sea ice
sastyk | January 21, 2010There's yet another kerfuffle about climatology going on. First, of course, there was climategate, whose total revealed knowledge is "if you hack into people's private emails you might find out that some people, even climate scientists, are jerks sometimes." Now there's another one - in the IPCC report, there's an error. That is, scientists took a non-peer reviewed source and transposed it into the report, and didn't back check that source. This was stupid, of course, and should be criticized and corrected.
That said, since the material in the IPCC is overwhelmingly peer-reviewed science…
stoat | November 6, 2009Nothing new, but M pointed me at Greenman on sea ice which has a quote from Wadhams (starts around 5:00, quote around 5:20 I think) that is the "the arctic will be ice free in summer in 20 years" or words to that effect (which got noted in my Arctic to be 'ice-free in summer'?.
I still don't believe it, not that that matters. Watch the video anyway for a glimpse of Wadham's / SPRI's rather haphazrd filing system.
stoat | October 10, 2009Its the traditional sea ice round up season. This year I have some solid wins (a bit of real money; Luna and Fred and Alastair I think) and a marginal loss (50 Quantloos to The Penguin).
Just to prove how debased I am, here is an excel spreadsheet graph:
My prediction was that the ice would "return to the trend", which TP interpreted fairly enough (ah: I see I said it myself) as 1979-2006: 5.84, and the answer was 5.36. I see that if I'd chosen 1995-2006 I'd have been just about spot on (of course it is cheating to say that but I've drawn it on anyway). TP tells me what Excel won't, which is…
stoat | August 31, 2009No, not arbcomm, though they seem to be fairly wacky. This summer has been very disconnected, but I'm finally back, so expect more unbridled tat. I was going to take a peek at the sea ice situation, on the off-chance that no-one else had, but googled it first and ended up with Greenpeace's sea ice 'mistake' delights climate change sceptics. Strange stuff. People forgetting to say "sea" in front of "ice" is hardly new or interesting, though, except in August when nothing happens. mt has the tedious detail so you don't have to bother.
But there is plenty more weird stuff. The Mighty James Annan…
illconsidered | August 23, 2009A commenter here brought up the controversy du jour for the denialosphere, how Greenpeace alledgedly admitted lying in a press release. Of course that stretch, (well, it's a stretch to call it a stretch), was further stretched to "Greenpeace just admitted that much of the human-caused global warming hype is also a fraud." Talk about extrapolation!
Anyway, as usual it is not what they would have us believe it is. Michael Tobis has all the details, worth reading. The whole thing rests on the imprecision of the phrase "arctic ice", very commonly used to really mean "arctic sea ice".
The…
stoat | July 23, 2009Just a quick note prompted by the comments: we've slipped below 2008 and are heading below 2006. A long way short of 2007 at the moment. Still all to play for.
[Update: as PH points out, 2009 is now not exciting at all, having rejoined "the pack", albeit at the bottom edge. 2007 still looks very much like an outlier. Meanwhile, the July ARCUS report is out. Nothing very exciting there I think. I notice that they still persist in nonsense like "All estimates are well below the 1979-2007 September climatological mean value of 6.7 million square kilometers" - this is nonsense not because it is…
stoat | June 30, 2009Time for a brief break from the viputeration. Dull, I know. But fear not: the daily diet of random insults will resume soon. Speaking of which read Arrse.
PD challenges me to a bet, which I expect to take up once I've found time from wiki to actually read the terms properly. He also points to the ARCUS June forecasts for Spetember which are just out. Such fun. It doesn't look like anyone is going out on a limb - Todd "I used to wrok at BAS, you know" Arbetter has a very low forecast in, but since he also has a very medium forecast he wins both ways, or ut another way stands no chance of…
stoat | June 17, 2009With all the wild excitement over 2007's record low there is clearly room for noise to be made about summer sea ice, so predictions must be made! We all know, of course, that whether this year, or any other year, is going to be a record is going to be a matter of chance: on top of the long term negative trend (and we can argue about whether that trend is typified by the slope of 1979-2006, or has got steeper recently) there is a lot of interannual variation. Certainly I'm not aware of any sea ice modeller with enough confidence in their predictions to put any money on them.
But the next best…
stoat | June 15, 2009
Catz women catching FaT (I think) on saturday. Which was all jolly good fun but meant that I didn't get to row myself all week after monday. And over the weekend I felt somewhat ill. Coupled with pouring rain at 4 this afternoon I was not at all looking forward to being 6 in our "M1" crew for the X-press head today. However, despite light rain as we were boating, we managed to row really quite well given the scratch nature of our crew (well done Phil, especially; and James's first serious race as stroke) and rowing in a stiff boat was a delight, as was the raw arrogance of James T's coxing.…
illconsidered | September 19, 2008 This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.Objection:
Sea ice at the north pole recovered a whopping 9.4% from 2007 to 2008 despite the doom and gloom predictions of the alarmists. Yet another wheel falls off the global warming bandwagon.
Answer:
It is true that the minimum summer ice extent in the arctic ocean in 2008 was 9.4% higher than the minimun in 2007. But calling this a recovery is simply not justifiable, not even by a long shot. Firstly, at 4.52 million square kilometers, this…
illconsidered | October 3, 2007Arctic sea ice dropped to a record low in 2007, surpassing by a very striking margin (twenty four percent!) the previous record of two years ago.
Record Arctic Sea Ice Loss in 2007
Click here to view full image (69 kb)
Large images
Arctic, September 16, 2007 (1.3 MB JPG)
Graph of Arctic Sea Ice Decline (200 KB PDF)
This record is about the sea ice extent, or the area of ocean surface covered by ice, and does not even reflect the ice loss due to thinning of the ice pack. Factoring this thinning (up to 40% by some estimates) makes a dramatic observation even more foreboding.
While the…
illconsidered | May 25, 2006This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
Sure, sea ice is shrinking in the Arctic, but it is growing in the Antarctic. Sounds like natural fluctuations that balance out in the end.
Answer:
Overall, it is true that sea ice extent in the Antarctic is increasing. Around the peninsula, where there is a lot of warming, the ice is retreating. This is the area of the recent and dramatic Larsen B and Ross ice shelf break ups. But the rest of the continent has not shown any clear warming…
illconsidered | February 25, 2006This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
The Antarctic Ice sheets are actually growing, which would not be happening if Global Warming were real.
Answer:
There are two distinct problems with this argument. First, any argument that tries to use a regional phenomenon to disprove a global trend is simply dead in the water. Anthropogenic global warming theory does not predict uniform warming throughout the globe. We need to assess the balance of the evidence. In the case of this…