Jeff said that the ice was going to melt like crazy during the third week of August and set a record low for the date. It is now the fourth week of August.
Almost as skillful as Hansen’s strong El Nino forecast. They can’t get a seven day forecast right, but they can tell us what the temperature will be in 100 years.
blow wind blow…..
I actually want to see the ice drop to record lows…..
….I just fans them all into hysterics
And the more hysterical they get, the more damage they do to themselves
Has Dr. Masters acknowledged his mistake? Looks like a perfectly average year.
They never do Andy, he just goes on to the next one….
…it’s agenda and has nothing to do with accuracy
Andy, what do you mean by average? The ice extent is near 2007 levels, and I wouldn’t consider 2007 average. What I would consider is that the Arctic has entered a new climate state with more seasonal ice loss each year. The average seasonal ice loss from 2007-2010 is 70%. Compare that to 56% in the 1980s, 59% in the 1990s and 61% from 2000-2006.
Who came from heaven to explain what “Average” is or should be? We have a pitifully short set of records. When the ice age scare of the late 70’s had our attention, “Average” was what had been experienced in the previous few decades, some of that most likely very similar to now.
C’mon, Steve. You are “cherry picking” with an Arctic Roos “area” map. You know that if area doesn’t stick with the program, then extent is the proper measure. And if not extent, then volume. And if not volume, then multi year ice. And if not any of those things, then pump out articles and papers which ignore what is happening while telling everyone how bad it all is.
So you are betting on a record minimum. My forecast this year is that MYI increases.
You missed my sarcasm. I think the whole arctic ice “death spiral” meme being pushed by Mark Serreze and his acolytes is a crock, and we just happen to be bumping along the bottom of an Arctic ice cycle that will see 1970’s like summer extent in the next 20 years. That being said, i did predict on Solar Ham’s summer ice poll that the IJIS minimum extent this summer would be 4 million sq. km. or just a bit below. I made that prediction based on certain conditions that existed at the start of the summer which I believed to be pertinentto the summer melt. It’s pretty clear now that my prediction will not be verified. This will be the first time in over 3 years of predictions on that site that i’ve been wrong.
That being said, I’ve also predicted over there that we will see a choppy rise in summer extent over the next several decades. The truth is, Arctic ice waxes and wanes with the natural climate cycles, and all the hysteria is unfounded..
That’s pretty spot on I would say, the tongue of older ice to the Russian side is proving a tough nut to crack and it will just get older of course. Will be interesting to see how it does in 2012, we might have a real big Canadian Maple leaf distribution for a few years to come????
Andy
I do that sometimes… it’s to the point you can’t tell sarcasm from the AGW defenders… so you know, it happens.
Yeah, these global warmers really know how to predict the future.
where’s Tony Duncan?
I believe he was banned.
Last couple of days haven’t been as nice to the sea ice as the previous week, lowering my predicted JAXA minimum daily value to:
4456534 km^2
-Scott
I am still sticking by my 4.75 given very early in 2011. Same time Joe Bastardi said 5.5 plus … stick to the weather Joe 😉
Andy
hmmm….I thought banning only happened on climate blogs run by climate scientists (at least according to comments made on climate skeptics blogs).
Julienne,
Nobody is banned.
NW passage has less ice in it than my gin and tonic I am currently drinking.
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/prods/CVCHDCTWA/20110815180000_CVCHDCTWA_0005967818.gif
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/prods/CVCHDCTEA/20110815180000_CVCHDCTEA_0005967837.gif
Give it another 5 – 10 years and it will be a major shipping route for 2 months of the year and people like this
http://www.zen141854.zen.co.uk/pole.jpg
will be going there as a premier sunbathing destination
Complete crap. It will never be open before mid-August
Steve, do you have a basis for saying that the NWP won’t be open? It has been open since 2007. In fact:
NW passage Southern route NW Passage Northern route Northern Sea Route (Siberian coast)
2011 OPEN STILL CLOSED OPEN
2010 OPEN OPEN OPEN
2009 OPEN CLOSED OPEN
2008 OPEN CLOSED OPEN
2007 OPEN OPEN CLOSED
but it looks like the northern NWP route is just about open now…
I said “before mid-August”
The northern route may well not be but the southern routes are lmost certainly likely to be. I can see mid July to mid Sept easily.
Andy
Joe’s meteorology was spot-on. He just failed to factor in the effects of the Russian ice-breakers.
Those ice breakers are nuclear powered, not dropping nuclear bombs !
😀
Andy
Phil Nizialek said
“That being said, I’ve also predicted over there that we will see a choppy rise in summer extent over the next several decades.”
What leads you to put forward this prediction?
Andy
Yes, I would be curious by what mechanism you think the rise will happen by?
Easy, Julienne. More ice will freeze in the winter and less will melt in the summer. But something tells me that’s not the answer you were looking for.
Ahem. let’s see. I think three or more natural cycles (PDO, AMO and solar) will sync to some extent over the next three decades, leading to cooler temps worldwide, and including the arctic. Given appropriate lag times for the effects of these cycles, we’ll see a slow and choppy summer extent recovery. If you look at the last five years of summer extent, it looks a lot like the decline in summer extent is bottoming out as the impact of these cycles moving into cooler phases starts to take hold.
All that being said, it doesn’t seem to be of great moment to me. Industrial civilization will be burning fossil fuels for the rest of my life, and those of my children (who are in their twenties). Tthe benefits and postive lifestyle effects of a world run on fossil fuels are too great to give up to prevent purely speculative future costs. Human kind has never had it so good, and as a practical matter, the Hansens and Ehrlichs of the world have got to come up with something more concrete than apocalyptic predictions based on computer models before people go back to windmills for power and horses for transport, not to mention decide to make the totally destructive decision to stop breeding. In my life, i’ve seen so many like predictions fail to materialize (population bomb, coming ice age, SARs, legionaire disease, nuclear winter, Y2k, about a dozen “peak oil” scares) that I would be a fool to buy into the draconian solutions being proposed to “stop” supposed runaway AGW. (By the way, i do believe that GHGs are climate drivers. The physics makes sense to me, I just don’t think CO2 is the predominant climate driver, or that the effect of all climate feedbacks are even remotely understood. More important to me however, is the economics of the matter)
Hope that provides fodder for your cannons. By the way, I am an infrequent visitor to these boards, so check back from time to time if you have any interest in my replies.
Hi Phil, thanks for your reply. I too don’t check on a regular basis so sometimes my comments may take a while to come. I too don’t buy into a runaway AGW, since I understand there are lots of uncertainties in our climate system that still need to be resolved for better predictions. However, I do believe that the increase in carbon we are adding to the atmosphere does have some impact, it’s the magnitude of that impact that is unclear.
Even so, my interest in moving towards alternative fuel sources has more to do with wanting clean air, clean water, pristine wilderness areas, etc. than global warming.
The Arctic sea ice loss though will have large implications for our climate, because of its impact on the temperature gradient between the equator and poles that drives our ocean and atmospheric circulation. Trying to understand these impacts is what I’m interested in. I do believe the Arctic will likely be ice-free (less than 1 million sq-km) during my lifetime. BTW…this summer is not seeing any recovery, the extent today is 4.88 (lower than 2008, 2009 and 2010 at this time of year, and not much above the value of 4.79 in 2007). And in fact if you look at the amount of ice melted each summer, you will find that the last 4 years have seen on average 10.5 million sq-km of seasonal ice loss, compared to an average of 9.2 million sq-km from 1979-2006. That said, certainly natural climate variability could slow or reverse the seasonal ice loss for a while.
Julienne,
Do you believe that there is more or less MYI than last year at this time?
Natural climate variability could also increase the amount of ice loss for a short period! The gate swings both ways!
Well…….. if some people would quit plowing through the middle of our MYI, we might have a better chance of arctic recovery. Is it NOAA that’s planting all of those buoys just north of Greenland?
Hmm, comment overlooked or just ignored?
🙁
Hi Steve, not sure yet until I look at the number at the end of this melt season, it will depend on how much was lost in the Beaufort/Chukchi seas again this summer and how much was exported out of Fram Strait.
Mike, yes it certainly can. I think natural variability has been reinforcing the background warming, leading to more ice loss.
Julienne:
It could well be only the natural weather patterns we are seeing at this time because what we are seeing looks suspiciously like past patterns and according to some calculations were expected about the time they happened all based on “Natural Variations”. If your AGW is contributing it would probably be to small to separate from natural. Therefore I think you have the cart pulling the horse!
Steve, I do have a nice plot showing comparisons of ice age versus ice thickness from ICESat through 2009 that Dr. Maslanik has put together that shows the age vs thickness relationship previously published by Maslanik et el. (2007) based on ICESat data from 2003-2006 has changed quite dramatically (with substantial thinning of the oldest ice). Surprisingly, 2009 saw even thinner MYI than 2008, which I didn’t quite expect. The thinning in the spring 2008 ice makes sense from the large amount of basal melt observed in summer of 2007.
One thing that I’m working on next month is to work with some of the IceBridge data to see if that’s consistent with the ICESat/age relationship.
James, just overlooked….NOAA has deployed buoys at the North Pole. I believe Uni of Washington also has buoys there as well as CRREL. I know the # of ships in the Arctic has increased, but I’m not sure about how many extra research vessels are up there. The US only has 2 icebreakers. Most of the shipping increase is tourism and commercial rather than research.
I’ve been tracking some of the movements up there. Apparently, so have a few others in that the website I used is hardly accessible anymore. It is dizzying to see so much traffic there. Yes, tourism and commercial. The Russians seem to be staying pretty active. And the Canadians seem to have some activity as well.
The buoys I was referring to, were ones that just showed up the other day. Just north of Greenland, there were 4-5 the other day, now we’ve 10-12. Seemed odd to me.
well if we now have 10-12, that’s great since these mass balance buoys are important tools to better understand the contributions of melt versus dynamics to the sea ice decline. they are also useful validation tools.
I have seen slides from Dr. Lawson Bringham before that show the increase in shipping in the last few years and it is quite dizzying as you say..
I’m not sure what type or purpose those are. They’re just dots with numbers on a map to me. It was the location and timing that piqued my interest. I was hoping you had some particular insights to this. But, it seems not.
BTW, was just having some fun with you. 🙂 I don’t believe you’d intentionally ignore me.
Ice has taken a beating the last few days, particularly the area metric. While noisy, CT’s area has already dropped below the 2008 and 2010 minima, and this year’s minimum could be as much as 3 weeks out still (the last 4 year’s minima all occurred between Sept 8 and 10). However, 2005’s minimum occurred on Sept 1, so we may be close to the area minimum.
Extent paints a different picture, and 2011 is still 208k km^2 above 2007 according to JAXA (and is ~250k km^2 below 2008).
Given recent performance, there’s a pretty good chance of breaking 2007’s area minimum record (admittedly there’s a fair amount of uncertainty in that metric), but my extent prediction for JAXA daily minimum is now at 4366631 km^2, which is still above 2007.
-Scott
Taken a beating? There is some low concentration ice around the edges moving around. Temperatures are below freezing across most of the ice. You take these 15% numbers way too seriously. This melt season is done for all practical purposes.
I probably do take the 15% extent numbers too seriously, but they’re the best data we have to go by.
In the last 7 losses, JAXA showed an average loss of 50647 km^2, compared to the 2002-2010 average of 40938 km^2, or 24% higher. The noisier area metric showed an average loss of 47698 km^2 compared to the 1979-2010 average of 20506 km^2, so more than twice as high.
Personally, I expect the area to show a sharp rise here in a few weeks as the melt ponds freeze over and remove that confounding issue in the area measure…but I think that will be a bit late for preventing it from going under 2007. Extent on the other hand…I expect it to finish close to halfway between 2007 and 2008.
-Scott
James, I’m not sure on the exact # of North Pole buoys currently in operation, you can
see what CRREL has here: http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/ with the active buoy data here: http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/newdata.htm
University of Washington has their north pole buoys http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/maps_daily_northpole.html
and of course there are lots of groups that participate in the IABP program (see here:http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/overview_contributions.html), but this table isn’t updated to the present.
Or perhaps your comment is about the # of ships? No I don’t have any particular insight into the # for this year since I’m not tracking shipping in the Arctic. Dr. Lawson Brigham though is regularly involved in Arctic shipping assessment, so I’m sure there will be another report coming out soon that updates their last shipping assessment report.
Julienne,
Thanks much for the links! My interest was specific to the new buoys. I’m assuming they were placed by a boat of some sort. I was using the site annotated in this pic. http://suyts.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/more-buoys.gif (sorry about the size) It showed both buoys and ships, but it isn’t all inclusive.
But, as I stated, apparently the site is having some traffic issues of their own.
Julienne, I think the traffic(shipping and tourism) will only increase. I think this would present some interesting challenges in studying the changes in the arctic and sorting out the different issues introduced by this activity. In many ways, there should be a race to gather as much less-tainted data than what you’d have in the near future.