Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic sea ice presentation template

Last week I received an e-mail from commenter Terry Moran, also know as Twemoran or TerryM. In the past couple of weeks he has been working on a talk called The Demise of Arctic Sea Ice that he recently held for a small audience in Canada (here is the original presentation on Google Docs, and here is a modified version). Here's the text he sent me, I will add
some of my thoughts below:

On May 4th I gave a presentation (linked above) to a group of not particularly concerned Mensans at the Canadian Mensa Annual Gathering in Niagara Falls. The response exceeded my wildest expectations so I'm providing the Google Presentation and notes that I worked from to others who may have the opportunity to address other groups. One of the offshoots has been that I've been asked to provide a video of the talk for an educational group that works with Canada's First Nation peoples.

The Four Charts That Really Matter

Guest post by R. Gates

Recently on Judith Curry's blog, a guest post was submitted by DocMartyn which was a rather nicely (from a math perspective) done extrapolation of past tropospheric temperature trends and cycles out to 2040 and beyond. It was essentially a nice job of, as he put it, "graphology", or in other words "curve fitting". Not great science, but some nifty math. Essentially DocMartyn's curve fitting graphology approach has led him to conclude that tropospheric temperatures will remain flat to 2040 or so before accelerating upward once more. 

I happen to strongly feel that DocMartyn's projective curve fitting approach will prove to be grossly in error (as almost all such curve fitting is, except for pure chance), but here's the thing-- in the big picture of Earth's energy imbalance caused by accumulating anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the tropospheric temperatures are quite secondary. The troposphere is a low thermal inertia part of the overall energy system of the planet and contains only a fraction of the overall energy.  It seems however, that there is an undue preoccupation with focusing on this part of the system-- probably because we as humans happen to live in it, and also because it is easy to measure. And since the troposphere can be fickle and far more subject to short-term noise from natural variability, it makes the most sense to look at the parts of the system such as the oceans and cryosphere that have greater thermal inertia and are hardest to change from short-term noise. When doing this, and comparing it to the constant upward trend in CO2 emissions, the following four charts become the most salient in terms of understanding what is really happening:

When the Arctic was 8 °C warmer

You won't see it in any travel guides, probably because of its name, but Lake El'gygytgyn offers many wonders. Lately it's been in the news because of fascinating paleoclimatic data the lake has yielded to researchers drilling its bottom. They managed to extend the climatic chronology of northern latitudes by a couple of millions of years and showed, besides a lot of other interesting stuff, that the last time the atmosphere contained 400 ppm of carbon dioxide, the Arctic was around 8 °C warmer than it is now.

In this video one of the authors of the paper explains what was done exactly (hat-tip to commenter Boa05att):

Edit: There's been some confusion due to my not being precise enough. The video below is from a previous paper, a couple of months ago, by the same group. The second paper extends the paleoclimatic data even further. Still the video below explains what was done exactly to retrieve the data and has fancy images of Lake El'gygytgyn. See the end of this blog post for links to more info.

Blogger Alexander Ač sent me this short blog post to explain the implications:

Party like it's 1989

This guest blog was sent to me by Bill Fothergill, also known by his nom de plume billthefrog. It discusses and takes on the yearly fake skeptic tradition of misleading people into thinking all is fine because ice cover around the maximum (when viewed from above, of course, not from the side) is just as large or even larger than in year X. It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it. Thanks, Bill!

Another thrilling instalment in the long running saga
of the “Arctic Sea Ice Recovery”

The Arctic Sea Ice Blog features a frequently updated set of links to relevant news articles. (Or should that be “arcticles”?) One of these recently linked out to a blog hosted by the Toronto Financial Post and written by the redoubtable Lawrence Solomon. The heading of the piece in question loudly and proudly proclaimed…

Arctic sea ice back to 1989 levels, now exceeds previous decade

On one level Mr Solomon’s claim is nothing more than egregious nonsense, but it is nonetheless worth looking at in order to see how cleverly the misdirection is perpetrated. (It is also worth looking at his article for no other reason than to see the somewhat unambiguous feedback provided to Mr Solomon by a certain Neven Acropolis.)

Greenland “snow drought” spells trouble

Hat-tip to HeisenIceBerg over on the Forum.

I think most of us vividly remember last year's events on and around Greenland. It started with albedo going down considerably, causing widespread melt - at one point involving practically all of the ice sheet's surface - ending in a record mass loss of over 500 GT, 2σ below the 2003–2012 mean. Just like with the Arctic sea ice, one would expect this record to remain standing this year, but signs so far indicate this is far from a done deal. As I mentioned in the 2012/2013 Winter Analysis temp anomalies in the Greenland and Baffin Bay region were quite positive almost all winter long (see image on the right).

Now Dr. Jason Box reports the following on his Meltfactor blog:

Greenland “snow drought” makes big 2013 melt more likely

A friend in Greenland’s capital Nuuk reported (with a frown) that the backcountry skiing this year was poor due to a “snow drought”.

Figure 1. Western ice sheet snowfall totals are 30%-70% of normal. Brown areas have less than ‘normal’ precipitation. Blue/purple areas are anomalously ‘wet’. The precipitation anomalies are calculated from ‘re-analyses’ data after Kalnay et al. (1996).

Multiple melt factors combine to increase the odds of more melt water runoff from the ice sheet during the 2013 melt season:

1. less ‘cold content’ of snow to melt away (ablate) for a given energy input before bare ice is exposed;
2. a longer period of exposed darker bare ice, in this case weeks earlier bare ice exposure is likely unless a big snow dump before or during the coming warm season;
3. Less snow leads to a smaller refreezing capacity in the lower accumulation area. Thanks Robert Fausto of GEUS for reminding me of this one.
4. a possible higher concentration of light absorbing impurities per unit volume of snow, assuming that the impurities are deposited whether or not it snows.

This pattern results from a persistent atmospheric anomaly, blocking cold air transport southward along west Greenland, producing relatively warm temperatures there while northwestern Europe has had a cold winter (Figure 2):

Crowd-Source Prediction of Minimum Arctic Sea Ice

How does the collective wisdom of Arctic Sea Ice blog participants compare with expert scientific analysis in forecasting the September sea ice extent? This question seems worth exploring with a crowd-source experiment. You are all invited to submit, as comments to this post, your best guess for the mean September extent of Arctic sea ice (NSIDC). Your numerical prediction should be in the first line of the comment, followed by at least a sentence or two explaining the basis for your prediction — whether pure intuition, elaborate calculations, links to a web page, whatever you’ve got. General discussion is welcome too.

Springer science summary

Steve Bloom writes:

It looks like Springer [a company that publishes many science journals, N.] is providing a useful service in issuing open-access summaries of the state of the science within each Earth Science specialty (many, but not all, will pertain to climate science).

The new polar science one is further organized by sub-specialty, each containing a brief discussion of the science and (most valuable IMO) links to a number of papers comprising the state of the science. It's short enough so that someone unfamiliar with the field can acquire an overview in short order. Apparently the plan is to update annually.

Here's the intro to their Polar science news in brief summary:

The addition of the ‘‘News in Brief’’ series to our Views and News section will highlight recent significant research in the last year—from high-impact papers to emerging research fronts—and will include papers with both classic and new hot topics. This series will offer a rotating view among the major Earth Science areas, as various experts will be invited to provide a brief look around the recent research conducted in their area. This selection of research papers is left up to each expert and due to the broadness of each field is not intended to be a comprehensive overview. Links to the published work are provided in each section.

David Carlson, former Director of the International Programme Office for the International Polar Year, has been invited to provide a glimpse into the latest findings in polar science. Carlson outlines selected research of global relevance hoping that readers will discover the fascinating connections among and across these topics, and the unintended prominence of three restless partners: ocean, wind and ice.

The summary's summary is also well worth reading: