Lets be honest about the ice melt season

[ScienceRocks]

This had to be one very crappy "weather pattern" over the Arctic to cause 4.2 million km^3 not to beat 6.4 million km^3 volume in 2007. That is -2.2 million km^3 decrease in arctic sea ice volume since 2007... What does that mean? That means the thickness has falling through the floor since 2007. Area's that might of been 3 plus meters thick are now likely 1 meter. You can look at the "ice extent" graph and look at the 'area' and 80-100 percent purple area that is the highest percentage of ice area and you will find looking at that alot less of the deepest colors this year. That is another way to know damn well the volume out of washington state is telling it like it is.

Extent is NOT a good way to judge the ice sheet at all. It is controlled by many factors
1# wind direction compacted or spreading the ice out(2007 had winds that worked to compact the ice into thicker/more dense sheets).
2# high and low pressures---high pressure centered over the arctic is going to have more solar energy hitting the ice pack then a low pressure with clouds. 2007 was amazing for having a high centered over the arctic all melt season(Imagine Texas over the arctic).

The truth is 2011 had a lot less sea ice within the arctic....But much more spread out over a larger area. Remember the sea ice is three "d", which means it has width, length and height=total of it. When you have a crappy weather pattern that spreads it out instead of compacting it; don't be surprised when it acts differently.

If a pattern like 2007 happens over the next 3-4 years, which is more or less a anomaly in of its self. I fully expect we will go below 3.5 million km^2...Why? Because there is 2.2 million km^3 less sea ice to go around and a compacting pattern like 2007 will have a far smaller area of extent. Makes sense???

You have less of something, but it is spread out as the winds are Not favorable for compaction, what do you expect? Get a favorable pattern and then grab your bag of popcorn, but don't hold your breath as 2007 was a once in 20 year event.

Here is the volume of each year until 8-31

You can clearly see that 2007 had much thicker(deeper purple) then 2011...It doesn't matter if it is one inch or 3 meters, but as it is 15 percent of the ice within a area it is counted.

 

[Old Rocks]

When the ice is. thinner, it breaks up into smaller peices which have much more surface area exposed per unit of volume than thicker ice. As the Arctic Ocean water warms, that not only melts the ice more rapidly, but also spreads it out more. Within the next few years, we will see a very dramatic reduction in both area and volume.

We could see the dissapearance of most of ice by 2020.

 

[Trakar]

When the ice is. thinner, it breaks up into smaller peices which have much more surface area exposed per unit of volume than thicker ice. As the Arctic Ocean water warms, that not only melts the ice more rapidly, but also spreads it out more. Within the next few years, we will see a very dramatic reduction in both area and volume.

We could see the dissapearance of most of ice by 2020.

I would not be surprised to see dramatic differences in the next few years.

 

[IanC]

and yet Greenland is still not as balmy as it was when the settlers arrived. climate changes, get over it

 

[ScienceRocks]

and yet Greenland is still not as balmy as it was when the settlers arrived. climate changes, get over it

I thought you were open minded about things?

 

[Trakar]

...and yet Greenland is still not as balmy as it was when the settlers arrived...

Got supporting evidence for this assertion?

I've seen nothing indicative that turn of the first millenia 800-1200 AD was any warmer than current temperatures.

 

[IanC]

and yet Greenland is still not as balmy as it was when the settlers arrived. climate changes, get over it

I thought you were open minded about things?

hahaha, I am! but my trust in arctic ice studies took a big hit when I checked the records for the early part of last century and there were no signs in the official numbers of the dramatic loss of ice written about in newspapers.

you also seem to be linking to PIOMAS a lot lately. I am too lazy to go back and find the thread or the orginal links but they recently made a large change in their model that derives their numbers from available data. do you think I am being overly pessimistic in thinking that their new 'adjustments' might be slanted towards the CAGW direction? why dont you spread your citations around a little bit more to give an air of neutrality? just sayin'

 

[IanC]

...and yet Greenland is still not as balmy as it was when the settlers arrived...

Got supporting evidence for this assertion?

I've seen nothing indicative that turn of the first millenia 800-1200 AD was any warmer than current temperatures.

first off- I am not one of those sceptics who denies that it has gotten warmer. I do believe that a substantial fraction is due to sketchy 'adjustment' however. I also do not deny that glaciation on average is declining, perhaps with the exception of antarctica. or that sea level is rising. or even that world wide climate is changing, with some winners, some losers and some with little change. I dont even deny that CO2 has some perceptible influence although insignificant.

what I do deny is that it is unnatural. we are coming out of a cold period and becoming warmer. ice melts when it is warm, forms when it is cold enough. there is lots of evidence that previous eras had less ice. new things get uncovered as the ice retreats. tree stumps, buildings, even human bodies. the volstock ice cores show numerous temp spikes at roughly the same temp as today with varying levels of CO2. none of them led to runaway temps or tipping points.

we may not like some of the changes. sea level WILL rise if it stays warm for a long period, it has been rising since the Little Ice Age. but as human history has shown it is cold we should fear. we cannot stop time because we like the climate at present.

human beings have always wanted to believe they were the centre of the universe, that their actions controlled the future. but crippling our civilization for reducing the temperature increase by a few hundredths or thousandths of a degree is no more effective than throwing a virgin into a volcano. of course we actually could cool the atmosphere down if we wanted to. just pump a few billion tonnes of sulphates into the sky or pop off a few thousand nuclear bombs. those actions might actually be less harmful than the suicidal actions some would like to impose on us.

 

[Trakar]

...you also seem to be linking to PIOMAS a lot lately. I am too lazy to go back and find the thread or the orginal links but they recently made a large change in their model that derives their numbers from available data. do you think I am being overly pessimistic in thinking that their new 'adjustments' might be slanted towards the CAGW direction? why dont you spread your citations around a little bit more to give an air of neutrality? just sayin'

Can you cite/reference the asserted PIOMAS adjustment assertion, at least with reference to when it occurred and what type of adjustment you are claiming are biased and inaccurately portraying the realities of arctic climate?

"neutrality"?

which national or international science agency would you recommend as portraying a "neutral" perspective on these issues?

As far as I can tell there are two positions with regards to AGW. The mainstream scientific perspective, and those who reject or deny that mainstream science position.

What is the neutral position between science and pseudoscience?

How will this help us to derive an accurate scientific understanding of the issue?

 

[Trakar]

first off- I am not one of those sceptics who denies that it has gotten warmer.

You are not a skeptic, merely another ideologically driven bleever trying to don the mask of reasoned conservatism.

I do believe that a substantial fraction is due to sketchy 'adjustment' however.

Skeptics use scientific evidences and supports for their understandings, nor unsupported assertion and beliefs in the framing of their understandings.

I also do not deny that glaciation on average is declining, perhaps with the exception of antarctica. or that sea level is rising. or even that world wide climate is changing, with some winners, some losers and some with little change. I dont even deny that CO2 has some perceptible influence although insignificant.

and yet more than half of these things are not in accord with the scientific understandings and evidences.

what I do deny is that it is unnatural.

Man is a natural animal, the consequences of our actions are "natural" in that sense, but this is irrelevent in accepting responsibility for our actions and the consequences of thos actions.

we are coming out of a cold period and becoming warmer.

according to the natural controls and cycles of planetary climate, our planet should have begun a long slow slide into increased glaciation and growing ice sheets culminating in a full fledged return to the depths of the current ice age within a few tens of thousands of years.

ice melts when it is warm, forms when it is cold enough. there is lots of evidence that previous eras had less ice. new things get uncovered as the ice retreats. tree stumps, buildings, even human bodies.

Regional warm and cold spells occur despite general global trends, previous episodic conditions and previous planetary conditions happen for their own reasons and are not related casually to the current episode of planetary climate shift.

the volstock ice cores show numerous temp spikes at roughly the same temp as today with varying levels of CO2. none of them led to runaway temps or tipping points.

actually they all had feedback factors, and all time frames that had current levels of CO2 in their atmospheres were much warmer than today and this is only because our current climate has not yet had the opportunity to fully equilibrate to the increased CO2 content of our atmosphere.

 

[bripat9643]

...and yet Greenland is still not as balmy as it was when the settlers arrived...

Got supporting evidence for this assertion?

I've seen nothing indicative that turn of the first millenia 800-1200 AD was any warmer than current temperatures.

The Vikings grazed cattle and sheep there in 800-1200 AD.

 

[IanC]

and yet Greenland is still not as balmy as it was when the settlers arrived. climate changes, get over it

I thought you were open minded about things?

hahaha, I am! but my trust in arctic ice studies took a big hit when I checked the records for the early part of last century and there were no signs in the official numbers of the dramatic loss of ice written about in newspapers.

you also seem to be linking to PIOMAS a lot lately. I am too lazy to go back and find the thread or the orginal links but they recently made a large change in their model that derives their numbers from available data. do you think I am being overly pessimistic in thinking that their new 'adjustments' might be slanted towards the CAGW direction? why dont you spread your citations around a little bit more to give an air of neutrality? just sayin'

sorry Matthew. I didnt realize how few institutions plot ice volume. Navy's PIP is another one but I couldnt reach their data, which apparantly doesnt jibe with PIOMAS

 

[Liability]

World Atlas ice loss claim exaggerated: scientists

* * * *

(Reuters) - The Times Atlas of the World exaggerated the rate of Greenland's ice loss in its thirteenth edition last week, scientists said on Monday.

The atlas, published by HarperCollins, showed that Greenland lost 15 percent of its ice cover over the past 12 years, based on information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado in the United States.

The Greenland ice sheet is the second biggest in the world and significant shrinking could lead to a global rise in sea levels.

"While global warming has played a role in this reduction, it is also as a result of the much more accurate data and in-depth research that is now available," HarperCollins said on its website on Monday.

However, a number of scientists disputed the claim.

"We believe that the figure of a 15 percent decrease in permanent ice cover since the publication of the previous atlas 12 years (ago) is both incorrect and misleading," said Poul Christoffersen, glaciologist at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at the University of Cambridge.

"We concluded that a sizable portion of the area mapped as ice-free in the Atlas is clearly still ice-covered."

Other scientists agreed.

* * * *

World Atlas ice loss claim exaggerated: scientists | Reuters

This excerpt is just another tip of another iceberg, so to speak. More available at link.

 

[konradv]

...and yet Greenland is still not as balmy as it was when the settlers arrived...

Got supporting evidence for this assertion?

I've seen nothing indicative that turn of the first millenia 800-1200 AD was any warmer than current temperatures.

The Vikings grazed cattle and sheep there in 800-1200 AD.

Doesn't mean it was balmy. That's totally ludicrous.

 

[Liability]

Got supporting evidence for this assertion?

I've seen nothing indicative that turn of the first millenia 800-1200 AD was any warmer than current temperatures.

The Vikings grazed cattle and sheep there in 800-1200 AD.

Doesn't mean it was balmy. That's totally ludicrous.

All "balmy" means is pleasantly warm.

It was balmy enough to graze cattle.

 

[konradv]

The Vikings grazed cattle and sheep there in 800-1200 AD.

Doesn't mean it was balmy. That's totally ludicrous.

All "balmy" means is pleasantly warm.

It was balmy enough to graze cattle.

Balmy means NOTHING. Tell us what the temps were compared to today.

 

[Liability]

Doesn't mean it was balmy. That's totally ludicrous.

All "balmy" means is pleasantly warm.

It was balmy enough to graze cattle.

Balmy means NOTHING. Tell us what the temps were compared to today.

Wrong. Balmy does mean something. Words (despite your urgent desire to deny reality) DO have meaning.

As for what the temps were then compared to today, I don't care. Your "question" is irrelevant.

It was warm enough to grow grass to graze cattle.

Capice?

 

[IanC]

its funny how smart people like to make up stupid ideas and then work furiously to make a case to support it.

Greenland wasnt warmer even though they grew crops and raised livestock.

urban heat island effect compensated by adding 0.05 degrees to the error bar even though any gardener knows it is much warmer in the city.

clouds cause warming even though a day on the beach or a thunderstorm suggest otherwise

 

[ScienceRocks]

its funny how smart people like to make up stupid ideas and then work furiously to make a case to support it.

Greenland wasnt warmer even though they grew crops and raised livestock.

urban heat island effect compensated by adding 0.05 degrees to the error bar even though any gardener knows it is much warmer in the city.

clouds cause warming even though a day on the beach or a thunderstorm suggest otherwise

1# You can grow crops and raise livestock today in Greenland.
2# Well some of the studies say that a warming world will have less stratus clouds in fact they have discovered this is so...Stratus clouds are caused by a uniform broad scale raise of air over a large geographic area(air masses push up against another clouds more or less); coming to condensation at a uniformed height. More or less. It makes sense within a warmer world that you'ed get more convective clouds and less stratus. So increase the sst's=increase instability=decrease stratus clouds.

"However, the decrease combined with observed increases in SST and the negative correlation between marine stratus and sea surface temperature suggests a positive cloud feedback to the warming sea surface."


"In regions of persistent MSC [marine stratus and stratocumulus clouds], time series show decreasing MSC amount. This decrease could be due to further spurious variation within the data. However, the decrease combined with observed increases in SST and the negative correlation between marine stratus and sea surface temperature suggests a positive cloud feedback to the warming sea surface."
AMS Journals Online - Variations in cloud cover and cloud types over the ocean from surface observations, 1954–2008

What is the net feedback from clouds?


Figure 2: (A) Scatter plot of monthly average values of ΔRcloud vs. ΔTsusing CERES and ECMWF interim data. (B) Scatter plot of monthly averages of the same quantities from 100 years of a control run of the ECHAM/MPIOM model. In all plots, the solid line is a linear least-squares fit and the dotted lines are the 2σ confidence interval of the fit.

It makes perfect sense being that convective clouds are very vertical deep, but don't cover as much area. So you'll get a positive cloud feed back. On the other hand sure you could get more clouds over the high lats, but that cancels each other out as during half of the year they could hold energy in(at night), while during summer don't allow as much in.

As I think through even more I've come to the conclusion as the area of above normal expands the area of higher then 1950-2000 means stratus formation should decrease and be replace with a increase with convective activity. Simple meteorology. This could result in a poleward means of the jet stream too...As temperature gradient difference between pole and tropics decreases slightly. I say slightly because -30c within the arctic to 28c within the tropics isn't alot from -40c within the arctic to 27.5c within tropics.

 

[RollingThunder]

and yet Greenland is still not as balmy as it was when the settlers arrived. climate changes, get over it

LIke most denier cultists, you're both extremely stupid and very ignorant. Greenland has been 80% covered in an ice sheet for hundreds of thousands of years. It has never been "green" in human history. Some fjords on the southern coast were marginally inhabitable for a few centuries but it was always a harsh cold place. There are more people and farms there now than there ever were during the Viking colonization. And BTW, just to deal with another denier cult myth linked to the MWP, they grow far more grapes in England now than they ever did during the MWP. It is not surprising that such an misinformed and retarded denier cultist like yourself would fervently believe a lot of stuff that isn't even remotely true.

Greenland Vikings
(excerpt)

In 960, Thorvald Asvaldsson of Jaederen in Norway killed a man. He was forced to leave the country so he moved to northern Iceland. He had a ten year old son named Eric, later to be called Eric Röde, or Eric the Red. Eric too had a violent streak and in 982 he killed two men. Eric the Red was banished from Iceland for three years so he sailed west to find a land that Icelanders had discovered years before but knew little about. Eric searched the coast of this land and found the most hospitable area, a deep fiord on the southwestern coast. Warmer Atlantic currents met the island there and conditions were not much different than those in Iceland (trees and grasses.) He called this new land "Greenland" because he "believed more people would go thither if the country had a beautiful name," according to one of the Icelandic chronicles (Hermann, 1954) although Greenland, as a whole, could not be considered "green." Additionally, the land was not very good for farming.

Greenland ice sheet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Greenland Ice Sheet is a vast body of ice covering 1,710,000 square kilometres (660,235 sq mi), roughly 80% of the surface of Greenland. ...The ice in the current ice sheet is as old as 110,000 years.[3] It is generally thought that the Greenland Ice Sheet formed in the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene by coalescence of ice caps and glaciers. It did not develop at all until the late Pliocene, but apparently developed very rapidly with the first continental glaciation.

Medieval warmth and English wine
(excerpts)

Are vineyards a good temperature proxy? While climate clearly does impact viticulture through the the amount of sunshine, rainfall amounts, the number of frost free days in the spring and fall, etc., there a number of confounding factors that make it less than ideal as a long term proxy. These range from changing agricultural practices, changing grape varieties, changing social factors and the wider trade environment. For instance, much early winemaking in England was conducted in Benedictine monasteries for religious purposes – changing rites and the treatment of the monasteries by the crown (Henry VIII in particular) clearly impacted wine production there. Societal factors range from the devastating (the Black Death) to the trivial (working class preferences for beer over wine). The wider trade environment is also a big factor i.e. how easy was it to get better, cheaper wine from the continent? The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the English King in 1152 apparently allowed better access to the vineyards of Bordeaux, and however good medieval English wine was, it probably wasn't a match for that!

However, for the sake of argument, let's assume that climate is actually the dominant control – so what does the history of English vineyards show?

Wine making never completely died out in England, there were always a few die-hard viticulturists willing to give it a go, but production clearly declined after the 13th Century, had a brief resurgence in the 17th and 18th Centuries, only to decline to historic lows in the 19th Century when only 8 vineyards are recorded. Contemporary popular sentiment towards English (and Welsh) wine can be well judged by a comment in 'Punch' (a satirical magazine) that the wine would require 4 people to drink it – one victim, two to hold him down, and one other to pour the wine down his throat.

Unremarked by most oenophiles though, English and Welsh wine production started to have a renaissance in the 1950s. By 1977, there were 124 reasonable-sized vineyards in production – more than at any other time over the previous millennium. This resurgence was also unremarked upon by Lamb, who wrote in that same year that the English climate (the average of 1921-1950 to be precise) remained about a degree too cold for wine production. Thus the myth of the non-existant English wine industry was born and thrust headlong into the climate change debate….