Arctic Sea Ice

Grasping at uncorrected straws

I rather not give too much attention to fake skeptics, or climate risk deniers as I like to call them, but lately they are somehow finding it in themselves to come up with stuff that they think disproves Arctic sea ice loss. I've already posted about MASIE annual average nonsense (about which the last word hasn't been said), but in the past couple of days an even more spectacular and desperate attempt at downplaying Arctic sea ice loss has sprung up. I'm posting it as a reference, because I'm sure this will become a (short-lived) meme.

It all started with a blog post on fake skeptic blogger Paul Homewood's blog Not a Lot of People Know That (NALOPKT) about how the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) got rid of an old sea ice extent graph "simply because it gives the 'wrong' results". I decided to partake in the discussion because I knew what it was about and the reason the DMI removed that graph was because it had been replaced by another graph months ago, accompanied by the announcement that it at one point would be removed. The graph had clearly been neglected as it diverged more and more from other SIE graphs.

It was a nice exercise for me to drive my points home, but I had no interest in posting about it here, as it was a typical mountain-molehill type of misinformation, sprinkled with some suggestive conspiracy ideation, on the fringe of the fake skeptic echo chamber.

However, for some reason Anthony Watts elevated it to WUWT status:

The word 'inconvenient' you see there is spelled incorrectly and should read 'incorrect'. Let me explain in detail what this is about, and how pathetically these climate risk deniers are grasping at straws. It's all about these two DMI sea ice extent graphs, on the left the old SIE graph with a 30% threshold, and on the right the new one with a 15%threshold (as used by most organisations around the world):

Many months ago the old graph was replaced by the newer one. There was still a link to the old graph below the new graph, accompanied by a text saying it could continued to be be viewed "for a while" (see the image in this Great White Con blog post). It's quite clear from visual inspection alone that something was increasingly wrong with the old graph, and the logical explanation was that no one at DMI was correcting it because it had been replaced by the newer graph.

In fact, this was my first argument in the discussion on the NALOPKT blog, but this didn't convince the fake skeptics who rather believed that the DMI removed the plot because, and I quote (lest you think my imagination came up with it):

A difference in nonsense

There isn't all that much fake skeptic nonsense going round when it comes to Arctic sea ice. Climate risk deniers rather just ignore the geologic time scale event going on up North that could lead to an ice-free Arctic Ocean within one human lifetime. Still, every now and then an effort is made to trivialize Arctic sea ice loss. In this case it is done by averaging all daily sea ice extent numbers over the course of a year, and then claiming that Arctic sea ice is recovering.

The source of the claim is this graph based on MASIE data, which is the subject of this blog post. I'll get to that later, but here's the 'recovery' graph:

I'm not even going to link to the blog in question, because it's full of misleading and embarrassing statements by an older gentleman whose mind has obviously been set in concrete a while ago, and this particular nonsense has been taken apart by Tamino back in September. Of course this hasn't discouraged the blogger in question to stop misleading his readers, and his latest production of the useless annual average nonsense* has, again, been taken up by the free market fundamentalist ex-banker hobby organization known as the (no) Global Warming Policy Foundation.

All of this wasn't all that interesting to me until I compared the 'recovery' graph with an annual average graph based on JAXA sea ice extent data (found here):Here the trend line goes down instead of up, 2012 is lower than 2007, and 2015 has the 4th lowest annual average instead of 6th. That's quite a difference. What could be causing it?

Now, the MASIE FAQ page has this:

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.

The bunny explains

It started one and a half year ago with the suspension of Arctic scientist Charles Monnett, which quickly turned out to be a Kafkaesque witch hunt. It is becoming increasingly clear that the 'investigation' was fuelled by fossil fuel, and the person that explains the whole saga best is none other than lapin extraordinaire Eli Rabett who will not let go of this carrot.

Over on Rabett Run:

It was Dr. Monnett in the Email, Leaking to Rick Steiner and PEER

Michael Tobis last month asked Eli to explain why the Department of the Interior was going after Charles Monnett.  The Kulluk is the short answer, more specifically BOEM wanting to approve Shell's drilling plans for the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.  The leaks were used to tie Shell, BOEM and BSEE up in court, delaying the issuance of permits four years from 2008 to late 2012 and indeed, this was the only ground that at the conclusion of their farcical investigation that the DOI Inspector General cited to reprimand Monnett.

Read the rest here.

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:

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:

The Double Recovery of Arctic Sea Ice

This is a re-post from Dr. Inferno's concise but brilliant analysis:

The Double Recovery of Arctic Sea Ice

Just two months ago we learned that Arctic Sea Ice Is Normal For The First Time In At Least Seven Years

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/nsidc-arctic-ice-extent-normal-for-the-first-time-in-at-least-seven-years/

Now we are told that Arctic Sea Ice is the lowest on record for the time of year.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Just what is going on?
Lets ignore what the so-called "scientists" say and look instead to the wealth of knowledge Blog Science has built up about Arctic sea ice over the years:

Use of graphs

Since the inception of this blog in 2010 a small community has developed of people who are interested in everything concerning Arctic sea ice and the science surrounding it. Though not climate scientists, a lot of these people have certain skills due to their work or education, and so it was hardly surprising that several of them, including myself, started playing around with data and make graphs based on them.

A couple of days ago an article on the BBC website appeared that discusses geoengineering to stave off a possible major methane release (we discussed this here). Based on written evidence by professor Peter Wadhams and the Arctic Methane Emergency Group for the Environmental Audit Committee of the British House of Commons that was published on February 24th (followed by oral evidence as delivered on February 21st, and published on March 8th), this graph appeared in the article:In the bottom right corner there was a caption saying 'PIOMAS project' (it has now been removed). Unfortunately the graph had nothing to do at all with PIOMAS or the Polar Science Center or its scientists, who decided to provide the data after popular request. The graph is made and regularly updated by ASI blog commenter Wipneus, who has a collection of graphs based on PIOMAS data and other sources on his ArctischePinguin site.

There are two things I'd like to make clear with regards to this:

The pitfalls of prediction

This is the last post on pseudo-skeptics for a while, I promise. I have written four in two melting seasons, out of approximately 250 posts.

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The Arctic sea ice, it can burn.

We all remember how Anthony Watts and Steven Goddard were a bit overconfident last year and predicted a nice recovery ('you bet ya'). Their prediction turned out to be just 1 million square km too high. Of course, it didn't matter much for their reputation.

Nevertheless, this year the bravado has magically disappeared and thus they didn't do any predictions, although Goddard still likes to imply that we are witnessing a recovery at every opportunity he gets (for example writing multiple posts at the start of the melting season about how well 2011 is tracking 2006).

Their colleague Joe Bastardi did much better, taking a conservative view and predicting that 2010 would go relatively low. As it did. This success instantly made him last man standing on the pseudo-skeptic side of the debate. Or at least with regards to the Arctic sea ice.

So what did he predict for the 2011 melting season?

 

One down, zero to go. Extent didn't set a new record low, but the credibility of pseudo-skeptics did. Bastardi was at least as wrong as Watts and Goddard (who got off lucky) last year.

Of course, this could happen to anyone (happens to me quite regularly). But most rational and honest people own up to their mistakes and learn from them. Or did I miss Bastardi's explanation for his miserably failed prediction?