Is There Really an Artic Meltdown?...

by: Les Carpenter
Rational Nation USA
Purveyor of Truth

Not being a climatologist or a scientist in the conventional sense, thus being at the mercy of the "experts", could someone, anyone, sort all the confusing and contradictory data and info out for us average, normal, hard working people with bills to pay and family's to raise so we know for sure if we are being screwed or not by the purveyors of climate change and the catastrophe will strike us all unless we cap and trade the hell out of everybody crowd.

Daily Mail - The speech by former US Vice-President Al Gore was apocalyptic. ‘The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,’ he said. ‘It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.’

Those comments came in 2007 as Mr Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning on climate change.

But seven years after his warning, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, far from vanishing, the Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in succession – with a surge, depending on how you measure it, of between 43 and 63 per cent since 2012

To put it another way, an area the size of Alaska, America’s biggest state, was open water two years ago, but is again now covered by ice.

The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres.

This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.

Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometres.

The satellite images published here are taken from a further authoritative source, the University of Illinois’s Cryosphere project.

They show that as well as becoming more extensive, the ice has grown more concentrated, with the purple areas – denoting regions where the ice pack is most dense – increasing markedly.

Crucially, the ice is also thicker, and therefore more resilient to future melting. Professor Andrew Shepherd, of Leeds University, an expert in climate satellite monitoring, said yesterday: ‘It is clear from the measurements we have collected that the Arctic sea ice has experienced a significant recovery in thickness over the past year.

‘It seems that an unusually cool summer in 2013 allowed more ice to survive through to last winter. This means that the Arctic sea ice pack is thicker and stronger than usual, and this should be taken into account when making predictions of its future extent.’

Yet for years, many have been claiming that the Arctic is in an ‘irrevocable death spiral’, with imminent ice-free summers bound to trigger further disasters. These include gigantic releases of methane into the atmosphere from frozen Arctic deposits, and accelerated global warming caused by the fact that heat from the sun will no longer be reflected back by the ice into space.

Judith Curry, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said last night: ‘The Arctic sea ice spiral of death seems to have reversed.’

Those who just a few years ago were warning of ice-free summers by 2014 included US Secretary of State John Kerry, who made the same bogus prediction in 2009, while Mr Gore has repeated it numerous times – notably in a speech to world leaders at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009, in an effort to persuade them to agree a new emissions treaty.

Mr Gore – whose office yesterday failed to respond to a request for comment – insisted then: ‘There is a 75 per cent chance that the entire polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.’

Misleading as such forecasts are, some people continue to make them. Only last month, while giving evidence to a House of Lords Select Committee inquiry on the Arctic, Cambridge University’s Professor Peter Wadhams claimed that although the Arctic is not ice-free this year, it will be by September 2015.

Asked about this yesterday, he said: ‘I still think that it is very likely that by mid-September 2015, the ice area will be less than one million square kilometres – the official designation of ice-free, implying only a fringe of floes around the coastlines. That is where the trend is taking us.’

For that prediction to come true it would require by far the fastest loss of ice in history. It would also fly in the face of a report last year by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which stated with ‘medium confidence’ that ice levels would ‘likely’ fall below one million square kilometres by 2050.

Politicians such as Al Gore have often insisted that climate science is ‘settled’ and have accused those who question their forecasts of being climate change ‘deniers’.

However, while few scientists doubt that carbon-dioxide emissions cause global warming, and that this has caused Arctic ice to decline, there remains much uncertainty about the speed of melting and how much of it is due to human activity. But outside the scientific community, the more pessimistic views have attracted most attention. For example, Prof Wadhams’s forecasts have been cited widely by newspapers and the BBC. But many reject them.



Much more BELOW THE FOLD.

Via: Memeorandum

Comments

  1. They have only been carefully measuring Arctic ice properties since 1980. The 30 year time frame
    offers little real data to estimate long term effect. Some scientists are concerned with what is happening to the three types of Arctic ice- multiyear, perennial and seasonal, noting an apparent
    decline in the old multiyear stuff. I'm not a fan of cap & trade, eg. putting value on pollution: heck
    they would have C&T futures and generate hedge funds. Nor is 30 years of Arctic ice study something to panic about. Perhaps, as some energy companies are already voluntarily doing, cutting stack effluent as a customer pleasing step, may become equally if not more effective over the decades? This is very long term stuff and we individuals are relatively short term.

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  2. Excellent points well stated BB Idaho.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I always equatic Arctic Melting as Sarah Palin saying something stupid.

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  4. Walter Wriston, the legendary CEO of CitiCorp (now deceased), once said:

    Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.”

    So what do banking and climate change have in common, you ask? Years ago, Citibank purchased weather forecasting models (run on supercomputers and known as “turbulence algorithms”) to forecast the behavior of financial markets. There are properties common to both: Random versus patterned phenomena. The challenge is to isolate significant data from randomized background noise. All complex systems exhibit anomalies, transitory spikes, and exceptions to prediction models and forecasts. There will always be data that do not conform to an observed and measured pattern. We call these “statistical outliers.”

    So the Arctic polar ice cap did not shrink as predicted by previous trends lines. Does this mean no more death spiral? Does this mean our climate change models are bogus? OMG, shall we accuse climate change scientists of hatching nefarious plans for fun and profit – to fleece an unsuspecting public?

    Hardly! There will always be skeptics who focus on the outliers but ignore the trend lines. The greenhouse effect does not mean atmospheric temperatures will rise every year. Heat is also trapped in ocean water resulting in changes of salinity and pH; and ocean gyres disperse these changes in unknown and as yet unpredictable ways. What we do know: Changes in salinity and ocean pH are destroying oceanic ecosystems at an alarming rate; the world’s coral reefs are fast disappearing; fish stocks – a staple diet for hundreds of millions of people – are near exhaustion; and methane plumes are bursting through Siberian permafrost. A lull in Arctic ice melt does not mean a lull in other adverse effects somewhere else in the world.

    There will always be statistical outliers that turn climate change skeptics into outrageous liars.

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  5. In mfg. we call them upper and lower control limits, data points within the UCL and LCL with random variation is good and indicates the process is in control. Variation that is non random and predictable means the process is out of control. Statistical Process Control or SPC.

    Interesting. Relevant? Perhaps...

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    Replies
    1. RN,
      Since statistical sampling methods are known to both of us, there is no need to elaborate further. However, there is another facet of climate change worth mentioning here:

      In the past 140 years, global average sea levels have risen 7.7 inches. Mechanisms that account for rising seas levels: Thermal expansion (ocean water expands as it warms), and melting ice. Sea level rise is one line of evidence in support of global climate change. The National Research Council believes a sea level rise of 22 to 79 inches is possible by the end of the century. Why predictions are uncertain: Climate-carbon cycle feedbacks are still not fully understood.

      Meanwhile, the National Defense Institute explored the potential impact of global climate change as a threat to national security. Conclusions: Vulnerable regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and island nations of the Pacific will face food and water shortages, catastrophic flooding, unprecedented refugee crises, religious conflict, and the spread of contagious diseases. These will demand massive humanitarian aid efforts and/or a military response.

      Let me digress for a moment to tell a Genesis story. It begins 400 million years ago, between the Devonian and Carboniferous Periods, when the earth was still hot and humid - long before the polar ice regions formed. As newly evolved forests drew carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and fell where they stood - their carbon buried and sequestered under layers of sedimentary rock - the climate cooled and glaciers formed. In simple terms: less atmospheric carbon allowed polar ice caps to form.

      Hundreds of millions of years later, a peculiar Pleistocene creature walked the earth and learned in short order how to dig up and burn carbon-based fossil fuels to cook food, warm homes, build cities, drive Hummers, make microchips and Barbie dolls and a myriad of trinkets to delight the fancy ... all far removed from basic survival needs. In less than 25 generations, these Pleistocene creatures released into the atmosphere as much carbon as earth had sequestered over hundreds of millions of years.

      Understanding climate change is not rocket science when understood in these terms: Hundreds of millions of years of sequestered carbon – suddenly released by a mere 25 generations of human beings. This is what is known as the anthropogenic cause of global climate change.

      Delete
  6. a) CO2 and warming have not correlated for 17 years now. b) There was a .4 degree Celsius decrease in temperature from 1945 to 1978 (hence the cooling scare of the '70s) - this despite the fact that copious amounts of CO2 were being pumped into the atmosphere. c) Even using Al Gore's own data, one can plainly see that it is the temperature which occurs first (sometimes by as much as 1,000 years) and not the CO2 increases (increases in temperature causing more of the oceans' CO2 to evaporate into the atmosphere - chemistry 101). d) The Antarctic ice sheet has been rising over the past 30 years and it is the alarmists who are cherry-picking there (finding one small area of the Antarctic that is losing ice). e) The ARGO system has been measuring ocean temperature since 2003 and there has been no oceanic warming since then - period. f) It is the alarmist side that has been lying through their teeth; Michael Mann merging two distinct data sets in an effort to prove his point (if I had done that in Experimental Psych I would been flunked out and possibly expelled), Michael Mann lying about Professor Lamb's views on the Medieval Warm period, James Hanson lying about the warmest years in American history (he was eventually busted by McIntyre and we all know now that 4 of the top 10 warmest years in American history were in the '30s!!), James Hanson trying to "adjust" away (via flattening) the post WW2 cooling period, Ben Santer cutting off the beginning and ending of a troposphere temperature graph in an effort to exaggerate the warming, etc., etc.. g) The evidence is also clear that global cooling is far, FAR, worse than global warming in that it is during glaciations that many of the droughts and famines have occurred and, really, when would have have preferred to live, during the Holocene Warming Optimum (they call it optimum for a reason, folks) or the ice age?......Yes, there has been some warming over the past 150 years (.7 degree Celsius) and yes human activity may have contributed it (probably about a third) but these past 150 years have also been a period of rapid economic growth and huge increases in life expectancy. My advice to people here would be to majorly cool it (no pun intended).

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    Replies
    1. Perhaps the reason why Will-the-Shrill takes no prisoners is because he decapitates intellectual honesty as assuredly as ISIS beheads hostages.

      Case in point: In the last blog post on climate change, he boldly claims:

      I've crunched the numbers" (Tue Aug 19, 07:11:00 PM EDT).

      Hells bells, anyone can invent bogus data and make mumbo jumbo appear plausible. He accuses climate scientists of malpractice and fraud but provides no links to any source; yet he expects readers to accept his “numbers” without question (which means we cannot check veracity of his claims). In science, there is a process called “peer review.” In denier lingo, it’s called: “Just take my bullshit at face value.”

      Here is how climate deniers operate: They throw vast amounts of unsubstantiated claims at the public, then persecute the crap out of scientists with frivolous lawsuits, defamations, endless harassment, and character assassinations in hopes some of the crap will stick. Here is a small sample of how a coven of climate deniers have persecuted Michael Mann for decades:

      Penn State Exonerates Climate Scientist Michael Mann On Bogus Climategate Accusations (Jul 2010)

      Judge slaps down Cuccinelli probe of Michael Mann (Aug 2010)

      Mann wins anti-harassment victory in Virginia court (Nov 2011)

      Cuccinelli revives crusade - files new fishing expedition lawsuit against Mann (Oct 2010)

      Judge finds malice in fraud charges against Mann (Sep 2013)

      National Science Foundation vindicates Mann (Aug 2011)

      Some astonishing facts about the so-called lawyer who has been persecuting Michael Mann:

      His law degree came from a mail order diploma mill;

      Claimed to be a member of the American Bar Association (false);

      Claimed to be an experienced attorney in New York and Federal courts (false);

      Charged in the U.K. for sexual assault of a 16-year old girl (true).

      Professor Mann has filed harassment and defamation charges against Tim Ball and John O’Sullivan after decades of persecution. This is the intellectual company kept by Will-the-Shrill. Finally, how can I forget this memorable quote:

      I have studied this issue in a way that you never have or ever could ...” (Will-the-Shrill - Thu Aug 21, 10:59:00 PM EDT)

      Oooh, shaking in my boots! The boasting! The bombast! A veritable BMOC! I can still hear the canned laughter beneath his words.

      Delete

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