Arctic Sea Ice

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.)

Perception of the Arctic

There was a time, not too long ago, when I didn't know the Arctic existed. Sure, I knew there was a North Pole and that it was cold there, but somehow I always thought that the Arctic and the Antarctic were the same thing, that someone had forgotten to add the Ant-. And of course, polar bears were hunting penguins. Or vice versa. Whatever.

It was around 2006 when I started to get interested in global warming and the changes in climate it could cause, just before An Inconvenient Truth would shift the Climate PR war to higher gears. I vaguely noticed there is a place called 'the Arctic' - where the ocean is covered by a floating layer of ice of a few metres thick - when the perfect storm of 2007 annihilated the 2005 sea ice area and extent records. I remember reading about it on RealClimate and the comments there were the spark that would eventually fire my intention to start this blog.

In the meantime the 2012 melting season - not a perfect storm, even though it hosted a big one towards the end - annihilated all of the 2007 records. It's quite clear now that sea ice is melting much, much faster than anticipated, and the jaw-dropping sight of an ice-free Arctic that was projected to occur somewhere towards the end of this century, could be witnessed towards the end of this decade (if not earlier). The melting itself as well as potential consequences are getting more and more media attention, and lately I have been wondering how much of this news is actually seeping into the collective consciousness.

Melting of the Arctic sea ice

Below is a guest blog by Jos Hagelaars who regularly posts on Bart Verheggens Dutch-English climate blog. Jos has been a hot streak lately, looking back at how the Klotzbach 2009 Hot Spot paper is holding up, producing a new iconic graph called the Wheelchair (TM: Rabett inc.) and with his latest blog post discusses the result of the first Climate Dialogue that had Arctic sea ice as its first subject.

I wrote about this Dutch initiative when it was first presented, and even though I thought there wasn't enough talk about potential consequences/risks that disappearing Arctic sea ice poses, I found it actually exciting to have the representative of (fake) skeptics admit that the decrease is largely caused by Anthropogenic, or human-caused global warming. That ought to be a game changer. Some day. Hopefully soon.

Below is Jos Hagelaars' take on the discussion, starting with an excellent summary of everything regarding Arctic sea ice.

Melting of the Arctic sea ice

by Jos Hagelaars

This was the title of a discussion that was held on the recently launched website ClimateDialogue regarding the possible causes of the decline in Arctic sea ice over the past decades. Three experts participated in this discussion: Walt Meier, Research Scientist at the NSIDC, Judith Curry, professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and Ron Lindsay, Senior Principal Physicist at the Polar Science Center of the University of Washington.

In this blog post I will start off with a description of the observations of the Arctic region, followed by a short overview of the potential causes of the decline in Arctic sea ice, incorporating the views of the three experts as they were expressed on ClimateDialogue. The final parts concern the uniqueness of this decline in a historical perspective and the possibility of having an ice-free Arctic in the summer in the not too distant future.

Observations of the Arctic region since 1979

Since 1979 the Arctic region has been extensively monitored by satellites. They detect e.g. the ice surface area, the extent of the area covered with ice and also the total amount or volume of ice. The results of these observations are startling. For example, sea ice area and the amount of perennial (multi-year) ice has decreased dramatically over the past 3 decades, as is visualized by the images in figure 1 and 2, generated by NASA (see here and here).

Fig. 1. Minimum ice extent.
The yellow line indicates the average minimum ice extent of the past 30 years
compared to the minimum ice extent on September 16th 2012.

Fig. 2. Perennial ice.
The bright white central mass shows the perennial sea ice. The larger light blue area shows the full extent of the winter sea ice including the average annual sea ice during the months of November, December and January.

Read the rest over at Our Changing Climate.

CT SIA anomaly above zero

After all those negative records that were reported not so long ago (how many were there? I've lost count), it is nice to be once again given the opportunity to make known a positive record: Global sea ice area as reported on the Cryosphere Today website has been above the zero baseline for two days now (data here).

Even though the CT SIA anomaly dips ever lower, the anomaly can still go positive around this time of the year.  This event follows the previous one a lot earlier than the one before that, which was a record 444 days and the first full calendar year of negative anomaly.

As usual the Antarctic sea ice anomaly is so positive that it compensates for the semi-permanent negative anomaly in the Arctic:

Looking for winter weirdness 5

From WattsUpWithThat (via Pierre Gosselin and Marc Morano):

Increased evaporation combined with more heat loss in the Arctic due to a record low amount of Arctic sea ice is the likely cause.

The likely cause of this: This graph is made and updated by the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab. They also have maps showing the Northern Hemisphere December and daily (in this case January 5th 2013) departure from normal:

Three of the five highest positive anomalies for December have all occurred in the last four years. It does indeed make sense that all of that open water in the Arctic Ocean has something to do with it. If that keeps up for a couple of more years, we could start calling it climate change, right? Not in a couple of decades, but now, as we speak.

It's exhilarating to see fake skeptics acknowledge this so casually. Just recently, the only fake skeptic scientist with any credentials they could find for the first Climate Dialogue on Arctic sea ice, Dr. Judith Curry, even acknowledged that at least 50% of the disappearance of Arctic sea ice was due to human activity.

And so you could even plausibly posit that all the deaths and damage due to the recent extreme cold in Russia and China are partially caused by AGW. I'm not saying it is definitely so, but it isn't that far-fetched either. And it's most probably not the last we've seen of it. If September sea ice cover stays at the level of the last 5-6 years or even diminishes further, we could be seeing more snowfall anomalies during winter. In other words, more deaths and damage.

Fake skeptics implicitly (are starting to) agree with this, but still they'll do anything to keep their coveted laissez- faire business-as-usual scenario going for as long as possible. Never mind the deaths and damage along the way, these sacrifices are needed for tomorrow's heaven.
I don't know, but it reminds me of war propaganda in the vein of 'Die, young man, for the future of your country'. Too bad they're not so honest as to say it outright.
I'd have more respect for them.

At the end of the post the WUWT science team even announces:

The real AR5 bombshell

The whole fake skeptic propaganda effort disguised as 'leak' is boring me to death, but of course it's interesting to have a sneak peek preview of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and see what they will have to say about Arctic sea ice. Geoff Beacon from the Brussels Blog already had a go at it, and found some frown inducing remarks. But for the sake of chronology I'm starting with first things first. 

From the Summary for Policymakers:

The average decadal extent of Arctic sea ice has decreased in every season since satellite observations commenced in 1979. The overall decrease in sea ice extent over the period 1979–2011 has been 3.9 [3.7 to 4.1] % per decade with larger changes occurring in summer and autumn (see Figure SPM.1). There is robust evidence of a decline in ice thickness, and in ice volume. The overall mean winter thickness has about halved between 1980 and 2009 {4.2.2}.

This, of course, is correct, and should give any sensible person pause. Given the magnitude of the event, the rate at which it is progressing (see long-term graphs), and the uncertainties with regards to possible consequences (in other words: we don't know what the worst case scenario could be), it's clear that just this short paragraph in the SMP (Summary for Policymakers) is enough to warrant some serious policymaking, which, I'm sorry to say, is not in favour of business-as-usual. Well done, IPCC!

But then, further on in the SMP, we get this:

There is very high confidence that climate models realistically simulate the annual cycle of Arctic sea ice extent, and there is high confidence that they realistically simulate the trend in Arctic sea ice extent over the past decades. {9.4.3}.

Very high confidence? I don't know about that, but before going to Chapter 9 let's first have a closer look at Chapter 4: Observations: Cryosphere, section 4.2.2.1:

Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!

Skeptical Science's John Mason has written a wonderful article, debunking some of the nonsense that is being spouted by fake skeptics to trivialize the stunning 2012 melting season (Tamino also re-whacks one of those moles):

Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared - it's the Silly Season!

Posted on 22 September 2012 by John Mason

The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is. Winston Churchill, 1916.

Late summer has long been known in media circles as the Silly Season, when any old story, embellished a bit here and a bit there, is trundled out to fill column space normally occupied by the graver matters of politics and business.

In the world of climate science, late summer is of course rather more important, marking the peak of the annual sea-ice melting season of the Northern Hemisphere, and this year has been extraordinary, with the canary in the coal mine tweeting louder than ever that something is seriously amiss with the climate.

With Arctic sea-ice having reached a record low extent, area and volume, several weeks ahead of the usual end-of-melt date, the Blogosphere has been ablaze with lengthy discussions of this event and its potential and worrisome ramifications. There have also been mass-outbreaks of denial accompanied by varying degrees of silliness, as one might expect when faced with an event like a record Arctic melt-out. Many commentators could see the meltdown approaching, both in the Arctic and around parts of the Blogosphere, with Gareth Renowden over at Hot Topic speculating in early August as follows:

Read the whole thing here.

Commenter Tim has sent me a couple of graphs that puts the 'Look at Antarctica!' diversion in perspective. Here's one showing decadal averages:

Here's one showing the last 6 years of Antarctic sea ice data:

Joe Bastardi found a cherry

Now that fake skeptics have dropped the IMS sea ice extent chart to call the results of this stunning melting season into question, Joe Bastardi comes up with another try (hat-tip to Chris Biscan) to imply that the melting season is over, something that is wanted so desperately by fake skeptics that Steven Goddard a month ago said it would soon end after the Great Arctic Cyclone. Any update on that?

Look at this tweet from Bastardi:

Now, Joe Bastardi is known for not knowing much about Arctic sea ice, as we saw last year when his prediction for the 2011 minimum failed miserably. This time he uses sea surface temperature maps - from the Danish Meteorological Institute (thanks for the link, Joe!) - to say something about the shape of the ice cover. I don't know why the DMI uses such an unrealistically large ice cover for its SST map, or why if differs so much even from the one on their SST anomaly map (select parameter on the left in the link above), but I would guess that if you want to know or say something about the shape of the Arctic sea ice cover, you go and have a look at sea ice concentration maps, such as the one produced by the University of Bremen (archive for this year here).

I had a look and compared yesterday's map to that of August 26th:

Record dominoes 10: IMS sea ice extent

That's it, all the daily sea ice records (area, extent and volume) that I know of have been broken (see the ASI Graphs webpage). The last one is of minor importance when it comes to monitoring sea ice, but is interesting nonetheless as it was used as a last-minute straw that fake skeptics grasped when one record after the other was being smashed.

I'm talking about the Interactive Multisensor Snow and Ice Mapping System (IMS) from NOAA's National Ice Center:
As the trend line on this graph was slow to go below the other trend lines, fake skeptic Anthony Watts all of a sudden decided that this was the best and most trustworthy graph out there, calling all other products that measure and calculate sea ice cover into question. Watts' posts on sea ice are usually very short and mostly consist of copypasted material from the NSIDC, with hardly any analysis or mention of what is actually going on the Arctic (like that big summer storm, that ought to have been interesting to a weather man). It has been thus since 2010, when his and Steven Goddard's boisterous and blusterous announcement of a recovery of sea ice at the end of the 2010 melting season didn't pan out.

But in this lengthy post, riddled with mistakes and implications of deliberate fraud, Watts goes out on a limb and soon finds himself on his ass on the slippery ice. Again.

Take for instance this:

Similar melts from 1938-43?

I'm supposed to be on a holiday and should let this one slide, but it's too much. I was expecting fake skeptics to remain mostly silent in face of the ice massacre up north, but apparently they acutely sense how big this blow is to the remaining shred of their credibility, and so they upped the ante of misleading and distorting stupidity. Anyone can see and judge the silliness of paid shill Marc Morano, 5-sentence posts regurgitator/vomiter Steve Goddard and of course WUWT. But this Sunday Times article, written by well-known pseudo-journalist Jonathan Leake (search for his name on Deltoid) had a quote by presumed scientist John Christy that really got my hackles up:

Professor John Christy director of the Earth System Science Centre at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said the Arctic had indeed warmed, but there was also anecdotal and other evidence suggesting similar melts from 1938-43 and on other occasions.

"Climate change is a murky science", he said. "To some it's an easy answer to say it's due to extra green house gasses. To the rest of us, separating natural variability from human impacts remains a wicked problem."

Commenters over at Skeptical Science quickly took this nonsense apart. First FrankD:

Danske Meteorologiske Institut published a series of annual reports on arctic sea ice covering most years from 1893 to 1956. The link has one folder per year, with each containing individual pages (month identified by the trailing digit) and the whole annual report (about 5 meg each).

Just referring to August extent...

Its true that ice extent was lower in the 1930s than it had been in the preceding 30 years. In particular, 1938 saw a dramatic reduction from the previous years - it was probably 1.4 M km^2 below the then long term average and maybe 0.6 M km^2 below the already low years in the late 30's (carefully measured using Eyeball, Mk I).

So, it is fair to say there were some big melts in the 30's. But Christy's false equivalence is an epic fail - "similar melts" is pretty nice weasel-wording for mine. 1.4 M km^2 below recent climatology? Considered like that, 1938 was like 2010, I guess.

But in absolute terms, August 1938 extent was much greater (4 M km^2?) than today. So any attempt to conflate the two is...well...I can['t think of an adjective suitable for polite company.

Taking the Kinnard graphic - the 1930's "similar melt" is the second last dip on the graph, the first decline with modern observational data. This saw a return to "normal" after a peak that had seen the greatest extents in 500 years.

Compared to the current decline on Kinnard (even without "enhancement")? Well, even on Sesame Street they could tell you when one of these things was not like the other...

And then Daniel Bailey posted these two graphs:

Arctic Sea Ice Extent August 1938:

[Source]

Arctic Sea Ice Extent August 2012:

[Source]

My question to Dr. Christy: Why do you lie?