The map below shows the “2007 record low” Arctic ice extent, and the red dot indicates where a Russian boat sailed to in 1935 – in ice-free water.
Apparently there was less ice in the Eastern Arctic in 1935 than there was during the all-time-record-lowest-Armageddon-we-are-all-doomed-irreversible-tipping-point summer of 2007.
“Remarkable Changes”
“Our generation is living in a period when remarkable changes are taking place almost everywhere throughout the world,” writes Professor L. Berg, of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. ”‘Certainly these widely distributed phenomena cannot be due to the action of the Gulf Stream, which, however, naturally receives its share of the greater general warmth.” The slow thawing of the Arctic is given as a partial explanation for the record voyages of Soviet ice-breakers to northern latitudes, which have never before been reached by navigating vessels. The Sadko in 1935, in ice- free water of the North Kara Sea, steamed to 82 degrees, 42 minutes of northern latitude—an all-time record.
While that side of the Arctic ice is the most stable.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Arctic_sea_ice_loss_animation.gif
Beautiful morning
http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_webcam
It’s easy to spread a lie over 20-30 years of data for a phenomenon that is cyclic over periods of many decades or centuries. The N. Pole was probably ice free during the summers of the Minoan warm period, but it got colder after that.
“… the normal global mean temperature for planet earth given the Phanerozoic history, is actually 19.5 degrees Celcius; a full three degrees higher than the present mean… ”
(http://climate.geologist-1011.net/)
25000 year ago where I sit today was just a few mils from the front of the 1 mile thich glacier and wolly mamoths were butchered here in Northern VA.
The climate is changing–all by it’s lonesome. It has done so for 4.5 BILLION YEARS. The Climate is not static. Climate is what you “expect” and weather is what you get. Dinosaurs used to forrage on the edge of a massive inland sea in what is now the High Desert of Utah & Colorado.
These cycles didn’t change just because man showed up. What hubris.
That 2007 low stand for Arctic ice keeps popping up everywhere, even as an introduction to Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog. I explained it in my book “What Warming?” in 2010 and covered it again in my article “Arctic Warming Is Not Greenhouse Warming” last year [E&E 22(8):1069-1083 (2011)]. The year 2007 was exceptional because strong poleward winds pushed warm water through the Bering Straight which then proceeded to melt a large batch of sea ice north of it. Russian Arctic on the opposite side remained undisturbed. As to the Russian ship in 1935, that is very probable because the thirties happened to be a warm period in Arctic history. Arctic warming itself has a fairly recent origin at the turn of the twentieth century. Prior to that there was nothing but two thousand years of slow cooling. Its beginning was sudden but it paused for thirty years in mid-century, then resumed, and is still going strong. Kaufman et al. who discovered it thought that this warming “…correlates with the rise in global average temperature which coincided with the onset of major anthropogenic changes in global atmospheric composition…” And their two thousand year temperature curve also looked like a hockey stick, even more perfect than the original Mann-made one. Joe Romm even listed it as one of the proofs that the hockey stick is real! This is probably also why Bradley, Briffa and Overpeck all put their names on as co-authors. Well, sad to say but none of their fantasies are true. It starts with a lack of understanding of the physics of greenhouse warming by big shots. They prefer their own propaganda to physics. To get a sudden greenhouse warming started laws of physics require that there has to be an equally sudden increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But this did not happen and carbon dioxide took no notice of the passing of the century. The only other way to start a widespread warming is by ocean currents. Apparently there was a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the century that started to bring warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic. The warming was interrupted from 1940 and 1970, then resumed, and is still going strong. It is impossible for greenhouse warming to start and stop that way but if currents are involved it is likely that the former flow pattern temporarily returned for that cool interval. We now have direct measurement of Arctic water temperature by Spielhagen et al. They remark that “The modern warm Atlantic inflow … is anomalous and unique in the past 2000 years and not just the latest in a series of natural multidecadal oscillations.” That’s the story of Arctic warming.
I agree with much you say, but you might want to revise “Prior to that there was nothing but two thousand years of slow cooling.” I’ve read a fair amount the Vikings in Greenland, and the MWP was a warm spike in temperatures. Among other things, a Saga describes a fellow swimming out to an island to grab a goat or lamb for a feast, and you’d die if you attempted to swim in those waters today.
They’re still arguing about it today.