Arctic Sea Ice

Global sea ice records broken (again)

Sabbatical or not, records must be reported (like I did last year, here and here, albeit a month later).

According to NSIDC data, the Global sea ice area record for lowest minimum has just been broken, as shown on this Wipneus graph (world famous now because of what happened after September last year; see the dark red line on the right side of the graph which should be fairly easily to spot):

The extent version is about to break the record as well:

For those who still think that man-made global warming poses no risk whatsoever, that it is a hoax, I'm just going to repeat what I wrote last year:

Global warming 2016: Arctic spin

Here's a great blog post by Tamino that tells this year's Arctic sea ice story and how a few cowards continuously lie(d) about it to their fellow men:

Global Warming 2016: Arctic Spin

The useful thing about a canary in a coal mine is that it warns you of danger before the danger kills you.

When 2016 began last January 1st, the average temperature throughout the Arctic was fully 18°F (10°C) hotter than usual for New Year’s day, and the extent of sea ice in the Arctic was lower than ever before recorded for that date:

The extra-high temperatures and extra-low sea ice with which the Arctic started the year, was just the beginning.

Arctic sea ice generally grows in extent during the first two months of the year (it being winter and all), and in that regard 2016 was no exception. It didn’t maintain its lowest-for-this-date status on all days, but did skirt the lowest-yet-seen extent consistently during the months of January and February:

Nobody who knows Arctic sea ice was surprised by this. It has been on the decline, overall, for decades, so it’s no surprise that this year’s levels would be at or near their lowest. It’s part and parcel of the ongoing trend of the loss of sea ice in the Arctic.

Nor was it a surprise that, even with an ongoing trend, it wasn’t always at its lowest-ever. Most everything in nature, including sea ice, doesn’t just follow a trend, it also constantly fluctuates. Added to the overall tendency, there are ups and downs and downs and ups that make it different from day to day, month to month, even year to year. But over the long haul, the fluctuations — even though they never stop — never really get anywhere. What does, what keeps on going and accumulates until we can’t ignore it any more, is the trend — and for sea ice in the Arctic, that means there’s less and less of it.

The surprise was what happened in late April and May. Ice extent didn’t just “skirt” the lowest-for-this-time-of-year line, it plunged far below and by May’s end was a whopping (not just surprising but shocking) more than half a million square kilometers less — not less than “average,” but less than seen before:

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):

Global sea ice extent record minimum

As discussed in the comment section of the Global sea ice area minimum record blog post, data provided by the NSIDC shows that the Global sea ice extent record has been broken as well:

Over on The Great White Con Jim Hunt has published this graph showing the long-term trend, still down it seems:

The old minimum record was reached in 2006 and stood at 16.766 million km2. As of today NSIDC Global SIE stands at 16.707 million km2. That's a 59K difference, and given the forecasts for the Arctic, Global SIE could go even lower.

So, that's it for the two daily Global sea ice data products (Cryosphere Today Global SIA, NSIDC Arctic SIE + Antarctic SIE). If there are any other out there, let me know. The record is probably being broken there too, if it isn't already. And also let me know if a climate risk denier outlet reports this.

Global sea ice area record minimum

Okay, we can remove the question mark of the earlier blog post concerning Cryosphere Today Global SIA, as the record was broken yesterday:

And here's how it looks on the graph from the Pogoda i Klimat website:

It's not easy to see, but 2016 has dipped below the 2006 record minimum of 14.391 km2, and currently stands at 14.365 million km2, which is 25K km2 lower. It will probably go up a bit in coming days, but the final 2016 minimum might go even lower after that.

Edit: Here's a graph from the Great White Con website showing the long-term trend for Global sea ice area minimums:

Remember, as I said, this measure doesn't tell us all that much about the health of either Arctic or Antarctic regions, if only because the seasons move in opposite directions (nevertheless, the Global sea ice trend is down). It's just an interesting statistical factoid.

However, climate risk deniers often use the Global sea ice metric as an argument that nothing is wrong and AGW is a hoax. In other words, the recent growth in Antarctic sea ice offsets the loss of Arctic sea ice (it doesn't), even though the poles are literally worlds apart and are pretty much incomparable (except for the sea ice bit).

Using this logic, it would seem that this new record minimum means there is something wrong with sea ice and AGW isn't a hoax. I wonder how they will spin this one. If they report it to their loyal readers, that is.

Now we move our eyes to the Arctic and keep an eye out for the upcoming maximum. Plenty interesting too, and not just for statistical reasons.

Global sea ice area record minimum?

This post is about global sea ice area, the simple addition of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice area.
As a statistic it's somewhat interesting, but it doesn't convey all that much information about the individual health of both polar regions,
let alone their sub-regions.

Despite this fact, or probably because of it, it's often being touted by climate risk deniers as proof that global warming is a scam and all is well, because Arctic sea ice loss is compensated by a growth in Antarctic sea ice. Even if this were true - it isn't, as this Skeptical Science article explains - it's like saying there is no hunger in the world because there are so many obese people.

But anyway, we're approaching that time of year when global sea ice area as calculated by and presented at Cryosphere Today is going to hit its minimum, or lowest amount of sea ice cover. And currently the number is quite low, as can be seen on this graph from Piotr Djaków's Pogoda i Klimat website:

According to the data 2016 is already 4th lowest at 14.73 million km2, just behind 2007's minimum, and almost 350K behind 2011 and record holder 2006 (14.39 million km2, the grey trend line just below the 2011 green trend line). Below I'll discuss the factors that will determine whether a new record is in the books.

An absolute prerequisite for a new record is for Antarctic sea ice area to go low. Whereas it's freezing in the Arctic right now, it's summer in the Southern Hemisphere and so the Antarctic melting season is slowly moving towards its apogee. If we look at the NSIDC sea ice extent graph for March, for instance, we can see some fairly large swings, with record years 2006 and 2011 standing out with their distinct dips:

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:

2015 minimum overview, part 2

This is a continuation of Part 1, wherein I posted several graphs and maps depicting the 2015 minimum, and the weather conditions leading up to it (Tamino has a great blog post showing the long-term sea ice extent trends, all of them, not just the cherry-picked, meaningless one the GWPF selected to mislead).

Before jumping into the ice age and volume data that is (perhaps) most interesting, intriguing, but also incomplete, I want to refer to one more factor that - besides weather conditions and ocean heat flux - can play an important role in how a single melting season plays out: land snow cover.

Here are the monthly Northern Hemisphere snow cover anomaly graphs from the Rutger University Global Snow Lab during the melting season:

It's clear snow cover got pretty low during June and July. It's a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg kind of mutual influence thing, with an albedo feedback leading to warming over land, leading to increased snow melt, etc. which then starts to influence the Arctic and its sea ice as well. There's been ongoing speculation on this correlation between land snow cover and sea ice for years now, and my guess is that there's a there there, but as it isn't the only influence, it's hard to quantify it. Either way, it has to do with (global) warming, as attested by commenter Al Rodger's guest blog a few years ago: The untold drama of Northern snow cover.

And so we turn to multi-year ice. I'll repost this animation from a blog post I posted two weeks ago, showing how virtually all of the older, thicker multi-year ice on the Pacific side of the Arctic has melted out this melting season:

Ocean circulation and Arctic sea ice retreat

As a rule I almost never link to disinformation websites, but this is funny. I'm guessing a combination of blind bias and a busy schedule (one must try to be charitable) have caused Anthony Watts to completely misinterpret a research paper, published today in Nature Climate Change.

I'm sure he will correct it and put his usual dog whistle in front of the title (ie, 'claim'), but I'm also sure Sou from HotWhopper has archived yet another prime example of Watts' wishful thinking, fueled by his climate risk denial.

Watts says 'Study: Arctic sea ice retreat due to ocean circulation changes', but of course, it's the other way around: Ocean circulation changes due to Arctic sea ice retreat. Or as this Washington Post reporter has put it aptly:

Melting Arctic sea ice could be disrupting the oceans’ circulation
- with major consequences

A close up view of the Greenland Sea, June 21, 2014 (NASA Earth Observatory)

We already know that melting sea ice in the Arctic is bad news. Less ice means less habitat for animals like polar bears, and it also means there are fewer reflective surfaces in the North to bounce sunlight back into space, allowing the planet to absorb more heat. And as global warming continues to warm up the Earth, we’re only going to lose more ice.

A study released Monday in Nature Climate Change is drawing attention to yet another ice-related problem — one that could cause some large-scale consequences. According to the study, retreating sea ice could disrupt a major ocean circulation pattern and even affect climate patterns in Europe.

As it turns out, sea ice in the Greenland and Iceland seas is an important player in the workings of a powerful ocean current known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. This current acts as a kind of conveyor belt, carrying warm water from the equator to the poles, and then shuttling cold water back to the tropics where the cycle starts all over again. The Atlantic overturning circulation, in turn, is the Atlantic branch of a much larger global overturning circulation, which shuttles water all over the globe.

Read the rest here, don't go to Watts' conspiracy disinformation den.

Bill McKibben nails it

This simply has to be shared, as Bill McKibben expresses my thoughts exactly. This sentence just about says it all: "It’s as if the tobacco companies were applying for permission to put cigarette machines in cancer wards. And the White House gave Shell the license."

I haven't seen such a good metaphor for quite a while.

Here's the op-ed McKibben penned for the New York Times:

Obama’s Catastrophic Climate-Change Denial

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — THE Obama administration’s decision to give Shell Oil the go-ahead to drill in the Arctic shows why we may never win the fight against climate change. Even in this most extreme circumstance, no one seems able to stand up to the power of the fossil fuel industry. No one ever says no.

By “extreme” I don’t just mean that Shell will be drilling for oil in places where there’s no hope of cleaning up the inevitable spills (remember the ineptness of BP in the balmy, accessible Gulf of Mexico, and now transpose it 40 degrees of latitude north, into some of the harshest seas on the planet).

No, what’s most extreme here is the irresponsibility of Shell, now abetted by the White House. A quarter century ago, scientists warned that if we kept burning fossil fuel at current rates we’d melt the Arctic. The fossil fuel industry (and most everyone else in power) ignored those warnings, and what do you know: The Arctic is melting, to the extent that people now are planning to race yachts through the Northwest Passage, which until very recently required an icebreaker to navigate.

Now, having watched the Arctic melt, does Shell take that experience and conclude that it’s in fact time to invest heavily in solar panels and wind turbines? No. Instead, it applies to be first in line to drill for yet more oil in the Chukchi Sea, between Alaska and Siberia. Wash, rinse, repeat. Talk about salting wounds and adding insult to injury: It’s as if the tobacco companies were applying for permission to put cigarette machines in cancer wards.

And the White House gave Shell the license. In his first term, President Obama mostly ignored climate change, and he ran for re-election barely mentioning the subject until Hurricane Sandy made it unavoidable in the closing days of the campaign.

Theoretically his second term was going to be different. The president has stepped up the rhetoric, and he’s shown some willingness to go after domestic greenhouse gas emissions. His new regulations on coal-fired power plants will be helpful, as will his 2012 rules on fuel efficiency for cars and trucks. And his nonbinding pledge that America will cut emissions in future decades may make the upcoming climate talks in Paris less of a fiasco than earlier talks in Copenhagen.

But you can’t deal with climate on the demand side alone. If we keep digging up more coal, gas and oil, it will get burned, if not here, then somewhere else. This is precisely the conclusion that a study in the journal Nature reached in January: If we’re to have any chance of meeting even Mr. Obama’s weak goal of holding temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, we have to leave most carbon underground. That paper, in particular, showed that the coal reserves in the Powder River basin in the West and the oil in Canada’s tar sands had to be left largely untouched, and that there was no climate-friendly scenario in which any oil or gas could be drilled in the Arctic.

Read the rest of the op-ed here.