I found this fairly down in the comments section. This was an interesting read. Funny how the alarmists are squawking about a supposed 4 meter rise in seal level when the reality is at worst it will be 1' 5".
Two thoughts on above. Unsure why Hunt mention Jason Boxs arctic study, but Nils-Axel Morner was clipped (perhaps catty comment?). But Morner is the guy on sea level rise.
With respect to John making a claim of 4+ meters for sea level rise, thats intriguing inasmuch as the IPCC said only 3 feet in 1995, downgraded to 211″ in 2001 and 15″ in 2007. Current rise is only 1 foot/century. Morner predicted 8″ and has been the closest to date.
As far as an arctic report card as shared by Hunt, lets consider
From the Danish Meteorological Institute: DMI 30% Arctic extent has reached its highest number for this date, exceeding 2006. The refreeze has been very fast. And
we learn, that Arctic 80N-90N temperatures in the melt season this year is colder than average. This was the case last year too, while earlier years in the DMI analysis period (1958-2010) hardly ever shows Arctic melt season temperatures this cold.
From JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency: Sea ice extent shows sharp growth, exceeding the 2009 rate, and almost as fast as 2005.
From the new peer-reviewed research North American Summer Arctic front during 1948-2007. International Journal of Climatology 30: 874-883. Based on their analysis, the two researchers report that the position of the July Arctic front varies significantly through the period 1948-2007, but they find that it does so with a mean position similar to that found by Bryson (1966), which close similarity, as they describe it, is striking, given that the Bryson study was completed over 40 years ago.
In other words, no real change for 40 years.
Recently, the University of Texas GRACE interpretations were shown to be wrong due to glacial rebound (isostasy.) A new study published in the September issue of Nature Geoscience suggested that the true melt rate might be much slower than that. A joint team of American and Dutch scientists took another look at the GRACE data and found that Greenland and West Antarctica may be melting just half as fast the earlier studies estimated. As researcher Bert Vermeersen, a professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, told the AFP, the earlier estimates failed to account for glacial isostatic adjustmentthe rebounding of the Earths crust after the end of the last Ice Age. There is some melting, but we are coming out of the Little Ice Age starting in the mid-1800s. We know that wind/currents are a significant determinant and further, recent research shows that more than half of any warming is easily chalked up to natural variability.
In April NOAAs GIS research suggests that aerosols play a large role in Arctic warming and pointed to aerosols as the cause of recent anomalous arctic warming.
In the last two weeks, Charlie Zender, a climate physicist at the University of California, Irvine, released research saying that even at concentrations below five parts per billionaerosols, such as soot triggers melting, and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming versus CO2/warming causes.
