Polar Meltdown Update

Global sea ice area has been above normal for almost the entire year.

ScreenHunter_209 Jul. 11 09.46

iphone.recent.global.png (512×412)

Spiegel says the larger than normal polar ice caps are disappearing catastrophically.

Global Warning

Heat waves, sinking cities, droughts and disappearing polar ice caps — the effects of climate change are catastrophic. Despite the consequences, human activity continues to belch greenhouse gases

Climate Change – SPIEGEL ONLINE – Nachrichten

About Tony Heller

Just having fun
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

24 Responses to Polar Meltdown Update

  1. michael says:

    Antarctic sea ice extent has been much greater than the norm in recent years:

    “Scientists have known for several years that meltwater from ice sheets can form a cold, fresh layer on the ocean surface that protects sea ice from the warmer waters below.”

    So this colder meltwater has been protecting the Antarctic ice pack against melting longer, thus increasing the extent of southern sea ice. See the article:

    http://www.nature.com/news/global-warming-expands-antarctic-sea-ice-1.12709

    Worse yet, “With climate change, some scientists had expected that warmer air would increase snowfall over Antarctica, and that this would largely offset the increased ice loss from Greenland caused by warmer seas. In recent years, however, a number of studies have shown that both ice sheets are losing mass at an alarming rate, as ice streams speed up their seaward journeys and more and bigger icebergs are discharged into the ocean.”

    http://www.nature.com/news/grim-picture-of-polar-ice-sheet-loss-1.11921

    Of course, who are you going to believe? Nature Magazine?

    • Otherwise known as “complete horseshit”

    • stewart pid says:

      Michael … King of the weasel worded excuses for every example of the folly of GLO-BULL warming.
      Michael do you really believe your own BS? Are you that simple? You believe more melt gives more fresh water gives more ice (and special guard the bottom from melting water) and less sea ice melt? I would love to see this issue from your perspective but I can’t get my head that far up my ass!
      Offshore Antarctica must be a very calm place with no winds, waves or currents to mix these magical waters 😉

      • michael says:

        Actually I do. And it’s not just my own idea, it got published in Nature. One of the two most reputable journals out there. So the idea has been pretty well thought out.

        A consequence of increased global warming is an increase in Antarctic sea ice spalling off during the warm months as well as an increase in meltwater flowing out. The meltwater chills the freshly spawned sea ice and makes it last longer.

        You can try this yourself with two glasses of water. Fill one with warm water and the other with ice water. Then drop a couple of ice cubes in each. See which one holds the cubes in ice form the longest.

        Offshore Antarctica carries the strongest, most dependable year-round winds on the entire planet– because there’s no land masses to disrupt them in the 40s, 50s and 60s degrees of latitude. But these winds have stayed the same since Antarctica wandered to the South Pole, 30-40 million years in the past. So the winds have not changed– something else has.

        • Amazing how complete crap gets through peer review.

          The IPCC report claimed that Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035, despite extensive objections and review over a period of more than a year. An industry of criminals at work.

        • Eco-worriers first quote some idiotic study like one that speculates that warmer temperatures create more sea ice. After that blows up in their face, argument from authority –

          “it got published in Nature. One of the two most reputable journals out there…”

          It gotta be true, then. 😉

          A few papers are good, most papers are garbage. Some are so bad, they actually have to be retracted. The paper Michael quotes will never be retracted, as it’s a modelling study so it makes no testable predictions. It’s not even science.

          More on retractions, especially from the most bestest scientific journal in the universe. 😉

          http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/category/by-journal/nature-retractions/

    • Sundance says:

      Antarctic ice mass balance has been increasing over the last decade Michael. Both Greenland and Antarctica ice mass balance were revised upward after it was found that GRACE Satellite data was in error and ICESAT data was used in reanalysis. Drew Shindell lead IPCC author on ice/glaciers from NASA has said in public that Arctic ice melt would likely halt if black carbon and ground level ozone were controlled. Numerous new independent assessments are putting Transient Climate Response at much lower levels than the IPPC estimate and a growing majority of climate scientists consider the IPCC estimate which ignores data for the last 10 years, as untenable. The cries of apocalyptic ice melt are growing fainter and fainter.

      The strategy of those embracing climate hysteria has shifted to trying to frighten people with storms/bad weather.

    • Jimbo says:

      Michael
      you point to

      “….a number of studies have shown that both ice sheets are losing mass at an alarming rate….”

      This study shows a mass gain. Eastern Antarctica has experienced extreme snowfalls in the last few years and the ice area is expanding. You really are living in cloud cookoo land.

      Zwally, H. Jay; Li, Jun; Robbins, John; Saba, Jack L.; Yi, Donghui; Brenner, Anita; Bromwich, David

      Abstract:
      During 2003 to 2008, the mass gain of the Antarctic ice sheet from snow accumulation exceeded the mass loss from ice discharge by 49 Gt/yr (2.5% of input), as derived from ICESat laser measurements of elevation change. The net gain (86 Gt/yr) over the West Antarctic (WA) and East Antarctic ice sheets (WA and EA) is essentially unchanged from revised results for 1992 to 2001 from ERS radar altimetry.
      http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20120013495

      Regarding your studies see
      http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/20/graces-warts-new-peer-reviewed-paper-suggests-errors-and-adjustments-may-be-large/

    • michael says:

      Nature told you something profound in that article. It said don’t trust any short-term forecasts. The weather guy can’t tell you whether it’s going to rain day after tomorrow– but he can give you a slightly better idea of how much rain we’re going to get for the rest of the year. And he can give you a very good idea of how much rain we’re going to average by the end of the decade.

      I look at the longer-term trends very closely. But I don’t place much faith in forecasts.

      • Latitude says:

        huh,,,,,every thing you just said is not true
        The further out you get….the worse they are

        “By starting in the present with actual conditions, Smith’s group hoped to improve the model’s accuracy at forecasting the near-term climate. The results looked promising at first. The model initially predicted temperatures that were cooler than those seen in conventional climate projections — a forecast that basically held true into 2008. But then the prediction’s accuracy faded sharply: the dramatic warming expected after 2008 has yet to arrive (see ‘Hazy view’). “It’s fair to say that the real world warmed even less than our forecast suggested,” Smith says. “We don’t really understand at the moment why that is.”

      • squid2112 says:

        Wow Michael, did you read your words before you posted?

        I look at the longer-term trends very closely. But I don’t place much faith in forecasts.

        Damn, I couldn’t even aspire to be that stupid.

      • “Nature told you something profound in that article….”

        The article admits climate modellers can’t do something. (And they only admit this because their predictions have since been falsified.) Michael considers this insight “profound”. What a moron.

  2. grant holt says:

    “Steven”: it is as entertaining as it is predictable to watch you move away from harping on about the supposed “signifcant recovery in Arctic sea ice”, now that the summer melt is making up for lost time, and is in freefall. Shifting the focus to global sea ice extent conveniently glosses over the reality that the Antarctic sea ice growth has nothing to do with cooling in that region – because it is not cooling, it is warming (albeit, more slowly than the Arctic). Thus sea ice expansion around the Antarctic continent is a paradox that needs to be explained, not ignored.

    But your swerving is noted. Keep up the *ahem* ‘good work’.

    • You might want to check your meds, grant. Arctic ice is right on the edge of one standard deviation – i.e. normal

      http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php

      • grant holt says:

        You might want to check your understanding of statistics ‘Steven’. It is below the lower bound of one standard deviation. Therefore below normal. This is in spite of a relatively cool spring and early summer, as you already eluded to in another post. Would you care to make a prediction about mid-September Arctic extent, as sea ice is in such rude health?

      • F. Guimaraes says:

        Antarctic ice has not only been greater in recent years, it has been steadily increasing since 1979. Both icecaps are doing very well this year, with colder temperatures in both poles and a record ~ 20 months above average icecap on Antarctica, where it has broken 1 million positive anomaly twice already this year, including the months of winter in the NP (no melt water there then), which had one of the largest ice extents of this century, of course, due to the change in air circulation at the end of 2012 and the beginning of the flip of the AMO into its positive phase.
        Both poles are getting colder and there is a lot of snowfall, of course, due to colder weather, similar to what happened in 2008 when solar radiations went down, as they are starting to do again.
        It’s impressive how well the Arctic icecap is doing this year. It’s following closely 2009, which is the 3rd highest icecap level during the summer since 2005.
        It’s a very impressive recovery. How is it possible to deny the influence of solar radiations with such a clear evidence?

    • Sundance says:

      Grant, no one cares about sea ice. If they did they could easily/cheaply cut black carbon to significantly reduce melt at the North Pole. Instead we have Dem politicians who want revenue from a carbon tax on CO2 which, by scientists’ own admission, will do nothing to reduce ice melt with a US carbon tax.

  3. Billy Liar says:

    A big chunk broke off the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica yesterday. Unfortunately, the unit of measure was >1 Chicago; I don’t know what that is in Manhattans.

    http://www.nbcnews.com/science/iceberg-bigger-chicago-breaks-antarctica-glacier-6C10593679

    It happened in the depths of the Antarctic winter and although there are no weather stations nearby, temperatures on the coast are about -20°C. So it must have broken off due to global warming.

    (Actually, it’s been threatening to break off ever since a large crack in it was discovered in 2011. So you can see that the global warming has acted with great speed. Climate scientists have said that if this happens all over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet global se levels could rise between 0.9and 1.9 meters and we’d be in ‘heap big trouble’ – to quote Johnny Depp)

    • Andy Oz says:

      Geoscientists say that if Chicago and Manhattan break off from North America, then the world sanity index will increase a whole 6 degrees by 2020.

  4. “An associate professor at Montreal’s McGill University is correcting two papers, one of them in Nature, after a university committee found evidence of falsification…”

    “Nature is retracting a 2010 paper by a team from Princeton and Drexel on the workings of Plasmodium falciparum…”

    “In baseball, it’s three strikes and you’re out. In Nature, apparently, you can stay at the plate after three swings-and-misses.

    That’s what we concluded from a Corrigendum in last week’s issue, for “CD95 promotes tumour growth,” originally published in May 2010 and now corrected not once, not twice, but three times.”

    “Shikeagi Kato, an endocrinologist formerly of the University of Tokyo who resigned on March 31 amidst an investigation into his work, has retracted another paper, this one in Nature.”

    The above articles are, BTW, just updates on a few retractions made recently.

    Like any journal, sometimes what gets published in Nature, turns out to be junk.

    But as far as Climatology goes, how would you even think about retracting a paper based on a model that predicts X will happen 100 years from now. For all practical purposes, such claims are not even testable.

    http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/category/by-journal/nature-retractions/

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *