Al Gore Ice-Free Arctic Update

Nobel laureate Al Gore said there was a 75% chance the Arctic would be ice-free in 2014.

May 30 ice extent is the highest in a decade.

ScreenHunter_204 May. 30 04.04

COI | Centre for Ocean and Ice | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut

About Tony Heller

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18 Responses to Al Gore Ice-Free Arctic Update

  1. Ben Vorlich says:

    If Al Gore was a bookmaker he’d be the first one in history who had to, rather than from choice, ride a bike.

    One of my dad’s (many) roundabout ways of advising against something was “You never see a bookie on a bike”.

  2. Tel says:

    Interesting that at this particular time of year the ice extent does not change at all in a decade. I mean not more than a fraction of a percent.

    If there’s supposed to be these long term heat effects and very slow response time to CO2 then how can every year have a point where it all comes back to the same level again? That would imply no “memory” in the system from year to year, and all time constants are short.

    • Jason Calley says:

      Tel, interesting point you make. That tight cluster certainly indicates that whatever is driving ice area changes from year to year, it is unlikely to be a normal sort of function of area itself. The feared albedo death spiral (low ice area causes low albedo causes warming causes low ice area) seems to be ruled out.

      Note, however, that the tight cluster of data points does not rule out some chaotic function of yearly ice changes being tied to current areas.

    • stewart pid says:

      Gents … I was looking at the various reporting areas just last night and thinking similar thoughts and noticed that up until about now the majority of ice loss is in areas that really aren’t the true arctic (at least IMHO) … check here to see what I mean.
      http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.13.html
      Go down to the map of the entire arctic and click on any region to pull up the data … repeat.

  3. Morgan says:

    If they don’t expunge that error from May, it will artificially lower the average for the year

  4. emsnews says:

    That was no error, it was the BLOW TORCH! But the gas ran out of the tank so they had to stop.

    • Scott says:

      No, it was all the rotten ice flipping over at once to show its rotten underbelly. Satellites read the rotten underbellies as they should be read–as open water. So it looks like there is about 3 million km^2 of rotten ice in the Arctic right now. It’s probably all at the highest latitudes and will melt out this summer for sure. So we’ll be about that much lower than last year’s minimum, for a final DMI value of 1.2 million km^2. Climate scientists round to the nearest 0.666 million km^2 and round down for modern ice (up for ice before 1997), so the final reported value will be 666 thousand km^2. Because this is less than a million, it will be reported as ice free.

      -Scott

  5. Brad says:

    blah blah extent, blah blah blah thickness blah blah. You see, it will now be thickness that is most important, not extent. 🙂

    • Send Al to the Pole says:

      I think it’s already been thickness….but PIOMAS is running out of ice to fake data from

    • BobW in NC says:

      That’s the liberal environmental magic – if something is shown to be false, ignore further mention of it as though it never happened (“la-la-la I can’t hear you!”) and move on to something else, which is now the critical factor…

  6. They always ‘assume’ (keeping in mind what that means) that a rise in CO2 levels causes the so-called green-house effect. Since we actually know so very little about the overall dynamics of planets and their atmospheres, perhaps something else is causing the greenhouse effect, which in turn drives up the CO2 levels? I mean, that’s at least as plausible as the theory pushed by the Al Gores of the world. Man has only been aware of the atmosphere for 100 or so years, we still have a LONG way to go in totally understanding it. Charlatans will ALWAYS claim to have knowledge unavailable to the common man, but snake oil salesmen are a dime a dozen.Lets face it, ALL forms of energy available to us are ‘renewable’. The carbon cycle just happens to be measured in millions of years. This little old planet has survived MANY ice ages and ‘greenhouse’ ages, too. When man is long gone, it will still be here, spinning around in space, unperturbed by man and his grandiose plans. We will hardly make a permanent dent in the long history of planet Earth. IMHO.

  7. Dmh says:

    The graph of “cryosphere today”,
    http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
    also shows the 2014 anomalies evolving similarly to 2005, starting the year with a relatively low value but stabilizing above -1 million km2 after that.

  8. Brian H says:

    Some people just have the “knack”. Oh, hi, Al!

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