Fifteen years ago NSIDC’s Mark Serreze said Arctic sea ice was in a death spiral. Grist said the Artic was past the point of no return and would be largely ice-free by 2020.
NSIDC: Arctic melt passes the point of no return | Grist
“North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: “It’s like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely.”
There has been essentially no change in Arctic sea extent ice since then.
New NSIDC director on “death spiral” Arctic ice | Grist
ftp://osisaf.met.no/prod_test/ice/index/v2p1/nh/osisaf_nh_sie_daily.txt
How did this graph get past the AI brains? GIGO
Wow, two immense mental midgets mentioned in one article – Mark Serreze and Joe Romm. These two fraudulent clowns have never been correct about anything they’ve ever claimed.
It seems they got it wrong. Now, I know that the Arctic was slightly warmer this winter than usual, but the degree of warmth essentially did not affect the albedo of the ice cap. The warm temperature was well below freezing and no ice melted, hence the albedo remained the same in that region. However, in the Western USA, and possibly other places the temperature was colder, and still is by about 10-20 F lower than normal, and large regions of the West have been covered with snow, some of which is quite extensive and will last well into the summer, possibly the fall, and even carry over into the next winter. Worldwide, this is a substantial increase in albedo and could change the surface energy balance enough to snowball Earth into the next Ice Age.
At this point in time, my explanation matches the conditions of the planet better than Hanson, Thunberg, and Mann et al (Serreze).
The climate hysteria brigade got hold of Thom’s catastrophe when it was fashionable back in the 1970s (nobody else seriously uses it nowadays), where it provided a model for the conditions for the onset of ice ages. However, it fails to explain the ends of ice ages.
Essentially, the system has two or more equilibrium states. A control variable is adjusted until the current equilibrium state becomes unstable and the system snaps quickly to one of the other equilibria, which is stable with the current value of control variable. The ‘tipping point’ narrative, of which we hear so much, tries to construct a catastrophe model using greenhouse gas concentration as the control variable.
There is an entire literature which declares that everything will appear fine, but the ‘tipping point’ will convert that atmosphere to that of Venus in a very short space of time. Apart from the fact that CO2 concentrations have been 15 times their present value without encounetering such a ‘tipping point’, the very equations on which it is based are thermodynamic rubbish.
As I recall, Venus’s atmospheric pressure at the surface is 80 atms, that is 80 x Earth’s. It is equal to the pressure at 2400 ft deep in the ocean. At that pressure, the temperature will be hot. Water at that pressure would be around 560F whether on the surface of Venus, or under the surface of Earth, and having nothing to do with CO2. I believe that Venus’s atmosphere is also 80% CO2, which makes it .8 (80)/(4/10000)= 160,000 x the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere. According to the global warming experts, man has caused our CO2 to double due to mankind’s fossil fuel burning. By their own rational, we will have to burn 320,000 times as much fossil fuel as all mankind has burned in all previous history, which probably way more than is on Earth, to get to where Venus is.
Increasing the air pressure to unheard of levels (on earth) actually did occur on earth, in the past, when the outlet between the Mediterranean and Atlantic closed, which allowed the entire Mediterranean basin to dry downwards like the Dead Sea, farther below sea-level than the Dead Sea is. Rivers like the Nile and the Rhône had to travel further down several thousand feet to either extremely salty lakes, or sometimes to places where they simply dried up in extreme heat. Just as air cools as it rises, air heats as it sinks, and the pressure increases. The coast of the Mediterranean Sea, at its lowest, was apparently a scorching wasteland devoid of life. Any fish swimming downstream in a river would turn tail at the increasing heat, or die, and no vegetation we know of was able to adapt to it. (Likely some bacteria, which can even live in geysers, adapted.) Apparently the extreme conditions allowed some interesting crystals of mineral salts to form, which still exist at the sea-bottom, and allow geologists to surmise what a strange landscape that must have been. It likely was a barrier no creature without wings could cross, with air pressures greater than we now know, but far less than experienced on Venus.
The density of air at STP is about .075lbm/ft^3, water is 62.2 lbm/ft^3. the surface pressure of Venus is equal to 2400 ft underwater.
The Arctic is screaming, “Mark, you were WRONG!!!”
This is so true. Skeptics were skeptical, but treated Serreze with dignity and respect he never returned, and waited to see if his theory had any basis. When neither the low extents of 2007 nor 2012 showed any ability to “accelerate” the decline of sea-ice, and in fact sea-ice rebounded, the premise behind the theory went down in flames.
Now it is time to start investigating elsewhere.
Read “hot Talk, cold science” by S. Fred Singer.
He dispels the lies of the “Climate fanatics.” Al Gore has become a BILLIONAIRE after setting up a company that buys and sells Emission credits. China is building at least one coal plant per month. No one says anything to Xi, hmm. BTW, the Congo has most of the world’s cobalt, needed to make batteries for cars and are using child labor to mine it. So, I guess if you are for electric cars you are for child labor.
Imagine receiving a poll as the morning alarm went off:
A. 1C hotter
B. 1C colder
C. Doesn’t matter
I can’t say how other people might vote, but I’d often pick hotter (including today).
What happens to data when its collection team’s Director-level owner has a stake in how the data looks on a chart?