The Arctic receives more solar radiation this time of year than any place else on Earth, and temperatures can be very hot north of the Arctic Circle.
The total energy received each day at the top of the atmosphere depends on latitude. The highest daily amounts of incoming energy (pale pink) occur at high latitudes in summer, when days are long, rather than at the equator.
Climate and Earth’s Energy Budget
In 1927, a group of women tried to drive to the Arctic Ocean. Hot weather, melting permafrost and forest fires forced them to abandon their expedition.
the motor party journeyed to 270 miles north of the Arctic Circle, prepared for freezing weather. To their continued astonishment the temperature was never’ less than 90 degrees in the shade
The intention was to reach the Arctic Ocean, but 40 miles of marsh country on the coast prevented this. An average of 210 miles a day was made on the journey, which was arduous in the extreme, ahd at one time the car had an actual race with death among the forest fires in Sweden over terrible roads
30 Sep 1927 – WOMEN MOTORISTS – Trove
Children were sunbathing near the North Pole.
02 Jan 1927 – SUNBATHING NEAR THE NORTH POLE – Trove
One hundred degree temperatures have been reported in the Arctic.
weather stations on the Yukon River, in the Arctic, have reported temperatures of more than 100 in the shade
30 Apr 1937 – A HOT STORY FROM THE ARCTIC! – Trove
24 Sep 1937, Page 11 – Democrat and Chronicle at Newspapers.com
Every time there is a warm day in the Arctic now, ambulance chasing journalists announce the apocalypse. Fox News says Greenland is having an ice crisis, and is being flooded by “melting glacial waters.”
The mesmerizing photo Olsen snapped on June 13 as they waded over the splashy ice sheet gives the illusion that his dogs are walking on water — but it’s anything but a trick. Experts say this image is indicative of the planet’s climate crisis.
Stunning photo shows dogs ‘walking on water’ amid Greenland ice crisis | Fox News
The current round of climate nonsense started with this tweet, which journalists immediately picked up and misinterpreted.
The guy who took the picture made it very clear that it had nothing to do with glacial ice, it was sea ice melting on its surface.
Then Fox News followed up with this gross distortion.
Olsen himself is calling for immediate action:
He didn’t say anything like that. He called for increased predictive capabilities, which is pretty dubious because I saw the warm weather forecast on Ventusky several days ahead of time.
Then Fox News piled on their climate lies, claiming that Greenland has seen record breaking melt, and that 40% of Greenland’s ice has melted this year.
At the same time Olsen took this photo, news broke that Greenland has suffered a loss of two billion tons of ice already this season — about 40 percent of their nation’s icy expanse. While the country experiences annual melting from June through August, the rate so far this year has been record-breaking.
The total volume of Greenland’s ice sheet is about 2,900,000 km³, which is a little less than 2,900,000 billion tons of ice. Rather than 40% of the ice sheet melting, the correct number is 0.000007% of the ice sheet. Fox News missed by seven orders of magnitude.
Two billion tons of ice sounds like a lot, until you consider that Greenland can gain six times that much in a single day, like happened last November.
Surface Conditions: Polar Portal
But to be fair, it was Jason Samenow at the Washington Post Capital Weather Gang which started the disinformation campaign.
Let’s look individually at the claims being made.
Ice is melting in unprecedented ways as summer approaches in the Arctic. In recent days, observations have revealed a record-challenging melt event over the Greenland ice sheet, while the extent of ice over the Arctic Ocean has never been this low in mid-June during the age of weather satellites.
The dogsled photo which started this propaganda tsunami was taken by the Danish Meteorological Institute, who have been monitoring sea ice longer than anyone else. They show sea ice extent the highest in several years, declining slowly, and close to what it has been in all recent years.
Ocean and Ice Services | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut
Their claim of unprecedented Greenland melt is within measurement error of other mid-June events, and much lower than many events which occur later in the summer.
The Danish Meteorological Institute shows that Greenland melt extent has been below normal most of the time since mid-May, with a spike over the past few days. The spike is just above the average melt extent in July. Nothing unprecedented about it.
MELTA_combine_SM_EN_20190618.png (370×759)
Snowfall was a little below average this year, but there has been little melt so far this season. Much less than had occurred by this date in 2012. Claims of record melt are wildly incorrect. The amount of melt in Greenland this year has been just about average.
SMB_combine_SM_acc_EN_20190617.png (368×759)
There were a couple of relatively warm days in Greenland last week, but temperatures in the center of the ice sheet have been generally cold.
Over the past two years, Greenland’s surface gained near record amounts of ice. The Washington Post failed to mention this.
Samenow then made this stunning claim.
Greenland saw temperatures soar up to 40 degrees above normal Wednesday, while open water exists in places north of Alaska where it seldom, if ever, has in recent times.
This is complete nonsense. The ice recedes much further from Alaska’s coast every year.
Compare vs. 20 years ago.
Temperatures have been cold north of Alaska, and there has been little melt. What actually happened was that winds pushed the ice away from Alaska and towards Svalbard, where they have the most ice in years.
There is more ice around Svalbard than there was in 1922.
Strange Things Happening In The Frozen Arctic
Is the North Pole going to melt?
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers who sail the seas about Spitzbergen and the eastern Arctic all point to a radical change in climatic conditions, with hitherto unheard-of high temperatures on that part of the earth’s surface.
Formerly the waters about Spitzbergen have held an even Summer temperature in the neighborhood of 5 degrees shove freezing. This year it rose as high as 28 degrees. Last Winter the ocean did not freeze over even on the north coast of Spitzbergen. This is on the authority of Dr. Noel.
03 Dec 1922, Page 63 – The Washington Times at Newspapers.com
Same story in Baffin Bay. There is more ice now than there was in 1923.
Then Samenow tries to blame tornadoes and flooding on melting ice.
Francis had earlier suggested that conditions in the Arctic may have played a role in the extreme jet stream pattern that spurred the tornado swarm and record flooding in the central U.S. during the last two weeks of May.
“We can’t say that the rapid Arctic warming is causing this particularly pattern, but it certainly is consistent with that,” Francis, senior scientist at Woods Hole Research Center, said.
Besides the fact that his claims of unusual Arctic conditions are baseless, these claims are the exact opposite of what happened in 2o12, when there was record ice loss and the US experienced heat, drought and near record low number of tornadoes.
2012 could be the slowest tornado year since 1989
The ambulance chasers at the Washington Post pull the same nonsense all the time, cherry picking a few days which suit their agenda, and ignoring entire years which don’t suit their agenda. Here is a similar article from April.
There was nothing particularly unusual going on in April.
MELTA_combine_SM_EN_20190618.png (370×759)
And why did Samenow fail to mention the large accumulation of ice over the past two years?
There is no indication of an ice crisis in the Arctic. Greenland’s largest glaciers are growing. The Petermann Glacier is growing.
The Jakobshavn glacier is growing.
One Greenland Glacier Has Started Growing Again, But That Doesn’t Mean What You Think
The claims of an Arctic meltdown are baseless. There has been no trend Arctic sea ice since the start of MASIE records thirteen years ago.
Greenland glaciers are growing. The last two years had near record surface mass gain. The current journalistic standard of cherry picking a day here and there, and then misrepresenting the meaning of it, is journalism at its worst. Greenland is not melting down, but 80 years ago it was.
17 Dec 1939, Page 15 – Harrisburg Sunday Courier at Newspapers.com
A comprehensive smackdown. Bravo!
Yes, thanks for this! A real service!
That’s an incredible piece of investigative journalism, and demonstrates that *innovation* and *discovery* come from swimming upstream and ignoring sneer pressure. Everyone in business knows this. It’s taught in every business school, and every self-help guru preaches it
Thanks for your excellent work.
They always try to use scenarios and images most people won”t forget,
therefore it does not matter how wrong they are.
Just as with AOC”s world-ends-in-12-years BS.
It was metioned 24/7 for several month so that 100% of US populatiom heard it and 67% of democrats believed her.
Her backpaddling several month later
that it was not meant literally was just a short statement 98% will never hear of.
PS
These dogs seems to move very well on flooded ice – i guess it is not their first time nor their first year they experience this phenomenon.
PPS
remember the time greenland was so green that it got its name greenland?
That was some real global warming.
Surface melt pools form every summer. The time to be concerned is when they don’t!
Yeah–it can get warm in the North. I worked from May until August on a property north of Yellowknife.
In camp kept the perishable food in a box. Peeled back the thick layer of moss and put the box on the permafrost. Put the moss on top.
The lesser part of Yellowknife had modest houses, some were shacks. It was called “Moccasin Square Gardens”.
Folks would carry the kitchen stove into the back yard. They were wood-burning and had about six feet of stove pipe sticking up.
This was before BBQ grills.
So the choice was between heat in the house or bugs outdoors.
CO2? nope…. Let’s blame Witches! Now that’s the ticket!!!
Lance says:
June 20, 2019 at 5:51 pm
CO2? nope…. Let’s blame Witches! Now that’s the ticket!!!
Greta Thunberg (Abigail Williams wannabe) hasn’t gotten around to pointing fingers at deniers yet. But she will.
‘all point to a radical change in climatic conditions’
Stupid. There is no such thing as ‘climatic conditions.’
‘weather stations on the Yukon River, in the Arctic’
More stupid. The Yukon River isn’t in the Arctic. It touches it at Fort Yukon, but that’s it.
A link to this post should be perma-linked to the definition page of ‘eviscerate’ in all online dictionaries. Tony eviscerates the claims of the global warmist propagandists.
We do not know what eviscerate means but we reckon the global warming alarmists will be gutted by fact from fiction.
I don’t know why? Alarmists have to deny facts to be alarmists in the first place. In my experience the more facts one puts before the typical alarmist the more they deny reality.
It would require identifying the parameters of defining alarmists. The manipulators, the mass manipulated, or both.
The manipulators have to do it in order to manipulate.
Inglefield Bredning has interesting heat flows. This paragraph part of a longer, 2011 article at
http://www.natur.gl/en/communication/news/article/a/greenland-climate-research-centre-takes-the-temperature-at-inglefield-bredning/
…discusses the mixing of deep, warm gulf stream water with surface meltwater…
‘The final branch of the Gulf Stream swings around the southern tip of Greenland, at Cape Farewell, and flows up along the west coast of Greenland through Melville Bay and into Inglefield Bredning, where the current occurs as a relatively warm and saline core at a depth of approx. 300 m under the cold and relatively fresh surface water. The ocean current’s journey ends in the innermost part of the fjord, at 77 degrees north. The Atlantic Gulf Stream waters mix with meltwater and flow out of the fjord near the surface..
The question arises… what happens here most years? Perhaps some clues can be gained through published papers researching the diet of narwhals in baffin bay and connected waterways, as discussed in
https://faculty.washington.edu/klaidre/docs/LaidreandHJ_2005b.pdf
‘Stomachs collected in Inglefield Bredning in August 2002 and 2003 were from whales harvested in inner parts of the Inglefield Bredning Fjord in mid-August (four males, two females, and two juveniles of unknown sex). Average wet mass of the stomach contents was ,0.5 kg. Five of the eight stomachs sampled from Inglefield Bredning were empty. Of the three that contained material (from two males and one female, .400 cm length), fresh remains were found from polar/ Arctic cod. Other prey species found sparsely in Inglefield Bredning included Greenland halibut (6–7-mm otoliths), Pandalus shrimp, and Gonatus. This was the only summer locality where evidence of recent feeding was observed.’
As described in the paper, narwhals are deep-diver feeders. And, as whales, come to the surface to breathe.
So, somehow and sometime in the late spring and summer, the 120cm-thick winter sea ice gives way to the combined meltwater and deep, warm gulfstream water to provide access by the narwhals to both the surface and the deep fjord water.
I can imagine without difficulty that the snowmelt from the fjord-side hills would be the first to be melted by the rising springtime insolation, and flow directly downhill to the ice-sealed fjord surface. I think it would be observable very many years, at some point in the cycle, and with timing strongly influenced by the local weather, especially the patterns of insolation. This year, Western Greenland has had the necesarry clear skies for an early melt.
Having stood on the sea ice at Tuktoyuktak in Canada’s NWT on 6 June this year having driven all the way up from Whitehorse I can confirm there is plenty of the cold stuff up there. Sea Ice stretched all the way to the horizon.
Good to see Scotland getting a shout out in Alarmist weather reports, we did see a record high for February but it sure wasn’t 70°F it was 18.3°C or 64°F a number which was equalled at the same location back in January 2003. As you’ve mentioned before, just about the only regions with reliable temperature records going back more than 100years are Europe and the USA. And while we’ve warmed quite a bit here I can see no trend in American temps. Which may explain the widespread skepticism in America, and AGW credulity in Europe. The whole AGW scare is based on data from about one percent of the Earth’s surface, un freakin believable. And even the warming here in Europe is pretty trivial.
One of “Snow White’s” many fan(s) on Twitter asked me to bring this “Shock News!” to your attention:
http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2019/06/facts-about-the-arctic-in-june-2019/#Jun-23
“Arctic wide sea ice area is now lowest for the date in the high resolution AMSR2 record”
The Steffen Olsen photograph was almost certainly taken in the middle of Inglefield Gulf (which is where Qaanaaq is).
I have attached a MODIS satellite photo of Inglefield Gulf on June 10 2019.
You can see how the standing water on the ice has given it a turquoise tinge.
I will try to follow up with another MODIS satellite photo for June 10 2012 – which is very similar.
2006 and 2011 were also similar.
This seems to be a regular occurrence up there. It’s just that Steffen Olsen wasn’t there with his camera on the other occasions.
Here is a MODIS photo of Inglefield Gulf taken on June 10 2012
Thank you.
A slightly more thorough review of the MODIS photographs seems to indicate that this effect happens NEARLY EVERY YEAR at some time in June.
June 10 2019, June 14 2018. June 29 2017, June 15 2016, June 27 2015,
June 17 2014, June 13 2013, June 10 2012, June 10 2011, June 23 2009,
June 12 2008, June 15 2007, June 10 2006, June 23 2004,
June 06 2003, and June 20 2002.
I tend to agree with Tony Heller but I’m no qualified.
My friend says the following …
Quote ” I try to read it, I really do. But it just pulls false comparisons. Like claiming that because there was less sea ice in September ’98, a claim that sea ice has never been this low at this time of year (June ’19) is wrong.
How is that comparable? How is that disproving the statements it seeks to disprove? All it is doing is providing pseudoscience to muddy the waters.