL (2014)
+ 26 Gt Antarctic sea ice VOLUME, Holland et al, J Climate (2014)
Wow – gaining 26Gt!! Woop de doo. Shame about the other 1005Gt per year eh?
But lets just ignore that and focus on the 26Gt.
Other ice stats from around the globe.
– 261 Gt Arctic sea ice, PIOMAS
– 378 Gt Greenland, Enderlin et al, GRL (2014)
– 259 Gt other land based glaciers, Gardner et al. Science (2013)
– 1,031 Gt, total
And in fact, the modest increase in seasonal Antarctic sea ice was predicted by Manabe et al 1991, nearly 25 years ago:
And, whildt I realise this might be confusing to an ignorant person. the increase in SEA ice is due to global warming.
John,
Hold on a minute, wasn’t a prediction made about 6 years ago that we would already have the effect of man made global warming to create a northwest passage of open ice? Or can we not use algore’s quoting of other’s work as predicting the that this being the case between 2011, 2016 or certainly by 2020 as you confidently predict?
Somehow, the amount of ice has returned to within 2 standard deviations of a comparatively narrow band of collected data withing a few months despite the ‘loss of ice’.
Careful with those predictions, you’ll end up just looking a bit ‘feverish’ yourself.
lesliegraham1 has your rebuttal just above yours, with actual statistics.
“the amount of ice has returned” ‘ice’ is something more than ‘sea ice’. Perhaps that’s why you left out that detail.
Ironically the oil industry is getting impatient to use the new ice free shipping lanes, just wait for the first mishap.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-22/arctic-ice-melt-seen-freeing-way-for-south-korean-oil-hub.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/23/business/energy-environment/exxon-mobil-moves-ahead-with-russian-oil-drilling-project.html
A whole 3 ships in 2012, and only 1 since. Korea still hoping that those ‘models’ will continue to show full openings by 2040 to 2050. Don’t hold your breath.
Stay feverish my friend.
I am not your friend, Don Easterbrook is a Geologist not a climatologist. You can stick to your appeasing delusions, but warming is surely happening and more influential than solar activity.
Don Easterbrook!
Oh please.
The same Don Easterbrook who stated that “From 2008 we will see a rapid cooling of the Earth”
2010 set a new global surface temperature record.
Hilarious.
sorry, this site is not a platform for trolls.
If you wish to post here, you can make your point, support it, then discuss.
The tactic of posting nonsense, being shot down, and the “look over here” post more nonsense is not acceptable.
I have an open posting policy on this board, anyone will tell you, and I have only banned a very few – however,
your showing so far is not promising, and this is strike one.
Don’t wait—-get rid of him now.
Anyone who is deluded enough to try to argue with the data shown in these graphs is not worth wasting our time on.
And the graphs ARE very nice—-persuasive, and disturbing to anyone who looks at them with an open mind.
„Now, a study published in the journal The Cryosphere suggests that much of the measured expansion may be due to an error …”
This error is probably insignificant (less significant) as evidenced by this graph (http://nomad1.ncep.noaa.gov/tmp/CTEST14061062897793.png) Antarctic sea surface temperatures.
Decreasing SST Antarctic correlate very well with weak filtered data Antarctic sea ice extent (http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/seaice-anomaly-antarctic.png).
Unless also graph of “ssta” contains an error …
LOL! And this from the honest fellow who blithely asserts that NASA and NOAA are using false data because Dr Don Easterbrook says so.
Hey Einstein! Check this out:
Do you realize how completely full of **** this makes your argument?